2001 | Misfit City

Archive | 2001 RSS feed for this section

November 2015 – upcoming London gigs – The End Festival 2015 in Crouch End, part 2

As promised, here’s the second rundown of people playing Crouch End’s The End Festival here in London this month (in fact, this week). It’s serving as my self-imposed penance for having been stupid enough to have missed the festival’s existence for so many years, especially as it’s been only a fairly short walk from where I live.

In case you’re interested at who’s already played this year, last week’s rundown is here (from math-rock heroes to underground pop hopefuls to assorted folk noises), but here’s who’s performing from tomorrow until the end of next Sunday…

* * * * * * *

The Mae Trio + Patch & The Giant + Elephants & Castles (Downstairs @ The Kings Head, 2 Crouch End Hill, Crouch End, London, N8 8AA, UK, Monday 16^th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £10.75 – information

Much-garlanded Melbourne chamber-folksters The Mae Trio are a great example of can-do Australian vivacity – three women who juggle multiple instruments (banjo, ukulele, guitar, marimba, violin, cello and bass). While delivering spring-fresh, sparkling three-part harmonies and witty stage banter, they also volley songs at us which merge the whip-smart compassionate edge of Indigo Girls, and the dizzy chatter of The Bush The Tree And Me. Londoners aim plenty of jokes at Aussie visitors, but if they will keep on coming here and showing us up like this… Well, the city’s home-grown alt.folk scene is at least holding its own, since it can produce bands like Patch & The Giant, another gang of multi-instrumentalists (throwing cello, accordion, flugelhorn and violin in with the usual mix) who come up with a ‘Fisherman’s Blues’-era Waterboys mingling of Irish, Balkan and American country influences plus New Orleans funeral-band razz, rolling off heady spirit-in-the-everyday songs for a potential singalong everywhere they go.

The second of the two London bands, Elephants & Castles, might not share the direct folkiness of the rest of the night’s bill (being more of a brash and perky power-pop idea at root, with fat synth and chatty peals of electric guitar) but the band does have an acoustic side (which they might be bringing along on this occasion). Also, a closer look at their songs reveals a strand of outrightly folky protest and character witness, with songs about gentrification, the lot of manufacturing workers and the ordeals and victimhood of Justin Fashanu showing up in their setlist.

* * * * * * *

Howe Gelb (The Crypt Studio, 145a Crouch Hill, Crouch End, London, N8 9QH, UK, Monday 16^th & Tuesday 17^th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £22.00 – information

Tireless alt.country legend and multi-project workaholic Howe Gelb (the frontman for Giant Sand, Sno Angel and Arizon Amp & Alternator) takes in two dates in Crouch End as part of his ongoing tour. The first of Howe’s dates will be solo, but Nadine Khouri (fresh from her Hornsey Town Hall megagig appearance on the preceding Saturday) will be playing support on the 16^th, with an extra surprise guest promised at some point in the proceedings.

* * * * * * * *

Romeo Stodart & Ren Harvieu (Earl Haig Hall, 18 Elder Avenue, Crouch End, London, N8 9TH, UK, Thursday 19^th November 2015, 7.00pm) – £13.75 – information

Romeo Stodart (half of the frontline for familial, Mercury-nominated, cuddly-bear band The Magic Numbers) has been taking time out from his main group to write and sing with Salford soul-pop singer Ren Harvieu as R N R. This performance gives both singers a chance to show us what they’ve come up with. Expect a full-potential set: reinterpretations of both Ren songs and Magic Numbers numbers, reworkings of standards (as defined and chosen by the duo) and the full song fruits of their new partnership. One or two examples of the latter have sneaked out into the public eye previously, so here’s a taste – via YouTube – of what’s on offer.

* * * * * * *

Before the Goldrush presents Green Diesel + Tom Hyatt + Horatio James (The Haberdashery, 22 Middle Lane, Crouch End, London, N8 8PL, UK, Friday 20th November 2015, 8.00pm) – £5.00 – information

Kentish folk-rock sextet Green Diesel happily embrace a spiritual descent from an earlier ‘70s wave of English folk-rockers – Fairport Convention, Mr Fox, The Albion Band, Steeleye Span). As those bands did, they conflate dazzling electric guitar, a mass of acoustic folk instrumentation and a sheaf of traditional tunes mixed in with new songs (“old-fashioned, new-fangled”). In the same spirit, they’re enthusiasts and honourers of the old forms, but are never shy of splicing in others (“a reggae twist into an old sea shanty… spicing up a jig with a touch of jazz funk”) in order to communicate the songs to a fresher and perhaps less reverent audience during one of the frenetic and joyous live gigs which they’re becoming increasingly famous for.

If you’re a bunch of Londoners going for that country-flavoured Neil Young lonesomeness, then you’ll need the conviction, you need a certain selflessness and freedom from posing, and you’ll need the songs. Horatio James have all of this, carrying it off without slipping either into pastiche or into a faux-Laurel Canyon slickness, offering “songs of estrangement, heartbreak and malevolence” floating like dust off a pair of snakeskin boots. A cut-down version of the band charmed me at a Smile Acoustic live session in Shoreditch: the full band ought to be even better.

Tom Hyatt tends to work solo, delivering his clarion tenor voice and songs from behind a propulsive, percussive acoustic guitar or from the stool of a fluid, contemplative piano. There are strains of Tim Buckley and John Martyn in what he does, perhaps a little of the young Van Morrison (and, judging by his taste in covers, a dash of ABBA as well) but with their boozy, visionary slurs and blurs replaced by a clear-headed, clear-witted take on matters. Some might reckon that this was missing the point: if you don’t, Tom – heart and mind engaged – is certainly your man:. At this gig, he’ll be playing with a regular collaborator, cellist Maya McCourt (also of Euro-American folk collision Various Guises and bluegrass belle Dana Immanuel’s Stolen Band).

