Newhaven Fort, East Sussex 13 September 2014 Wow! This place was superb!! A semi-ruin with a labyrinth of white-clad tunnels eating into the gloom, the natural reverb promoting plenty of pseudo monk fun. The weathered solidity and teasing signs of atrophy, the stonework full of weird apertures that once occupied armoury now harbouring a host of musical oddness.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
448 posts
Ankst So when a new EP comes out from Datblygu, Freq offers up not one, but two reviews. Firstly, Kev Nickells enthuses: In a caveat that might as well be me saying “this is why I don’t write for a living,” it’s tricky writing about Datblygu. Certainly from my perspective. If you don’t know, they’re broadly considered as arguably the most important Welsh-language bands of the last 32 […]
Handmade Birds Right from the offing, “Dancing On Ledges” is a difficult listen, plies a remarkably fucked-up notion of ambience, shooting your lobes in sherbety shards, like a redux of “Everybody is Christ” from Cindytalk‘s Camouflage Heart (which is 30 years old this year), its heavy drones daggering you brilliantly into submission as the uncompromising vision jousts it through with lathe-like screams. Discernible licks of bass give you […]
Play Loud! Just guitar, bass and drums — it’s a simple tirade but Guru Guru pushed beyond those limitations, expanding out into a universe eaten into with discordant joys, and zim-zoned tresses of effect-soaked goodness. There’s chord ego in there, yeah, but what Seventies band didn’t cling to that tattered flag — but for these guys it was just a starting point which hooked into a whole lot […]
Narodowe Centrum Kultury Poland fared worse than most in World War 2; the fields and woods are still littered with macabre reminders of the grim extent of Nazi ideology. By August 1944, sensing the Nazis were losing their grip on Europe, thousands of poorly-armed residents of Warsaw decided enough was enough and fought back. Things went quite well to start, much of the city falling under partisan rule […]
Bristol 30 July 2014 Rock the Roberts(on)s plumbed an ad hoc and lo-fi angle spectacularly. A bizarre scrapbook of spurting poodle rock from a butchered karaoke machine injected with gargled indigestions that were grins-ville all the way. Irate spikes of feedback, ruler twangs, radio miss-tunes, things literally falling off the table and lord knows what else. This girl art school stoic mumbling dead pan, holding a sign up […]
Red Wharf It’s hard to get a handle on this word wise; I was really tempted to leave this as a three letter review – just “wow,” with maybe a few exclamation marks for good measure. Indeed I think this impression was cemented in the first two minutes and didn’t seem to waver in the slightest for ExcitoToxicity‘s whole duration. I know I’m incredibly biased towards Stapleton and […]
Alphabet Business Concern Saw the Cardiacs back in the ’80s when music TV as a worthy proposition. A university challenge spotlight highlighting bruised and bloody faces like a visual rewrite of “Bohemian Rhapsody” oozing with insane carnival colours. The kind of memories that stick with you in crooked smiles and water-squirting lapel flowers, the music as arresting as the spectacle glaring with zombie-esque madness replete with jerky arthritic […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps tackles a trio of recorded documents from London’s Café Oto released for wider consumption on the ever-expanding Otoroku label… Decoy with Joe McPhee – Spontaneous Combustion This one grabs my attention first, the gritty screen-printed abstracts go well with first half of this tasty double, recorded back in twenty eleven. It’s a fragmented fermentation, loose dot-joining limbs avoiding the unusual scuffle cuffs jazzy improv seems to […]
Organized Music From Thessaloniki Another tiny offering from Seth Cooke, the man behind Pneuma‘s panoramas. He certainly has a talent for pulling surprising stuff from unusual places — who’d have thought pneumatic drills could sound so exotic? This latest offering on the intriguingly-titled Organized Music From Thessaloniki label is no different, a combo of no-input holler and decaying field recordings set under the moniker of Sightseer. The track […]
Idioblast There’s a cryptic, arcane nature to the goods Theme offer up here; which strike me as Coil-like in a lot of ways — that corkscrew of dualities, those discordant magicks, the word-choked secretes, repeat ectoplasms weaving dissident truths. “Enough is Never – Parts 1,2 & 3” begins in a cornucopia of effect-driven phrase-roasting on a skeleton’s ribcage, Richard Johnson‘s withering words tangling slipping — “NEVER ENOUGH,” a […]
Northern Spy (N. America)/Ponderosa (Europe) I sort of lost touch with Arto Lindsay‘s work after Mundo Civilizado, the second album in which he swapped his usual oblique guitar trademarks for the sweet whispering of sensual nothings into your ear. A Brazilian-focused crooning wrapped in a spicy salsa of re-circuitry and upbeat topographies. Disc one of this new Lindsay compendium takes this easy on the ear perspective, twelve songs […]
Bristol 6 June 2014 Really enjoyed those colour-blind psychedelics Ramleh were plying, being partial to a bit of nihilistic zeal. All that top-heavy primary and scuzzy nail-throwing does you no end of good, run through with copious amount of feedback roughage, a storm of grainy monotonies stabbing your ears and hitting the spot. Both Anthony di Franco and Gary Mundy looked in their element and seemed . Gary’s […]
Peripheral Conserve én‘s op. 80530 needs loudness, craves it. Minimal wares that require you to be encased in its edifice, the window-shaking physicality of its dronial weathers, a humble servant to the stretching dramatics, that bare corridor eating into the shadows like some Lynchian neurosis. Feels for the majority like a key slipping a lock whilst falling down the rabbit hole, forever dangling on hooks of expectation. It’s a […]
Southern Rudimentary Peni always seemed like a ticking clock of dystopias to me, a psychotic scaffold of tri-chords and drums, pyre-building a grinding axe of vocals, ranting at the greed miestering stink that (still) ruins, contaminates. Death Church, their first proper long player, spews out a gothika of crucifixes to nail society’s ills to – world hunger, hypocritical religion, the two-faced cancer of celebrity, vivisection and more. The […]
Constellation A collaboration between David Bryant (of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Set Fire To Flames) and Kevin Doria from Growing, this is an exquisite 10-track drone tone, a weathered and majestic beauty with a slow burn of salted guitar whirring through the ruins. Shortwave Nights‘ woeful currents are superb, reflective, wrapped in the legioned wheeze of the dilapidated, as if written in the dust of some abandoned factory […]
Zoharum I’m not familiar with Machinefabriek‘s work, but on the strength of this release I think a little extra digging into the man’s back catalogue is required. Dubbeltjes (Dutch for dimes) is a collection of small wonders culled from 7″ and mini CDr rarities recorded and released by Rutger Zuydervelt between 2008 and 2013, the tracks being re-presented here in pairs and trios, reflecting how they originally appeared. […]
Slowfoot One Did has a Max Wall kind of rhythmic comedy about it, as if the instruments have taken a ministry of silly walks pill, a ganglia of legs skipping the hoots and jaggerations. You wouldn’t be surprised to know that former Stump bassist Kev Hopper is behind this gem. After having his fill of abstract, atmospheric electronica he’s back with a vengeance as Prescott, joined by former […]