Grönland/EMI Electrola/Astralwerks NEU! Guitar arches out like twilit sunshadows and the omnipresent beat is there, new dawn, new dawn. Synthesizer languidly moves backwards and forth, the Sunday eveningmorning that holds in rapt attention at the creation of something new. Six crepuscular tracks? Wcka wcka wcka. Wow wow wow. And so […]
David Cotner
14 posts
Label: M Records Format: CD,LP When the Freq Meister asked me if I liked dub and fancied reviewing some I said yes. And after listening to this I’d still say yes again. What I like is that you can either let it all wash over you and be vaguely aware […]
Label: Mego Format: CD,LP Interesting. We in Los Angeles have to suffer through the endless re-viewing of this surf escapade. It’s expected. It’s part of Western (literally) cinema, much now like a muscle in the face that one uses but forgets exactly what its purpose is. And yet these sounds […]
Beyond Baroque, Venice, California 29 June 2001 (15 in attendance) Consolidated Lint Guitar, Pro One and toy spun over the head of the person furthest right. Pitch shifts and the bowing starts. Chattering, like automotive idling, wells up and fills the room. Much bowing, and it’s as if the doors […]
The Smell, Los Angeles, California 29 March 2001 The stages faces a room which cages a particular piece of modern art and the reflection is this: levelor blinds painted with barcode marks bracketed by (0) and (1) and a neon word consci divides ousness. White of the eye stares back […]
Label: Label M Format: CD Charming the snake of Jazz, the pipes lead the tones on a dance of hitherto unheard-of proportions. Bongos and drums – bongs and drugs? Methinks not. “High on life” seems more the fit. This is one of those recordings from the “outre” days of releasing […]
Label: Synaesthesia Format: 3″ CD A rolling quilt of crackles and scour tumbles over the sadness of things – that low series of tones which augur an undesired reflection. How many tones and clicks does it take to raise a feeling, a memory, a thing of resonance? The cover: cross […]
Label: DiN Format: CD A buried thud and muffled melody curve out from this unexpected source of sounds. Collaborations are infinitely fascinating – well, they can be – and yet relatively few happen. Are we really so victim to the village mentality as all that? The headlights of the automobiles along the […]
Label: Ash International [R.I.P.] Format: CD This is the third in Andrew Lagowski‘s excursions into the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and perhaps the most disengaged from the planet of sound. The theme is escape from Earth and oneself – hence the title. Much more Solaris than Apollo 13 in other […]
Label: Manifold Format: CD The tentative roughing of the recording – this time out, the sound source is stone. It’s packaged between two sheets of stone. Fucking-a right! Scraping repeats repeats and so forth as other pieces of stone make occasional and spectral appearances. The wow of the feedback moves alongside the […]
Label: Ytterbium Format: CD “What’s that sound?”, from the other room. Brain-wave sounds. Electroencephalograms. “Okay, whatever turns you on…” And so on. I think what he meant to ask was, “What were they thinking when they recorded this?” Which is an incredibly salient point. The sounds come from those brain-waves but what […]
Rectangle Bells come ringing and buzzing and oh, that French! It reminds of first listenings to Einstuerzende Neubauten – unsure of what was being said but perhaps something profound…one never knows, so, keep shrugging those shoulders. Irrevocably humourous liner note photographs – salvation in the hovering black angel, the war […]
Label: Bubblecore (North America)/Payola (Europe/Afterhours (Japan) Format: CD A high-pitched crackle like the malfunction angel coming to take your stereo away. Dulcet bass repetition and skittering percussion make a strange and uneasy juxtapose of quite lovely and what’s-that-noise? A warbling, wobbling sense of trying to move around in the world. […]
Label: EMI/Electrola Format: 12″,CDS Smoothness… There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It would be easy to bring the metaphor of the “well-oiled machine” into play in considering these four pieces. Is the situation of the metaphor the dominant theme in the existence of Kraftwerk? Even in the days of […]