* * * * * * *

The Apple Of My Eye + Michael Garrett + The August List(SoftlySoftly @ Kiss The Sky, 18-20 Park Road, Crouch End, London, N8 8TD, UK, Sunday 22^nd November 2015, 3.00pm) – £4.40/£5.00 – information

Of course SoftlySoftly – who present regular unplugged folky gigs in Crouch End – fit perfectly into the festival, and present one of their acoustic afternoons (which are adults only, for reasons of booze rather than scabrousness) with barely a blip in their stride Offering “folk music for the drunk, the drowned and the lost at sea”, Bristolian-via-London sextet Apple Of My Eye write thoughtful, contemplative alt.folk songs tinged with country harmonies and displacement (mellow but slightly homesick, in the manner of the itinerant and accepting). Michael Garrett is another rising star on the London acoustic scene, usually performing with a backing band of Chums to back up his voice and guitar with viola, cello and cajon although this occasion looks as if it may well be a solo gig. There’s not much of Michael’s open, unaffected songcraft online, although I did find a video of him taking on Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, as well as a brief homemade clip of one of his own songs. Husband-and-wife duo The August List belt out a take on Carter-classic stripped country with honey-and-bitter-molasses vocals, shading into occasional rock clangour and odd instrumentation stylophones – hardbitten songs of hardbitten ordinary folk, sometimes driven into cruel situations.

* * * * * * * *

The Feast of St Cecilia: The Memory Band + The Lords Of Thyme + Elliott Morris + The Mae Trio + You Are Wolf + Collectress + Spectral Chorus + DJ Jeanette Leech (Earl Haig Hall, 18 Elder Avenue, Crouch End, London, N8 9TH, UK, Sunday 22nd November 2015, 1.00pm) – £11.00 – information

The second and last of The End’s big gigs is also the festival closer. Apart from The Mae Trio (making a mid-bill return after their Monday performance) it’s a once-only grouping of End talent – “a fitting folk finale, a weird folk all dayer” with a wealth of bands tapping into or springing out of folk forms across the spectrum, plus DJ-ing by Jeanette Leech (scene authority and writer of ‘The Seasons They Change – The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk’).

The Memory Band is a folktronica project with a difference. Rather than clothing old or new folk songs in electronic textures, Stephen Cracknell builds new folk pieces up from scratch, assembling them via computer and a virtual “imaginary band” succession of guest players, Instead of smoothing the gaps, though, he makes the most of the eerie collage effect of digital sampling and patchwork. Some Memory Band pieces are familiar guitar and slap hollers with a folk baroque smoky swirl – hard-drive recordings with a trad air. Others are tapescape instrumentals, like an English-folk translation of Bomb Squad hip hop techniques: old-sounding folk airs carried on acoustic instruments against drones and percussion snippets like jingling reins, while backing tracks are made entirely out of ancient tune snatches and Sussex field recordings (hedgerow birds and bleating sheep, tractors, skyborne seagulls, landscape echoes; the tracery of air, wind and sky over downs). The live arrangements may lean more towards the acoustic and traditional style, but if they capture any of the vivid reimaginings of the recorded efforts they’ll still be well worth seeing.

The Lords Of Thyme are what you get when musicians from the wild psychedelic folk cyclone of Circulus decide that they want to slow down a little but go deeper. Joe Woolley, Tali Trow and Pat Kenneally (three Circulus players, former or current – it’s always hard to tell which) bonded with singer Michelle Griffiths over shared musical loves and have gone on to play and record songs which draw and build on the quartet’s steepings in both psychedelic esoterica and better known touchstones: Wizz Jones and Nick Drake, Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay, Nico, Davy Graham, early ’70s prog (Soft Machine and Yes) and even New York post-punk (Television). The results are a shimmering but solid acid-folk songbook, perfect for recapturing the tail-end of a half-imagined, cider-golden summer in these dank November days.

Celtic Connections award-winner Elliott Morris is the kind of young folk musician who makes both his peers and older musicians wince ruefully into their beers. Not only does he play fingerstyle guitar with the dazzling, percussive, ping-pong-match-in-a-belfry attack of Michael Hedges, Antonio Forcione or Jon Gomm, but he simultaneously sings with the controlled passion of a teenaged Martin Furey and writes like a youthful John Martyn. There’s something quite magical here.

Like The Memory Band, Kerry Andrew – who works as You Are Wolf – is a folk reinventor, taking ideas from current technology, leftfield pop, contemporary classical music and spoken word recording and then applying them to folk music. Her current album, ‘Hawk To The Hunting Gone’ is an invigorating cut-up of melodies and Kerry’s extensive vocal and production techniques, sounding like lost ethnology tapes of Anglo-American folk strands from a parallel history.

To call Collectress an alternative string quartet sells them too short – it suggests that the London-Brighton foursome can be summarised as an English take on Kronos. Aside from the fact that that any such position has already been taken (and reinvented, flipped and superseded) by the Smith and Elysian Quartets, Collectress just don’t play the same pattern as regards repertoire or instruments. They’re more of a quartet-plus, with musical saw, keyboards, woodwind, guitar, software, field recordings and singing as much in their armoury as their strings. Citing the Necks, Rachels, Bach and John Adams in their puzzlebox of influences, the group offer four very individual women musicians, a knack for full improvisation, and a sense of narrative that imbues everything from their songs to their suggestive spontaneous pieces.

Finally, Merseyside trio Spectral Chorus seem to have emerged from a post-dole background of disintegration, drifting and life lived one long ominous step away from the black. Their tale of sharing one hovel and a single bed as they honed their craft, living off pawn money from putting their instruments in and out of hock, and of nourishing themselves solely with spare hotel breakfasts from one member’s work as a caterer sounds like a grim joke: in these unsparing days, of course, it could well be true. Now homed at Skeleton Key Records (the Liverpool-based label-of-love set up by The Coral), they’re releasing their spooky semi-hymnal urban folk songs – part Shack and part Brendan Perry – to a waiting world, and there’s evidently enough in the kitty for live appearances too.

* * * * * * * *

And that’s it. More on the End Festival next year, when I’ll know what to expect.

