Intravenal Sound Operations St Galás of the plague. Obviously now is the perfect time for a re-issue of this most excruciating of records. Insofar as the general fuckedness of everything is front and centre and needs a soundtrack.
Monthly Archives: May 2020
23 posts
Crammed Discs The Aksask Maboul story is an interesting one. Formed on 1977 by Crammed Discs supremo Marc Hollander and Vincent Kenis, they recorded two experimental and now hard-to-find LPs, covering all sorts of genres, before merging with the Belgian band Honeymoon Killers and releasing another couple of diverse albums in the ’80s.
Cooking Vinyl With its cover and title looking and sounding like a Crass record from the eighties, this is very different Orb than the cosmic warriors that bought us The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld all those years ago. Abolition Of The Royal Familia has a message in its notes of Extinction Rebellion‘s fight to save the planet; a worthy theme, and certainly one worth shouting about.
Courier The latest beautiful little Courier Sound package to drop is another based on an intriguing premise. Using the idea of William Burroughs‘s obsession with the number twenty-three, mysterious electronic artist Alien has concocted twenty-three pieces in twenty-three minutes.
Benge (Ben Edwards) built his MemeTune studio as a haven and playground for his wondrous collection of vintage synthesizers. He has released numerous solo albums as well as forming the duo Tennis with Douglas Benford of Sprawl club and label fame, and has branched out to curate the Expanding label. Freq interviewed Ben about his session for Philippe Petit‘s Modulisme project, and he reveals a deep and lifelong fascination […]
Thrill Jockey The photograph of Jim White and Marisa Anderson in the studio that adorns the inside sleeve of The Quickening says a lot of what you need to know about this album. The pair face one another, playing in real time, but they are intent on their instruments.
Dubby and delirious, Korin Complex‘s “New Growth” is a collaboration with Pugilist and appears on the just-released Winding River EP, released by Miracle Drug Records.
Happy Robots The trio who comprise Mood Taeg are the musical arm of a wider artistic collective that includes video and graffiti artists, DJs, photographers and painters. Over the course of the thirty-odd minutes contained on their debut LP Exophora, you feel an obvious love for all things motorik and German-influenced, but reflected in a modern and rather charmingly effervescent style that brims with repetitive joy.
Tenor-Vossa (CD) / 1972 (vinyl) Given the deluxe gatefold treatment, Breathless’s 1986 debut LP The Glass Bead Game is being plucked out of relative obscurity to shine once again.
Nahal The Ondes Martenot is one of those instruments that’s absolutely lovely, but has struggled to find an identity for itself. It’s in the realm of early electronic instruments, and it’s consistently used for swoopy spacey things and occasionally in the work of Olivier Messiaen.
Thrill Jockey As Ripley Johnson strips away colleagues and friends, going from the four-piece Wooden Shjips to the two-piece Moon Duo and finally to the solo Rose City Band, so the enjoyment factor seems to increase as if, in reality, this is what he would choose to do.
Elli Because who doesn’t want to have a record that’s recorded largely with scraping chairs on a floor? No-one, that’s who.
Discus Article XI was originally convened by Discus regular Anton Hunter of Beck Hunters, amongst others, for a Manchester Jazz Festival commission in 2014. Drawing friends to investigate the possibilities of large ensemble improvisation, they recorded a live set in 2014 which was released in 2018. Following the interest in this disc, they have now released a further live set, record in Newcastle in 2017.
Nonplace Burnt Friedman‘s Nonplace label certainly keeps him busy along with all his other engagements, but to celebrate their fiftieth release, he has paired two tracks of his collaboration with João Pais along with two of the tracks from his Jaki Liebezeit sessions which were recorded in 2015 on his famously pared-down kit.
Potomak It’s been twelve years since the last, proper, Einstürzende Neubauten album, whatever that means. They’ve been detached from the music industry for a while now, pioneering some kind of multiple fan feedback mechanism, which I guess predated crowd-sourcing and kept them away from the supposed struggles associated with label imperatives and the pressure to relate (to the public, to their fans, to themselves).
Upset The Rhythm (UK) / Antifade (Australia) It is great to see that Upset The Rhythm have squeezed another album out of Australian fun-lovers Primo! With their feel good blend of simple C86 / Sarah Records-inspired tunes and low-key but charming vocalising, they are a perfect antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding the current world situation.
With virtually every public event in Europe and beyond cancelled, postponed or taking place on screens only, it comes as no surprise that the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 will not appear as a live and direct spectacle from Rotterdam to a billion television sets this May; but never fear, for Kev Nckells is still going to give each and every entrant into the non-happening competition a thoroughly superficial […]
Nonclassical With Pink Nothing, electronic musician and hardware constructor Tom Richards has pursued ideas on Daphne Oram‘s Oramics synthesizer and re-imagined it for a modern world, constructing his own and using it for these four lengthy and meditative, if somewhat unsettling, minimalist masterpieces.