So what business do they have deploying experimental music under the radar? Well, it’s all in the name: NMIXX — (Pick) NMIXX, if you will? This approach in their first single, “O,O”, wasn’t immediately embraced by audiences and critics. Multiple shifting styles and frequent unexpected jump-cut changes weren’t easily digested, even by an audience that has come to expect split-second editing in both music and videos.
Iotar
33 posts
This year has been huge in K-pop. South Korean pop culture is at a pivotal point where the new fourth generation of groups is making a definitive impact on the landscape.
Esoteric Recordings remastering of The Complete Liberty Recordings is a welcome reissue of the core canon of High Tide recordings, the two key albums — Sea Shanties and High Tide — and a third disc of demos and unreleased materials. Some of the demos have appeared before as bonus releases on earlier CD reissues.
In which Iotar looks back at his year in music for 2022. There’s been so much excellent new music this year that I’m going to break this roundup into regional and thematic sections for ease of reading.
Century Media Electric Callboy are in many ways the very acme of a contemporary metal band; or maybe to put it another way, they have become that very acme. Their first decade was not perhaps as distinctive as their current incarnation, which may have something to do with the arrival of their new vocalist Nico Sallach in 2020. We shy away from describing him as a frontman, for […]
Music On Vinyl / Seventh Claude Vorilhon was a racing car driver. He was a typical French man of the 1970s. Long hair, cigarettes, fast cars; he probably watched Un Homme Et Une Femme in the cinema. All of this changed for him abruptly at the end of 1973 when he had an alien visitation from an entity that called itself Jehovah. Those of you who are looking […]
Cleopatra A lot of people were very surprised when the 73-year-old Hawkwind veteran Nik Turner blew our heads clean off with the single “Fallen Angel STS-51-L”, ahead of the release of his Space Gypsy album. It was a Newtonian as all fuck, hurtling ride of a number. It had all of the giddy propulsion of classic space rock. Messy and noisy, but turn on a sixpence tight, and […]
Southern Lord Retrospektïẁ I, II and III are the crown jewels of the Magma empire. You’ll get told elsewhere that those jewels are located in the 1970s studio albums by Magma. You will get told that by people who cannot tell you why Christian Vander waited until 1980 to bring the key players of Magma back together at Olympia to record “Theusz Hamthaak”. If you don’t understand why “Theusz […]
Ahead of the launch of Robert Sotelo‘s début album, Cusp, Iotar interviewed Sotelo while he was in Buenos Aires from his new abode in Graz, Austria. They talked about the drift away from a London-centred culture, the glorious meaninglessness of great pop and much more that is pertinent.
Arrow Films If you were to look for a definition of the term “cult movie”, you might find the huge stone face of Zardoz staring back at you from the page, bellowing “the gun is good, the penis is bad”. Because it is for this and dozens of other images of batshit unheimlich that Zardoz has earned its cult status.
Jazz Village (Before we go any further, a word about the title: you saw the caron on the s, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did. And that immediately suggested to you that Šlag Tanz is pronounced Schlag Tanz and you didn’t have a silly schoolboy [or girl] moment, did you? Good, and furthermore you get the Germanic sense of the word that indicates something like Shock Dance, […]
Acrobat The 1960 tour of Europe of the Miles Davis Quintet is a significant moment in jazz. It stands at a fulcrum for the development of John Coltrane as a musician and as a distinctive voice. The Quintet here is essentially the Sextet featured on Kind of Blue, but with Bill Evans swapped for Wynton Kelly on piano and without Cannonball Adderly. Coltrane had played with Miles Davis […]
Elektrowerkz, London 8 November 2014 One can learn a lot about two bands from their inter-set changeover. Here in the black box of Elektrowerkz, surrounded by dressed-down men with beards and a few women too, we are watching AK DK remove a lot of equipment. There are two drum kits in there, a couple of synths with reassuringly wooden sides on tables covered in lots of other associated […]
Thrill Jockey When we look back to the ’90s, back when something that was called post-rock was as vital a part of the musical landscape as Britpop or grunge, we might find ourselves wincing at the apparent uselessness of this subgeneric category, or we might find ourself wincing at the uselessness of all subgeneric categories, or we might find ourselves just not caring either way. Post-rock was described […]
Seventh Five DVDs into Magma‘s series of live sessions at Le Triton,we find the pioneers of Zeuhl way out there beyond the Theusz Hamtaahk trilogy and exploring some of the stranger byways of their œuvre along with some dazzling new material. The entire programme runs to about two hours. There are a few interludes during which audience members, including Steve Davis, are interviewed about their relationship to the […]
London 5 September 2013 In the lead up to the first London gig in thirteen years from Manuel Göttsching we have been treated to a certain amount of media nonsense situating him as a godfather of minimal techno.
Thrill Jockey Phil Manley will already be known to fans of Total Music as a key member of the groups Trans Am and The Fucking Champs. To those of you who really keep your eye on the ball, you will also know that he released a solo album in 2011 called Life Coach. It is not that Life Coach but his new band Life Coach and their début […]
(self-released) In an era of bands reforming, reappearing and generally revising, sometimes apparently out of the blue, few albums have been as eagerly anticipated as My Bloody Valentine‘s third; and after twenty-two years it finally appeared on their own website with barely a breath of warning to the waiting throngs – and on YouTube when their servers crashed too. Freq offers three opinions on the mbv brouhaha. 1. […]