Label: Young God Format: CD This has got to be one of the oddest musical surprises in a long time, and an intriguing one too. Devendra Banhart recorded the twenty-one tracks on dodgy 4-track tape recorders, and the hiss is evident throughout — but just adds to the close-up intensity of his songs, played on acoustic guitar and only occasionally supplemented by handclaps, thighslapping and some off-key whistling. […]
Reviews by Freq
854 posts
Label: Wonder Format: CD Black Gothic letters and skull graphics in gloss black print on a matte black Digipak (although it’s a shame about the barcode’s intrusion on a white rectangle breaking up the black theme). An opening choral Mellotron drone worthy of Popul Vuh‘s soundtrack to Nosferatu The Vampyr. Will it be the heaviest of doom metal or the most brainpan-shuddering of nasty gothic industrial anguish? Not […]
Label: Kitty-Yo (Europe) Mute (North America) Format: CD/LP Tarwater return, enigmatic and phlegmatic as ever with Dwellers On The Threshold, charting journeys across an imaginary landscape of shifting borderlands and elusive edges. Opening with the hypnotic and immediately engaging “70 Rupies To Paradise Road”, with words spoken on this occasion by Tone Avenstroup, it is apparent that there is something special about this record. Partly thanks to a […]
Label: Ipecac Format: CD,LP Brimming with fractured beats and an omnivorous musical approach which draws in experimental influences from Industrial, Post-Rock and Jazz as much as from the conscious side of HipHop, Dälek‘s From Filthy Tongue Of Gods And Griots burns with a bright spark of questioning anger, musically as well as lyrically. Having collaborated with Techno Animal, 2nd Gen and Faust on occasion, coming at this outfit […]
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: CD, Limited LP Argentinian three piece Reynols have been walking their own particularly strange path for nearly a decade, droning and chugging on a collection of home-made and improvised instruments and guitars, with everything underpinned by the percussive and vocal drive of Miguel Tomasín. Their sound is at first chaotic and then enveloping, with walls of distortion and other effects piled on the […]
Label: Snapper Format: 2CD Summoned by that shadowy entity, The Pongmaster, the Ozrics come to you live from the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a gathering place of eldritch forces. This troupe of space minstrels are celebrating 20 years of tantric trucking. Their vehicle, laden with synthesisers, flutes and guitars, has been unloading at carefully selected sites of festival throughout those years and now a portion of their celebrated utterances […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,LP If any band is ripe for some re-mixing, it is Faust. The elements that combine to form their music have already been through a process involving a stripping down, transformation and reformation both in the studio and in ‘live’ performance. To offer these elements to those who are influenced by and in sympathy with Faust’s working methods seems an ideal situation for both translation […]
Label: Rock Action Format: 12″,CDS Three tracks, barely eleven minutes in total and more accomplished than an hour of almost any other band you choose to name. The five piece Kling Klang – the original core trio of Joe McLaughlin , Amy Corcoran and Dave Smyth with Ali McDonald‘s drumming and Peter Smyth filling out the keyboard ranks – are a force to be reckoned with. The band […]
Label: Rocketgirl/Mind Expansion Format: CD Füxa‘s sixth album finds Randall Nieman‘s particular take on guitary synth music (or perhaps, synthy guitar music) developed yet further into a sound of drones and melodies which insinuate their way into the background and back again. Aided by the steadfast drumming of Drew Peters and occasional low-key vocal contributions from Stephen Lawrie and Jo Doran, Supercharged will more than likely have started […]
Label: A-Musik Format: 3″ CD Combining Disco with toys seems like a fun idea, and Felix Kubin‘s Jet-Lag Disco likes its treble really reedy on top of some thumpingly mid bass kicks. Two thoughts spring immediately to mind – Alec Empire‘s hyper-bleepy Nintendo Teenage Robots project, but with more beats and structure, and the fact that this EP was intended for Kubin’s Japanese tour in early 2001. So […]
Label: Frozen Empire Media Format: CD Nyugodt lurks somewhere in the grey area between dub and electroglitch musique concrete. Noisescapes mix (at times clash) with fractured rhythms. Sometimes closer to the twisted rhythms of Autechre than dub, sometimes almost completely seized by the seething abrasive textures of manipulated noise, the album seldom abandons rhythm completely. And then, beneath the layers of noise the occasional melody manages to surface. […]
Label: Phantom Code/World Serpent Format: CD The title of Cyclobe‘s second album release soon becomes fitting as the music opens out, expands and contracts, almost oozes from the pores in the breathing walls – but where are they visiting from exactly? Some might suggest grayling spacefarers, others could contend, quite successfully, that the source of the sonic visitations lies closer to the realms of the subconscious, and of […]
Label: Expanding Format: 7″ Abfahrt Hinwil‘s contribution to the Expanding Records EVS Series clicks and wheezes to life with “Links Oben”, built around a distracted melody constructed from synthetic bells. The undercurrents gurgle, fizz and whirr with biomechanical trills, keeping the electronica sweetly chilled. “The Light” starts off langorously swirled, rotating on a synthetic textural axis while deep down a bass tone generates vibrations. A gradual insertion of […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Okay, so it may be the wrong time, given recent events, for a band whose name translates as “Collapsing New Buildings” to release an album called Strategies Against Architecture III, but, heedless of a Stockhausen-style backlash, those wonderfully inventive German sonic terrorists (again, perhaps not a good analogy, but what the fuck) Einstürzende Neubauten are at it again, this time with a double CD […]
Label: Staubgold Format: CD What better subject for a To Rococo Rot concept album than a highly modernist building in Cologne? With twelve modular rooms to work represent both the structure and purpose of, the logical method the band took was to compose a three minute track for each section. What emerges is a stripped-down album which works within the structural constraints to deliciously minimal effect, whether on […]
Label: 130701(UK, Europe)/Alien8(North America)/P-Vine(Japan) Format: CD,2LP This recording contains the result of collaborative jamming from musicians including members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am and Exhaust. They set up in a house in Montreal, ‘an old falling down monstrosity’, and recorded solidly for five days more concerned with the actual experience of collective playing/recording than the end results. But it’s the end results that we have […]
Label: Soleimoon Format: CD Face The Wound is a Sprache Opera, a dialogue between the male and female voices. Known for working with found sounds, Z’ev assembled the narrative of Face The Wound from 30 cassettes collected from thrift shops, garage sales, and flea markets. The rhythms of the voices mix with the rhythms of electronic percussion and electronic textures. The journey through Z’ev’s assembled narrative isn’t an […]
Label: Stretchy Format: CD Like Hawkwind before them, the Ozrics have stuck to their groove with determined, singled-minded commitment to spacey reggae bass and soaring, intricate guitar line. Rushy, twiddly synths, flute twirls and all the expected head, ears and what’s left of the brain in the sky moments ride over faux-Arabic percussion and nifty keyboard throbs. It’s all very lysergic, and as they’ve been at it for […]