Potomak It’s been twelve years since the last, proper, Einstürzende Neubauten album, whatever that means. They’ve been detached from the music industry for a while now, pioneering some kind of multiple fan feedback mechanism, which I guess predated crowd-sourcing and kept them away from the supposed struggles associated with label imperatives and the pressure to relate (to the public, to their fans, to themselves).
Loki
114 posts
Rocket Neologisms are where electronic music finds its music. Autechre’s IDM (the worst of labels) wouldn’t prosper in a world of real words. “Cipater” couldn’t be “Bike Ride”; “Dael” or “Gnit” couldn’t take their asynchronous routes with anything like their blank machine majesty if they were tarred with bad brushes like “Clown Grin” or “Telephone Box”.
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 […]
Faber and Faber There’s so much here. This book has almost been written several times, but here we have it; the real deal. If much of this material has been covered in other places, David Stubbs injects everything with a new light and throughout he maintains a sense of reverent shock and awe at the sound itself.
Buried Treasure A book, a CD, a crackle, a cackle. It’s an undialled radio… buzz… Echoes a little of 2000AD’s Zenith… perhaps even the first few episodes of Hellboy… this is England Calling, The Delaware Road… a little graphic play, beautifully illustrated…. A Black Mass…
Mute Chris Carter is a worldly presence amongst electronic pioneers. It’s a shape of music with a number of associated images: the egg-head technician, the scientist, perhaps the hermetic egoist. There’s no doubt this music is cerebral – it seems joined together in a way that in many ways defies easy explanation – but this is an alchemical method
Buried Treasure It’s taken me a while to process this. I’m still processing it. I’ve watched this right the way through three times and jumped around in it (you will go into it, if you bother to go at all) a few more; selecting little movements, trying to find ways to explain what it is.
Beats In Space There’s a soft interference about this record, a sense of loss; it’s beautifully produced throughout and sort of drifts under you as an album (not a bad thing at all), but there’s a real sense of dislocation; you never know quite what it is you’re hearing.
Whip Angels The title sets you up. Death is Coming, cumming… come in; the water’s lovely. La petite mort, sex and death, and rebirth. This is an audio slice of an audio-visual feast, best savoured whole. It is music and it stands alone and proud, but it’s also part of a wider project
English Heretic This has a stately grace, which seems full of ghosts. A fifty year de-celebration of The Summer of Love and a fugue for a darkening isle (that book seems closer to reality than any of us would like). It reimagines and repurposes, taking obscure psychedelic tracks from that lost year, 1967
Cherry Red I saw that car. You know which one. In Stockwell, where I used to stay at a mate’s brother’s squat. I think Thatcher On Acid or Blyth Power or someone lived there. It just sat on the street a few doors down and we took polaroid pictures of each other lying in vaguely provocative poses on the bonnet. Eventually, someone yelled at us to fuck off, […]
Dais “This is what it’s like.” A softly whispered, wraith-like voice appears during one of the tracks and it’s an exemplar: this is one (relatively) short descent into a steaming woodland of madness. There’s great chasms opening up all over the land and we’re listening to ourselves being swallowed.
Sub Rosa It’s becoming a little unpopular, and there seems a tiresome insistence creeping in that music should stand for itself (I completely disagree), but I love electronic music that’s about something; I love a history and a context. The words surrounding a release are as important to me as the music within. Almost.
Faber and Faber A long time ago, I wrote that Genesis P Orridge singing “marmalade” in Throbbing Gristle‘s “Hit By A Rock” on D.O.A. was the key moment in industrial music, a moment that most of the “industrial” artists that stomped around in the wake of TG utterly missed. You couldn’t imagine SPK or Clock DVA or Nine Inch Nails or whoever having “marmalade” in their lyrics
Impossible Objects Of Desire I didn’t ask for this, but it came anyway. I’d been a Fujiya and Miyagi sceptic: too accommodating, too precise, too Brighton.
Rocket Recordings There will be many howls, and here’s one of the first out of the blocks. Gnod can meander, at times (and I like their meanderings), but here the rage is palpable; this is a headbutt into the side of a fast-moving machine. Hawkwind on double-speed, ditching the mushrooms for Brown Acid and amphetamania.
House Of Mythology It’s all in the trails. In a recent, small-scale, study carried out by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, participants took LSD and carried out a number of tasks. The experimenters documented the experiences and noted that tasks that required linguistic and semantic application seemed to be particularly affected
Touch Sometimes, the press releases just absolutely nail it and I hate it when they do. This latest release from the band that fell from the belly of The Amal Gamal Ensemble came with a description that’s clearly trying to ruin my review before it’s even got going.