The Kosmische Club Upstairs At The Garage, London 28 July 2001 For the Kosmische Club’s fifth birthday, the party hats, balloons and banners have been brought out to celebrate half a decade of putting on one of the best clubs in London, if not the country and possibly the world. A touch of hyperbole, perhaps, but the nice thing about this club, despite the almost unbearable heat in […]
Monthly Archives: July 2001
13 posts
Label: Ash International Format: CD Sourced from field recordings made by Hazard and Chris Watson and reprocessed by Benny Nilsen, Wind takes the sound of that element as it moves across two continents and brings out the drama of nature in an immediate, textural manner. Where the Isolationists drew their analogue/digital interfaces into dense wastes of often desolate structures (a broad generalisation, true), Wind concentrates on the immensity […]
Label: M Records Format: CD,LP When the Freq Meister asked me if I liked dub and fancied reviewing some I said yes. And after listening to this I’d still say yes again. What I like is that you can either let it all wash over you and be vaguely aware that space is being moved around while you stay where you are, or you can focus on the […]
93 Feet East, London 9 July 2001 “Bosses, They’re all cunts, pricks wankers and shits – does anyone here like their boss?” Well, those were similar words to the ones I muttered when Simon Breed nearly trampled me in his stampede to the bar pre-showtime. He was allegedly referring to his boss, or bosses in general. The same song also proclaimed him to sound like Bruce Springsteen, make […]
The Junction, Cambridge 9 July 2001 For whatever bizarre reason, this gig couldn’t be advertised. Having found out about it, having already missed Tricky’s appearance at Robert Wyatt’s South Bank Meltdown, and noting that his only other UK appearances this tour were at the V2001 festival and Penrith (remember Withnail spitting this town’s name out in a phone box? – yes, that Penrith), I had to check it […]
Label: City Slang (Europe)/Mute (North America) Format: CDS,12″ The Pantone EP brings together a selection of tracks originally aired on To Rococo Rot and I-Sound’s Music Is A Hungry Ghost album, here revised in light of live performance. “Pantone (Red)” whirrs out from an opening skim across the glitchscape into a tinkly melody, all trailed echoes of brightly-sparking electronics and the characteristic TRR bass glide. The synthetic strings […]
Staubgold This is one of those albums which goes on forever, but with the pleasant companionship of days passing and the changes of the quality of light and temperature on one side, and the intensity of a nightmare storm battering on the other. The title is German for Keep Cool, and the long slow unwind of electronic tones is certainly chilled out to a specific degree of mellowness […]
Arts Café, Toynbee Hall, London 3 July 2001 One of the things about getting older is the urge to mellow out, to chill into a fully-realised state. Warn Defever has been skimming the surfaces and wading into the depths of music for over a decade now, and his frequently disparate collision of sounds and genres onto each His Name Is Alive record has been whittled down into a […]
Label: 4AD Format: CD Get ready for a complete departure. The latest from Warn Defever has absolutely nothing to do with anything His Name Is Alive has done before. This is a R&B album, through and through. In fact it is a showcase for the o-so-Blues-ish Lovetta Pippen. Listening to her velvety smooth/rough voice which can stand up to a lot of volume, it is apparent why Defever decided to produce this record and give […]
Label: Speakerphone Format: 7″ Tucked away on this seven inch disc of transparent red plastic is one of Black Heart Procession‘s mini masterpieces of melancholic glorying in the sadness of things in general and the passing of time in particular. “Love Sings A Sunrise” coasts on a slow-turning beat and a lambent shimmer of electronic detritus, with Pall Jenkins‘s mournfoul voice declaiming his lost love as the band […]
The Mean Fiddler, London 2 July 2001 Somehow Lolita Storm should have got a better reaction on this bill – their shouty teen rants and splattery digital hardcore beats and pieces are part of the busy collision of electronics and rock the Young Gods were instrumental in creating after all. But perhaps the early start time is why there’s about twenty people gently bobbing in front of the […]
Label: Mego Format: CD,LP Interesting. We in Los Angeles have to suffer through the endless re-viewing of this surf escapade. It’s expected. It’s part of Western (literally) cinema, much now like a muscle in the face that one uses but forgets exactly what its purpose is. And yet these sounds scuttle like the smallest parts of that film – ones that are never popularly noticed, even after a […]
Label: Dubhead Format: CD,LP Counscious Centry man and all-round dub star Dougie Wardrop‘s third outing with P Davey in the Bush Chemists‘ trilogy of digital roots manoeuvrings continues to prove that this particular branch of reggae is as much a London thing as Jamaican. From the fields and tents of sunny sound-systems on Hackney Marshes to the dub clubs of Brixton, Tufnell Park and Finsbury Park, the Stamford […]