...everything changed because this record is the one they recorded after Electric Larryland. It is from the '90s and it is exactly the Butthole Surfers record I’d wanted them to release at the time. I went back, took out all the crybaby ‘why did they do this?’ stuff, and re-listened. It’s a completely different record when you see it was supposed to come out in ‘97 and ‘98.
Loki
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They don’t let the intensity dip; they just hurl themselves at their instruments and search for each others’ groove. They find it, and then they keep going. We want them to. People in the audience are finding their inner head-banger.
...like other ‘noise’ rock bands but also strangely unlike most of them in that, even at this early stage, it felt like every note was deliberate. If it sounded like an unGodly accident then that was exactly how it was supposed to sound. These freaks could play; there might even be some kind of score.
The people on the bill tonight feel like threads from the same dark bass wagon; they don’t necessarily sound alike (although they share a sympathy for low tones and steel beats) but they feel like they are parts of a wider subliminal zeitgeist.
It is cosmic and dusty, like a long road across a desert. It is windblown music, or rather music than rides into the storm until, disorientated and windblown, you find yourself in the eye. It feels like big country music.
To be fair, you can see why this film would have been annoying / perplexing to reviewers back in 1981, and many of those issues remain. It is genre-(and gender-)bending in every way. Is it a monster movie? A psychological thriller? A spy film, even, with heavily codified Cold War chic?
The encore gives some of the release the audience have been craving, a delirious bagpipe-led trance concoction, which drifts just the other side of the line between Dionysian and line-dancing. Even the band seem a little surprised, as if this had come from somewhere they hadn’t previously been prepared to go. The King Arthur is a bit like that sometimes.
We know what No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead refers to, but we also know that it doesn’t have to. Yes, it’s the response to that, but though there’s always been clear signifiers in Godspeed You! Black Emperor releases (including references to Palestine) and even clearer references in their actions, the music has often taken a less dogmatic approach, swapping 'mere' words for rhythmic sweep and crescendo, finding emotional aggregates and passion in the interleaving of string and guitar.
Drag City The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, paraphrasing Aristotle (or maybe Aquinas), suggested that “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts” and here we are: two artists that I’ve followed and respected, both of them arch innovators with collaboration in their bones, joining their heads together in a new beast and it’s set me into a flutter in several ways.
You get glimpses of what might have been and also an insight into how good at editing their own ideas Coil were. John Balance might have been canonised as the archetypal wide-eyed soul-in-flames, but here we can see the amount of revision he put into his work. Drugs and drink may have been a part of his stream of consciousness, but there’s more lucidity in here than you’d expect and a lot better editing. He’s more James Joyce than William S Burroughs.
Thrill Jockey This is the disco of slurs, of slurry, of slurrrs. Everything seems wasted, in the sense of my favourite Donna Summer track (yep, “Wasted”). Even the hi-hats sound shattered, like you’ve found yourself at Shoom sometime around 1987, the real turn of the century; still dancing but full of MDMA on the down, starting to feel your calves give out but not wanting the music to […]
Timeless Editions There’s a lot to unpack. Visually, The Universe Is A Haunted House is a beautifully presented book, too big for comfort, like an ancient Bible, waiting for its lectern. Images tumble out and over each other – like Peter Greenaway’s books, Pillow and Prospero. It overwhelms at every turn, each giant page ceding new sight and deepening the spirals. Further down. Furthur. You won’t find out […]
Dais I’m not going to use the C word, because it’s been a long time since they ceased to be and we all have to stop thinking in those tired patterns, even me, who can’t. Agalma is a minor triumph all of it’s own, finding pathways through music that spins off and around what could broadly be called New Age and finds its own corners. This time around, […]
Planet Mµ I got sort of lost at dubstep, or maybe 2step, or ponycore, or chiptune, or skelefunk, or, um, footwork… I never properly learned to differentiate jungle from drum’n’bass, or to understand the point in which that became drill or drizzle or whatever the Hell it became. The continuum became the ‘nuum and everyone blamed each other for continuing, for not innovating, for not finding the right […]
Young God / Mute “New Mind” was the soundtrack to a teenage holiday in Cornwall with a couple of mates. It was that kind of holiday: evil cows, bad beer, psychotic karaoke singers (the best-worst version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”), amyl nitrate dreams. One of the people on the trip also writes for this site. He’s not been the same since. “New Mind” is the opening track on Children Of God […]
Warp I get this as a single stream, which might be protective or perhaps artistically purposeful. If this is intended as a single stream assault on the history of Oneohtrix Point Never, then it’s a jagged, mischievous stream, characterised by one-stop assaults, Windows loading sounds, disrupted sweeps and strings.
Marionette I listened to this this morning and the rabbits came. Bear with me. I was listening on headphones, which seems the most appropriate way to access this and the rabbits started to emerge from the hedgerows as I walked through the field to work. They couldn’t hear, unless they were the psychic rabbits we’ve heard so much about in these parts, but they understood their role in […]
Carpark It’s been thirty years since the last album, but the music of Sonic Boom has remained a constant on my record players since I was sixteen, and this beautifully measured record is a return to the forms; it doesn’t particularly sound like any of his previous records, but it is unmistakably the work of Pete Kember.