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 […]
album review
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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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
empreintes DIGITALes Music to write science fiction to. L’Envol is the first solo album release from American-born, Brussels-based composer Elizabeth Anderson. She is a prolific artist and teacher, and when I hear the opening of L’envol, I feel somewhat like I am at the beginning of a lecture on electronic music. The sounds are perhaps what you might have expected from the title of the record, (L’envol is […]
On-U Sound/Tectonic One of the genre’s key figures joins forces on Late Night Endless with a genuine wizard of the mixing desk to put the dub back into dubstep (something which it has probably needed for a long time
Sulatron The Night is a CD reissue of Sula Bassana‘s 2009 LP and finds him playing some of his finest space rock on what could be seen as almost a concept album, all wrapped around by Frank Lewecke’s luscious cosmic sleeve design. “In Space” opens the album and has more than a nod to ’50s sci-fi in its lush groove — the feel is more like The Tornados […]
Futurismo When I heard that I was to review this album, I had to re-visit some of my old Devo records, blow the dust off and give them a new, fresh listen. Some call them punks, post-punks, new wave or even artrock, but they certainly have their own signature no matter what. The recordings from the late ’70s especially have some of the same quirkiness and dark moods […]
Sacred Bones John Carpenter has had quite a career. After writing, directing and scoring some of the greatest horror films of the ’80s, he has since somewhat fallen off the metaphorical wagon, mustering a less than congenial reception to the majority of his output of the last two decades. The exception to this rule however, is his soundtrack work, from which a whole new generation of composers have […]
Suezan Studio The last thing I was expecting when listening to these recently-unearthed rarities was Gospel. But that’s what hits your ears first, hallelujahs, hand claps and all, roasted on some mad Blackpool-type organ and acoustic hints of blue grassy glinting holy — a bedazzle for the senses indeed. Thomas Dinger‘s only other released work, Für Mich, lightly dusted you with its composed turquoise, as its strange inclinations […]
Ici d’ailleurs/Mind Travels Important Aidan Baker has made an art of being really, really boring. Having released several thousand albums to date – with almost all of them revolving around a guitar and a couple of pedals – you’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘boring’ was in some way a pointed derision aimed squarely at the man’s omnipotence, his unwavering dedication to a singular minimalist aesthetic, but Baker […]
Staubgold Collected from two years’ worth of home two-track tape recordings made between 1982-1983 by Liquid Liquid‘s percussionist, Reel To Real gathers together Dennis Young‘s sketches of sometimes engagingly naïve acoustic songs alongside frenetic percussion workouts and occasional synth frenzies which prefigure the arrival of drum and bass in their clattery pace. The demo-like quality of most of the material makes for an occasionally intimate and sometimes plain […]
Beta-lactam Ring This has got to be Edward Ka-Spel‘s most introspective album to date; some would say business as usual, another party political broadcast from the inside of Edward’s head. Words held in tea-stained sepia and dust-choked webs, hints of jaded melody creeping out of the inky gloom, like threadbare playthings that have seen better days. Yep — definitely business as usual, and I wouldn’t want it any other […]