Tags: Alice Eldridge, Before The Goldrush (event), Caroline Weeks, Collectress, Elephants & Castles, Elliott Morris, Giant Sand, Green Diesel, Horatio James, Howe Gelb, intriguingly mixed bags, Jeanette Leech, Kath Mann, listening to women, London (England), Maya McCourt, men and women singing together, Michael Garrett, Nadine Khouri, Patch & The Giant, Quinta, R N R, Rebecca Waterworth, Romeo Stodart, Softly Softly (event), Spectral Chorus, The Apple Of My Eye, The August List, The End Festival (event), The Lords Of Thyme, The Mae Trio, The Magic Numbers, The Memory Band, Tom Hyatt, women of heart and mind, You Are Wolf

June 2014 – through the feed – Sufjan Stevens reissues ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ with various goodie options

26 Jun

Sufjan Stevens: ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’

Assuming that you’ve not heard about this yet (I still have the sneaking suspicion that the majority of my readers are ahead of me as regards news)…

…that prolific, poly-instrumental singer-songwriter/critical darling Sufjan Stevens is reissuing one of his earliest and oddest albums. Originally released by Asthmatic Kitty back in 2001, ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ was reissued a couple of days ago (June 24th) on limited-edition deluxe vinyl and as a download.

On initial hearing, ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ doesn’t sound much like the work with which Sufjan later made his name. Despite the man’s reputation for assured eclectism, it seems out-of-place and unexpected – very different from the concept albums in which he codified his life and thoughts into the hopes, dreams and terrains of American states; or from his baroque-ified folk-Americana (in which you were as likely to hear a cor anglais as a banjo or harmonium); or from his combining of original film and symphony music for ‘The BQE’; or even his battery of Christmas albums.

Recorded during Sufjan’s first stint in New York, it’s almost entirely electronic – a fizzing post-modern cut-up built from digital work station noises, samples and tweaks of live sounds (including stray guitars, organs, the brassy lather of Tom Eaton’s trumpet and prelingual vocals from Liz Janes and Sufjan himself). There’s a running theme via the Chinese zodiac and its twelve-year cycle, each year of which lends its name to a track (Year Of The Dragon, Year Of The Rat and so on), although Sufjan muddies the waters with two extra pieces – the title track and The Year Of Our Lord. (Given his professed Christianity, the latter is as likely to be sincere as it is to be a tongue-in-cheek gag: given the nature of the album, it’s probably both.)

Over to his label, Asthmatic Kitty, for a fuller explanation (as Asthmatic Kitty appears to have a staff of two, one of whom is Sufjan, you can be pretty sure that this is a definitive statement):

“Departing from the singer-songwriter format of his first Asthmatic Kitty album, ‘A Sun Came’, this collection of fourteen colourful instrumental compositions combines Sufjan’s noted gift for melody with electronic sounds to create an unusually playful and human – not to mention humane – electronic experience. First released in 2001 on CD, 2014 — the Year of the Horse — brings the original recording back as a double-LP set, the first disc clear and the other left to fortune. And no one can foresee who will receive one of two very special boxes of fortune cookies, containing fortunes penned especially for this occasion by Sufjan himself.

‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is the most underrated and overlooked album in Sufjan’s discography. It contains in capsule form what he would later unpack into more palatable music. There are flashes of ‘Michigan’ and ‘Illinois’ in Year Of Our Lord, Year Of The Ox and Year Of The Dog, and shadows of ‘Age Of Adz’ in the darkest moments of Year Of The Boar, Year Of The Snake or Year Of The Dragon. ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is a harbinger. A precursor. A wink in the eye before the slight. You should have listened in the first place. We’ll forgive you though, because when an album is only available in wasteful jewel-case CD, how cool can it be? Jewel-cases are so 1998. But now that it’s in multi-colored limited-edition gimmick-ridden vinyl, you have no excuse. ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’, which Sufjan wrote and recorded in the innocence of a pre-9/11 2001, is Sufjan’s best work because it is Sufjan at his least self-aware.

In an alternate reality, Sufjan never made ‘Michigan’ or ‘Seven Swans’ or ‘Illinois’; he kept making electronic freakout albums like ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ in obscurity, until perhaps he just gave up and stayed in graphic design and some pitying barely-afloat label re-released ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ and sold a few dozen copies to a few scattered part-time record store employees. But here we are in this reality, where ‘Michigan’ is slated for an energy drink commercial, ‘Illinois’ is a backdrop to a pensive montage in a kickstarted blockbuster movie, and ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is relegated to a drunken purchase at Amazon.com.

Here at Asthmatic Kitty, where we often ignore reality as it’s presented, ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is one of our most played records. We find ourselves in the small company of ballet choreographers, quartets, and occasional internet reviewers, but there should be more of us. So, as if we were in that alternate universe where “Sufjan” is more likely the name of a ‘Game of Thrones’ character than an indie star, we hope you’ll give this record a chance now that it’s available as vinyl. It is just as genius as anything Sufjan has released since. Everything’s been downhill since.”

To my own cranky ears, ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is a fascinating, skillful blip in Sufjan’s career – a rare chance to see his singular talent from a specific angle. It’s a little similar to your first encounter with Frank Zappa’s cascading Synclavier cut-ups if all you’d previously heard was his catalogue of hairy, horse-laugh rock cabaret numbers about groupie misdemeanours and middle-America caught napping and dribbling. Another comparison is Adrian Belew’s 1986 one-off ‘Desire Caught By The Tail‘ – a snarling, abstract career swerve from a musician who’d previously satisfied his avant-garde leaning by blowing spacey textures and barnyard/traffic sound effects through art-rock songs, but was now sitting down with a crude guitar synth (plus a jumble of pedals and assorted things to hit with a stick) in order to create uncompromising Picasso-Hendrix shapes at heavy-metal volume. Did someone say ‘Metal Machine Music’? Not quite, although there are moments of crushing noise on ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ which recall Lou Reed’s own Marmite effort.

One thing which can be said for certain is that ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ is a breathtakingly playful record which nonetheless exhibits Sufjan’s extraordinary breadth of influences and compositional skills. If you listen closely, his subsequent ways of building a song are all already present and correct. Though they’re sheathed and blurred within the blip-glitching video-Pong noises, Tibetan bells and drunken brass band textures of Year Of The Monkey, they’re definitely there: it’s a song, voiced with all the oddness of a Charles Ives let loose on a sampler.

