Cardinal Fuzz (Europe) / Man Hand (North America) Haven’t heard from these guys in a while, then suddenly this pops onto the 2020 radar in ultra-limited quantities. It’s been an age, the last official Sunburned Hand Of The Man release must have been the one on Ecstatic Peace back in 2010, but as always they’ve been peppering the intervening years with a steady flow of hard-to-get-your-hands-on CDrs and […]
album review
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Out Continuing in the necessary Ut re-issue programme, their second LP and the first studio album to appear on Blast First, is given the deserved re-release treatment. In Gut’s House saw them taking a few steps beyond Conviction. Although still self-produced, this time they took assistance from that doyen of the ’80s underground, Paul Kendall, who produced Loop, Thee Hypnotics and Wire,among many others. The production feels clear […]
Phantom Limb A long-overdue retrospective of Venezuelan synthesist and ambient composer Miguel Noya is always going to be something rather special. However, as Noya has been active since the 1980s, giving a broad perspective and overview of his work will always be a difficult task. As most composers work from album to album, a compilation like Canciónes Intactas — especially one that covers such a vast period — […]
Adaadat Yan Hart-Lemonnier‘s second release for Adaadat pretty much lives up to its title. Le Partage Des Griefs translates as ‘the sharing of grievances’ and there is something of a relentless kind of grief-stricken melancholy that infects the synthetic sounds unleashed here.
Disciples Another archival trip into His Name Is Alive‘s formative years, and a follow up to last year’s excellent All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never is an altogether darker/noiser joy, that (as on the previous LP) spreads out as a whole, although segmented into individual tracks.
Mottomotto Kyoto’s super-pop prog virtuosi Viva Sherry are back with a delightful 10″ vinyl release on the ever-reliable Mottomotto and considering it six tracks come in at about twenty-five minutes, it is extraordinary how much ground they manage to cover in that short period of time. 2017’s Obento Music was a similar formula, and I can only imagine that they don’t think that the general public is able to […]
577 Records The latest release from drummer Tony Irving and sax player Massimo Magee is a forty-eight-minute blast-off of improv craziness that holds the listener by the neck and very rarely lets go. Although the sax starts warm and smoky on opener “Vitriol”, as you can imagine by the title, that subtlety doesn’t last very long and begins to scrape and scree out of the speakers, leaving a […]
Rosehill Teetering between funk-pop, electro-ambience and performance poetry, ChopChop have long been one of Brighton’s most exciting live bands. With blistering riffs that dissolve in and out of polyrhythmic chaos, an intriguing array of instruments (conch shells, bagpipes, homemade samplers) and the lit-fuse stage presence of front-man Xelís de Toro, they were never going to make a boring album. The real question was always going to be just […]
Sulatron Zone Six comprises Electric Moon members Sula Bassana and Komet Lulu and former Embryo guitarist Rainer Neeff. They were founded back in 1997 and have intermittently done gigs and released albums throughout that time. Kozmik Koon is a huge ever-growing pulsating universe of sound dedicated to space rock stalwart and all-round good guy Kozmik Ken and the late Richard van Ess, a friend of the band. It […]
KrysaliSound Italian sound sculptor and musician Andrea Laudante has been looking into the way that we perceive concrete and instrumental music, and how the two can interact in a natural way. As one part of Degoya, he has already been involved in an album release this year, but this series of ten tracks on Banat Banat Ban Jai acts as a personal journey of sorts that we can […]
Modularfield Hot on the heels of the recent Panic Girl Cake On Jupiter LP, Wrocław-based An On Bast arrives with Modularfield‘s next instalment in their excursion into modern electronica. However, where the Panic Girl record hinted at home comforts on a distant shore, Anna Suda‘s Coherent Excitations is a meditative, yet dance-inflected body with a sense of mystery and travel at its core.
Hubro Stein Urheim has been recording for the best part of ten years now and this is his sixth album for Hubro, but you can’t even try and pigeonhole it just by the label. Clearly, Stein has an ear for anything good over the history of music and distils all this down to his own special recipes.
4AD The moment that twisted discord gives way to the first tune “Way The World Is”, the Pale Saints‘ The Comforts Of Madness album has you hanging on a massive wave of daggering sound. That piranha(ing) energy slamming around you, Ian Masters‘ dreamy voice thistled by melodic splashes and restless propellants, his vocals bleeding existential bluntness buttered in flaming ascents and cross-cut dynamics. As first tracks go it’s […]
Thrill Jockey It has been for over twenty years that Markus Popp has been releasing material through Thrill Jockey and still his desire to keep advancing electronic-based music keeps him ahead of the pack. He has been recording and releasing music now for nearly thirty years as Oval and also as part of Microstoria, but each new instalment finds him upping his game.
Sulatron / Pancromatic So where do I begin? This is a six-CD retrospective boxset of some of Sula Bassana’s music since 2006 containing nearly thirty tracks and beautiful presented in three gatefold sleeves, all in a hard box — this truly is a thing of wonder and a must-have for all Sula / Electric Moon fans as they are limited to 500 copies (a vinyl version is to […]
Øra Fonogram Sax player Signe Emmeluth has had a busy time of it over the last eighteen months with the release of the first Emmeluth’s Amoeba album, playing as part of Skarbø Skulekorps and guesting on the last Broen album. On top of all that, the second Amoeba album Chimaera is here and a real blast of intuitive and innovative improvisation it is.
Blue Tapes Blue Tapes‘ head honcho has thumbed his nose at what others may deem suitable for release and has chosen two highlights of his own personal canon to delight the listeners, and lure them remorselessly into the happy family of the label. A lovely and striking package on C45, the cassette is divided between two quite different sets, whose common ground is the sleepy warmth of a […]
Krysalisound The latest release from Krysalisound is the debut from Paolo Iannantuoni, trading as Nāda Mushin. A doyen of the Italian ambient scene, Paolo uses these meditative soundscapes as a means of exploring the dichotomy between movement and stasis; his guitar, electronics and field recordings conjuring up dreamlike states and the metaphysical act of travelling without moving.