Dancing Wayang The third album turmbling forth from the fertile pairing of Alan Courtis (Reynols and more) and Aaron Moore (of Volcano The Bear, Dragon Or Emperor, Invisible Sports, Textile Trio, etc) follows on from the phonographic slurs of last year’s KPPB with four new tracks which find the duo pushing further at the avant-garde fringes of ludic surrealist interplay. For Bring Us Some Honest Food, while the […]
Reviews by Freq
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Plombage Bursting with the same sort of demented energy which characterise much European music of the Seventies and Eighties, Anthony Cedric Vuagniaux‘s bizarre space opera Le Clan Des Guimauves (The Marshmallow Clan) tells the story of “the adventures of a gang of Alien Gypsies lost on our planet. Their physical feature is to have a big nose and seven fingers on their left foot.” Part pot-head pixies, part […]
London 2 April 2015 A spectre is haunting Camden, and that spectre is the spectre of Spectre, Laibach‘s most recent and sublimely poppy album. On the face of it, you’d think Laibach’s “foregrounding the totalitarianism inherent in pop music” schtick would have worn thin really fast, like a one-joke Damien Hirst piece that blows your head off at first and then gives you no real reason to go […]
Église Saint-Merri, Paris 9 April 2015 Paris’s historic Église Saint-Merri is the scene for the more sedate concerts in Sonic Protest‘s busy festival schedule of gigs which take place across the city and its environs over a very long weekend. The music which unfolds beneath the multi-coloured illuminations that scatter across the ranks of cherubim, illuminate the stained-glass windows and fall upon the various sculptures and multimedia installations […]
Injazero A member of both Khing Kang King and Old Apparatus, No Pasa Nada is LTO‘s second solo outing of haunted dubscape electronica. The EP shifts slowly and recursively across four tracks of gritty textures washed languidly in a bath of tape-hiss, echo and reverb, feedback and all (with the occasional environmental recording of rustling clothing or running water dropped into the mix for good measure). Operating somewhere […]
Zoharum The fourth re-release of the Hybryds back catalogue by Zoharum expands at length on their 1991 composition, adding in three more pieces of music, two more parts of the title track and a bonus piece from the same era. Together, they now make up a full album’s worth of largely unheard material. The late Eighties and Nineties saw an upswell of music that aimed for some form […]
Öm For their third album, K-X-P have upped their psychedelic game as well as expanded their kosmische disco credentials (with a hint of prog) by not only naming the LP III, but Part I thereof, with who knows how many more instalments yet to come. If those aren’t real Mellotron sounds which introduce the thumping tribal drums of “Psychic Hibernation”’s overture, then the synths that sweep majestically into […]
Thrill Jockey The two Brians from Rhode Island are back with Lightning Bolt‘s first album since 2009’s Earthly Delights and their first for new label Thrill Jockey. Lightning Bolt are a classic example of an underground noise band who have had some success in the mainstream without compromising their sound or attitude. Their live shows are experiences, the band playing on the floor surrounded by the audience. An […]
1 April 2015 The word “Hoxton” to me is like the word “Mordor” to hobbits — a terrifying place whence flows all the evil plaguing London. So tonight I’m deep in the heart of enemy territory to see Bo Ningen, and you know what? It ain’t that bad. There are very few shovelbeards on show here, and while part of me fears that this may just be because […]
Bristol 2 April 2015 Pohl were an epic, hard and ultimately satisfying display of heavy riff-based shenanigans. A mighty three piece whose ranks boasted Hugo of Bristolian psyche monsters The Heads fame, who supplied some seriously grunged-up basslines whilst the (Buddy Holly look-a-like) singer stabbed at them with octave grates of guitar and some excellent shouty incentives, leaving the drummer to smash and grab at the sound barrier […]
Constellation Now Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven defined Godspeed You! Black Emperor for me, even more than their début F#A#∞ (1995-1997). Although that album’s “Dead Flag Blues” certainly glows favourably in my head, the rest seemed instantly overshadowed by Skinny Fists‘ scope, its harmonic exhilarations — those soaring crescendos that seemed far richer, more determined, taking the fucked-up economy and . An impression further sealed after […]
Important Boasting one of the more amusingly unpronounceable album titles of recent years, ggrrreeebbbaaammmnnnuuuccckkkaaallloooww!!! puts on record the performance of Charlemagne Palestine, Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan (of Guapo, Ulver and Æthenor) at Café Oto in London during Palestine’s two-night residency there in June 2013.
Nuclear Blast Blues Pills are one of the best new bands to emerge in recent years that very generously tip their hat at the great heavy rock and psychedelic music of the late sixties. This limited release album by Nuclear Blast finds them performing live at the Freak Valley Festival (and what a great name for a festie) in May 2014. OK, let’s start off with the cover; […]
London 13 March 2015 Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. H G Wells – The Time Machine The Orb are celebrating 25 years of making music that has headed for the outer reaches and then […]
Brighton 24 February 2015 Last time Earth came to Brighton they played The Haunt, a tiny space which scores highly on the intimacy scale, but you couldn’t help feeling a band of this stature deserved a bigger stage, both literally and metaphorically. It’s pleasing then to see them upgrading to the Komedia, but before the main event we have the intriguingly named Black Spirituals, who turn out to […]
Rocket Recordings On In Black And Gold, various intersections between the hypnotic grooves of space rock, kosmische music and freewheeling ’70s hard rock — a template already successfully mapped out by the likes of Circle in their several incarnations over the years — are held up to be examined with curiosity by Hey Colossus and weighed carefully in the balance. The band set about their task with suitably […]
Fixture Remember when any miffed wannabe-Luddite music fan could be relied upon to heap opprobrium upon electronic music with the assertion that “it’s just push-button music”; “the synths are playing the songs” or dismissive words to that effect? That’s essentially what Bob Lee attempted to do, more or less, a quarter of a century ago with his cybernetic alter-ego -bøb-. Recovered from the only remaining recording Lee had […]
United Jnana There’s definitely a sense of deadly nightshade woosh(ing) through this baby, a poisoned chalice dripping with moans, groans and mysteriously creaking paraphernalia. The Chris Wallis film it was intended to — but eventually never did, according to the sleevenotes for this disc — soundscape was/is a juddery super eight exploration of the Irish potato famine mixed with a healthy dollop of ancient folklore, a journey into […]