Speaking of Zappa, some prime bogus pomp shows up on Year Of The Snake and Year Of The Boar. Amongst the larking bass-harmonium reed drone and the razzing fizz of Sufjan’s electronics, some weighty blimpery waddles and patters. I could have sworn that Year Of The Boar even quotes ‘The Phantom Of The Opera’ at one point. Sufjan’s certainly not slow to drop in a ‘Mission Impossible’ quote on the album’s title track, which is otherwise the odd song out – an angular, dissonant line of Rock-In-Opposition guitar fuzz joined by a cavalcade of pushy racket and chiptune burble.

As for the Chinese component, it’s not clear whether this is a gimmick (like Sufjan’s subsequent tall tales of a “50 States” concept project) or another little metajoke which he’s balled up and sent sailing over our heads. Scattered sparingly across the record, Mannar Wong adds some genuine spoken Chinese. In and around certain pieces, trilled Chinese melodies bump up against European string quartet tunes or (as on Year of the Tiger) flute around cabaret vocalese and bells over thudding shadow-tones. But at least as much is drawn through and worked in from other sources: Sufjan’s first years in the thick of New York’s cosmopolitanism must have been a greedy feast for his ears. Steam-organ and No Wave whomp, carefully orchestrated, collide with early-Genesis prog flourishes. Sewer-pulsations meet Bontempi organs and sample-heavy vocal murmurs, folded into Latin pop melodies. Silvery Krautrock turns into dinky, glitch-mauled castle music on Year Of The Rat. For Year of the Sheep, Sufjan turns the music into a battle between pulp and celestial. Against the birth-of-the-world vocalise which he and Liz Janes knit together, animal sounds yawp and rampage – angry pregnant elephants, excited pterodactyls.

Rat

The thirteen-minute Year Of The Horse – the piece on which Sufjan could really have come unstuck – instead shows him in full control: sustaining and mutating schools of ideas at greater length, like a post-techno Mike Oldfield. Despite its mongrel elements and its sense of hazard sources, over the course of its journey (minimalist piano figure in trio with vibrating mechanical sounds and out-of-focus kettledrums; panpipe-riffles marshalling around industrial squashing-tones; a finale of glitched/phased/near-atonal signal twitches), it’s not so dissimilar to those carefully-structured stretches of ‘Tubular Bells’ or ‘Ommadawn’ back in the 1970s. Not that Sufjan would necessarily agree: his time at New York’s New School (which he was attending while he wrote this album) would have exposed him to any number of inspirations from chance heroes to masters of structure. What’s clear is that under the capering and restless sonics, great swathes of ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ display Sufjan’s bedrock talent and the solidity of his musical placings. It’s a cliché that a single work by one artist can hold as many ideas as another artist’s entire career, but this is one of those cases where the old saw is true. I’ve heard plenty of electrophonic records eking out a single concept or a sparse few, albeit successfully. ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ makes most of them sound like lazy sketches.

You should judge for yourselves, though – this wasn’t supposed to be a review. You can get your copy of the album from Asthmatic Kitty or Bandcamp (both fixed-price vinyl or download) or from Noisetrade (pay-what-you-like download-only). For the possibility of fortune cookies, I’m guessing that you should pester Asthmatic Kitty directly. If you want the additional option of ordering a vinyl twosome of ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ and Osso String Quartet’s ‘Run Rabbit Run’ as a thirty-dollar special offer… well, that’s another thing to talk to Asthmatic Kitty about.

Sufjan Stevens online:

Tags: glorious twitch, head spins gently, intriguingly mixed bags, New York City programmatic music, reissues, Sufjan Stevens

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, 2014, album reviews, baroque pop, classical fusion, electronic, electronica, experimental music, previews, progressive rock, reviews, sampledelia, singer-songwriter

March 2013 – EP reviews – Henry Fool: ‘The Free Henry Fool Download EP’ (“picking carefully through detailed instrumental weaves”)

19 Mar

Henry Fool: ‘The Free Henry Fool Download EP’

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue; and all in one package. Henry Fool (resurgent with the ‘Men Singing‘ album after over a decade of woodshedding) are offering a free look at what they do and what they’ve done. A four-minute edit of a rolling juggernaut from the new album; an exclusive, keyboard-led instrumental; two tracks lifted from the band’s 2001 debut album.

While the older tracks (touted via their expansive Steven Wilson mix) might pull in some attention, Henry Fool offer plenty on their own account. Like a number of their contemporaries (such as Sanguine Hum, with whom they currently share drummer Andrew Booker) the band pick carefully through the detailed instrumental weaves of progressive rock left behind by the likes of Soft Machine and Genesis during the early ’70s. Admittedly, they’ve also got the odd thing in common with the sometimes inspired, sometimes benighted neo-proggers of the 1980s. Keyboard whiz Stephen Bennett was one; while guitar puzzler and sometime singer Tim Bowness (better known for no-man) had his own mid-’80s brush with the genre via a bellowing one-night stand with Hertfordshire pompsters Gothique. However, the Fool’s music is churned and tinted by connections and cross-talk with jazz, Brian Eno, Cambridge, avant-garde texture loops and post-rock, making it a subtler and more diverse stew.

For the most part Henry Fool are reappraising that old-school prog fabric, re-cutting it via thinking shaped by four more decades of musical developments, step-backs and parallels. At no point does it feel that they’re simply replicating the old vintage – still less watering it down. It’s more as if they’re inhabiting it; as if they’d moved into an old house, given the interiors a fresh coat of paint, and are now at the stage where they’re hanging bright new pictures and squinting at them, trying to see if they fit with the lines of the beams. Plucked from ‘Men Singing’, the four-minute edit of Everyone In Sweden (trimmed down from its original fourteen) keeps much of its vigour and its cunning ancestry: slow-motion Soft Machine keyboard cascades married to the rapid aggressive wobble of a 1976 Genesis groove, layered with scribbling synth lines which scurry over the structure like a gang of weasels. While clipped, wrangling guitars (part-post-punk, part-post-rock) hack against the smoothness, the edit brings out aspects less evident in the long version – the chippy funk in Peter Chilvers’ fretless bass, or the ghost-train lean of the chords.

