Organized Music From Thessaloniki Another tiny offering from Seth Cooke, the man behind Pneuma‘s panoramas. He certainly has a talent for pulling surprising stuff from unusual places — who’d have thought pneumatic drills could sound so exotic? This latest offering on the intriguingly-titled Organized Music From Thessaloniki label is no different, a combo of no-input holler and decaying field recordings set under the moniker of Sightseer. The track […]
Monthly Archives: June 2014
16 posts
ATP Even though the members of Eaux have been making music together since 2006, originally as the post-rock band the Sian Alice Group, Plastics seems entirely of the moment, firmly rooted in the present, in its anachronism. That’s not to say Eaux are bandwagon-hopping, rather that they are an example of something in the air, a cultural tendency, a drift. They can be seen as a microcosm of […]
Gonzo Multimedia F Scott Fitzgerald famously once declared that American lives had no second act. Thankfully, Don van Vliet, throughout his career an exception in so many ways, was one exempted from this rule. For, following the musical big bang of 1976, Beefheart – truculent, dissonant, and decidedly not a member of the flaccid hippie ranks against which Punk rock had raged – gradually began to assume something […]
Electrowerkz, London 21 June 2014 This was something I never dreamt I would ever see. I stare at the ticket in my hand and still can’t quite believe what the lettering says: “Chrome – doors open 7pm.” I would have been less surprised to have found myself standing atop the cliffs at Beachy Head with Chris Marker’s cat Guillaume-en-Egypt, looking out to sea whilst the Kraken rose from […]
Avalanche So I defrosted my fridge yesterday. Inches thick in ice, it was. Had to take a hairdryer to it in the end. Scalding hot air. Huge expanses of frozen water. A lot of wrenching, smashing and cries of frustration. All in all, it was a lot like the new Godflesh EP. Decline And Fall is the first new material from the reactivated Godflesh project in thirteen years, […]
Idioblast There’s a cryptic, arcane nature to the goods Theme offer up here; which strike me as Coil-like in a lot of ways — that corkscrew of dualities, those discordant magicks, the word-choked secretes, repeat ectoplasms weaving dissident truths. “Enough is Never – Parts 1,2 & 3” begins in a cornucopia of effect-driven phrase-roasting on a skeleton’s ribcage, Richard Johnson‘s withering words tangling slipping — “NEVER ENOUGH,” a […]
London 13 June 14 It is summertime and in Britain the early morning mist drifts across fields and clings to the roots of trees. Tents are erected and the dowdy colours of winter are a thing of the past as the children of the rainbow appear from forests and their various hiding places to worship the sun, to enjoy the abundance of nature around them. And the music […]
Damnably Shonen Knife tend to massively divide opinion. And, contrary to what you may have been told by the well-meaning, there ARE opinions which are right and opinions which are wrong and worthy of no respect. Some people find their Ramones-drenched girlpop infuriatingly twee- these people have the WRONG opinion, and should be pointed and laughed at in the street. Others think their particular brand of kawaii-core (yeah, […]
Northern Spy (N. America)/Ponderosa (Europe) I sort of lost touch with Arto Lindsay‘s work after Mundo Civilizado, the second album in which he swapped his usual oblique guitar trademarks for the sweet whispering of sensual nothings into your ear. A Brazilian-focused crooning wrapped in a spicy salsa of re-circuitry and upbeat topographies. Disc one of this new Lindsay compendium takes this easy on the ear perspective, twelve songs […]
Brixton Electric London 27 May 2014 Since reforming – or, perhaps more accurately, reincarnating – in 2010, Swans have rapidly become one of the most extraordinary musical entities of our age. Their comeback album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, was a fine release, and they soon re-established themselves as a formidable live act. But with 2012’s The Seer – a vast, audacious, […]
Software I’ve heard it said that for art to truly succeed, it needs to run the risk of failure. If there is no antagonism, if everything is completely predictable, it glides right off of you without making an impression. Compare Tropic Of Cancer to drugstores full of pulp romance, for example. When an art form is rote, completely succumbing to convention and formula, you might be able to […]
Editions Mego In the past couple of years or so there has been a resurgence in synthesizer music, with more and more titles being released every month by various labels. Most of the work I have heard has been of a high quality and is generally packaged well. Many of these albums make use of, and note on their sleeves, old analogue synthesizers to create these sounds. John […]
London 4 June 2014 “In case of sonic attack,” warned Hawkwind, “follow these rules,” before advocating such crazy measures as “try to get as far from the sonic source as possible.” One assumes, therefore, that the combined onslaught of Loop and Godflesh doesn’t technically count as an “attack,” what with being consensual. More like sonic S/M play, maybe. Because the urge here definitely seems to tend towards getting […]
Bureau B Kreidler’s latest album continues their post-kraut-rock meets techno melange — a kind of bastard love child of Neu! and Carl Craig — which emerged on their 2012 album Den. ABC is a genre-bending and -blending collection of tracks built around consistently strong keyboard and guitar riffs with driving percussion. ABC was recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia and the east meets west vibe of the studio’s location rubs […]
Exotic Pylon Dark ambient music is particularly effective at evoking strange, surreal, subjective visions. Synthetic tones and natural field recordings, swathed in echo and cavernous reverb, are stripped of context, and freed from the brutal confines of Western tonality. It borrows a lot from cinematic sound design, particularly of a horror/sci-fi nature, but it’s untethered to visuals to concretize it, and tie it to down to a particular […]
Bristol 6 June 2014 Really enjoyed those colour-blind psychedelics Ramleh were plying, being partial to a bit of nihilistic zeal. All that top-heavy primary and scuzzy nail-throwing does you no end of good, run through with copious amount of feedback roughage, a storm of grainy monotonies stabbing your ears and hitting the spot. Both Anthony di Franco and Gary Mundy looked in their element and seemed . Gary’s […]