Exotic Pylon/Zoharum These are separated by time and space (never separable, never suited) but are nevertheless kin – in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color they would be pigs and people, skin-bonded, worm-tailed, consciousness-sharing. I guess they are both broadly branches of that jagged, never truly existing, tree called ‘dark ambient’ (a tree that confounds at every twist, that seemingly can’t die because it has roots in the infinite itself) […]
Loki
107 posts
Recollection GRM De Natura Sonorum seems an impossibly private affair. It feels a little like spying on an old guy as his mind is going and he’s trying to make sense of his belongings, looking at them with old-new eyes, touching them and trying to match the creases, smiling faintly because maybe that person in that clipping might be someone he once new, had a muscle memory of, […]
Monotype Okay. Let’s get the press over with; as a press release, this is actually pretty sweet: Given the bleak times we find ourselves in today, Cascone felt that another (he’s referencing the 50 years of Sunshine DBL on Silent) tribute to Herr Hofmann was in order. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the first LSD trip, a batch of etheric lysergic soundscapes were contributed to this project […]
Editions Mego COH intrigues because he seems to go elsewhere into the light. Most elsewheres are darkness-bound, content to continue stirring the ambient-stew given to them by their industrial ancestors (so many have made a cuckold of Lustmord) but COH’s music . This release is perhaps the most beautiful yet and works like a prettier, more sophisticated cousin of Rustie; both make music from cut class, COH’s shapes […]
Nochexxx I could use Nochexxx to teach Freud and ambivalence. Everything I’ve heard seems to be gnashing against the groove, as if he’s almost willing to let fly and be techno, disco etc but there’s a thick seam of Super(fly)ego holding him back at the last moment and sending him spinning off into far more interesting territories. Nochexxx is close to being a superstar DJ but these twists […]
Cleopatra The sleeve of this release says: “After Listening to this Record, your friends may not know you anymore” and you can see what they meant, at least in 1971 when this was first released. Cleopatra seem Hell bent on making Brainticket a thing, re-releasing their classic albums, pushing them onwards, trying to find a space for them in the world.
Editions Mego So, here we are again. I think I’ve reviewed in some way every Ekoplekz release – even if some of them were just 140 character yelps in the empty rooms of Twitter – and now, for the first time there’s signs that Nick’s relentless pursuit of his sound is cracking. Slightly. Okay. It’s not really cracking. I’ve heard marketing gloop that suggests that this sounds nothing […]
Front & Follow There’s buckets of finely congealed empathy here, beautifully presented. Front And Follow is an unusual, old-fashioned label, not quite made for these times. And thank God for that. This box set is a collection of nie EPs from a host of incredible artists, all working within the confines of some strange call & response routine which sees invited artists submit audio clips into a central pot, […]
Divine Records This is what Time-damaged sounds like and I’m not sure this is a good thing. I don’t believe the sleeve notes any more than I believe the record. Something is very wrong about this record. Actually, that’s not true at all. In fact, there are too many things that are just right about it. It’s just too… convenient. A quick confession (for most of you this […]
Editions Mego “Concret PH” begins with glass splattering, not in a Vagina Dentata Organ way, but made to seem like static, or phrases in static – . With Xenakis, your brain often has to look the other way. I know nothing about Xenakis as such but he seems like a tough guy: a hard philosophy. He doesn’t seem like he’s the kind of guy who values compromise. “Concret […]
(self-released)/Front & Follow It makes sense to review these together, since whatever the actual chronology of these songs, one begat another. They are linked to each other by a strange umbilicus, a slurry wurm of flesh. The self-released Carn shows us the Coilish side of Kemper Norton’s sound; the voices here are muttered, liminal (everything’s liminal these days), lurking around in the dark. One track in and the […]
Exceptional This is evidence of time travel. Not in a good way. In the future, we’ll still be in thrall to the past, still looking back and longing. We’ll still be unable to understand the terrible now. We’ll read and re-read Simon Reynolds’s Retromania (really must get round to that; it’s on my Christmas List. The irony of not reading it yet is killing me) and we’ll use […]
Front & Follow This gives me the gargles. It reminds me a little of the tone behind James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (it doesn’t sound much like it at all) in that it’s like Roman Bezdyk has found himself unable to distance himself from the music he’s riffing on. This seems respectable, seems right, seems like these aural artefacts (I’m talking about library music, mostly) ought to have a […]
Rocket Girl Untreated, Colin Wilson’s voice might be Paul Vaughan, the narrator of Coil’s “The Golden Section”; it has the same, slightly clipped, slightly cold authority but we don’t get to hear enough of it on this album. There’s a lot of processing here and the voice is often unrecognisable, sent off into shivers and hums and blurs. This is a strength of most of the music I […]
Editions Mego This seems chunky and real compared to the other Ekoplekz releases. You can buy it at Sainsbury’s. It’s out there, in all senses but it also feels like something of an end, like Nick Edwards is drawing a line, er, under the sand; it’s like a statement of where he’s been and how far he’s come. Nick’s always been very willing to give up his influences, […]
12K/Bitstream Sometimes, smaller and quieter is better, is perfect. This slender little piece is 20 minutes exactly, a precise slab of (ahem) Lovely Drones that shows Stephan Mathieu at his serious, studied best. Beauty slowed down. The WK is legendary “quiet” pianist Wilhelm Kempff, whose 1927 recordings of Beethoven‘s Piano Sonata No. 26 Les Adieux are used as some of the generative material here. Mathieu’s process sort of […]
Klangbad It was a total surprise to find out that Golden Diskó Ship is really one person, Theresa Stroetges, a Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist – because I was struck by how much this sounds like several different bands, all vying or attention and all too polite to really push their ideas to the foreground. The production seems to place these bands in different sound chambers, so that they’re marginally aware […]
Bureau B It can’t be a mistake that Red = Rot since this is electronic music rotted one note at a time. As a debut solo album – its actually more complicated than that – it’s a singular attempt to define a new genre of bubbling, messy, electronic music… Rot is propulsive/compulsive; as dark and shiny as a Scribing Mirror. You can hear the tangles that Conrad Schnitzler […]