As you might expect from the punning title, the Bennett-led A Canterbury Scene (exclusive to the EP) reveals more Soft Machine elements. Centred around the brittle tones of electric piano – wah-ed and echoed in the style of late ’60s Miles Davis bands – it gradually shifts to more Egg-like territories collided with grand Yes string parts. Lurking in the shadows of pomp, it edges its way around the outside, never setting a foot in the brasher spotlight. Written in a dicey 25/8, Poppy Q (its counterpart from those 2001 tracks) is a careful pick-through of electric piano, like a tiptoe through a prog minefield. One minimal keyboard figure arches over odd chords and a faux-Mellotron counterpoint, before the whole band step up into a stately twitching rhythm, keyboards interplaying with a bass part which pulls its shape from the original piano line.

Heartattack (also from the 2001 album) is the only track on which Tim Bowness unleashes his whispered, impeccably English spring-water croon. It’s also the song that best shows how Henry Fool differ from the standard prog approaches. While so many bands in the genre expand everything from ballad to suite into a mass of crammed lyrics and grand significance, Tim opts for a quick peep-show look into a life more ordinary, with a jolt of inner panic. “Stone-in-love and lost again, / you’re walking through the fields. / Summer fresh, your life’s a mess, / you’re wearing down your heels. / Don’t look back, / you’ll have a heart attack.” Thirty-five syllables of narrative, and that’s it. The rest is your own guess, to be worked out against a backdrop of clover-burst keyboard chords, discreet-but-urgent guitar peals and clenching rhythms. Prog balladry from the leanest side, in which the musical scenery is as much the story as the words are, but in which the delicacy asserts a refusal to hammer home the meaning.

Henry Fool: ‘The Free Henry Fool Download EP’
Burning Shed (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download-only EP
Released: 8th March 2013

Get it from:
Free download from Burning Shed

Henry Fool online:

Tags: Andrew Booker, Darkroom, Henry Fool, I Monster, Jarrod Gosling, LaHost, Michael Bearpark, Myke Clifford, No-Man, Peter Chilvers, Stephen Bennett, Tim Bowness

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, 2013, EP reviews, experimental/avant-garde rock, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz fusion, music downloads for free/cheap/pay-what-you-like, post-rock, progressive rock, reviews, rock

REVIEW – Darkroom: ‘Fallout One’ album, 2001 (“like a small corpse flattened onto a moving tyre”)

13 Jan

Darkroom: ‘Fallout One’

Maybe it’s due to simply not being on the right label (they’re homed neither at Warp Records nor at Rephlex, nor at any of the other established electronica houses who provide a credible passport to attention). Maybe it’s the frustration of continually bouncing, disregarded and unloved, off the defense radar at ‘The Wire’. Maybe it’s simply the usual difficulties regarding working on and playing an abstract, thickly electronic music with even fewer anchors than most of the buzzing, bleeping efforts in that particular field.

Whatever it is, while the mightily amorphous Darkroom should have been a serious avant-garde cult act by now. Instead, they’ve been in retreat since their initial late ‘90s rising and since those times when they brought their galactic rumble-and-wail to some of the artier club-nights around London. It’s dispiriting – but at least this has been a strategic retreat rather than slinking off, defeated, to lick their wounded diodes.

Darkroom remain active, particularly in their native Cambridge. They still haunt basements, galleries and art-house cinemas whenever they can, recording hours and hours of live material. They’re still more or less unknown: but they’ve been making the most of this anonymity. At least it allows them to continue to explore their own unsettling take on ambient music, unencumbered by the demands of the more familiar electronica clubs or by any micro-cultures other than their own. The ‘Fallout’ trilogy (of which this is the first installment) is the result.

These recordings present an unadulterated Darkroom, live and in the raw – a sound of boiling sea-stuff, of natural chaos, of expansively stewing noise. They’ve abandoned the song experiments and the more disciplined, streamlined aspects of their previous album ‘Seethrough‘ in order to embrace more of the chaotic, massy, polytextural wanderings that they touched on in their ‘Daylight’ debut. Each of the tracks on ‘Fallout One’ is functionally numbered: One to Seven. None are graced with any more of a name, nor indeed any more clues of any kind. There are no sine-wave surfing references, no snippets of French or intimations of disturbance, no jokes (unless you count the press release name-checking both Photek and Satan). There aren’t even any nods to the collective’s old Samuel Beckett fetish.

Darkroom don’t guide anymore. They drift remotely through their music with a mixture of utter authority and confusing haphazardness, stirring ideas in and spinning them out. You can’t place yourself with this music: you can only live with it. Any associations which you care to make are now entirely your own.

‘Fallout One’ also emphasizes an increasing musical dominance by Andrew Ostler, the keyboard-and-programming corner of the Darkroom triangle. Freshly returned from his solo project Carbon Boy, Os brings back plenty – he adds a glut of shortwave radio voices; he disrupts Darkroom’s light-footed beats and breaks them up into free-jazz stumbles. His relentless mutations of dense electronics regularly distort and destroy any settled landscapes that the group might have settled on. Lurking in the background, Michael Bearpark concentrates on turning his guitar into a slow-hand blur of inscrutable forbidding noise. When he’s not doing that he’s building up a succession of aquamarine loops, sounding like a coldly psychotic take on Michael Brook.

By comparison, singer Tim Bowness seems more displaced than ever. Already abstract, whenever his vocals appear now they take the form of shocked, drowning, incoherent whoops and keens, half-submerged in the swirl of choking ambience and psychedelic space echo which his collaborators are cooking up. As ever, the effect is similar to the contorted vocal tapestries of Tim Buckley’s ‘Starsailor’. This time, though, Bowness sounds as if he’s gradually being sucked down a black hole, protesting all the way. It’s a far cry from the measured, beautifully-finished art-pop tones and diction of his day-job in no-man. Still, he seems to thrive on the chance to unleash this kind of utterly unguarded noise.

Caught as live as this, Darkroom’s music is more disorientating and disturbing than it’s ever been before on album. Though always too lushly endowed with timbre and detail to be unrelentingly hostile, it offers little in the way of chill-out calm or methodical reassurance. Even the gentler tracks such as Three or Four regularly see Darkroom’s more pastoral landscapes bent out of shape. A desperate, looping Bowness mantra of “say” will be overcome by data squirts and snippets of Gregorian chant; a hum of guitar will be scratched over by a violently juddering, reedy electronic screech; clicking needles will have a strange banana-boat yodel stretched across them.

