Staubgold This creaks and groans at you in satisfying amounts. The double bass player pushing against the instrument’s confines in fricative flurries, like somebody scrambling over the tuneful core whilst struggling with an Ikea self-build. Detailed acoustics eating at that see-sawing harmonium, a Klezmer colour sway agitated by electronic mites or a sudden rush of guitar. A vibe that dissolves, tourniquets some tasty twilights. Apertures that sink into […]
Sulatron After their planet-building collaborative album The Papermoon Sessions, the lucky people at Roadburn last year got to witness the glory of both Papir and Electric Moon sharing the stage together for the massive psychedelic wig-out that is captured on this disc. Two tracks sit upon . “Powdered Stars” starts with pure space rock cosmic wibble and big, heavy chord structures that glide over taut rhythms. It is […]
Klangbad Neu! have a lot to answer for. Their best bits can be transcendent, their worst bits lazy and a little pointless and even a little contemptuous. We all have days like that, but . We all loved them despite their patchy output (perhaps because of it) and many attempted to emulate them. Stereolab did it pretty well, I thought, but the Stereolab imitators sounded exactly like a […]
Zoharum As forbidding and icy as the cracked and scratched surfaces which adorn its sleeve, Austeros opens with shuddering dry heaves of bass which threaten as much as they signify an ominous portent of glacial things to come. Like a heavier doom-laden cousin to Thomas Köner‘s equally resonant arcticscapes, Inner Vision Laboratory sketch out and fill in the detail of sound stages filled with slow — very slow […]
London 27 February 2015 Its been a long time since Node has performed live in London. So not only is the show sold out tonight, but it’s also at one of the most astounding venues that the capital can offer. Sitting opposite the back end of the Royal Albert Hall, I’m assuming that the Royal College of Music doesn’t normally see that many rock concerts happen here, but […]
Malicious Damage There’s something gratifying about the way that The Orb‘s music has both progressed (in all senses of the word) and stayed within its own vaguely-defined parameters over the last quarter century. Pick any one of the tracks on History of the Future Part 2 or set it to shuffle play, and a certain number of slightly off-kilter vocal samples, blips, bloops and chunky shuffling beats from […]
The Shacklewell Arms, London 25 February 2015 Called in at the last minute to cover a band of whom I’ve never heard but am assured I’ll like, I’m downstairs at The Shacklewell Arms, its cave-like stage, especially the part where the drummer has an actual alcove instead of a riser, proving to be the perfect location in which to take in the oddly-named Seven That Spells, purveyors of, […]
Turquoise Coal Heldinky‘s Miles To Go Before I Sleep intrigued me — anything referencing Robert Frost has to be worth my time, right? And an influence list boasting the likes of Tim Buckley, Elizabeth Frazer, Annette Peacock and Kate Bush was enough bait to get me to put my hand up to hear the debut LP from the Welsh trio. The vinyl I received in the mail all […]
Bristol 23 February 2015 From the IYABE’s screamy staggering starts, I was expecting that riot grrrl action to continue, but it was quickly evident these weren’t one-trick ponies, but a dynamic beast, dissolving onto something more deliberated, atmospheric, flitting happily between spindly trip-hops, brooding frustration and a whole lot else. They fitted themselves around an array of spooky pre-recorded landscapes that exploited that soulful vocal exploration to the […]
Zoharum Having previously appeared on the label’s From Earth to Sirius compilation in 2011, Expo 70 mark their full album début on Zoharum with not one but two CDs, one a reissue and another a brand-new offering. With a shade under fifty albums alone in his discography, it’s interesting to discover where Justin Wright takes his expanded one-man band on two disparate examples of his ongoing mission to construct […]
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe)/ Captcha (North America) The latest from the trio of Paul Allen (of longstanding and criminally under-exposed Bristolian psych-rockers The Heads), Gareth Turner and Jesse Webb (both of Big Naturals). The track titles are a selection of place names and dates (“14.10.54 Southend-on-Sea”, “17.7.55 Bexleyheath”) referencing several decades’ worth of UFO sightings around the UK. However, the tracks themselves don’t bear any obvious relationship to these […]
Sulatron Love the way Seven That Spells storm at you in corrugations of drum and hyperactive fret fingers on the second instalment of their Death And Resurrection Of Krautrock albums, staggered momentums that cool into some twilight rebound, a delight as bassy injections flirt with the drums and the guitar noodling some sweet Egyptian-strung ode. Far from the kraut-worshipping you’d at first expect, IO dips nicely into some […]
Sulatron A wonderful new release from Sulatron Records has arrived on my home world, so here I go with trying to interpret the incoming data… Sula Bassana‘s Live at Roadburn 2014 starts with the synthesizer cosmic wind of “Rainstorm” that works up into a thudding big riff as bass and drums roll around under some expressive guitar playing. This is pure freak-out music, the kind that Sula’s band […]
Jazz Village (Before we go any further, a word about the title: you saw the caron on the s, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did. And that immediately suggested to you that Šlag Tanz is pronounced Schlag Tanz and you didn’t have a silly schoolboy [or girl] moment, did you? Good, and furthermore you get the Germanic sense of the word that indicates something like Shock Dance, […]
Heaven, London 15 February 2015 So tonight CarterTutti bid a fond farewell to their iteration as Chris & Cosey, and as expected the place is rammed to the rafters, as nobody wants to miss the end of this particular era. Prior to the gig my Facebook feed was a constant stream of updates telling me that one person or another on my friends list was going, and judging […]
Phase! The fold-out sleeve holding this baby together is a delight for the eyes. Its over-printed black imagery singing from beneath a golden glow of textured stock inkling at the album’s corroded essence. The struggling definition of the half-buried vocals, that healthy scouring of frustration eating into the machined percussives. Tastes forged in Dead Gum’s “lost decade” and a myriad of other releases, a mood finely-focused and now […]
Formlessness Press Remember the ’90s? Well, I only vaguely do. But ignore all that Britpop/Cool Britannia shit, as nationally embarrassing in the cold light of day as Diana’s funeral, and think in a more esoteric direction. Think of Coil‘s classic album Love’s Secret Domain, and the fucked-up techno they were doing back then. Do you remember? Protection certainly do, being a synth duo one half of which has […]
Crucial Blast This is the record that you put on when you are lying entwined with your loved one, the both of you perhaps shimmering in a post-coital afterglow, the bedroom window open, a warm breeze blowing in the faint sounds of summer. Hang on. Actually, no. Sorry. That’s by The Isley Brothers. Rather, this is the record that you put on when a small selection of your […]