Dekorder Conical Space, the first offering of Dekorder‘s brilliant Hybrid Vinyl series, finds Pye Corner Audio‘s Head Technician channelling all his loves: ’80s horror synth, Detroit Techno, kosmische and corrupted technology. These synthscapes conjure images of polished chrome skylines, with miles high neon adverts, before yr cruiser exits the stratosphere, eventually being swallowed in the event horizon of Dr. Reinhardt’s black hole. It’s always a pleasure to hear […]
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Clouds Hill For those who have waited for a recent live document of Gallon Drunk, I’ll say it’s halfway there. As a part of the Clouds Hill live 10” series, only five songs fits on this white vinyl record and the good thing is that the fans can stay hungry for more.
Clouds Hill Bosnian Rainbows is the recently-formed group of Omar Rodriguez-López from The Mars Volta, and supposedly a more pop-like approach to music than he did before. I haven’t encountered Bosnian Rainbows’ studio versions yet, so I was curious to what to expect of this live recording from a series of 10” vinyl documents by Clouds Hill studios in Hamburg. What did I immediately hear? A record of […]
Endtyme Having played together at the Supersonic festival and with one joint CDr already under their collective (metal-studded?) belts, Zeni Geva‘s mainman KK Null and post-tuba drone duo Ore slip out this double A-side 7” vinyl single as a little extra, perhaps and hopefully prefacing more joint efforts yet to come. While “Components of Circulation” is as doomy and droney as might be expected (and that’s not meant […]
Leather Apron Hi there. I have some shocking news for you. You ready? Hogarth was wrong. HOGARTH. WAS. MOTHERFUCKIN’. WRONG. Yup. You heard right. Hogarth, with his celebrated piece of anti-gin propaganda, Gin Lane, was utterly wrong. (He was, however, right when it came to its companion piece, the pro-beer Beer Street, but that’s not really relevant here. I’m all about the Hogarthian WRONG). . Also, nobody in […]
Peripheral Conserve A few predictions: you like sleeves by Babs Santini. If you’re my age you’ll have spent a fair amount of time in obscure record stores and fairs staring at Nurse With Wound covers and wondering if it’s worth the 25 – 100 quid they were asking for the original vinyl. You’ll have grown to love those sleeves even if you didn’t shell out at the time. […]
Sulatron Electric Moon’s new release is a 10” white vinyl-only EP. These will only be available at shows, so you lucky people who not only get to see them play live can also snap up this wonderful piece at the same time. Side A begins with “The Inner Part.” Lush synth bass notes hover serenely under some Steve Hillage-style gliss guitar before the drums hit in and we […]
Instrumentarium This is a great little double A-side 7 inch by cosmic electronic trio Metamono. Side A is a cover of the Bowie/Eno track “Warszawa”. Rather than the sad – almost dirge – of the original, Metamono add a punchy sprinkling of beats and some wonderful synth sounds, some of these sound like Tomita meets the early Human League in outer space as . The track is largely […]
Drag City UK digi-dub veterans Alpha & Omega have taken on the task of remaking Om‘s track “Addis” from their recent Advaitic Songs album, transforming the original’s hypnagogic swell of doomy bass and mournful cello into a dub workout in two parts. Side A weighs in as “Ababa Dub,” Kate Ramsey‘s haunting vocal lifted into the echo chamber while the strings vibrate below, riding on a coasting undercarriage of […]
Full Contact Like the music of fellow synthpop freak Jimi Tenor, that played by the duo of Rättö ja Lehtisalo seems to come from a strange otherworld of their own devising, one where off-kilter percussion and jazzy notes sidle at the beck and call of Mika Rättö‘s distinctively weird vocals. It’s not even because they’re in Finnish, because Mika has an international delivery offset by the trademark tendency […]
Fourth Dimension Second in the series of Fourth Dimension Singles Club 7” releases, Into The Dark represents Sion Orgon‘s first new music to be released in a good while. Like his previous album, 2008’s The Zsigmondy Experience, the A side of this 7” features appearances from Thighpaulsandra, Seb Goldfinch and the late Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of Coil, Throbbing Gristle and The Threshold Houseboys Choir infamy. The title track […]
(self-released)/Front & Follow It makes sense to review these together, since whatever the actual chronology of these songs, one begat another. They are linked to each other by a strange umbilicus, a slurry wurm of flesh. The self-released Carn shows us the Coilish side of Kemper Norton’s sound; the voices here are muttered, liminal (everything’s liminal these days), lurking around in the dark. One track in and the […]
Rise Above (12″)/Coptic Cat (CD) It was 1974 when Comus, after two truly blood-curdling albums (1971’s First Utterance and 1974’s To Keep From Crying), retreated to his woodland bower, lay down in a mossy hollow and went to sleep. Those recordings had been barely understood at the time, their power and strange attraction undeniable, yet somehow they remained too demonic, too priapic, to be embraced by those frightened […]
Tourette To celebrate 20 years of Dead Voices On Air, Mark Spybey is in the process of releasing a series of 7″ singles in cahoots with a variety of friends and accomplices. The first appears under the name MzMz LalaLa, and consists of Spybey and Simon Fisher Turner. Together, the two sides of the 7″ offer , so (seemingly) brief is their span – seemingly, as the A-side […]
(self-released) Cozmic Onion Express are one of those bands it would be far better to see live than listen to on this record. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with it at all; in fact it’s a great introduction from one of the most zanily accomplished head-messing bands in London right now. The recording quality is fine, the dynamics are sharp, the energy conveyed is high – but they just […]
Agitated Taken – kidnapped, stripped, re-educated and reborn, even – from Mugstar‘s heavyweight slab of spacerocking goodness [post=mugstar-lime text=”Lime”] and given a thorough going over by Robert Hampson of Main and Loop fame, “Serra” reappears in a 39 minute extended format on clear green vinyl (split in two parts) and CD. And what a re-imagining this is. Hampson extracts the essentials, then reprocesses, extends, twists, unravels and distends […]
Optimo This will play out. This will be roundly buggered, sliced and diced and shat out all over the lightflashes and discofloors of your local sleaze pit. It’s good music for dancing girls, car chases, hedge-trimming, car-jumping. Chris Carter has the Abba fixations, of course, but the Devil’s in the disco. The Neurotic Drum Band remix (reimagining) maybe slows the beat down a little to create something that […]
Optimo Simon Reynolds has a great new book out entitled Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, in which he argues that pop culture has been killed off by its obsession with its own past and that we are now trapped in a mire of tributes, reissues and revivals. It’s his opinion, and being a music journalist, he has a fair chance of being wrong but hey! […]