Throughout, Os’ sculpting of the sounds induces sonic meltdown. Hiccups of sounds, whale song, a mutilated loop of geothermal Mellotron or a dignified broadcaster’s voice will all be sucked up, shredded and blown out, or brought round and round like a small corpse flattened onto a moving tyre. In their collision of the beautiful, the horror-inducing and the plain distorted, Darkroom offer nothing easy. ‘Fallout One’ is music for dissolving cities – a cool-headed, unconditional embracing of confusion.

Darkroom: ‘Fallout One’
Burning Shed (no catalogue number or barcode)
CD-R/download album
Released: 01 January 2001

Buy it from:
Burning Shed or Bandcamp.

Darkroom online:

Tags: Andrew Ostler (Os), apocalyptic roars, Cambridge (England), creeping horror, Darkroom, drift and float, ghostliness, head spins gently, live concert recordings, Michael Bearpark, murmur to wail, No-Man, pitch-bending, rattlebag, textural guitar music, Tim Bowness, wall of sound

Comments 1 Comment
Categories 2001, album reviews, ambient music, drum and bass, electronic, electronica, experimental music, improvisation, industrial music, instrumental music, kosmische & Krautrock, loop music, remixes, reviews, sampledelia, techno

September 2001 – EP reviews – centrozoon’s ‘The Divine Beast’ (“a kind of relay race across trance territory, whipping up a tautly disciplined psychedelic frenzy”)

27 Sep

centrozoon: ‘The Divine Beast’

There are some musicians who claim to consider themselves aerials, with their feet lightly arched off the ground and their heads inclined into some kind of ether, through which they conduct the music and songs which are looking for a means to get to earth. Robert Fripp is one of these claimants, but whether his occasional disciples centrozoon think the same way is questionable.

centrozoon’s touch-guitarist Markus Reuter is a graduate of Fripp’s school of Guitar Craft, and previously played with the Craft-inspired Europa String Choir, but an enquiring look at the Centrozoon website reveals little in the way of earnest, wintry Frippian mystique (though much in the way of dry German humour). If centrozoon (of whom the other half is synth-and-beats man Bernhard Wöstheinrich) are channelling music, it’s of a much more liberating and less clotted variety than Fripp has been downloading into King Crimson over the past few years.

There’s certainly a latter-day Crimsonic element to their work – the rich swathes of Soundscapes-style ambient tone colour, the wild electronic percussion, and the brassy or droning sounds that Markus employs while soloing on his Warr Guitar. But there’s less of the tightness that makes and sometimes mars King Crimson’s music; and a more thoroughly integrated use of the clubland elements of trance, techno and garage that have recently been informing Crimsonic offshoots like BPM&M and ProjeKCts Three and X.

Thúsgg (Skinny and Crazed Mix) possesses that analogue-synth gastric twist that regularly seeps up into club music. Bernhard launches a rapid, broken-beat squirt-funk-and-dripping-water cave ambience, through which Markus flies big wheeling paths of Frippian improvisation in unearthly arpeggios. But barely halfway through, most of the beats quietly fall away: Markus’s chilly howl of overdriven Warr briefly rises, saxophone-like, into free-time jazz questioning, before both centrozooners dissolve into a duet of shifting ambient lambency.

The sixteen-minute extract from ‘The Cult of: Bibiboo’ shows an even broader example of centrozoon’s fusion of club culture and evolutionary rock textures. The duo engage in a kind of relay race across trance territory, whipping up a tautly disciplined psychedelic frenzy. It flowers from auroral ambience through thunder-drum percussion and what sounds like nods to the ‘X-Files’ theme, to warm and constellatory ambient drifts, cut by flares of harmonised Warr and quizzical harmonies.

Five-and-a-half minutes in, it’s become a glittering chillout zone covered in singing glassy loops. By nine minutes, Markus’s weaving Soundscapes are rubbing up against clipped artillery shell boom-beats, and by eleven minutes he’s razoring the starry sky with saw-toothed shapes and snarls. By the thirteen-minute marker Bernhard’s thundering distorted beats have forced Markus back into the angelic role, and they finally coast onto a home stretch of firework bangs and prismatic orchestration.

Tagging all this rich invention as “Fripp on Ecstasy” seems cheap, but it’ll do for now as we start to tune in to the powerful, thrilling hybrid music centrozoon have to offer.

centrozoon: ‘The Divine Beast’
self-released, CZCD01 (no barcode)
CD-only EP
Released: September 2001
Get it from: download from Bandcamp or Amazon Music
centrozoon online:

Tags: Bernhard Wöstheinrich, centrozoon, Gütersloh (Germany), Markus Reuter, touch guitar music, Warr Guitar music

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, dance music, electronica, EP reviews, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, IDM, instrumental music, loop music, post-progressive rock, progressive rock, psychedelic ambient music, reviews, rock, soundscapes, techno

September 2001 – album reviews – Theo Travis ‘Heart of the Sun’ (“one of Britain’s finest yet least precious saxophonists”)

8 Sep

Theo Travis: ‘Heart Of The Sun’

Having followed a series of assured, wide-spanning loops passing through jazz, art-rock, prog, ambient electronics and Gong’s fertile psychedelic universe, perhaps it’s time for Theo Travis to come home. Or, perhaps, to build a home.

One of Britain’s finest (yet least precious) saxophonists, Travis has paid tribute to the post-bop traditions of Coltrane and Tyner, blown full improv and racing fusion, played balladeer and pop romanticist, and breathed frost over ambient darkness. ‘Heart Of The Sun’ summarises this breadth on a single album, unifying itself around his compositional variety and the flexible determination of his playing voice. It’s remarkable for the humility and warmth of its approach – partly from Steven Wilson’s beautifully atmospheric mixing (an object lesson in letting jazz studio performances breathe as naturally as live gigs), but more significantly from Travis’ uncomplicated attitude towards allowing music to happen.

