Bureau B Walter Dahn (of Die Hornissen) and Tom Dokoupil (of The Wirtschaftswunder) met up for a single weekend back in ’81 and this 36 minute album was the kinetic fruit it bore. It’s a forgotten classic if you relish your post-punk Germanics as much as I do, and being quietly obsessed by anything Wirtschaftswunder related…well… resistance was futile. It sounds retro, but in a good way, a […]
Front & Follow In which Kemper Norton applies his spectral resonances to The Doomed Bird of Providence‘s “Mahina,” a standout track from their most recent album Blind Mouths Eat. The Doomed Bird of Providence explore the very darkest recesses of Australian history through their bleak sound constructions
London 11 April 2014 There’s probably an argument to be made that talking about Chrysta Bell in terms of David Lynch is lazy, but that’s what I’m going to do, at least at first. The reasons for this are threefold – first, having not only produced her album but co-written it with her, he casts a pretty long bequiffed shadow over the music. Second, at a gig plugged […]
Chrysta Bell‘s album This Train has finally been released officially in the UK (with extra tracks too) via QQ5 – read David Solomon‘s original review here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hozNfOuQwIw
Trendkill/7 Degrees/Shove (LP)/The Path Less Traveled (CD) It begins with “Walls that Breathe.” All that can be heard is the sound of raindrops pattering delicately on hard ground, punctuated occasionally by booming thundercracks that pierce the quiet night sky and reverberate out through the darkness. I cannot resist it. I cannot ignore it. There is something hard-wired deep inside the human brain that responds to an electrical storm, […]
Clouds Hill After the tragic death of their bassist Simon Wring in 2011, Gallon Drunk continued as a trio, releasing The Road Gets Darker From Here, a furious raw document of their stance at the time, almost a tribute to their own live appearances. After that, the band toured with Leo Kurunis on bass, and today the quartet has moved on even more, bringing also with them that […]
Editions Mego Through A Pre-Memory is an embrace of the titans; two behemoths of the dronederground, Mika Vainio of Pan Sonic and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O)))/Khanate/KTL/Lotus Eaters and head of the Ideologic Organ label. While screeching black metal, doom, glitch, noise and dark ambient may not be the most obvious of bedfellows, they all share an interest in exploring the trans-human, using sundry technologies to evoke images […]
Touch & Go We are living in the era of re. Remakes, reissues, reunions and yes, remasters are becoming the staple of our cultural life. I for one have a tendency to resignedly sigh “oh, really?” when I hear of another bit of creative heritage being given a once over, a new lease of life – the defibrillator paddles being applied to the long cold corpse of something that […]
Sound of Cobra (LP)/Paradigms (CD) No-one would have believed that in the first years of the 21st century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space… Easterfaust is The Cosmic Dead’s 12” vinyl, two track wig out to spiral galaxies via doses of Krautrock and good old space rock. The vinyl comes in glorious coloured loveliness with some artwork that wouldn’t have been out […]
Peripheral Conserve Absolutely loving this musique concrète mixer: its powertooled psych-o-delia of mis-shapes pleases me no end, quivers a satisfying kraut dot’n’dashes too. The overall sprawl is akin to a modern rework of The Faust Tapes, and well, I wouldn’t expect anything less, as The Wasp Boutique is one part Jean-Hervé Péron after all. This is rousing fare for sure, thrown into the light by Peter Strickland of […]
The Bishopsgate Institute, London 21 March 2014 Greeted at the entrance to the venue by a very City commissionaire resplendent in full uniform complete with ceremonial sash and medals, it’s clear that this is going to be no ordinary gig. The Bishopsgate Institute is at once an adult education centre and a concert hall, and it’s certainly a splendid setting in which to revisit the live music of […]
Alamuse Thirty-six minutes to ascend. Thirty-six minutes to grasp the interior of a piano and strum, stroke and pluck softly until it hums. Thirty-six minutes to clatter and hiss between strings and keys and electronic devices, to shuttle like a poltergeist rising mordant among ectoplasmic shudders. Reinhold Friedl‘s prepared piano and Franck Vigroux‘s analogue synthesizers, tape recorders and other machinery collide on Tobel with the force of , […]
Fourth Dimension/BDTA How many records or compositions have taken the existential essence of the cactus as their theme? Kaktuus is one (perhaps the only) such; and on the evidence of the album under consideration here, perhaps kakofoNIKT had the Agave americana particularly in mind. It’s certainly a psychedelic experience from the opening minutes, evolving into a surround-sound trip where garbled, guttering voices extemporise and vocalise without words and electronic […]
Brighton 18 March 2014 This was a funny evening. Good, of course. Sidi Touré is really quite the performer, and his band some of the finest. I kind of get the impression it’s not really a regular gig-going crowd. At one point there was a chap clapping out of time (clapping out of time is quite a feat, in a way). I clocked someone who seemed to take […]
Zoharum Contemporary Detroit is in ruins, its car plants and the employment they provided gone; and given the pollution and petrol-guzzling its main product was and is infamous for, perhaps not especially mourned by many. It’s a city where recoverable houses can be bought among the weeds which are making home to resurgent scrubland for $500 or less. There’s supposedly a number of optimistic new settlers moving in […]
Four releases from a shiny new label devoted to something like sound-art, but not as asceptic and dry as that genre has a habit of implying. Hopefully, label head Seth Cooke is already known to Freq readers, but if not his is a formidable CV – sometime Freq writer, engine, petrol and tillerman for Bang The Bore, previously one of spazzy rock’s finest drummers (Hunting Lodge), an improviser […]
Choose Choice finds Arnold Dreyblatt making his instruments and chosen musicians sing and chime from minimalism to moments of forthright completeness over two sides of vinyl which demand an honest listen and are ultimately rewarding when given such. Curated from more than thirty years (1981-2007) of live recordings, the LP is all the more remarkable for not sounding like a compilation of music made over such a long […]
Software Thug Entrancer‘s Death After Life smashes the fourth wall of an Atari screen, riding into outerspace on Hokusai‘s Vaporwave to fight Space Invaders, while the Silver Surfer does backbends and smokes spliff. Equal parts eccojam and beat-tape, Ryan McRyhew draws an intangible line from ’90s braindance to the folk poetry of hip-hop. McRyhew has been making music for years, in a variety of projects, along with running […]