Label: Output Format: CDS, 2×12″ The first non-compilation solo release from Fridge’s Kieran Hebden is a one-track single (cunningly presented in DJ-friendly style as two one-sided 12-inches) whose title reflects its length – even if the CD does register various lengths on different players. Smoothly slipping from motorik breakbeats to fast beats, with a selection of instruments and samples flowing over the top of it all, ambient-style. Given […]
Reviews by Freq
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Label: Mute Format: CD As acerbic as their recent gigs together, the collaboration of Alan Vega with two-thirds of Pan Sonic shows that the loss of a vowel has not affected the latter’s ability to construct minimal sine-wave beats and blasts, nor the former’s anomic bile against The Man and his system. While the Finns lay down the tearing glitches, chundering basslines and hard stepping thuds of analogue […]
Label: Rocketgirl Format: CD,2LP Now that Spacemen 3 have joined the pantheon of those influential enough to have had a wide impact on a broad variety of other bands sufficient to inspire their collection into an album’s worth of covers, perhaps there’ll be a flood of homages to late Eighties groups to follow those of the Seventies. Despite the inherent tendency towards pot-luck assortments in such endeavours, at […]
Label: Go Beat Format: CDS,12″ Having set up their own studio with all the creative freedom that allows, Fridge seem to be heading outwards further from their alleged post-Rock roots into the realms of cluttered Electronica, and as with Kieran Hebden‘s side project Four Tet their HipHop, jazz and even easy tendencies have more room to breathe. Kinoshita Teraska is split into two tracks, each having half the […]
Label: Mute Format: CD, 2CD There’s a problem I always have with “Best Of” albums. To me, at least, they always bring to mind images of motorway service stations, racks filled to overflowing with Greatest Hits, The Very Best Of, or, worse, The Best (insert allegedly zeitgeist-defining noun here) Album in the World, Ever!. They suggest something a little too posthumous, a little too much like an obituary- […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD,Limited 2LP In his inimitable style, master mythologer and spinner of eerie Millenial tales for The Legendary Pink Dots here presents some further solo efforts. There’s the hissing, steaming clockwork music box of “Supper At J’s” with unsettling reflections on the state of virtual 1999, which rises and falls from song into semi- orchestral concrète-samplescapes as the lead-in for an album which includes the disturbingly […]
Label: Asphodel Format: 12″ Sub Dub‘s percussionist Raz Mesinai manifests here in his Bedouin guise, deplying five tracks showcasing his cultural heritage through a New York filter. “Final Warning” has a persuasively swaying main drum loop, topped with stretched ululations and sirens which lend a hallucinatory character to the cross-pollinated groove, while “Do We Belong” shows that bagpipes are not a purely Celtic invention. Badawi mixes pipes, chants […]
Label: Fat Cat Format: 12″ Supremely mellow, fascinatingly layered micro-dubs from a country (Germany) teeming with super-proficient Electronica. Ripples, pulses, flows and then grows. Crackles, lo-fi sound sources and bass bleeps celeverly arranged to produce an all-suffusing glow of satisfying serenity, without descent into Ambient earwash. Why don’t record players have repeat buttons? -Freq1C-