A sometimes-unguarded, sometimes-studious musician – who gives his all either way – Travis is also someone who doesn’t need to throw a leader’s weight around. Subtly poised and authoritative, he stands back from the obvious limelight throughout ‘Heart Of The Sun’, allowing his guests (in particular, pearly-toned trumpet veteran Palle Mikkelborg) to illuminate the music, and then gracefully reflecting that light back himself. Grinding no axes, ‘Heart Of The Sun’ sits itself down at the accessible end of jazz, with Travis discreetly polishing his musical breadth to a smooth evanescent ‘Kind Of Blue’ consistency.

His standard quartet members – David Gordon on piano and organ, Andy Hamill on double bass and Marc Parnell on drums – are the album’s backbone (with occasional rhythm section substitutions from Stefan Weeke and Björn Lücker). Theo’s partnerships with these players allow him to exercise some more straightahead jazz moves, via a tenor sax tone blending the polished New York bite of Michael Brecker and Dave Liebman with the earthier strengths of British bluesman Dick Heckstall-Smith: as demonstrated on the velvet-smokey blues of All I Know. On the other hand, the standard crew also raise the stakes on Fast Life, in which Andy Hammill makes the most of his experiences backing contemporary drum’n’bass luminaries like 4 Hero and LTJ Bukem. It’s a nimble, daring demonstration of how clubland’s drum’n’bass beatscapes are both nourished by jazz and able to feed back into it. Hammill, Parnell and Gordon slip and slide through a succession of sleek, exciting, ever-morphing junglist pulses, like Red Snapper in black ties. Travis and Mikkelborg travel cheek to cheek over these flexing surges, quoting mischievously from mariachi and Mission Impossible, Mikkelborg occasionally rinsing the beats in a wash of wah-wah’ed electric trumpet.

It’s also the standard quartet who are behind the very different approach of Northern Lights – texturally, a close cousin to Travis’ dark-ambient work as half of the electronica duo Cipher. His soprano sax (making its only appearance) stands poised in a lonely, bowed-head intro, redolent with melancholia, over Eno-esque dark-water atmospherics. Mikkelborg responds with a silvery, fantastically tender muted melody – comforting and passionate – that comes and goes like caught breaths and compassionate advice above the carpet of Gordon’s Hammond organ, slowly warming and soothing that initial exposed chill.

The quartet – this time augmented by Mystics guitarist Mark Wood, a companion from Travis’ nights in the improv lab – turn in a relaxed yet magnificent performance on Barking Dogs And Caravans. A musical picture of childhood holidays and British holiday camps, it provides Travis’ best melodic solo of the album. But with its friendly air of disarmed tongue-in-cheek pomp, the barrel-organ Hammond figures and Wood’s Frisell-ish lacing of bell-like guitar, it’s also an opportunity for Travis to explore the more unselfconsciously affectionate corners of the British jazz impulse. Here, you can hear the same mingling of warm, pubby matey-ness and superbly expressive playing as found in the Loose Tubes school of Django Bates and Iain Ballamy: particularly when Travis cuts loose with some celebratory, laughing tenor wails.

Elsewhere, British improv-scene tendencies get a look in on That Old Smile: initially a deceptive, straight sounding blues strut driven by Parnell’s haughty cymbal. Wood – using a solid-yet-limber blowtorching tone – moves outward from a supporting position via a series of iridescent bubbles of sound, allying themselves with Gordon’s increasingly shardlike organ, The piece’s impatiently accelerating choruses (and its nods to the excitability of prog) moves to a point where the playing melts, with a dropping silence, into a heated atonal Bitches Brew jam. Inflamed by hissing cymbal work, Wood’s Sonny Sharrock-ish car-crusher guitar explorations utterly displace the saxophone as the heart of an aggressive whirl of mutinous invention.

More extra-curricular activities are represented by Gong guru Daevid Allen. His infamous glissando guitar (a gentle, thrilling shiver of sound, like sheets of luminous rain stroked by fingers of wind) adds an unearthly, spine-prickling element to offset the familiarity in the album’s lone cover – Van Heusen and Burke’s Here’s That Rainy Day. The returning Mikkelborg (on serenely confident flugelhorn) and Travis (in luxuriant, purring ballad mode) handle the traditional melodics, while the subtle icicle colorations of Gordon’s piano and Björn Lücker’s steady click of rimshot mingle with Allen’s eerie distortions of the atmosphere.

More outright subversion of tradition comes with the surreal Last Flight From Twinwood – an impressionistic, pulse-free, last-days-of-Glenn-Miller tribute in which a spectral big-band sound is provided care of multi-tracked Travis flutes and the one-man clarinet ensemble of Stewart Curtis (moonlighting from Kletzmer Groove). Mikkelborg’s delicately wah-ed electric trumpet haunts the music’s open spaces; Travis’ sometimes anguished tenor cuts across them. But the trump card comes in the unrepentant, disincorporated screech and spring-noise of Mark Wood’s distant guitar, a harbinger of failing aircraft machinery…

The sixteen-minute trail of Bass Rock is a final piece of Travis landscape portraiture, tracing a fluent and understated post-bop slide. Its freedom is defined by Stefan Weeke’s beautifully-timed, gliding elisions on double bass and the casually intent whisper of Lücker’s brush-drumming. And also by its cessations into near-silence but for oscillating ambient loops. Here, Gordon’s flickering touches of piano are sometimes the only foil to Travis’ sax – liberated now from discretion or restraint, to cry with a kind of baffled joy into the night. An open-ended homecoming.

Theo Travis: ‘Heart Of The Sun’
33 Jazz Records, 33JAZZ063 (5020883330631)
CD/download album
Released: 3rd September 2001

Buy it from:
Amazon

Theo Travis online:

Tags: Andy Hamill, Björn Lücker, Daevid Allen, David Gordon, flute music, jazz quartet music, London (England), Marc Parnell, Mark Wood, Palle Mikkelborg, saxophone music, Stefan Weeke, Stewart Curtis, Theo Travis

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, album reviews, drum and bass, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, jazz fusion, loop music, progressive rock, reviews

September 2001 – album reviews – Tony Harn’s ‘Moving Moons’ (“beautiful liquid-gold guitar with its shoes kicked off”)

2 Sep

Tony Harn: ‘Moving Moons’

Little has changed in Tony Harn’s approach, but the Warrington fusion-rock guitarist has never sounded happier. His lyrical, tightly-controlled hard-rock drive is still set off against tumbling, multi-faceted art-rock arpeggios, plus enquiring shapes and vocalised textures drawn in from the world of modern jazz guitar. But the lightness of touch on ‘Moving Moons’ – and its renewed breadth of expression – makes it his most assured work to date.

