Safety Meeting Inspired by Sabbath, Acid Mothers Temple & Space Paranoid seem to do black better than Black Sabbath ever imagined. That stoner bass-line on the opening title track giving out a deep seriously trough-like muscle. A rippling crypt-like foundation for Kawabata Makoto to riff-witch all over, his frets carving out super-bright highways. Veering into the uncharted with breathtaking ease, as if you could see Hendrix grinning in […]
Album review
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Mordant Music On Your Crate Has Changed, the chimerical union of the wicked Baron Mordant and resident sonar technician Nick Edwards, better known to the world as Ekoplekz, eMMplekz rally against the digital diaspora with bricks, knives; words and confusion. If you picture the polished perfection of pop culture glitterati as the grotesque, stretch-faced bureaucracy of Terry Gilliam‘s Brazil, then eMMplekz are the freedom fighters and rogue air-conditioning […]
Sulatron Whoa! Let’s get things straight from the start – this is psychedelic music, pure and simple. . Both Papir and Electric Moon have a way of playing that turns your brain to mulch and then kicks it out of your head towards a multi-coloured sun. This meeting of fried minds on the edge could really only produce one type of music and that is bloody great slabs […]
Further You know that feeling of ominous expectation, when a storm’s a-brewin’? What about the feeling of sparkling clarity, once the clouds have broke and vented their fury? This colossal slab, The Elements’ Rage, is like hunkering down in a megalithic stone circle as silver-dappled thunderheads of guitar, feedback, percussion and field recordings doth spew and fume. It can take a lot for an instrumental, sound-collage theme record […]
Southern Lord Opening with a kick drum that could loosen the fillings in your teeth, Pelican‘s fifth full length gets off to a brooding, ominous start with “Terminal,” a dark slab of menacing noise, its first half filled with an almighty bass and wailing feedbacking guitars. The dust then settles bringing in more melodic, dare I say it “post-rock” guitar lines before the ferocious bass re-enters and we […]
Dekorder The trio of Luke Fowler, Richard Youngs and Steven Warwick of Heatsick have made some very strange electronic music here. Red & Blue is one of those on the spot collaborations which sounds like a huge amount of fun was had by all while plugging away in the studio. A liberated sense of playfulness is especially apparent, and it’s pretty much an electronic jam session which, if it […]
Consouling Sounds Joining together for a 19-minute epic on a single side of vinyl (also available as an all-black CD), the skin-crawling, crepuscular misanthropy of Netherlander Mories de Jong meets grim Belgian band Alkerdeel‘s doomy experimental black metal in dark celebration of Counsouling Sounds‘ fifth birthday. What a slathering, slavering beast it turns out to be, comprehensively , riding in on a mordant tide of bass groan and […]
Hank 3 You can’t say Hank Williams III (sometimes Hank III or Hank 3) isn’t prolific. Well, I suppose you could, but it would make you a big ol’ fuckin’ asshole of a liar. Since his first solo album Risin’ Outlaw in 1999, he’s released a colossal, some might say ludicrous, amount of music, giving nary a shit about genre. Aside from the obvious country and western stuff, […]
Instrumentarium I love vinyl. There is something about it, lifting the needle and placing it down on a record seems real. That slight crackle of the run on groove, that wonderful analogue warmth that breathes from the speakers, the music’s cold hard digital heart taken away. So it was nice to be sent a real piece of proper lovely vinyl to review from a band local to me, […]
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 […]
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 […]