Dwelling upon what humanity has done to this planet, Echoesfromtheholocene’s narrative is a reflective one, disillusioned with the incessant greed that continues to mess up all our futures.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
444 posts
A cracking bit of headphone ambience this from Cindytalk – a very austere rhythm-less space, Subterminal's minimally milled contours full of tiny expressive shifts, subtle changes of bleak brilliance that daisy chain this album's brooding foursome.
The butterflying flute work here is beautiful, sonics a new serene, resplendent in soft clanking glass and bell-like dings, its simmering satellites dimensionally expanding...
Mute Like Phew‘s first album, this collaborative jewel was recorded in Conny Plank‘s legendary studio in Cologne. For the occasion, Chrislo Haas of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft fame gathered a few like minds to soundscape the surrounds. Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) on guitar, Thomas Stern (Crime And The City Solution) on bass […]
Upset The Rhythm This is frantic, fibrous, a Kat Bjelland-like vocal blender. All hot potato vowel action, roller-coasting a gnarly pickle of a backing. A Meredith Monk cave painting of multi-erupting misrule, spitting feathers and glutinous jelly tangling up and clawing on old school Arto Lindsay-like fret lunacy and buck-a-roo […]
GOD Laibach have been on a winning form since 2017’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, that oozing dark matter and gravelly gravitas of yore gloriously reconfigured, later thrown around on the sonically saturated Wir Sind Das Volk. Now this latest offering, Sketches Of The Red Districts, sees them returning to the conflict-ridden […]
Buried Treasure The slick satin soft-back cover – a sense of luxury housed in a warm bakelite grey, that Festival of Britain motif fanning out in ’50s spirographics. This is a beautiful artefact, a labour of love from Alan Gubby’s Buried Treasure label, an ode to those pioneering pre-digital days […]
Erototox This is a feathery snake of an album. The quality of drone hovers in there like a forgotten memory that ensnares. The first track’s clustering notes messing with your wiring in a good way, its perfume potently levitating in your skull, ominously glowing like the matt-black gloom of the […]
Bristol 29 November 2022 Stereocilia plied an exquisite soundscape of guitar-generated ambience. A beaming iridescence of infinite frets blooming in circling sand, layered up and waspy, later sipping some sweet subterranean gloom splattered in shivering petroleums and graining howl. The back of the guitar’s neck sending thundery quakes on through, […]
Lava Thief Clean is a warm acoustic delight, sees known Thought Forms songs stripped back and reconfigured, born anew with fresh titles reflecting this. The slow creeping weave of “Hiding Beneath” invites us in, its spidering vocal spiral chased in recoiling twang and cello, attentively sweeps you off your feet […]
Retractor Persistence Is All After putting up with muffled audience recordings of this memorable experience for over twenty-odd years, this recent instalment from Thighpaulsandra’s Coil archive is a total godsend. Considering the strictness of the staff on the night in question, capturing a personal memento of the gig was nigh-on-impossible, […]
(self-released) Produced for sale at UnicaZürn’s incredible IKLECTIK performance earlier this year, this thirty-minute CD-R features three live improvisations that are totally in the zone without edits nor overdubs. The slow and deliberate churn of track one, “Ancident”, sets the scene, its scattering fractals spaciously , an Arabian flavour that […]
Mute This one-shot adventure between Dome’s Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis and Mute Records‘ Daniel Miller is a sparse and abstract beauty rubbing up against some glowing new wave edginess, a crooked mix of soundscaping with a smidgen of songwriting. A serious art over commerce venture, that the relentless squishy bounce […]
NEOS What an exciting listen — that creeping tension weaving the fragments is ace — a stretchy saturate for all that delicious atonal action to dance in divergent colour and sparing tuning. The surging symmetry of all those haunting little details jostling for your attention, somewhere a drunken Kurt Schwitters […]
Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil Dais As Coil albums go, Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil is an assault on the senses, as was the first time I saw them live. “Persistence is all” couldn’t have been a better expression of the fact, that skin-shredding noise / strobe fest of a […]
Ramble My favourite Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya are back with another slice of splintered luminosity influenced by the Saint Petersburg poet and artist Arthur Molev. “Scythian Nest” dives straight into a clink-clanked needling mélange of avant folk — an addictive jiver, hot-coal leaping in falsetto warbles […]
London 16 July 2022 Journey’s End is one of those rare “are we really in London” type of venues. A leafy relaxed, creatively crafted affair at odds with the industrialised ugliness of its surrounds, the gig itself taking place in what looked like a reclaimed school hall. UnicaZürn are first […]
Buried Treasure Recorded entirely within a closed-input / fedback set-up and two antique tape machines, Howlround‘s Trespass And Welfare involves no actual input at all – samples, synths, pedals all abandoned in order to chase the ghosts in the machine. Ghosts that for the opener “Sonicjob Horsfunk” are of the […]
Sedna Chronicles Sedna Chronicles is a travel guide to the occult, unusual and downright eerie. English Heretic’s Andy Sharp and The Hare & The Moon’s Grey Malkin attempt to channel the weird energies trapped within their favourite Scottish haunts, and to be honestly they do a great job, the accompanying […]
Rocket This re-visit to The Utopia Strong sound-world is a meditative one, full of sketched atmospherics, where splintered notes seem to levitate, shimmer to symbiotically smile. A chemistry lesson whose individual tracks blur into a sensory whole, subtly pulled three ways, but still sparking a hypnotic unity.