Magic and Dreams In China Mieville’s wondrous The City And The City, the city of Beszel exists in more or less the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. The cities interweave, crosshatch; citizens unsee their counterparts in the other city, buildings themselves merge but don’t merge. Neighbours live next to each other but dutifully don’t notice their proximity, in fact are forbidden from doing so by […]
Loki
107 posts
Critical Heights Imagine that Animal Collective could be reformatted like a hard drive. Imagine some mad urfolk indie scientist, their senses dulled by slow cracks and too good weed, decided that the shimmering pop tarts of Merriweather Post Pavilion was just too much to bear, too damned hummable and so somehow found a way to just suck the Baltimore boys back to a time, circa Spirit They’re Gone, […]
Paw Tracks “Rest in Peace”, the opening track of the latest Prince Rama album opens with a slightly strangulated House howl, the kinda thing you might have gurned circa 1990, which is then savagely dismissed without a thought, a discarded, non-devotional whore… the drum rumbles begin and then the Dead Can Dance Indian sweeps and suddenly we’re deep into what might be a psychosexual memory of Sinbad movies… […]
Leaf I didn’t hear Roll The Dice’s first album Live In Gothenberg but a quick bum around the blogs finds mentions of Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Kosmische slop in general (I’ve already written at least four reviews on this site where I reference Klaus Schulze, so this time I won’t). You can imagine. People either do this stuff well (Emeralds) or they don’t (insert unfave here). In Dust, their […]
Important You might have heard this record before. If you’ve scuttled and scurvied around various Asian cities, found bands playing deep into the night in Ho Chi Minh cocktail bars, Tokyo splatterfest beer halls, Bangkok’s secret lock-ins. , playing because it’s the only thing keeping them up at this late hour. You’ll have seen them through a gauze of over-the-counter codeine, maybe sucked your consciousness through Mai Tais […]
Punch Drunk The title is revealing: throwaway and heartfelt, this is certainly intrusive (this is not ambient, except in the sense of enveloping) and it is a little incidental, a little sketchy in both senses of the word (cf everything else by Ekoplekz) but there’s more to it than that. There’s something else here. This is Ekoplekz unleashing his noise horde and the title might almost be read […]
Splendour This is music made from orchestral peak experiences and emotional aggregates; it’s big, a little brassy and, while perhaps not as overwhelming or pompous or Wagnerian as it might have been, it nevertheless has intent, like Laibach without moustaches and Lenin vests. Finnish quartet Siinai have created 21st Century marching music for non-psychick youths. You’ll have heard some of the guitar + synth textures before but rarely […]
Tequila Sunrise / Cream of Turner These two LPs came to me with the coolest hand-made sleeves I’ve seen in ages. Beautiful, odd designs. The Sunlore sleeve is a psyched wig-out of paint and scratches and burns, looking not unlike one of the shotgun paintings of William S Burroughs smeared by Max Ernst (you can see it being made on the label website). The Heart Land sleeve is […]
Dekorder This is a work in progress about a work of progress. A split album in all senses. Side A is Debussy’s La Mer played on sawtoothed (maybe snaggletoothed) electronics. Keith Fullerton Whitman’s latest Buchla synth missive, “101105,” comes with health warnings embedded; a strobe in sound rather than light, sending the audience (this was recorded live) into dead spasms. There’s rumours that a good few of the […]
OIB This started so well. Opening track “Gobachi” lets orie(m)ental toy tunes sumo each other out of the ring, while some crazy sub-Venetian Snares drums roll. It’s and had me and the kids dancing our hair off. It’s silly and relentless (the cover has a guy – I’m guessing this is Pseudo Nippon himself – with a fried egg on his head) but then, well, it kind of […]
Outlier . The fact that they’re from Iceland (via Rome) won’t help here; they could be from anywhere but they especially don’t sound Icelandic. You know what I mean. I’m struggling because I kind of like this but it’s because I really loved Spacemen 3, bought every Jesus and Mary Chain single (okay, I got bored by Automatic, but I bought most of the singles that people still […]
Further You know the quote, Arthur C. Clarke’s finest: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” You can only imagine how mind-blown people must have been when Conrad Schnitzler cranked up his machines way back in the early 70s but his influence has been written out of the major theses on the development of electronic music, perhaps because of his affiliation with the hair-synth of Tangerine Dream, […]
Tin Angel I love Little Annie’s voice. It’s a time-stretched instrument; a voice wracked with melancholy, a voice you’ll find singing alone in a bomb-blasted, ex-colonial hotel at the outer edges of the Empire. The press release puts her way down in the mix, as if she’s on there in the same way she was on Coil’s Love’s Secret Domain, but this is misleading. This album isn’t hers […]
Riot Season I’m in a marquee, somewhere in the midst of pre-Empire, pre fucking ‘Glasto’ Glastonbury. An odd hour. Somewhere just behind me, people are bartering over the price of admission to the Healing Pyramid: “Nah, mate; three quid each.” “Each? But it’s the same energy, isn’t it?” “If only it were, my son, if only it were (shakes head sadly)… you should see what the Orgone Accumulator […]
Constellation Bruce Cawdron (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and Becki Foon’s (Thee Silver Mt. Zion) latest release as Esmerine (now expanded to a quartet, with harpist Sarah Page and percussionist Andrew Barr) is dedicated to Lhasa de Sela, the Montréal-based singer-songwriter who succumbed to breast cancer in 2010. I know nothing about Lhasa, but I’m guessing this is a fitting and heartfelt tribute. The tones are uniformly elegiac and […]
Spectrum Spools I saw someone head-butted over an album like this. Well, I say headbutt but I’m guessing it was more an headglance, a floppy-haired headslash, a vaguely embittered coming together between two Kosmische fans with half an eye on the past and a bellyful of animal tranquilisers. I’m paraphrasing, but it seemed as if Kosmische Fan 1 (you know what he looked like) was angry at Kosmische […]
Room 40 John Chantler hasn’t released any significant solo albums for seven years and The Luminous Ground suggests he’s spent that time wrestling with his machines until, finally, he’s given up and has let them speak for themselves, twisted electronic entrails and all. The album opens with a peak-experience rush of oscillation, no gently evolving crescendos here, we’re thrust right into the eye of the storm; wave upon […]