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.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
459 posts
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 […]
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, slowly airbrushed away on curving twilights as one track blends into another, cuts back into a cascading corrosion […]
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 for the words of “Our Ghosts” to vividly burn, buoyantly pull around that sinewed strum, shuffling percussion and […]
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, so this crystal-clear souvenir of Coil’s second Royal Festival Hall appearance is way beyond expectation. Persistence Is All […]
(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 seems to tattoo the amorphous sands, pencilled in by scarab-chasing harmonics.
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 of “Hill Of Men” typifies. A soft and fleshy techno to muffled distant voices and a subtle hum […]
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 stumbles into a squabbling Punch and Judy, stapled in an uneven measure of ulcerated piano. The , leaking […]
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 finale still scars me with satisfaction twenty-two years later. One of those gig experiences that has yet to […]