Light In The Attic This Heat This Heat‘s self-titled 1979 début album is a document of three musicians finding their mojo in an abandoned meat locker. Although much of the LP was recorded elsewhere, it generally feels — for the most part — a very enclosed experience, as if (I like to think) you can hear the damp walls of those black’n’white promo-shots reverberating within the fibre of […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
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The Alphabet Business Concern Musically, it’s a frantic fairground erupting cosily in your head – an aesthetic matched by the queasiness of Cardiacs‘ badly made-up faces. I remember their video for “R.E.S.” — the turtlenecks, nodding heads and punch’n’judy antics, beamed barmy from the offset. An eensy-weensy bit disturbing too; as your eyes filled with those fixed pearly grins and purple bruises — fffurrrrrrhhh — They were like […]
4AD More loveliness from the vaults of 4AD, and the label have pulled out all the stops on this one. A five-disc Lush retrospective housed in a glossy hardback book, surely destined to become an instant collector’s item. Not only are the historical releases Gala, Spooky, Split and Lovelife captured, there’s tons of session tracks, demos and previously unreleased miscellany appended to each disc too – in all […]
St John at Hackney, London 5 December 2015 It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas: illuminations strung across the lampposts of the capital, sparkling every night like twinkling stars; the inky darkness of the night already setting in by mid afternoon; overflowing trays of “luxury” mince pies everywhere you look. And – really – what says “Christmas” more than a Faust gig?
Young God (North America) / Mute (Rest of the world) Disc 1 — White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity After a disastrous flirtation with a major label on The Burning World, White Light From The Mouth of Infinity was a self-financed regaining of confidence for Michael Gira. The acoustic spirit of Burning World was still high on the agenda, but the lacklustre verve that cursed that LP was ditched […]
Troum and Yen Pox – Mnemonic Induction Transgredient This disc shows the collaborative strengths of the German bliss-mongers Troum coupled with the menacing ambience of America’s Yen Pox, originally released by Malignant Records in 2000 and remastered for this re-release on Transgredient. Mnemonic Induction is a 63 minute journey divided into quarters, each track eating the tail of the next to make essentially one continuous dronescape, the whole […]
The Spheres Swastikas For Noddy was my favourite of Current 93‘s work until Thunder Perfect Mind stole its glory some years later. It’s very much a family affair, a pulling of disparate threads directed by David Tibet chasing his hallucinogenic vision of a crucified Noddy.
Arrow Films Aleksei German‘s Hard To Be A God is sci-fi in the Tarkovsky tradition, very much a state of mind rather than flashy tech and shiny spaceship CGI. The film is based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky‘s 1964 novel of the same name, and was completed after the director’s death by his son Aleksei German Jr. The back story is that a group of earth scientists (although […]
Editions Mego If one artist could embody epic, Thighpaulsandra would try to top it. Rumour has it his first solo record was so big he had to spread it across two releases and one of those was a double’s worth. Musically well travelled and mustering a mind-boggling proficiency of styles, he happily hopscotches from classical to avant electronic, proggy free jazz to full-on kraut and a whole of […]
Industrial That foetal thump propelling this is cavernous; and at high volume it’s huge. Dynamically churning up the digital silt as collapsing structures fall through in cacophonies of brokenness, shadowy vectors that smoulder in the arch of pulsing ambiguity. Yep, my favourite trio Carter Tutti Void are back with more post-industrial mutations to be savoured. The splintered majesty that started with Transverse (and I still can’t believe that […]
ICR / United Dairies Loving the way this triptych holds you sensory hostage. One of Nurse With Wound‘s most mellowest outings to date too, documenting three separate live concerts between 2011 and 2012 with the Blind Cave Salamander — a onetime support act that Steve Stapleton invited to be absorbed into the NWW sound world. On paper this was meant to be a live rendition of Soliloquy for […]
Bristol 21 August 2015 Loved the way Twin‘s guitars seemed to shimmer in your mind’s eye like a hazy mirage. A spectre of voice weaving through as lush loops were overlaid in trebling ascents. Endlessly changing, channelling, dusted in a candle-lit intimacy of curling chords caught in a Fursaxa-like beguile. A sound that . A delicate and dreamy apparition that exploded in applause. https://soundcloud.com/twin-music-2/asteria Next were angular tantrums […]
Crammed Discs I’m seriously fixated by musique concrète, along with a lot of other musical niches; it’s been a slippery slope ever since hearing Luciano Berio’s Visage at an impressionable age, which set the dominos toppling for other magnetic tape twisters, splicers and slicers. In turn, this spurred an appreciation of more tonally spread hues, that floating gasp to our everyday stripped of recognition, the petri dish of […]
Lava Thief From the angsty bristles of their debut All Mind in the Cat House comes another Jaggersaw of squabbling quadients with a smidgen more hip-swinging melody sneaking under/over that the despotic word spillage. A danceable zest that happily avoids cliché whilst simultaneously dragging you through a thicket of barbed carnivores and bullying percussions. This is so good — every song a radiant splinter, siphoning the spirit of […]
United Jnana I like to think these were lullabies, bedtime ambience for Steven Stapleton and Diana Rogerson’s daughter Lilith, born in the same year this was first released, the album’s shapes spinning the horsey mobiles as she slipped into the deep nether world of unconsciousness, that wordless sparkle of fertile imaginings. This, remains for me, one of Nurse With Wound’s best, born out of some studio electrical fault, […]
Bureau B This is part of a continuing series of works that delve in the Conrad Schnitzler sound archive to generate newly inspired works. As the label stresses, this series isn’t intended to be homage or to be taken as a plain remix project, but more as an active experiment in creativity itself. Con-struct starts sedately enough in a drift of aerosol(ed) bleeds over a plasticity of hiccups […]
Domino (Europe) / Drag City (Americas) There was I thinking Dave Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack‘s main auteur) had retired from the music business entirely, living in some quiet corner of the countryside, content to be the only audience for his personal musings. Then out of the blue comes a whole album of instrumental fayre, a stark reminder of what makes FSA’s music so intriguing, essential even. Fifteen (title-less) […]
4AD 4AD have always had a good ear for the creation of compilations — The Birthday Party’s Hits was total cherry-picked greatness for one, then there’s Lonely is an Eyesore, The 13 Year Itch; the list stretches into the horizon. Now this Cocteau Twins ‘best of’ (originally marketed to strike the American market back in the mid-Eighties and now lushly re-mastered for 2015) is further evidence of this. […]