House Of Mythology Rosarium starts like you’re eavesdropping onto some fizzing broadcast, Daniel O’Sullivan‘s daughter Ivy imparting electrified words poetically bleeding into a cello’s resonate glide. Cocooning ellipicals lightly dusted in harp-like radials and shimmering sententials, as if you were starring at the sun’s spiking corona. Affecting shapes akin to Shellyan Orphan caught on sweeping vocals, wordless and levitating a , to which the strings hold a golden […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
448 posts
Zam-Zam / La République des Granges Building on the spacey krautrock shivers of their 2018’s Pan And The Master Pipers LP, Zohastre‘s Abracadabra salivates like a mediævalised motorik. Vivid and laser-locked, this sci-fi verve enthusiastically contracts into a an insane neu-techno crowbar of a groove. A brightness that’s squeezed into the dagger dance of “Tarantella”, its folksy core valve-smurfed into a repetitive dazzle as that snare sonically snips […]
The intermittent strums of the first scarred in Gira’s vice-like vocal, a phonically physical experience that always feels like he’s at the coalface of emotion, mining some immaculate truth. The buttressing splashes of instrumentation between each sentence cut back to just words, then strung out on a symphonic hypnotic, shimmering into bleeding lines sung over in chorusing volatility.
A superb series of endeavours embracing classical and avant flavours, Ark Hive Of A Live is full of improvised sparks and juddering disposition, the enclosed write-up full of fascinating insight.
Pram’s musical elves were on fine form, injecting this fine summer’s evening with their own special brand of skewered cuteness. Everyone here loves it, each track resulting in massive applause.
It’s hard to believe both these albums — which first appeared as unearthed archive material as part of Faust‘s epic 1971-1974 boxed set in 2021 — stem from the early seventies; they feel so startlingly modern, totally out of touch (in the best way possible) with the music of the time.
A dreamy concoction penned in acoustic and electric guitar with some dazzling piano touchpoints, Mars Is A Ten's tracks seem to beam with an off-the-cuff straight to tape immediacy / intimacy that nestles in there; remains with you.
All their separate concerns coming together to create something new, each throwing fragments in the pot, searching for cohesion. Finding that all-important communal bite, Stratagems picks up from their last collaboration Facilitators, sees this enthusiasm bearing fresh fruit.
The world definitely needs more warding-off-evil’ songs, I’d say, the balance always seems to be frustrated stacked in the negatives’ favour after all; so I’m cranking the volume up on this one, and letting it do its worst.
Words that ignite on a slow see-sawing sorrow and symphonic scorch, atmospherically crash-landing into the pulsating syncopation of "À Notre Nuit", its keytoned circles and percussive stutter filling up the canvas in saffron-soaked strokes and feathering accents.
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.
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 and Can‘s drummer Jaki Liebezeit, who was no stranger to collaborating with Phew, having worked on her solo […]
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 grunts. The bush fire insanity of those guitars fills me with so much joy — that thrown- stapling […]
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 knot of a country that was Yugoslavia, taking from it two points of reference (both from the band’s […]
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 and more.
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 stately artwork. The up close and personal of the instruments that adorn the cover giving material context to […]