Bourgoin-Jallieu 1 March 2014 Tonight’s show at les Abattoirs provides a chance for Michael Gira to share a stage with Ulan Bator, a band he worked with on the Ego:Echo album in 2000. The venue is an unusual one, sat on the corner of a roundabout on the outskirts of a small town on the road to Grenoble from Lyon. Taking place on one of the busy weekends […]
Reviews by Freq
854 posts
Lava Thief This is an extraordinary piece of work, a wordless communion in caustic colours and sterling guitar playing. Its diverting textures are best appreciated through headphones, where they funnel-web your consciousness, cut through your head, jet between the ears in sweet diffusion; adventures you can taste, savour. Both participants are highly accomplished in their own right: Bill Horist seems to have collaborated with a whole host of […]
London 29 January 2014 The London post-rock/math-rock (or as I prefer to say, maths rock) scene is a small but devoted one, so when local purveyors of big chiming epics 52 Commercial Road need to pay for the album they’ve just recorded, Communion, with a benefit gig in Dalston’s tiny Power Lunches, it’s hardly any surprise that they’re playing to a full and appreciative house. The entry fee […]
The Island, Bristol 21 February 2014 Second time round, The Island seemed less foreboding, with its seats, circular bar and rather cosy with a choice of off-kilter ambience leaking through the speakers from Bizaare Rituals. H, AKA Heloise of the excellent ZamZam label, kicked off the proceedings in contacted cymbal loop-caught metal overlaid in temples of spinning pennies, cross-stitched, pollinated in drifting drones, cross-cut with mythological teeth and […]
Mute Approaching this new album by Laibach – their first proper in six or seven years – seems an awesomely intimidating task. I feel like the hominid leader Moonwatcher confronted by the sudden appearance of the Monolith in the opening ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – approaching it nervously, touching it briefly and then scurrying away quickly to a safe distance in […]
Rural Isolation Project One of the great things about writing for Freq sometimes is that you get to hear some artists or albums you may not have stumbled across before. Quttinirpaaq is one of those artists. This LP comes on beautiful limited-edition coloured vinyl and is housed in a remarkable witch house-looking sleeve with an insert that hints of industrial music of old. It’s a feast for the […]
Black Horizons/Self-released Un Festín Sagital‘s Deimos has just four tracks over its twenty-three minutes and appears both as a cassette on Black Horizons as well as digitally, but makes its presence felt forcefully via whatever medium. There’s more than a slight affinity for the murky avant-garde sounds of a previous cassette era, with “La Ofrenda Danzante del Cuerpo Enamorado” emerging and folding into electronic static while scrawls scuttle malevolently […]
Exotic Pylon Antimacassar, the debut LP from Dolly Dolly (the alter-ego of David Yates) explores the three -realisms of the 20th Century – surrealism, irrealism and magickal realism – with a combination of spoken word, sci-fi electronics, sound collage and avant-classicism. The result is punker than punk, heavier than heavy metal and manages to creep-out, illuminate and inspire; and thus subvert normalcy. Antimacassar also features some of the […]
London 8 February 2014 Macgillivary started proceedings with some rather spooky vocals, multiple choirs caught in the looper’s long corridors, trapped trajectories, cloister curving, quickly followed by a souped-up electric zither accompaniment, as her sorrowful voice continued to work its magic through the vastness of the chapel. She pulled out some nice feedback too, and those ‘white horse’ piano tides were superb, reminded me so much of Galás‘ […]
Southern Lord On Terrestrials, drone metal pioneers SunnO))) join with black metal genrefuckers Ulver. Here, SunnO)))’s signature basalt bass sculptures are adorned with electronic flourishes and orchestral elegance to create a sprawling desert landscape. Ra’s priests worship the sun with burnished brass, while poor benighted pilgrims wander through blighted, mosquito-ridden swamps. Terrestrials picks up where 2009’s Monoliths & Dimensions track “Alice” left off, drawing previously unheard connections between […]
Bam Balam Acid Mothers Temple supremo Kawabata Makoto, arch dude of the stratospheric guitar, harbours his more reflective side on most of these discs for French label Bam Balam, transmissions from the mellower drone-loving universe that we occasional glimpse between projects. Kawabata Makoto – We’re one-sided lovers each other First up, We’re one-sided lovers each other captures Makoto at his LaMonte Young best. A two-tracker, with the title […]
Island Space is the place, and this is where The Orb seemed to come from 25 years ago when the first single hit the racks in 1989; it was like a message from the nether regions of deep space. “A Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre of the Ultraworld” mixed Tangerine Dream kosmische with Eno’s ambience but still with a hint of the dancefloor at […]
Woe To The Septic Heart Just in time for a mordant shot at the Easter Number 1, here comes Shackleton again; his last album was a work of necessarily flawed genius, drifting across lines, missing beats and breaks, losing itself in the mystery of moments. It ought to have been everyone’s favourite album of the year but often got a little missed, as if it was just too […]
Zoharum To West And Blue is the 50th (!!!) album by Rapoon, and it trades in dark ambient’s typical deep space cosmic horror for mudflats and marshlands, making for a superb movie of the mind. The album was inspired, in part, by a part of Britain where Robin Storey, here known as Rapoon and also co-founder of influential industrial terrorists :zoviet-france:, grew up.
Bureau B Silber When most people were glam(ming) it up in the mid seventies Mr. Conrad was studio tinkering with possible futures. Messing with the building blocks of rhythm, harmony and melody to bleed a snakey elixir that formed this sixty minute noir-riddled masterwork, suitably blighted in whir kittens and sci-fi weevils.
Premier Sang Osaka Fortune is a fiery four-way fusion. <\\….. Jojo Hiroshige of the legendary Hijokaidan chewing up his guitar’s frets… Lasse Marhaug siphoning the buzzing veins of electric chairs…. Afrirampo‘s Pika dynamo smacking the skins and yelling like Annabella’s bow wow phantom daughter whilst Paal Nilssen-Love throws his percussive toys down the stairs, up the walls, face plants them into the concrete ….//> As you could imagine, […]
Boyznoize On Self Therapy, the debut LP from 20 year old German producer SCNTST, Bryan Müller smashes the fourth wall, managing to span the dark space between representation and the real thing. SCNTST’s productions are a love song: a love song to video games and machines, as well as real life, real romance. On one hand, SCNTST’s music is the most badass menu music you’ve ever heard in […]
Mute Originally released a couple of years back as a single CD, Laibach‘s astonishing soundtrack to the cult crowd-funded Nazis-on-the-moon fantasy Iron Sky returns as a double album (available on vinyl too, in a luxurious gatefold package), extended, remixed and altogether managing the difficult feat of being yet more epic than before. The soundtrack is packed with the sort of low end orchestral rumble which cinema still does […]