Intravenal Sound Operations Gargoyles are odd little things; like a lot of Christian ephemera they’re reminders of the impure relationship between the faithful and the spirit realm. In Catholicism, the church is a woman to whom the priest is married, hence their continued spurious and damaging homophobia within that institution. The major distinction between a gargoyle and a grotesque, legendarily, is that a gargoyle acts as guttering, a […]
Kev Nickells
204 posts
Zehra Devotional music is always so awkward to write about, and this collection of Gnawa music is no exception. And for why? Well, it’s never entirely clear what folk mean by devotional music, and that gets less clear the less information there is available about a group. And the Gnawa, well, they’re apparently the descendants of enslaved folk brought to Morrocco. What kind of devotional are we talking […]
Faber and Faber Cosey Fanni Tutti is likely best known to readers of Freq as a musician of some reknown, part of the imperative of Throbbing Gristle and with a substantial discography (Chris and Cosey etc). Art mavens know her variously for her work in pornography and mail art (also etc). As of 2017, she’s found a new life as the kind of writer who gets featured on […]
Black Editions Masayuki Takayanagi is something of a legend in free circles, although tricky to place — nominally free jazz, but a great deal more aggressive than that. Also proximal to free improv, but again a fair amount more savage and, with the exception of maybe Derek Bailey, Takayanagi was more transparently immersed in some very heavy jazz techniques.
Even in the midst of the continent’s most devastating war in half a century or more, the Eurovision Song Contest sails on; and what better than having Kev Nickells take on the annual task of examining and occasionally eviscerating each nation’s entry in all the detail such a cultural monument deserves. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. In a year that Europe has been pretty shaken
Brighton 28 April 2022 It’s difficult not to use words like “hushed reverence” for a band like Low, and you wonder if someone isn’t very much testing that by hosting them in a lovely church. I’m not sure if we’re “post-“Covid, but certainly being out and about, at a gig with lights and everything, is unnerving. I’m pretty sure everyone’s forgotten how to act in public and the […]
In Real Life So 2020’s Pompi EP from Meth Math was one of the highlights of the year for me, despite the fact that I flounder to describe it any more accurately than the phrase “ketty reggaeton”. And this new EP is not very reggaeton. Which is fine but they have entirely pushed me down the rabbithole of reggaeton (tl;dr – Bad Bunny is a trans hero; Daddy […]
Purple Trap Keiji Haino has rarely been one to avoid portentous titles and boy howdy has he stayed on-brand with My Lord Music I Most Humbly Beg Your Indulgence In The Hope That You Will Do Me The Honour Of Permitting This Seed Called Keiji Haino To Be Planted Within You. Away from Fushitsusha, Haino has a reputation for playing an extensive range of instruments — Shruti boxes, […]
Karlrecords Of course we’re all knee deep in re-issues of unheard electroacoustic works at this point in history, but Iannis Xenakis is something special-er than merely one of the bods who had a go at electronic means to produce music. A lot of composers went through periods of giving it a go and ultimately not finding their voice in it — while I’d personally say György Ligeti was […]
Greyfade Christopher Otto has clearly read the twentieth century composer’s guide to nicking ideas from the East, and leans heavily on knowledge of just intonation. But this debut release isn’t one of those superficial “exotic” borrowings (when do we get to lay into Terry Riley for that, by the way?) and probably has more to do with the kind of tonal particularly of Horatiu Radulescu than any mid-twentieth […]
Here we are then, a big ole' retrospective of Faust's... if not golden era, then certainly their best-known stuff. "Canonical" krautrock. And of course krautrock is a silly term at its silliest in reference to Faust -- the German band featuring least Germans, singing in French and English and German
Two albums linked by a label (Discus) and a player (Matthew Bourne ) and possibly joined by being somewhere in the fallout of jazz that’s not quite jazz. Neither sounding particularly alike, and that’s as it should be. Mzylkypop – Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? There are other words that precede it but, as is right and just, the first proper word on Mzylkypop‘s Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? is “Kurwa”. Which […]
Sub Pop I think this didn’t leave the CD player for a good ten listens when it came through. I wouldn’t say I was one of those Low fans. I was mostly indifferent for the last twenty years or so. But Double Negative really was a massive shot in the arm. Either for me or the band, who knows. This feels massively like a companion piece to Double […]
Bedroom Community As often happens with these things, Rakhi Singh was a new name on me and then her Manchester Collective popped up for this year’s proms, putting in a rare performance of establishment-baiting Julius Eastman. Having checked out some of her other work, she’s clearly comfortable sitting with the establishment classical world — and there’s a cracking rendition of Bach‘s Chaconne for solo violin you should check out […]
Spoon / Mute The live CD is a precarious beast. Cementing the band’s reputation or besmirching it with cash cows. Or somewhere in between — servicing the more obsessive of a band’s fanbase, kneecapping the bootlegger. I’m often cautious — for a band like Can, how much is it adding to know that they could turn out the goods live? Well a fair amount. There’s a lot of […]
The most wonderful time of the gay year, isn’t it. How much we’ve gay learned, and gay we’ve all become. I mean joking aside, there’s a lot of people have had a chance to spend some time with themselves and have come out as fuck. So it’s not all bad. What is ambiguous from this whole lockdown stuff is the effect it’s had on Eurovision. Here’s the skinny: […]
(self-released) Debut record from a Brighton-based duo doing something oddly nostalgic. In a way that’s possibly not obviously nostalgic. I don’t know how many readers are familiar with that time in “post-rock” when it was more associated with Tortoise and being quietly cerebral than big instrument rockist gestures, but this is fairly close to that. Similar to that time as well there’s a kind of parity and austerity […]
Broken Tape I’ll apologise for being brusque, but there’s a lot to get through and we haven’t got all day. – What is harsh noise wall? It’s harsh noise, except less happens. Typically fairly long, typically just white noise, typically minimal if not no dynamics. Often abbreviated to HNW. If it’s quieter it’s ambient noise wall (ANW) – Great, so what’s this compilation? It’s called 100 Harsh Noise […]