4AD It’ll End In Tears Being the kind of guy to gravitate towards the melancholic, there’s certain records that stay with you, speak an (un)comfortable truth, live far beyond the era they were created in. Dreampop supergroup This Mortal Coil‘s It’ll End In Tears is such a jewel, a timeless beauty whose cover versions went beyond mere homage, opened up lots of extra-curricular exploration
Michael Rodham-Heaps
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Tiny Global Productions Forty years young, The Nightingales are back with a storming album. Perish The Thought is a sharp and saturated beast wrapped in a lush baroque of a cover full of rich flora, that if you stare hard enough is a garden full of death, subtly strangled in barb wire. The Crass-like eye-popping photo-montage of the inlaytoo (is that Elvis floating above tenements?)
Bristol 13 November 2018 Deep in the building’s basement, illuminated by flashing red strobes, Copper Sounds totally seduced with their ritualistic roast of belt-driven bicycle wheels and contact mic(ed) boulders. The undulating mechanism murmured like an arthritic after-shadow in the PA as the calcium rub of the stoney surfaces was effect-fed, bent across grainy percussives in a parade of pendulum-painting pennies
Front And Follow Kick-starting Front and Follow‘s new series celebrating the past and present of some of the label’s regular contributors, the Sone Institute (after a six year hiatus) takes Ex Post Facto by the horns, presenting new work, along with a bonus download album of retrospective highlights and unreleased secrets from their archives. The new work is brilliant
[PIAS] As a long-time fan, I found Dead Can Dance’s comeback album Anastasis a tad disappointing – that mesmerising sheen of old seemed oddly suppressed, and I don’t think the use of machined percussives helped matters either. Anyways, hearing Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had a new album out, I thought I’d give them another try — and I’m so glad I did
Upset The Rhythm Well, this baby smacks you in the face with its furnace-like enthusiasm in an impenetrable feast of guitar, drums and yelling from the Leeds duo Guttersnipe. If you’ve seen them live, you’ll be happy to hear that that self-same ferocity is bleeding out of this release unimpeded.
Editions Mego On the back of last year’s double LP début comes this teasing taste of UUUU‘s expanding soundworld, a two-track twelve inch that steeps your ear in some mighty fine sonics as your eye is creeped out by the grainy black and white of the cover.
Beggars Arkive On the heels of The Frenz Experiment came this curve ball for The Fall’s eleventh (or maybe thirteenth) album. Who could have foreseen a ballet soundtrack was in the offing? Yeah, it was quite a surprise
Bristol 6 October 2018 Great to be back at the Colston Hall again, the stairs and upper foyer looked down on a stage that bustled with analogue and hi-tech loveliness, a crowd were perched against the glass railings in anticipation, a great vantage point for later
Bristol 4 October 2018 First up at The Thunderbolt were Dead Space Chamber Music, offering up a crafted dronescape of e-bowed pickups and cylindered frets from Tom Bush and a witchy, spiralling sonic topped off with choral gasps and murmuring abstractions from Ellen Southern. Even without their cellist (who couldn’t make it), this was still whorling and wondrous
Newhaven Fort, East Sussex 22 September 2018 Ahhh, that relentless rain! After a blazing summer it’s great to get back to some genuine English weather, isn’t it? And boy, it rained all day, meaning a lot of the improv parade ground goodness at Fort Process‘s 2018 edition got secreted away, upping the happen-upon expectation to rise that bit higher.
4AD The first track on Pixies‘ début release Come on Pilgrim takes a dump in your mind with its bad Samaritans and shamanic shears. Thirty years on, it’s still gnawing at you like a raggedy chihuahua as you stumble through the wreckage of a house party’s aftermath. Those heavy drums of David Lovering‘s really feel like there being clambered over, that slow thaw of salivary guitar eating at you as
Antifrost Drawing on an ancient word for witches across German-speaking Europe in the Middle Ages, Lukas Feigelfeld‘s film Hagazussa is a gloomy feast for the imagination where plague and paranoia paint an atmospheric treasure-trove of unease. A gothic feast for the eyes
Om Kult Another unsettling listen from the master of extreme – Rudolf Eb.er, Om Kult Volume I is a cerebral feast that cancers the comfortable with needlepoint clarity. The carrion flies that dart between your hemispheres, those dirt dragging paws. It’s a focused feast that predators a pulse, shadow-plays a closely mic(ed) drama
Bristol 8 September 2018 Luckily zero nightmares on the parking front meant we only missed a small portion of Microdeform’s set, a colour-washed dronescape, needled by fractured dissidence. These tasty elasticated hues pulling you into a kaleidoscope of blistered sunsets, spreading out in grainy after-images
Self-released God’s Teeth And The Interstellar Tropics are a psychedelic improv threesome hailing from Brighton. Suitably mysterious, extra details are scant, but I’m liking the airy acrobatics on this, their third release, GNASH.
Fish Of Milk (Australia and New Zealand) / ReR Megacorp (Europe and Japan) / Northern Spy (Americas) This newbie from Australian improv giants The Necks plays a Charlemagne Palestine-like long game (or it appears so) in a snakes and ladders of subtle tone shifts and erosions. A deceptively simple premise that sleekly seduces, seeps in there, tingles in the fragmentary unison of a trickling piano and scattered percussives.
Karlrecords A Philosophy Warping, Little By Little That Way Lies A Quagmire documents the second collaboration between Konstrukt and the Japanese avant-garde / noise icon Keiji Haino. This live manifestation, captured at SalonIKSY back in December last year, (and confusingly carrying the same title as its studio sister) is a meaty two-track beast that makes you envious you missed out on witnessing it in the flesh.