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.
Iotar
32 posts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]
The Sound of White Columns Unlike Star Trek fans, Can enthusiasts never have to choose between the two key vocalists of the Can oeuvre. Partly this is because Damo Suzuki and Malcolm Mooney both found idiosyncratic ways in which to interact with the rest of the band. It is also […]
The Jazz Café, London 10 November 2012 Anyone who knows anything about Krautrock will already know that Agitation Free were one of the most significant bands during the early ’70s in Germany. They will also know that both Manuel Göttsching and Christopher Franke are included amongst their alumni, and that […]
Sub Pop There’s always a tension going on between artists and their audiences growing up. Back when we first encountered Low they were playing deliberately quietly, persistently black and white. . In a few years we all stopped being so bloody miserable; us, them, everyone. Although God knows there was […]