Dreamy Life Over the course of the five track on this EP, Signals & Alibis, a boy/girl two-piece from Fort Worth, Texas, have constructed their own brooding hinterland using keyboards, guitar and baritone.
EP review
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Substantia Innominata The latest instalment in Drone Records‘ series of double 10″ vinyl releases comes from Pepijn Caudron, AKA Kreng. Commissioned for a dance piece choreographed by Kevin Trappeniers, and performed in Ljubljana by Dagmar Dachauer, Selfed is envisioned as a metaphorical method for breaking down the borders thrown up by both the individual and society.
“Noinge” / “Gloakid With Phendrabites” Dirter Promotions The first side is the sound of the playful Band Of Pain remixing Nurse With Wound‘s A Sucked Orange in a game of arrant right-angles and ink-splattered goodness where the original source material is utterly fucked over in malfunctioning attention deficits that splutter like a cyborg cat with a data hairball.
Zamzarec This is a truly haunting experience; think Mazzy Star with a whisper of Shelleyan Orphan or Alison Shaw from Cranes, but softer, swollen in the ambiguous. Its language a diffusion of hues, suggestions for your mind to play with, backed by switchblades of horizon that pull at the frame, inverting the scenery in cycling hooks of guitar, droning key-lines, tumbling percussives.
Edamame The sky is bright blue, adrift with white motherships of the imagination – an inbound vision on which the shimmering haze of this recent four-tracker from Lush glides. Blind Spot marks a welcome return to the fray after the tragic death of their drummer halted their desire to continue far too many years ago. Listening to this handsomely designed EP (something Chris Bigg of 4AD fame has […]
Front & Follow Mark Kluzek‘s project The Doomed Bird of Providence began in London in 2009 with the aim of telling the stories of early colonial Australia. This latest offering, You Brought the Knife, is a haunting five-track EP that recounts the tale of Maria Murray (née Middleton) — a runaway slave, convicted murderer and transportee, largely forgotten by all but a handful of academics.
White Label Music Like the former colonel of the First Earth Battalion, Jim Channon, whom Jon Ronson encountered in the story he recounted in The Men Who Stare At Goats, Radio 9 are apparently encouraging their charges – their listeners – to embark on a mission to achieve the impossible, and walk through the walls; though maybe via the more simple expedient of metaphysically opening up the doors […]
Ankst So when a new EP comes out from Datblygu, Freq offers up not one, but two reviews. Firstly, Kev Nickells enthuses: In a caveat that might as well be me saying “this is why I don’t write for a living,” it’s tricky writing about Datblygu. Certainly from my perspective. If you don’t know, they’re broadly considered as arguably the most important Welsh-language bands of the last 32 […]
Front & Follow In which Kemper Norton applies his spectral resonances to The Doomed Bird of Providence‘s “Mahina,” a standout track from their most recent album Blind Mouths Eat. The Doomed Bird of Providence explore the very darkest recesses of Australian history through their bleak sound constructions
(self-released) If you have ever longed to hear La Düsseldorf covering The Damned‘s “Neat Neat Neat,” Polly Harvey backed by Wire and Hawkwind (at the same time!) or The Saints fronted by Lydia Lunch, then Art Trip and the Static Sound are the group for you. EP2 (I somehow missed EP1 – but will remedy that) is full of concise, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll – driving rhythms, grinding […]
Label: Matador Format: CDS,12″ Taking as its sample base the sounds of plastic surgery operations, “California Rhinoplasty” does precisely what the title describes; only funkily. Not for Matmos the obvious route of ambinece as the bones rasp and the noses are broken with a hammer. Instead, every sound becomes grist(le) to their sampler’s mill to make a groovy shuffle of sprightly plops, squeaks and chugging bass. Part of […]
Label: FatCat Format: 12″ Matmos‘ side of this disc has two tracks, the first of which, “Freak ‘N’ You”, uses digital cut-ups to make snickering Funk from the garbage of sundry abandoned R&B acapella vocal CDs left lying in bins at Drew Daniel‘s college radio station; and very odd indeed it is too. Deracinated Soulful singers make a skipping, skimming presences in a piece which gets up early […]
Label: Beggars Banquet Format: 12″,CDS Initially, this is really quite disappointingly normal, especially when compared to the stunningly evocative combination of HipHop rhythms with Isolationist textures which made up the remarkable Beat album a few years back. By contrast “Freedom Fighter” goes for the laid-back, casual-smoking vocal style and ironic personality analysis song-structure of indie trip-hop, but in what feels like a very commercial manner. Which, to be fair, is adequately hooky and […]
Label: Warp Format: 12″,CDS One of the scarier tracks from his Organism album, “Year Of The Apocalypse” finds Jimi Tenor deploying the kind of sub-funky sounds and sequences which give swingbeaty house such a bad name and such a loose-limbed grotesqueness. That the subject is making love and partying hard in the face of Millennial doom is only to be expected, and engenders a certain amount of choral interludes and pitch-bent oscillators at […]