Avalanche At first listen, Justin Broadrick‘s latest outburst of noisemongering — here incarnate as JK Flesh in industrial electronic style — might just be a assumed to be a bit too content to stick to the tried and tested formula of harsh beats, dubby echo effects and the sound of a machine drum stomping on the human corpus forever (or at least for around an hour or so).
album review
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Editions Mego If one artist could embody epic, Thighpaulsandra would try to top it. Rumour has it his first solo record was so big he had to spread it across two releases and one of those was a double’s worth. Musically well travelled and mustering a mind-boggling proficiency of styles, he happily hopscotches from classical to avant electronic, proggy free jazz to full-on kraut and a whole of […]
S Object/Folk Wisdom Inspired by Chris Marker’s fragmentary post-apocalyptic time travel film La Jetée and purporting to involve a mysterious black box dating from the Anthropocene era, AirEffect seems at once an imaginary soundtrack and the illusory object of its own investigations. Stanislao Lesnoj‘s haunting saxophone circles SmZ‘s shuffling drums and other percussion while Christian Fennesz‘s guitar and electronics scrape and shimmer. All the time and environmental sounds […]
Bureau B A companion to the album he and Hans-Joachim Roedelius recorded together, released as Selective Studies Volume One in 2013, 1D takes sketches and solo parts that Lloyd Cole created as part of the process, but that were ultimately unused for the record as a duo. Composed entirely using a modular synthesizer, and instrument that Cole was learning to use as he went along, the eleven tracks […]
London 10 September 2015 Sold out, The Barfly is pretty rammed tonight with the by-now-traditional rabble of goths, rockers and punks both steam and… erm… the other kind. For tonight is the launch of The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing‘s third and latest album, Not Your Typical Victorians.
Tigertrap The live-wire pairing of drummer Thomas Fuglesang and electronic sound-mangler Jussi Brightmore have come on leaps and bounds, deservedly gathering admirers as they have done so, since their debut album, Silent Cenotaph. First released in 2011 , it’s now finally been blessed with a Tigertrap vinyl edition, wrapped up in as suitably bizarre a gatefold cover as its music deserves and Brightmore could devise. The duo push […]
Industrial That foetal thump propelling this is cavernous; and at high volume it’s huge. Dynamically churning up the digital silt as collapsing structures fall through in cacophonies of brokenness, shadowy vectors that smoulder in the arch of pulsing ambiguity. Yep, my favourite trio Carter Tutti Void are back with more post-industrial mutations to be savoured. The splintered majesty that started with Transverse (and I still can’t believe that […]
Not Your Average Type /Genepool The Cesarians are back, which is great news for all lovers of the dark and depraved, as well as punks and lovers of stuff that rocks hard who have become bored with endless guitar solos. Although they’ve long since broken their own self-imposed “no guitars” rule, that hasn’t stopped them continuing to resolutely plough their own brass-driven furrow to the end of the […]
ICR / United Dairies Loving the way this triptych holds you sensory hostage. One of Nurse With Wound‘s most mellowest outings to date too, documenting three separate live concerts between 2011 and 2012 with the Blind Cave Salamander — a onetime support act that Steve Stapleton invited to be absorbed into the NWW sound world. On paper this was meant to be a live rendition of Soliloquy for […]
Front & Follow The inscription inside the cover of Laura Cannell’s beautifully packaged CD reads “Beneath swooping talons we choose to be brave, or else to edge the shadows of open spaces, Silent wings come upon us in a strobe of feathers, we choose to be free, or else let the unknown control us.” There is a pleasing sparseness to these single-take recordings, , played on fiddle, overbow […]
4AD It’s been nearly a decade since teenage wunderkid Zach Condon released The Gulag Orkestar, Beirut’s bells-and-whistles, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink-and-Granddad’s-accordion, Eastern-European- influenced debut album. Whist both The Gulag Orkestar and its follow-up, 2007’s The Flying Club Cup packed in a lot, Beruit’s third album, 2011’s The Rip Tide, suggested a shift in tone, moving away from the large brass and strings sections found on previous albums towards a lighter, more […]
One Little Indian It is more difficult to write about The Sugarcubes‘ Life’s Too Good than I had anticipated. Although I know the record well, played it endlessly throughout my mid-teens and still find it to be a really good listen, it is hard to say any more about it than has been said elsewhere. It is a great album, a great first album and a record that […]
Crammed Discs I’m seriously fixated by musique concrète, along with a lot of other musical niches; it’s been a slippery slope ever since hearing Luciano Berio’s Visage at an impressionable age, which set the dominos toppling for other magnetic tape twisters, splicers and slicers. In turn, this spurred an appreciation of more tonally spread hues, that floating gasp to our everyday stripped of recognition, the petri dish of […]
Lava Thief From the angsty bristles of their debut All Mind in the Cat House comes another Jaggersaw of squabbling quadients with a smidgen more hip-swinging melody sneaking under/over that the despotic word spillage. A danceable zest that happily avoids cliché whilst simultaneously dragging you through a thicket of barbed carnivores and bullying percussions. This is so good — every song a radiant splinter, siphoning the spirit of […]
United Jnana I like to think these were lullabies, bedtime ambience for Steven Stapleton and Diana Rogerson’s daughter Lilith, born in the same year this was first released, the album’s shapes spinning the horsey mobiles as she slipped into the deep nether world of unconsciousness, that wordless sparkle of fertile imaginings. This, remains for me, one of Nurse With Wound’s best, born out of some studio electrical fault, […]
Calostro Recordings (LP) / Little Crack’d Rabbit (CD) Following up on the success of Aidan Baker and Eric Quach (thisquietarmy)’s 2014’s début live album of the same name, the now-expanded Hypnodrone Ensemble is now a band in its own right and presents here a set of four new studio recordings laid down in Berlin. Judging from the album and track titles, the group seem intent on seeing just how […]
Drone Pressed on four different mixtures of coloured vinyl and its sleeeve graced by vibrantly lysergic geometrical paintings by Pete Greening, Drone-Mind//Mind-Drone 4 is another landmark release from the label whose very name defines their purpose more than most others. The fourth instalment of Drone Records‘ LP-length explorations of meditative instrumentals of all sorts from across the globe brings to light six new pieces by a quartet of […]
Harbinger Sound When I was a kid, Key Markets’ car park was the venue for all sorts of dark dealings and (as AC/DC would put it) . If there was a story going round school that someone had been stabbed, overdosed on smack (which was a hot topic in the classrooms and corridors due to that Zammo off Grange Hill) or been arrested for sniffing glue, it was […]