English Heretic This has a stately grace, which seems full of ghosts. A fifty year de-celebration of The Summer of Love and a fugue for a darkening isle (that book seems closer to reality than any of us would like). It reimagines and repurposes, taking obscure psychedelic tracks from that […]
Loki
107 posts
Cherry Red I saw that car. You know which one. In Stockwell, where I used to stay at a mate’s brother’s squat. I think Thatcher On Acid or Blyth Power or someone lived there. It just sat on the street a few doors down and we took polaroid pictures of […]
Dais “This is what it’s like.” A softly whispered, wraith-like voice appears during one of the tracks and it’s an exemplar: this is one (relatively) short descent into a steaming woodland of madness. There’s great chasms opening up all over the land and we’re listening to ourselves being swallowed.
Sub Rosa It’s becoming a little unpopular, and there seems a tiresome insistence creeping in that music should stand for itself (I completely disagree), but I love electronic music that’s about something; I love a history and a context. The words surrounding a release are as important to me as […]
Faber and Faber A long time ago, I wrote that Genesis P Orridge singing “marmalade” in Throbbing Gristle‘s “Hit By A Rock” on D.O.A. was the key moment in industrial music, a moment that most of the “industrial” artists that stomped around in the wake of TG utterly missed. You […]
Impossible Objects Of Desire I didn’t ask for this, but it came anyway. I’d been a Fujiya and Miyagi sceptic: too accommodating, too precise, too Brighton.
Rocket Recordings There will be many howls, and here’s one of the first out of the blocks. Gnod can meander, at times (and I like their meanderings), but here the rage is palpable; this is a headbutt into the side of a fast-moving machine. Hawkwind on double-speed, ditching the mushrooms […]
House Of Mythology It’s all in the trails. In a recent, small-scale, study carried out by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, participants took LSD and carried out a number of tasks. The experimenters documented the experiences and noted that tasks that required linguistic […]
Touch Sometimes, the press releases just absolutely nail it and I hate it when they do. This latest release from the band that fell from the belly of The Amal Gamal Ensemble came with a description that’s clearly trying to ruin my review before it’s even got going.
Hallow Ground I’m not going to use the C word, but he’s not hiding from it. As much as Danny Hyde is his own man, and Electric Sewer Age is his own creation, there are several tantalising trails and in-jokes and red herrings for the fanatic(al). Some of these traces […]
Heavy Rural This sounds like home. It’s slow, like Somerset. It creeps up on you, like the sunlight splitting off the top of Glastonbury Tor. It gets where it’s going in its own time; there’s absolutely nothing about this release which feels forced. Neil Mortimer (Urthona) and Michael J York (Cyclobe, Téléplasmiste, […]
Cherry Red Nobody is evil, nobody is good All the guilty people have misunderstood I have a bit of a man-crush on Momus. It goes right back to 1987, just after this retrospective begins. He can’t do any wrong (even when he does lots of things wrong) and I’m probably […]
Disco Gecko I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I totally bought into the Planet Dog/Shamanarchy angle as a teenager and still buy in now. This compilation has been put together by Toby Marks AKA Banca de Gaia, one of the heads of the scene in the ’90s, a […]
Dirter Andrew Liles, the second Duke of Burgundy, third in line to the old French throne and now a broken-hearted (re)publican millionaire (his fortune in bacterial warfare, a subsidiary of Pershing), scores when he wants. He spends his time at his Bavarian recording castle, chasing peasants, scaring locals and recording […]
United Dirter Seriously plunderphonic, this baby plays Surrealist ping-pong with ’50s advertising, sped-up exotica, Brat Pack crooners and virtually anything else that fevered mind of Steven Stapleton could chuck in there (it’s little wonder this was three years in the making). I can imagine Stapleton dressed in his crow-black finery […]
Red Wharf They’ve been here before. Well, not quite here but near enough. This isn’t the first collaboration and, on this evidence, it won’t be the last. They’ve found that . I’ve been in and out of the NWW canon for what seems like all the years now; I drift […]
Black Mass Rising The music on this album feels quietly all-encompassing; you can tell immediately that it’s Sleazy because over time he’s developed true signatures; there’s sounds here that are indistinct and yet unmistakable. I mean, we know that sometimes Coil’s music was just Sleazy don’t we? We know that […]
Klangbad Neu! have a lot to answer for. Their best bits can be transcendent, their worst bits lazy and a little pointless and even a little contemptuous. We all have days like that, but . We all loved them despite their patchy output (perhaps because of it) and many attempted […]
Magic + Dreams Of Human Bondage; salvation through restriction. An intriguing premise, where all the artists in the series were given not just the limitation of time per se but the ultra-specific requirement of actual track times (0:06, 0:23, 1:11, 2:37, 3:03, 3:14, 4:20 and 6:06) to conform to. It […]
Ipecac At the start of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, the disclaimer suggests: “This is not for you” and this is where I find myself with Sleaford Mods. I like this album, find it witty and funny and I’ve always liked The Fall and it’s not as annoying as Renegade Soundwave but… this […]