Trailing on the shirt tails of last year's lathe-cut seven inch Afterlife EP comes a whole album's worth that doesn’t disappoint. Pleasantly parading around the head like the cover of an unread novel that fertilizes the imagination before you’ve even taken in a single word, The Afterlife’s treacly glow sticks to you in chorused warmth and glittery keystrokes, the occasional word-form whirling its architecture like an intoxicated hex.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
448 posts
The free-flowing chemistry between Finnish producer and audio engineer Antti Uusimäki (Uzu Noir) and Pharaoh Overlord’s Pekka Jääskeläinen (Ontelo) is great -- low-key and unscripted. Invisible Labyrinth's two sides seemingly to blur into one cohesive whole, each quietly teasing out the best in each other, bringing their undeniable lightness of touch to the listener.
The music here thistles a composed and crafted ambience, eagerly pulling at its constraints. A flush of triggering sensibilities that are masterfully dark. Weaving energies tied to the spherical-shaped symphonics of the next track, "Mono No Aware". Sonics that seem to bounce off the stern-faced circles of samurai on the cover, spilling over in semaphore pulses and torn keystrokes.
Bristol 13 November 2023 Reimagining Suicide’s legacy they go, Lydia Lunch clutching her double microphones like a praying mantis — one’s all reverbed echo, the other sounds like pulled sellotape. Her vocals incoherently fall and flail around, gift-wrapped in Marc Hurtado‘s steely squall. His inky yells adding to the action as the sound brutally lunges at you, slams and screeches in slippery synchronicity. At one point it sounds […]
I’m pleasantly caught in the curling correspondence that Neil Mortimer and Mark Pilkington are brewing here, that syncopated-straight-jacket slowly loosening ,envelope-slipping and jangle-frosted. Its drifting contours are reborn in a looped simplification as strummed guitar falls on through, throwing a shoegazery sparkle into the mix.
The EP spins out on Dorothy’s silvery words to a backdrop of softly brushed instrumentation, “Moon”’s cradling circadians bringing to mind the eerie elegance of Anaïs Nin’s poetics on Bells Of Atlantis, its dream-caught atmospherics cloudy with vaporous validation.
Their music often feels like a dark comfort blanket that you could pull around yourself, relax into — and tonight it’s hitting the spot. A brooding brew of blurring intention and fleeting impression that grasps at and enhances the storyteller’s weave of tangible disappointments with the human animal and the redeeming embrace of love.
Blue Tapes I’ve yet to see this band live; life always conspires against it, but I’m glad this tantalising snapshot from their 2022 Café OTO show has made it out there. A beautifully packaged Blue Tapes item that amplifies the primal weirdness of Staraya Derevnya‘s studio recordings, takes things to a whole new level. The transformative shivers hit early and stay throughout, each track lifting out of an […]
A track that finds "Blass Schlafen Rabe"’s sleeping raven caught in the tumble of some synthesised ambulance / car horn honk. A Keystone Cops comedy that sizzles in its simplicity, finds Holger a zombified poet in a driven piano gallop beset in peculiar interjections and shifting signatures that insistently flood you with plenty of pigeon-toed footwork.
The sounds here are absolutely lovely, incubate a subtle magistry from the offset as ‘They Will Come" gracefully swirls the head. A buoyant dance that holographically harpoons you to its harmonic gravity of synthy wash and plucked melody.
A police car’s blue lights flows through the venues windows from outside. A random moment that dances the back wall to Phew's sleek slivers. Blurring fragments that compass a faint fœtal heart’s beat that’s reverbed to boom outwards, as subtle injections of Japanese leak on through pinched-in reversed glints.
Now, a lot of dance music leaves me a bit nonplussed, but Buried Treasure always seem to deliver, and by midnight, label honcho Alan Gubby smashed it straight into the fun zone with some roster rainbows.
This commercial swerve was quite a revelation at the time (for me at least) and I was kinda thankful the brooding angles of the next ‘Ordeal’ dirtied things back up again. Those screechy distortions that bat-wing into the melody are great, so is the solid kick of those drums.
Unearthing buried treasure is what this label’s all about, dipping into the hauntological hangover of years gone by, to resurrect or recreate their own interpretations. An ethos that seeps into this recent compilation, a tenth anniversary celebration that features a whole host of new, remixed, rare and unreleased material, giving the curious a decent taste of what floats their boat.
A darkened ambience of spiralling guitar that extends the experience, anchored by a pulsing undercut as chords dramatically feast, density dine in wavering cut-ins, solar-flare the imagined vastness.
Ueda’s metal prayer paddles aloft in rattling baptism, added to by seashells and firefly frets, her voice soaring on through, hands outstretched, as the keys and guitars jiver-jade a proggy reverie, her face clearly smiling from within the ricocheting richness of it all.
Taas Kerran, Äkkiä combines traditional Finnish folk musician Hannu Saha, who plays the kantele (a type of Finnish zither) with the electronic music duo Pakasteet. A relatively new(ish) improv group which consists of Circle founder and Pharaoh Overlord member Jussi Lehtisalo swapping his usual bass for synths, drum machine and prepared zither with film director and visual artist friend Mika Taanila accompanying him on tapes and synth.
An ambient introduction of birdsong and news snippets dusting a smokey melody, its chirruping curls of wordless vocal only hinting at the songworthy delights yet to come.