...creatively, Jodorowsky has always embodied a near singular collision of European high art and Latin American magical (sur)realism. Despite having been born in 1929, and thus being over thirty before the Sixties even began, Jod’s unique and psychedelic approach to writing, art and film-making clicked into place during that decade like a machine-tooled piece of jigsaw, its liberated, vision-questing aesthetic perfectly in tune with the new age of Aquarius:...
David Solomons
121 posts
Desertshore is not an easy listen. Across eight songs, which together are scarcely more than half an hour in length, Nico leads us on a melancholy musical journey through a portrait gallery of those who were, or had been, close to her: Garrel, Andy Warhol, her mother, Brian Jones, Ari. For a woman barely over thirty, there is already an abundance of loss, pain and sadness here, as Nico plays the role of medium to the voices of those troubled and damaged souls towards whom she had gravitated during her passage through the effervescent 1960s.
Although their collective nose was rather put out of joint by the release of Walls Have Ears – it was, after all, unsanctioned – contained within its fiery orange pumpkin cover, the album nevertheless remains an early jewel. Some inspired unofficial curation has caught ferocious live interpretations of an hour and a half worth’s of material culled from their first two albums and some which would appear for the first time the following year on Evol.
While Earth 2 has undoubtedly influenced a generation of experimental and drone musicians, its impact goes beyond the confines of genre. The album is a pilgrimage, an exploration of the primal power of vibration and resonance. It transcends the boundaries of conventional rock music, offering an immersive experience that is both challenging and rewarding for those willing to embark on the journey.
A proper overview of Goth is probably at least a decade overdue. The first band who could arguably merit the tag as exponents rather than just forerunners (and more about them later…) trod the boards around forty-five years ago, and music writing has proved distinctly tardy around giving the phenomenon some decent examination and analytic heft. In an era when the bookshelves of major retailers are fair groaning under the weight of mighty tomes covering the minutiae of everyone from EMF to The Shaggs, it seems curious that a movement that encompasses such revered names as Bauhaus, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Sisters Of Mercy and The Cure seems to have remained so impervious to criticism for so long.
ÉlianeRadigue started her career way back in the 1950s, studying as part of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in Paris, helmed by those frolicsome twin Pierres, Schaeffer and Henry, from whom she received a firm grounding in electroacoustic music and musique concrète. Gradually, however, Radigue’s interest in electronic music began to take her away from this orbit, and off onto a trajectory of her own, one which she has been following now for some five or six decades.
Universal In the depths of a bleak January such as this, one might very well find oneself tramping across sodden fields, beneath sullen grey skies, breath forming clouds in the cold and clods of mud clinging to your boots, crows wheeling and calling overhead and a line of skeletal trees […]
Cadabra Heavens above, this one comes so packed with goodness it’s hard to know where to start. Like a Whiskas Pure Delight fish selection, this burst of retro loveliness provides everything you and your cat need nutritionally for a healthy and happy life. From Twin Peaks dreamy moodiness to spaghetti […]
It’s often said that in hindsight some of the greatest inventions were so bleedin’ obvious that it was a wonder that no-one had ever thought of them before. In many ways that same logic applies here; given the dub chromosomes that, from the very offset, were nestled within The Pop Group’s DNA, it’s a forehead-slapping revelation that dub remixes of them, particularly this album, weren’t attempted years ago.
Sacred Bones In the great taxonomy of rock, Alan Vega was kind of like a platypus. ‘What? That can’t exist in nature!’ A Catholic Jew (a combo not known for its over-frequent presence in demographic cross-breaks), a veritable Methuselah when punk broke (he was already forty, though pretended to be […]
Cinema Paradiso WARNING – Contains filmic spoilers, conspiracy theories, adult themes, and chimpanzees. ADVICE – If you need a spoiler warning, that can only mean that you haven’t seen The Parallax View. Well, what the Sam Hell are you waiting for? It’s a masterpiece of the second golden age of […]
Zoharum And so, Phurpa are back. Like Russian Cenobites stepping slowly from the shadows and wreathed in a thick fug of juniper smoke, they are here once more to bathe us in their power and resonate our chakras in sympathy with the universal vibration. For those not already familiar with […]
Rocket When receiving this new album by enigmatic motorik outfit Och, I had hoped that the band had taken their name from the well-known Scottish linguistic trope. More specifically, I entertained vague hopes that they were perhaps (as I am) huge fans of the late Fulton MacKayi and, tuning in, […]
Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too When we last left our heroes in the early 1980s, they had just staggered bloodied but unbowed from the triumphant disaster that was The Mole Show, an interlinked series of albums and associated live tours that detailed the epic and deranged saga of the conflict […]
Mute Bristol in 1979 saw the emergence of one of the most beloved and influential bands of the punk era. Reformed again in recent years after a prolonged period of dormancy, decades after their serial appearances on the front covers of a number of influential music papers such as Melody […]
Dio Drone / Dirter Promotions About a year ago, we discussed a pioneering piece of Harvard University research, Thorsten A Cardy’s 2005 work “An Experimental Field Study of Ambient And Drone Based Music on Temporal Perception in Higher Mammals”. (The Annals of the American Academy of Auditory Zoology), which demonstrated […]
Epping Forest Until 28 July 2019 Something is stirring in the forest. Epping Forest to be precise, that area of ancient woodland straddling the divide between London and Essex. The woodland there has existed since Neolithic times at least, and scholars now believe it was granted legal status as a […]
Mute / BMG It was Voltaire who perhaps put it best when he reviewed the first Suicide album on its original appearance in 1977: “If Suicide did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them”. A punk band before the term existed, a rock band without guitars, a duo […]
Judi Gee Attention revellers. What with summer finally here, Europe cooking in a heatwave, and you and yours sprawled out languidly on the grass, eating picnics, drinking wine (spo-dee-o-dee), or otherwise trying to stay cool in the pool, you’re going to need a soundtrack, right? Something fitting for that golden […]
Cherry Red / MVD Entertainment / New Ralph Too In Early Modern English – the transitional phase of the English language from the Middle English of the late fifteenth century to the Modern English of the mid to late seventeenth century – the mole was known as the “mouldywarp”. Could there be any more […]