Blue Tapes Originally formed to provide a live original soundtrack for a screening of E Elias Merhige’s silent horror film Begotten, this underground supergroup comprising members and associates of the Rude Mechanicals, Gnod and Téléplasmiste has evolved into its own continuing thing. The Begotten‘s debut release is a subtly shifting improvised spectrescape that opens on rattling chains and soft vocalisations, bells chiming
album review
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Dronarivm Russian label Dronarivm has released the latest offering from Swedish sound sculptor Ingmar Wennerberg on a beautifully packaged cassette limited to forty-five copies. The images on Snufmumriko‘s Sekunder, Eoner‘s cover depict etchings of ancient flying machines and the drifting drone of opener “Kasta Loss”, emanating from the speakers like an elongated sigh
Zoharum Appearing in a CD edition via the good offices of Zoharum, The Stargazer’s Assistant‘s Mirrors & Tides, Shivers & Voids was originally released on double 10” vinyl in 2013 on Utech Records. The trio here consists of David J Smith, David J Knight and Michael J York, all of whom have been members of Cyclobe and/or UnicaZürn among many other groups (Guapo, Coil, Miasma And The Carousel […]
Modularfield Modularfield is continuing its exploration of contemporary German electronic music with a couple of vinyl releases, both in beautifully executed sleeves by label boss Markus Scholz and on lovely white vinyl. First up is Panic Girl‘s Cake On Jupiter, a perfect title for the solitary joy contained within.
Zoharum Blending field recordings from places as far afield as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Brooklyn and Indonesia, Robert L Pepper and Robin Storey (also known as Pas Musique and Rapoon respectively) brought Composited Reality to the world on cassette and USB stick in 2018. Now Zoharum have issued a CD edition, and it shimmers with a haze of imaginary and real landscapes made artificial flesh, its coherence constructed into a miasma of hallucinatory […]
Riot Season Finding a welcoming home at Riot Season, Stockholmers Kungens Män‘s umpteenth LP, and their second album for the label, Hårt Som Ben (Hard As Bone) positively oozes out of the speakers, dripping with lysergic guitar sking and a stoner (post-)rocker’s earch for the had-nodding rhythmic chug. Channelling their illustrious Swedish forebears Träd, Gräs Och Stenar as much as the heady noodlings of fellow astral travellers from […]
empreintes DIGITALes Commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur in 2017 and broadcast first in July 2018, Oscillations Planétaires evokes the larger geological cycles of planet Earth, from the eruptions of geysers and volcanoes to the motion of the tides and onwards to the formation of mountain ranges and the tectonic movements of the continental plates themselves.
Warp For his original soundtrack to Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) has pulled out all the faux chorale tricks, conjuring an electronic soundtrack that positively bulges with analogue synths that lay the groundwork for a maze of synthesized and sampled voices which are not averse to interjecting “huhs!” and other Ennio Morricone-esque and sub-Magma vocalisations at suitably dramatic moments.
Mute Sometimes they come back. Throbbing Gristle were never really away. The albums that came out of the charnel house at Industrial Records threw multiple spanners in the works as the ’70s drew to a close. The world TG inhabited then was as grey as their followers and they made no effort to alleviate the suffering. TG were punk, perhaps, but the music turned away from the stop-start […]
Modularfield A squeal of metal and a wave of drone introduces Piksel‘s Places and throws you headlong into a dramatic situation with no time to prepare. Like the slow movement of enormous creatures, wings beating in subterranean isolation, things grind and shriek, and the oppressive drone pushes everything before it.
Upset The Rhythm Waiting there patiently for over thirty years, Normil Hawaiians‘ third album Return Of The Ranters finally got the airing it deserved in late 2015, thanks to Upset The Rhythm. An act that kick started a re-issue campaign to get all their recordings back into print, finally re-addressing the group’s bad luck story with a vengeance.
Upset The Rhythm Upset The Rhythm really seems to be cornering the market in literate if slightly eccentric indie pop these days. It takes me back to the halcyon days of C86 in the way that each new band that releases something on the label is bringing their own skewed vision of what passes for post-punk or indie guitar (for want of a better term). Carnage Hall from […]
Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too When we last left our heroes in the early 1980s, they had just staggered bloodied but unbowed from the triumphant disaster that was The Mole Show, an interlinked series of albums and associated live tours that detailed the epic and deranged saga of the conflict between two opposing peoples, the Moles and the Chubbs. It would therefore make sense, would it not, to […]
Blue Tapes Stuart Chalmers has created a lot of interesting soundscapes with minimal means. Live he’s a walkman wizard, dealing out an aesthetically beautiful seance of strange and slippery shapes, tangling up dialogue with wah-scarred short-wave.
Slowcraft / KrysaliSound James Murray set up Slowcraft Records back in 2011 to enable him to release his drifting passages of ambience, as well as highlighting other artists with a similar approach. His latest, Embrace Storms, numbered and limited to 150 copies and released in association with KrysaliSound, is a further variation on the theme of distance and dissolution.
Thrill Jockey Ryley Walker has been leading any interested parties a merry dance since his career started in earnest with 2015’s Primrose Green. I was talking to somebody who had taken a friend to see him this year at The Fleece in Bristol, expecting the pretty psych-folk of that album and ending up with the post-jazz extrusions of The Dave Matthews Band, which flies in the face of […]
Figureight After 2017’s EP Recôncavo was re-issued on Phantom Limb, people have obviously been awaiting a full-length album from Louisville-based JR Bohannon and here it is, a rare release on Shazad Ismaily‘s Figureight label. The rich musical history of Louisville in Kentucky, from Appalachian finger-picking to the post-rock vibes of the likes of Slint, are all filtered through in the DNA of JR’s music to create a hybrid that […]
(self-released) A re-visit to one of my favourite Legendary Pink Dots albums, Asylum Relaspe re-shapes the patients’ mood, and propels its themes with new perspectives. Some tracks are obvious nods to Asylum’s original content, but others are more slippery with context, wiggling out of the woodwork, adding to the fun as Patrick Q Wright’s musical nous excites the eleven tracks therein, his fevered violin playing and voice spinning […]