The Dome, London 3 July 2015 Okay, so here’s a thing. I don’t really remember ever seeing Acid Mothers Temple. I’ve seen them on various occasions, and I don’t really remember any of them. Now, I don’t make a conscious effort to indulge any more before an Acid Mothers Temple gig than I do before a show by anyone else, but somehow after the fact they always elude […]
Reviews by Freq
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Lava Thief From the angsty bristles of their debut All Mind in the Cat House comes another Jaggersaw of squabbling quadients with a smidgen more hip-swinging melody sneaking under/over that the despotic word spillage. A danceable zest that happily avoids cliché whilst simultaneously dragging you through a thicket of barbed carnivores and bullying percussions. This is so good — every song a radiant splinter, siphoning the spirit of […]
The Barbican, London 18 July 2015 “My name’s Terry Riley, I’ll be here all week”. It would be nice to think that at some stage over the previous weekend, America’s great composer actually expressed his forthcoming residency in exactly this way. For in order to celebrate his eightieth birthday, El Tel (as doubtless everyone calls him), has spent the last seven days encamped here as part of the […]
United Jnana I like to think these were lullabies, bedtime ambience for Steven Stapleton and Diana Rogerson’s daughter Lilith, born in the same year this was first released, the album’s shapes spinning the horsey mobiles as she slipped into the deep nether world of unconsciousness, that wordless sparkle of fertile imaginings. This, remains for me, one of Nurse With Wound’s best, born out of some studio electrical fault, […]
Calostro Recordings (LP) / Little Crack’d Rabbit (CD) Following up on the success of Aidan Baker and Eric Quach (thisquietarmy)’s 2014’s début live album of the same name, the now-expanded Hypnodrone Ensemble is now a band in its own right and presents here a set of four new studio recordings laid down in Berlin. Judging from the album and track titles, the group seem intent on seeing just how […]
Drone Pressed on four different mixtures of coloured vinyl and its sleeeve graced by vibrantly lysergic geometrical paintings by Pete Greening, Drone-Mind//Mind-Drone 4 is another landmark release from the label whose very name defines their purpose more than most others. The fourth instalment of Drone Records‘ LP-length explorations of meditative instrumentals of all sorts from across the globe brings to light six new pieces by a quartet of […]
Harbinger Sound When I was a kid, Key Markets’ car park was the venue for all sorts of dark dealings and (as AC/DC would put it) . If there was a story going round school that someone had been stabbed, overdosed on smack (which was a hot topic in the classrooms and corridors due to that Zammo off Grange Hill) or been arrested for sniffing glue, it was […]
Zoharum (CD)/Sonic Meditations (cassette) From the ominous drones and splutters of “A1V” by way of the decidedly Harmonia-like curlicues of “Crawling Through Crystal Skies” — all twinkly echo trails and meandering electronic rhythms — to the freefall wafts of guitar feedback and multiple effects units orbiting each other in a docking pattern, Solar Drifting does exactly what the album title suggests, conjuring imagery which hovers and glides from […]
Bureau B This is part of a continuing series of works that delve in the Conrad Schnitzler sound archive to generate newly inspired works. As the label stresses, this series isn’t intended to be homage or to be taken as a plain remix project, but more as an active experiment in creativity itself. Con-struct starts sedately enough in a drift of aerosol(ed) bleeds over a plasticity of hiccups […]
Ankst Yn ddiwedd mis Ebrill eleni, teithwyd drosodd i Gaerdydd (sydd yn hyfryd, o ddifrif) i wylio gŵyl CAM. Mewn gwirionedd, es i, i wylio Datblygu a digwydd fod yne bandiau eraill yn chwarae (parch i Ian Watson ai electro-acwstig clecian ac electro-pop Y Pencadlys, a byddai’r ddau ohonynt wedi gwneud y daith yn gwerth chweil os nid bod Datblygu ar y bil). Dwi wedi bod yn ymwybodol […]
Clouds Hill Nisennenmondai are a group whose stage performances are inevitably exercises in hypnotic repetition and mesmerising fascination, so it’s interesting to see just how well it translates to the live album format. As indicated by the title, the disc was recorded as part of the label’s series of such events in front of an audience at Clouds Hill‘s Hamburg studio (the set length limited by the available […]
DDS While probably best known for making the earth tremble beneath heavyweight drones from the likes of SunnO))), KTL and Gravetemple while also rocking hard in both Thorr’s Hammer and Goatsnake, Stephen O’Malley is also the guiding hand behind the Ideologic Organ imprint of Editions Mego, releasing a treasure trove of avantgarde, experimental and electronic music both old and new. So it was with these latter activities in […]
Leather Apron MELVYN BRAGG – Good morning. Today on In Our Time we’re going to be looking at the Steampunk era, a time which often seems to be shrouded in a fog- or possibly even a smog, ha ha, of mystery. With me today is Dr Deuteronemu 90210, emeritus professor of Musical Archaeology at the Institute of Awesome. Dr 90210, it wasn’t all that long ago. Why is […]
Important “You never seemed to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the paths, behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only you and I in all that garden.” A man and a woman meet at a social gathering in a magnificent baroque chateau. He claims that they met the year […]
The Null Corporation/Mute Reznor and Ross may have seemed a weird choice to score The Social Network, essentially a movie about courtrooms and codings; almost as weird a choice as Fincher was to direct it. But that worked out OK, didn’t it? So it’s no surprise that when reunited with Fincher, but this time on a movie about sex, violence and serial killing, the result is one of […]
Room40 “Oansome” is a word coined by Russell Hoban, American author of the triumphantly bleak post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker, set in Kent after a nuclear war has ravaged the land and left the survivors scrabbling to survive and speaking in a language as changed by the Bomb as the landscape and people have been. Indicating a sense of despondent solitude, of being left abandoned and profoundly alone in […]
The Borderline, London 13 January 2012 “Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.” Like the spaceship in Ray Bradbury’s book about to blast its cargo to Mars, Space Ritual have a constant feel of the summer, their music warming even the coldest of winters evenings. The sense of free festivals and long warm days hangs in the air and a mystical pan […]
Crammed Discs This could have been. The idea behind Belgotronics is zeitgeist-tappingly brilliant; , those alien sounding timbres and treads, that otherness. Everything seems in place; the name – Hoquets references “hockets” (the technique used in Western medieval music, Africa, Bali and elsewhere of sharing a melody line between several voices or instruments) and “hoquets” (pronounced “OK”, and the French word for “hiccoughs”) – even the music itself, […]