Eyeless Well, well, well. Look what these cats dragged in. There’s a witticism of Simon Munnery‘s that’s springs to mindd with this record: “Shakespeare says, ‘brevity is the soul of wit’. I say ‘Bum’. Thus, I win”. In Threads‘ schtick, such as it is, lies in vignettes of skittery improvisation, offering .
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Discus Once again, Discus give us a musical body swerve with the latest release from improv monster The Geordie Approach. Shields, their first album in eight years, is made up of two monolithic slabs of rumbling noise that evoke fooling around in an abandoned railway yard.
Jawbone Attitudes to women were awful in the 1970s — pretty much like most of history preceding it, a whole half of humanity shoved into a subservient background, even worse seen as “playthings” to be used and abused.
Odin The latest album from Norwegian drum powerhouse Gard Nilssen involves sixteen players, so it is not for nothing that the band is called the Supersonic Orchestra. If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours is a veritable feast for lovers of the Scandinavian jazz scene; but perhaps best of all, there are three drummers and three bass players, so although it mines elements of jazz, there is […]
Hubro The Christian Wallumrød Ensemble has been trading through various line-ups for the best part of twenty years. After five albums with ECM, they arrived with Hubro and this is album number two for them after 2016’s Kurzsum And Fulger.
Spurge Right now, as we all try to re-orient ourselves to the frozen stills, underwater-slow latency and constant glitches of online communication, it’s a bloody blessing to have the self-titled Slum Of Legs album to hand. Not just because the gleeful instrumentation, heart-felt punk pop and reckless abandon will give you something to bop around your kitchen to, but because the mission behind it is a reminder that […]
Bureau B The shiver shiva of close-mic(ed) debris greets you on “Empfang”, an inky shoal of suggestiveness mauled in mysterious mantras as the flare of a sleeping beast’s nostrils dusts the air in drowsy electronica at the opening of Die Wilde Jagd‘s Haut LP.
Happy Robots Happy Robots is perhaps the perfect label name for the latest release from Roman Angelos. Spacetronic Lunchbox is a vehicle for NY-based composer Rich Bennett to go all library music wibbly on us, and I defy anybody to come out the other side of this eleven tracks in eleven minutes (yes, you read that right) extravaganza without a great big smile on their face.
Freaksville For the follow up to 2018’s compilation of instrumental tracks Quand La Nuit Tombe Sur l’Orchestre, Benjamin Schoos has divested himself of the ’70s theme tune rollneck and opened his shirt buttons to embrace his inner yacht God.
Consouling Jarboe‘s Illusory LP is just lovely, those warm jettisons of voice on the title track caught in the flow of a simple undulating accompaniment, its glittering glide delicately delineated in vaporising distance, the soft shimmering edges finally tapering out on a faint organ drone.
Upset The Rhythm Once again, Upset the Rhythm brings a report right from the coalface of the UK underground music scene. This time, the trio in question, Handle, extract a twisted and angular take on the bass, drums and vocal lineup with something that could be a guitar at times, could be a keyboard, but causes conniptions whatever it is.
Upset The Rhythm Upset The Rhythm are touching base with a lot of happening female artists at the moment, none more so than London four-piece Es, whose synth-heavy dystopian take on post-punk would have sat very happily on 4AD in 1983, or even Merciful Release, such is the primal vibrancy of the bass guitar.
Opa Loka Philippe Petit‘s double-CD album Do Humans Dream Of Electronic Ships is all over the place, exhaling a sci-fi softness the type Louis and Bebe Barron sculpted back in the ’50s. A gouging cello bursting in somersaulting capillaries, chased by an errant black’n’decker rub that casts some scary shadows. A patchwork bounce of . The nostalgic blur of copulating shapes owling on the tap of empty skipping […]
KrysaliSound As well as running KrysaliSound for the last ten years, Francis Gri has been recording soundscape art, producing thought-provoking and atmospheric pieces that, while they tend to head in an ambient direction, have far more depth. Here, due to personal experience, he has tried to capture through a suite of four soundscapes the loss of memory and how one interacts with the world around them when this […]
Joyful Noise This is Magic Sword’s third album. and their fourth record if you include an EP released a short while ago. Each record comes with a comic book telling an overarching story that the band have put to music, so in a way its the mother of all concept albums that even out-does progressive rock bands like Yes
Nonplace The latest release from Wolff Parkinson White is an intriguing proposition. The alias of German drummer Jochen Ruckert is put in use when radical electronic ideas need a vent and the latest album Favours and particularly the tracks chosen from that album for the Nonplace EP are pretty radical.
Jono Podmore has been at the studio controls of a host of musicians and bands since the 1990s, also releasing music as Kumo and as part of the all-analogue ensemble Metamono with Mark Hill and Paul Conboy. Jono is Professor of the Practice of Popular Music at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, where he runs the MA course in Production.
Mute (Europe) / Fat Possum (North and South America) / Bloodlines (Australia) Rowland S Howard is one of the heroes of the post-punk musical landscape, and possibly the most innovative and unique guitarists to ever venture forth from Australia. As a member of The Birthday Party, his razor-scarred, angular guitar swathes traced the routes for Nick Cave‘s messianic vocals. After they split, he passed through the dust-ridden gothic […]