Bureau B This is a gleeful, cheery offering. A million miles from the moody cultures of Inland, Kurt Dahlke‘s ’79 debuting ice-breaker, it’s all ruby-cheeked whimsy, paddling in the shallow end, sucking on plenty of easy ear lollipops. Knowingly going where most experimenters fear to tread, into a world reserved for elevators and on hold appeasement; in short , the land of the inoffensive ditty. Pyrolator is clearly […]
Album review
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Thrill Jockey Getting the hastily-search engined blurb out of the way: Sidi Touré (no relation to the other famous musicians with the same last name from the same country) is from Mali; Mali’s had it pretty rough of late, and seems to be in a tempestuous state politically. I shan’t embarrass myself by feigning more than a cursory awareness but the appearance of a number of conflicting voices […]
Zoharum For his first album in seven years under his own name (rather than as S.E.T.I.), Andrew Lagowski seems to have decided to revisit every possible way of making synthesized music – let’s lump them all under the rubric of techno just for the moment – and give it an extra shove in various oblique directions. Sprinkled with bleeps, thwups, trickles and sprightly bursts of brightly-crafted sonics, Redesine+ […]
MIE Is Black Dirt Oak a supergroup? Perhaps. With members of Desert Heat, Violators, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Rhyton, Psychic Ills, D. Charles Speer‘s band and NNCK (that’s just from the more well-known groups too) it probably counts as one, if such a term really holds much meaning anymore. With seven musicians on board, it often sounds like there are yet more hard at work on creating as […]
Dubmission Deep Fried Dub are on a bass mission to quiver the livers of all who enter to within a five kilometre radius of ground zero around their bass bins, it would seem; because every track on Slow Cooked, whether presented in rootsier style, teched-up or given the dubstep wobbleover is a binshaker of the highest quality. Breakbeats and stepping rhythms are flavoured with horns, skanking guitars and […]
Zoharum The desert is a place of sunlight and shadows; a place of bedouins and fertile deltas; lazy, muddy rivers and ancient tales. Time stands still beneath the flaming orb of the relentless sun. You feel the need to whisper, despite the whining wind. It is a place of fakir and genie, supplication and purification. This is the realm of Vernal Crossing Revisited. Vernal Crossing was the third […]
Zoharum Tadeusz Łuczejko‘s eighth album as Aquavoice finds him stepping out beyond the more abstract and/or ambient territory hitherto occupied by his particular take on electronica. While all the elements are synthesised – in software or with physical devices – there is much on this album which resonates with the warmth of acoustic instrumentation. This is particularly evident on “Magma,” whose cellos and other strings, however artificial, tremble […]
Ryan Moore has been hard at work on a remaster of his classic 1999 Twilight Circus album Horsie, and it’s a lovingly-tweaked and toned new version, available alongside the entire TC back catalogue here. Below is the original Freq review of the album, which still stands (though sadly hand-crayoned covers don’t translate to digital format quite as easily): Ryan Moore‘s fifth solo album as Twilight Circus is billed […]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mike Gangloff‘s solo record Poplar Hollow (Blackest Rainbow) – here appearing on swirl-patterned vinyl wrapped up in a gloriously psychedelic sleeve, following on from an earlier self-released edition – bridges the sounds of the two groups he is best-known for. Opening with the plaintive violin round “Queen of the Earth,” it’s easy to hear within Gangloff’s deep attachment to and knowledge of the mountain music of […]
Northern Spy (North America)/ReR (Europe) I was determined not to like this album. I’d signed up to review it in advance of The Necks’ sold out three-night stand at Café OTO in early November – new album review, live gig write-up, . I’ve always like symmetry, me. Yet the album never showed up from the USA. And it kept on not showing up. Eventually, Freq’s estimable editor had […]
Lotushouse Is it a joke, disguised as a New Age record? Or a cosmic drone record, masquerading as a joke? In July 2005, a small package was delivered to an address in Stamford Hill, London for the attention of Mr Otto Amon and Mr Solomon Kirchner. The gentlemen who received the package have never revealed who sent it to them or what was inside it but a body […]
(self-released) Starts in a dawn chorus of cymbal scrapes and reverbatory metals, rebounding some abandoned factory walls, dust bars of light catching the . A mild introduction that opens to the raspy slaps of “Grey Meat,” a curmudgeon that clumsily knocks into drawers full of cutlery franked by Gnostic monk moans. Then moments later it’s jumping out of the fire extinguisher smoke going headlong into a percussive jumble […]
Editions Mego This’ll be the second Freq review where I start with “I miss Coil” but I do miss them, they felt necessary, at least in my bubble. They didn’t seem in the least contingent and thus neither of them being here – still – is vaguely preposterous, almost illogical. That said, there’s still hints, around the corners, in not especially dark places, under stones, inside the wind. […]
Exotic Pylon There is a television advertisement for Cow and Gate infant food supplement currently doing the rounds (at this juncture it is more or less obligatory to state that “Other baby and toddler nutritional products are available”), which shows a gang of little nippers unleashed in a spacious recording studio. Wandering curiously around this acoustic playground the bright little buttons innocently scrape away at violins, pluck at […]
Thrill Jockey On Drifter’s Temple, Plankton Wat takes us on a vision quest through a dream of America’s West Coast. The ghosts of deadheads and time-travelling Rainbow Family gather in ancient sylvan redwood groves, playing the endless groove, while immortal orange-clad Boddhisatvas hold down the pedal note on a tambura. . Dewey Mahood has been constructing homespun new age guitar meditations since 2008, leaving his native northern California […]
Captured Tracks To The Happy Few, the new album from seminal So.Cal. shoegaze/noise pop act Medicine, is like being submerged in a lake of amniotic glycerine, and watching the sky. Guitars like outboard motors disturb the stillness, making waves, while chanteuse Beth Thompson lulls you towards the depths. Jim Goodall‘s drums go off like depth charges, and it suddenly occurs to you how badly you’ve missed rock ‘n […]
De Wolfe Music Library 1968 was the year that British horror films began to turn away from the cosy gothic perennials of Dracula and Frankenstein and move into the unknown territory of heathenism and the darkness of the English woodland. These new tales of secret rites and pagan communities had to have a very distinct filmic language of their own. Here nudity and extreme sadistic violence would take […]
Ex Cathedra / Words+Dreams …so there’s a thing with a lot of musical vaguely designated as ‘classical’ where the descriptions don’t per se tell you a great deal. ‘Pounding kraut vibes’ tells you most of what you need to know about a record but “ a palindromic movement structure, the quartet moves through a cycle of compositional styles from diatonic tonal material, to atonal, lyrical writing, to twelve-tone, […]