Play Loud! Oozing an off-kilter chemistry, Guru Guru were full of escape plans and wormholing excess filled with a real “let’s see what these toys can do” verve. The first three tracks of their début album UFO (re-released at last on both black and turquoise vinyl by Play Loud!) hold court to a certain rock joie de vivre, a freeform adventure that surges at you both explosive and mesmerizing, […]
Reviews by Freq
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Ektro Shot over two nights in February 2011, at the Dynamo in Turku and the next day at YK-Klubi in Helsinki, Silta is one of the few Circle DVDs1 released so far which give the viewer a close approximation of the live experience of this most uncategorisably outré of bands. The Dynamo footage which forms the first part is filtered in sepia tones and framed within an oval […]
Domino (Europe) / Drag City (Americas) There was I thinking Dave Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack‘s main auteur) had retired from the music business entirely, living in some quiet corner of the countryside, content to be the only audience for his personal musings. Then out of the blue comes a whole album of instrumental fayre, a stark reminder of what makes FSA’s music so intriguing, essential even. Fifteen (title-less) […]
4AD 4AD have always had a good ear for the creation of compilations — The Birthday Party’s Hits was total cherry-picked greatness for one, then there’s Lonely is an Eyesore, The 13 Year Itch; the list stretches into the horizon. Now this Cocteau Twins ‘best of’ (originally marketed to strike the American market back in the mid-Eighties and now lushly re-mastered for 2015) is further evidence of this. […]
Dirter Andrew Liles, the second Duke of Burgundy, third in line to the old French throne and now a broken-hearted (re)publican millionaire (his fortune in bacterial warfare, a subsidiary of Pershing), scores when he wants. He spends his time at his Bavarian recording castle, chasing peasants, scaring locals and recording recording recording. There’s Liles smears everywhere, even if you think you don’t own one of his records you’d […]
Hubro Heavy skies that turn from the beautiful to the devastating; Ask is the immersive solo début of young Norwegian trumpet player Hilde Marie Holsen. It’s a good five minutes until the first recognisable trumpet sounds arrive, such priority is given to the distinctive voice swirling around inside the electronics. Even though combining solo trumpet with the latest software is not new to me, that she uses to […]
Front & Follow Mark Kluzek‘s project The Doomed Bird of Providence began in London in 2009 with the aim of telling the stories of early colonial Australia. This latest offering, You Brought the Knife, is a haunting five-track EP that recounts the tale of Maria Murray (née Middleton) — a runaway slave, convicted murderer and transportee, largely forgotten by all but a handful of academics.
Hôpital Caroline, Marseille 5 July 2015 Festival MIMI has been bringing all kinds of innovative, avant, experimental or just plain far-out music to Marseille for thirty editions to date, and for the last fifteen years its annual home has been in the splendid isolation of the ruins of the Hôpital Caroline on Ratonneau, largest island of the Frioul Archipelago, just off the coast and in sight of both […]
London 4 July 2015 And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountain green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? Whilst my marginally less ancient feet are walking up Olympic Way once more (a mere ten after having last done so), the one man who might be able to answer those questions is doing a decidedly poor show of proving […]
United Dirter Seriously plunderphonic, this baby plays Surrealist ping-pong with ’50s advertising, sped-up exotica, Brat Pack crooners and virtually anything else that fevered mind of Steven Stapleton could chuck in there (it’s little wonder this was three years in the making). I can imagine Stapleton dressed in his crow-black finery rooting through the charity bins, this perverted twinkle in his eye as his mischievous mind affixes to new […]
The recently unearthed double LP of Ben Zimmerman’s experiments with Tandy DeskMate music in the 1990s was a revelation; here, Software presents Ramez Silyan‘s short but informative documentary on The Baltika Years: https://youtu.be/Xb628y2NLac
MVD Gabriel Carrer‘s In The House Of Flies is an ’80s movie, made in the second decade of the twenty-first century designed around a trope from the first which became a cliché and eventually a sub-genre all of its own, though it does a bloody good job of avoiding cliché and in the process returns the trope to its ingenious origins. Remember Saw? The first one, I mean. […]
The Barbican, London 27 June 2015 88 cymbal beaters, five drummers, four bassists, four guitarists and one EYƎ, an ensemble that literally dwarfed the stage bathed in super-real colours. Right from the start this felt more like a ritual than a show — an invocation even. From its early referential whisperings it held you in its meditative grip, then flung your expectations wide open on colossal tidal pulls, […]
London 24 June 2015 I’m shuffling through the Wembley sand, but my head’s in Mississippi. It’s been a long time since I was last at Wembley Arena. Twenty-two years ago this month, in fact, lured like a Hamelin rat by the strange and, ultimately, ill-fated second coming of The Velvet Underground (Reed and Cale needing to spend more time together in order to remember exactly why it was […]
Sulatron Kick out the jams and get your freak flag flying with two new releases from Sulatron. Zone Six are a mindbending mixture of members of Electric Moon, Modulfix and The Pancakes (who also get together under the name Krautzone) playing spiralling hypnotic psychedelic madness in free-form jams that have been condensed down to these four blistering tracks. Komet Lulu’s bass kicks us into the title track, its […]
4AD Nobody ever sounded like the Cocteau Twins, a band so startlingly original that they spurred a lot of imitators; they took the jangle of indie to a whole different level, an otherworldly soak that no doubt inspiring the shoegrazery verve that would follow in their wake. By 1985 they already had three albums under their belts, but their sound was still evolving to ever-more luscious territories, concocting […]
Rocket Sprawling its way across three sides of vinyl and two CDs, Infinity Machines is Gnod at their most epic. There’s a lot of it and can feel initially daunting to step into it as you realise the weight of expectation, and the fact that your brain has to disseminate so much music, creep up on you. So I’m going try my best at reviewing such a large […]
RVNG Intl. The slow evolutions of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (AKA Lichens) and Ariel Kalma are curling my head to perfection, all long sustains and modular gurgles mingling gently with the environmental ambience of aviary tweets, bubbling brooks the call of the wild. The saxophonics climbing through most tracks like a waking body stretching in span-like evocations, coupled with the blissful smoothness of simple melodies that would make […]