Màgia Roja The era of the late ’60s/early ’70s has been whitewashed through the rosy lenses of hindsight. Baby boomers waste no time in reminding us theirs was the greatest generation, with the best music. The era where everything was being invented, the future was being ushered in. It was […]
J Simpson
63 posts
Exotic Pylon Bloodhounds is folk poetry. Paul Snowdon is reclaiming the machines of technology from the cultural elite, the bright and polished megastar DJs and superslick mnml producers, ensconced in their citadels of expensive outboard effects, to create a rural ritual evocation of a youth spent in northern England. Let’s […]
Mute In a world inundated with live recordings and DJ mixes, what makes a release stand apart from the barbarous hordes? The fact alone that this is mnml mastermind Richie Hawtin‘s first record under his Plastikman guise in a decade, since 2003’s Closer, means that people will be paying attention, […]
Oblique (vinyl)/Daymare (CD) Given how the ubiquitous comparisons to the American desert-scape were for Earth‘s classic Hex: Or Printing The Infernal Method, it’s a minor miracle that this is the first soundtrack for Earth’s main man, Dylan Carlson. Fittingly, it is a Western soundtrack for the movie Gold, released in […]
ATP Even though the members of Eaux have been making music together since 2006, originally as the post-rock band the Sian Alice Group, Plastics seems entirely of the moment, firmly rooted in the present, in its anachronism. That’s not to say Eaux are bandwagon-hopping, rather that they are an example […]
Software I’ve heard it said that for art to truly succeed, it needs to run the risk of failure. If there is no antagonism, if everything is completely predictable, it glides right off of you without making an impression. Compare Tropic Of Cancer to drugstores full of pulp romance, for […]
Exotic Pylon Dark ambient music is particularly effective at evoking strange, surreal, subjective visions. Synthetic tones and natural field recordings, swathed in echo and cavernous reverb, are stripped of context, and freed from the brutal confines of Western tonality. It borrows a lot from cinematic sound design, particularly of a […]
Portland, OR 16 May 2014 After several weeks of attending the vaunted interior of Mississippi Studios, it seem that the calendar had skipped from 1963 to 1968 or so. Maybe 1970. The flower power and idealism and utopia of bands like Acid Mothers Temple and Trans Am were replaced by […]
Portland, OR 9 May 2014 A burly dude writhing on the oscillators wearing a plastic Viking helmet is pretty much what you hope to greet you on stage when attending a psych rock gig. Portland’s best and beardiest turned out to the barn cathedral interior of Mississippi Studios for a […]
Portland, OR 30 April 2014 Seeing Thee Silver Mt. Zion, the most famous off-shoot of post-apocalyptic prophets Godspeed You! Black Emperor, on the eve of both May Day, the most famous of socialist holidays, and Beltane, a Celtic pagan festival halfway between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, often […]
Mississippi Studios Portland, OR 25 April 2014 The ramifications of the loop, the power of the riff, the subdivision of the motorik beat. College, krautrock, and working for yr music festival. This jam-packed free-for-all in the barnlike interior of Mississippi Studios on a Thursday night illustrated exactly how far kosmische […]
Portland, OR. 18 April 2014 The Evolution Of Bass Every time a band reunites, it raises the cynical question: is this mere nostalgia, a quick cash grab? Musicians with nothing new to say, relying on former glories to make a quick buck? Or is it merely that their time has […]
Editions Mego Through A Pre-Memory is an embrace of the titans; two behemoths of the dronederground, Mika Vainio of Pan Sonic and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O)))/Khanate/KTL/Lotus Eaters and head of the Ideologic Organ label. While screeching black metal, doom, glitch, noise and dark ambient may not be the most […]
Software Thug Entrancer‘s Death After Life smashes the fourth wall of an Atari screen, riding into outerspace on Hokusai‘s Vaporwave to fight Space Invaders, while the Silver Surfer does backbends and smokes spliff. Equal parts eccojam and beat-tape, Ryan McRyhew draws an intangible line from ’90s braindance to the folk […]
More Than Human Straight society often views conceptual or avant-garde art with a suspicion bordering on hatred. “Art for art’s sake,” a dirty phrase, meant to imply these artists contribute nothing to society, only existing to inflate their own egos and justifying their existence with pretentious-sounding theories that the everyman […]
Portland, OR 2 March 2014 Rise Of The Mutants I had the strongest sensation of living in the future, as I bussed past the emerald green glass towers of the Oregon Convention Center on my way to the Wonder Ballroom on a drizzly Sunday evening, the trancey binaural beat construction […]
Exotic Pylon Antimacassar, the debut LP from Dolly Dolly (the alter-ego of David Yates) explores the three -realisms of the 20th Century – surrealism, irrealism and magickal realism – with a combination of spoken word, sci-fi electronics, sound collage and avant-classicism. The result is punker than punk, heavier than heavy […]
Southern Lord On Terrestrials, drone metal pioneers SunnO))) join with black metal genrefuckers Ulver. Here, SunnO)))’s signature basalt bass sculptures are adorned with electronic flourishes and orchestral elegance to create a sprawling desert landscape. Ra’s priests worship the sun with burnished brass, while poor benighted pilgrims wander through blighted, mosquito-ridden […]
Zoharum To West And Blue is the 50th (!!!) album by Rapoon, and it trades in dark ambient’s typical deep space cosmic horror for mudflats and marshlands, making for a superb movie of the mind. The album was inspired, in part, by a part of Britain where Robin Storey, here […]
Boyznoize On Self Therapy, the debut LP from 20 year old German producer SCNTST, Bryan Müller smashes the fourth wall, managing to span the dark space between representation and the real thing. SCNTST’s productions are a love song: a love song to video games and machines, as well as real […]