Blue Tapes Those prolific Ashtray Navigations have more lo-fi on your hi-fi – a ten-track odyssey that leaves your brain a fizzin’. The diode-soaked bag-piping of the first takes no prisoners, brings back that glittery glutton of “Bird’s Beak”, oozy with a plunge-pool of sticky sauce celebratories. Meditatives you tune into, adjust your antennas towards and the slippery eels of “The Tactic” make it far easier to disgust.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
448 posts
Bristol 10 March 2022 The acoustic charms of Stroud-based Maja Lena are first up, a songbird sweetness of voice attached to a fingerpicking deftness, that ’60s Yamaha neck dwarfing her fingers, her vocals skipping like wind-blown grass to gentle tonal shifts, then leaping unexpectedly in joyous abandon. The slumbering reflections of her Christmas-themed song reverbing to those silent quilted fields, the matted mulch of morning leaves.
Cooking Vinyl Back in the distant ’80s, Loop’s heavy sound was a breath of fresh air. A hazy comfort blanket surfing a scissored sustain that a few years later and three albums in simply imploded, its nucleus split straight down the middle and slung-shot out into various new distractions. As if success had become a catalyst for change, Robert Hampson ditched his guitar for the seriously cerebral electronics […]
Erototox Decodings On the shirt tails of Zappi Diermaier’s recent solo project Monobeat Original comes this exciting take on faust. A primal purr that, I suspect, seeped into the series of rough mixes that Zappi, along with Schneider TM’s Dirk Dresselhaus and FaUSt’s Elke Drapatz produced, then sent out to the a host of Berlin-based collaborators to re-furnish.
ZamZam / Adaadat Hermetic mysticism, alchemy, and past-life regressions bend into this, with the recent birth of a new life further elevating the esoteric thematics. You could say this a labour of love, obsessively circling in tangled narrative and a brooding piano that empathically scaffolds. An instrumental centrifuge that percussively pearls your attention, ebbs the enigmatic itch of Mark Wagner’s words and their slipping meanings.
Bristol, 21 January 2022 This is a pairing of contrasting acts, both enterprising bastions of electronica, one coming from a cinematic sensibility, the other skewing the dance equation.
Southern Lord (CD & US vinyl) / Pomperipossa (vinyl in Europe) Recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival back in 2018, this is a powerful testament to the Anna von Hausswolff live experience. She eases you in gently with the lilting latitudes of “The Truth, The Glow, The Fall’, a folksy saturation pinning you back, a black magic love awash with swelling orchestration, that voice resining the architecture – […]
Southern Lord An improvised uprooting of their Pyroclast and Life Metal albums — or epic exorcism — suitably broadcast on Samhain of 2019, these three tracks catch SunnO))) at the end of their world tour, emotionally expanding the raw material, giving the BBC 6Music listeners a monumental feast.
Bedevil Fermenting for over six years, Scapa Foolscap began as a series of rough sketches initially inspired by the shipwreck-strewn waters of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, understated soundscapes that gave Pumajaw’s vocalist Pinkie Maclure plenty of space to explore as it slowly evolved into the duo’s eighth album.
Abrams Now I’ve been a Throbbing Gristle fanboy for most of my adult life, became an avid follower of the many splinters that branched from its demise, a host of alienated sounds I felt a positive connection with — Coil, Chris and Cosey and of course Psychic TV. Yeah, PTV’s pre-acidhaus days really struck a chord back then, although I was very sceptical about Thee Temple Ov Psychick […]
Happy Robots The oval oddness of Anaphora’s opener “Pilomotor Reflex” are ace, reversed shivers cerebrally nibbling slowly, beaconing out on a delightful Kraftwerkian romance (minus that detached chill). A dance of chameleon-like shapes that fluidly viper that dry percussive, an agitated softness for that anti-capitalist narrative to dagger deep, tangle favouringly with your reason. Political / cultural arrows that empathetically grenade throughout the whole of this album, nestled in […]
Rose Hill As the album title would suggest, this is a Solstice recording made by God’s Teeth And The Interstellar Tropics at The Old Market Theatre in Brighton in the pre-covid bliss of the winter of 2019. A three-track recording that attempts to untangle your subconscious on a lysergic lance of percussive mis-shapes and vocalised abstracts, with a lovely Angus MacLise sensibility that floats on Karl MV Waugh’s […]
Upset The Rhythm If the Frank Sidebottom homage of a cover doesn’t grab you, the explosiveness of Bad Advice Good People‘s contents is certain to freeze-frame the widest of smiles to your face. A raucous six pack akin to Kleenex or Gang Of Four with hard-chiselled words and bloated basslines that hook you in front and centre, prowl your head like an over-active imagination with armfuls of day-glo […]
London, 15 November 2021 The sense of anticipation was immense, bathed in a blue haze, monitors staring out of it like Ewok eyes, the stage remaining empty as the words “Dream the name and I will answer to it” breeze in, tantalised in sparse flickerings and occasional birdsong roughed by the distinctive rub of a cement mixer.
Bellissima It was only a matter of time until Katharine Blake (Miranda Sex Garden and The Mediæval Bæbes) and Michael J York (Téléplasmiste, The Utopia Strong, Current 93 and Coil) would conjoin a bewitching whole, gather a few musical friends into the equation to produce this haunting debut that gathers the periphery around you in a stretchy equilibrium.
Klanggalerie Long-time contributor to and performer with Eyeless In Gaza and wife of Martyn Bates, Elizabeth S has just released her first solo album. Gather Love presents twelve tracks that texturally invite you to ask what it means to be human, sparkles with a withering warmth that stays with you.
Mute Phew‘s New Decade strips it all away, orbits the sultry sizzle of fragmented abstracts and of course Hiromi Moritani’s vocal dynamics that magnetically grab-bag. Born in the pandemic, the album’s whispering contours were a result of wishing to not annoy the neighbours too much, an oh-so-quiet verve that’s best suited to and appreciated on headphones.
Upset The Rhythm Upset The Rythm‘s radar is always sharp and can be relied on to serve up a healthy antidote to the burger’n’fries musical factory that clogs up our cultural arteries. Companioning the creative, often at the expense of commercialism they go, scouting fresh talent, scouring the musical roadside for neglected gems, and I’m guessing their recent journey with Normil Hawaiians has bought fresh dividends in the […]