Bureau B Magnetband: Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR 1984-1989 Like Play Loud!‘s excellent Ende Vom Lied, this collection from those bastions of Germanic goodness Bureau B gives you another whistle-stop tour of the DDR’s vibrant underground tape culture. Magnetband is a fourteen-track compilation from the mid- to late Eighties salvaged from a load of brave documenters
various artists
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Play Loud! It’s a miracle that any of this happened at all, given the claustrophobic nature of the (can’t believe it called itself Democratic) DDR/GDR. If you’ve ever seen The Lives of Others, you’ll get a good idea of the level of repression and fear the folks behind the wall were bombarded with on a daily basis.
Zoharum The second instalment in Zoharum’s Circuit Intégré series brings together a trio of electronic artists from the Polish musical underground, each providing three pieces in turn for the compilation.
Freaksville This comes from a world that feels very familiar to being a teenager listening to indie radio, but also not. There was a lot of this kind of stuff around — retro-ish fetishists for ersatz ’70s string arrangements and Rhodes pianos
Cherry Red Early on in Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren’s majestic – and comic – memoir (its early years set against the growing pains of British youth culture), he relates an incident that took place whilst visiting his friends Paul and Beryl in Brighton one grey bank holiday weekend in the mid-Sixties. Sitting on a wall outside the Metropole Hotel, amidst the hand-to-hand combat and full-on […]
Riding Easy If this album were attending high school, right now it would be on its way to the principal’s office, about to be expelled for having been caught selling cheap speed to the younger kids at the school gates.
Disco Gecko I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I totally bought into the Planet Dog/Shamanarchy angle as a teenager and still buy in now. This compilation has been put together by Toby Marks AKA Banca de Gaia, one of the heads of the scene in the ’90s, a guy who used to be everywhere, whose music was played at and defined by West Country beach parties […]
Drone Pressed on four different mixtures of coloured vinyl and its sleeeve graced by vibrantly lysergic geometrical paintings by Pete Greening, Drone-Mind//Mind-Drone 4 is another landmark release from the label whose very name defines their purpose more than most others. The fourth instalment of Drone Records‘ LP-length explorations of meditative instrumentals of all sorts from across the globe brings to light six new pieces by a quartet of […]
Universal Music Has it been twelve months already? Twelve months since Conchita Wurst swooped into our hearts and planted a big blue, pink and white flag in the heart of Europe for the second time in Eurovision‘s history. I realise that for a lot of people Eurovision is some chintzy, end-of-the-pier nonsense, but when you can have someone advocating trans* politics in front of millions of people across […]
God Unknown This review is based on seven of the first 7″s released in the God Unknown Singles Club Volume 1, of a total of 10. What is most apparent is the variety musical output on these tracks. No specific genre is represented, rather it seems like a selection of artists from some underground, more than half of whom I had never even heard of. They vary very much, […]
Cache Cache If I ever got my hands on a time machine I’d make ‘8os Germany my first destination. The cassette culture back then was rich and varied, a future that even today seems beamed in from a different planet. Enviously, Felix Kubin was lucky enough to be right in the thick of it at the time, a teenager both consumer and participant. The self-penned liner notes to an […]
Adaadat The Fractal Meat on a Spongy Bone show has been running on NTS for around three years now; a platform for the musical outer limits run by artist and musician Graham Dunning. The show is fortnightly and is basically the breakfast show for every other Friday (noise in your cornflakes?). Dunning is a sound artist who is gaining a lot of recognition of late. His exploration of […]
With the annual festival of all things Europop upon the screens of a continent and beyond, Kev Nickells runs through the entries. Eurovision – a cherished institution. Writing this has been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest, because Europe’s a lot bigger than you think it is. Spreads all the way over to Azerbaijan. And for all the tack/awesome stage-setting, it’s a timely reminder that Europe, […]
LM Duplication This music is presented to the world via the extremely productive LM Duplication label, the LM standing for ‘Living Music’, which couldn’t be a more appropriate association for the music recorded here. Life is full of grit and dirt, no matter how much we in the west try and get away from and sanitise it. Some of this mess is captured on the album with tracks […]
Iotacism Back in the day, there was tape-trading. Conducted by post, y’know, when there was a postal service rather than a mausoleum of “a good idea we used to have”. I used to do a fair amount of it. It was a great way to find out about stuff you didn’t know about. Someone would put together a selection of stuff they liked, and you’d do one in […]
Front & Follow You enter a dark theater. Yr not entirely sure where you are, or how you got there. You don’t know what’s going on. You walk into the flickering shadows, the interior of a theater swims into halflight, shadowy patrons whispering, pockets of activity in the corner. A young man beats a bone drum in a ceremonial dirge in the corner, a woman in blood is […]
Monotype Okay. Let’s get the press over with; as a press release, this is actually pretty sweet: Given the bleak times we find ourselves in today, Cascone felt that another (he’s referencing the 50 years of Sunshine DBL on Silent) tribute to Herr Hofmann was in order. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the first LSD trip, a batch of etheric lysergic soundscapes were contributed to this project […]
Front & Follow There’s buckets of finely congealed empathy here, beautifully presented. Front And Follow is an unusual, old-fashioned label, not quite made for these times. And thank God for that. This box set is a collection of nie EPs from a host of incredible artists, all working within the confines of some strange call & response routine which sees invited artists submit audio clips into a central pot, […]