This third album seems to be about simply enjoying the flow. Its gently sparkling mood is that of a well-pleased man, leaning sensually into his work. As ever, Harn (playing or programming all the instruments) blends his music without cynicism or self-consciousness about his comfortable sound. The bright, guileless weave of cyclic minimalism, gleaming Factory Records economy and judiciously-employed jazz-prog flamboyance retains Harn in a small, well-kept territory of his own.

You can trace a Pat Metheny legacy in some of those friendly guitar percolations, and that of Vini Reilly in the glittering, spindly-but-intricate echo-box patterns. But the overdriven keens of his lead lines have the affable, comfy edge of a ’70s geezer rocker – good-natured, puppy-rough and serenely blissful. At root, ‘Headstart’ is a Satriani-style rocker, growling from the pit of its sulky, dirty wah-rhythm and attempting to swagger. Yet Harn focuses and soothes it, opening the music outwards and festooning it with reflective pointillistic arpeggios; finally leading it towards inclusiveness and away from posturing.

Compared to the pastoral English flavour of Harn’s previous album ‘Lifebox‘, ‘Moving Moons’ is built on a summery Mediterranean warmth – hot nights of brilliant stars, or energising washes of daylight and bright stucco walls. Although Harn sometimes lets his airy keyboards dominate (especially on the pocket-funk throb of Pulsecode, synth riffs chuckling like contented babies), the pervading sound of the album is acoustic, or near-acoustic. Despite of the squadron of stratospheric rock wails and the sheath of Andy Summers textural swells, what really informs Jackal is Spanish guitar, all tangy attack and tremolo. Anger And Empathy provides a dynamic demonstration of Harn’s experimental side – a slow-motion volcano-burst of bent whammy-bar swells, scrapes and tortured violin-bow noises, all fed through outer-space distortions and echoes. But this too flows forward into another Spanish-styled guitar progression, clean and sweet: and ‘Safe Again’ is full of perky acoustic strumming as Harn takes flight, deliciously chasing his own echo.

Although this strays closer to driving music for the Algarve than it does to Paco Peña, Harn invariably saves the day with his ear for tunes, his knack for beautifully refracted arrangements, or his mastery of unabashed constructive naivety. The marriage of technology and innocence – a rare quality in guitarists – is Harn’s ace card, and a surprisingly effective one.

Moving Moons itself is a fragrant nightscape – tootling synths kissing up to arpeggio guitar and the sound of floats bobbing in reflective water. Sweet meteor trails of guitar-wail arc across the air for a rendezvous with moving cross-rhythms; and more spare, sweet paths of feedback show up on the deliciously lazy study of Standing In The Doorway To Your World. Here, they play over the gently assured structures built up by Harn’s synths and organs, or ease breathlessly across a classical-minimal duo of Reilly-esque clean guitars. Lake Song has Harn orchestrating a duet of twinkling post-punk guitar and hooting ’70s overdrive, the drumbox teased by reggae-tinted bass beneath those double-stopped minimalist patterns.

Generally avoiding the temptation to rampage incessantly across his fretboard, Harn’s drawn instead towards finding and sitting on pretty patterns. Sometimes this gets dangerously close to cuteness – the breezy Bubbleburst, for example, like a chance meeting between Alphonso Johnson and Brian May in the kids’ end of the jazz-rock pool. User One (Moon Two) also lives in the bright-eyed zone, bouncing its swirly jangle of notes against the night sky, keeping them up and moving via its pumping, lightly-whipped funk bass-line.

As a counterweight, Harn addresses his jazz leanings more substantially in a couple of loose fusion ballads. Time For Answers merges swing rhythms, prog assertions and a Django Reinhardt gypsy wriggle, leading them all through to a celebratory duet of guitar and tootling synth. Sixlowdown aims at the jazz pocket through the gaps of another reggae-styled bassline: a bubbling, tripping sway like a mid-’80s Miles Davis ballad, emphasized by the growl of bluesy distortion Harn employs for terse comments from the sidelines, flexing a few John McLaughlin sensibilities.

‘Moving Moons’ sometimes seems a little becalmed within its coasting motions – a touch too happy in its light’n’easy beauty – but with such lovely scenery to glide through, it’s little wonder that Harn’s opting to cruise easily. Ultimately, this time he’s offering beautiful liquid-gold guitar with its shoes kicked off, and whether you choose to join him on the sundeck is your own affair. But he couldn’t be any more welcoming if he tried.

Tony Harn: ‘Moving Moons’
Tony Harn, THCD2 (no barcode)
CD-only album
Released: 2001

Buy it from:
Burning Shed.

Tony Harn online:

Tags: electric guitar music, gemlike sparkle, multi-instrumentalists, Tony Harn, travelling hopefully, Warrington (England)

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, album reviews, ambient music, experimental/avant-garde rock, instrumental music, jazz fusion, loop music, reviews, rock

August 2001 – album reviews – Michael Jon Fink’s ‘I Hear It in the Rain’ (“into the tundra of forgetfulness”)

25 Aug

Michael Jon Fink: ‘I Hear It In The Rain’

Often it’s as simple as this – for true treasure, let go of the precious.

Michael Jon Fink (operating within New Music but sidestepping much of its systematic, lab-dulled pretensions) proves it on this album of close-up and subtle music, aided by remarkably sympathetic collaborators – textural guitarist Rick Cox, percussionist Dan Morris, Bryan Pezzone on piano and celesta, and bass clarinetist Marty Walker. There’s something of Gavin Bryars’ evanescent emotional skill to Fink’s music; something of the soft spatial blur of the Evanses (both Bill and Gil); but little of the chart-plotting dryness of a composer after cleverness points. Although Fink’s composing seems to be romantic at heart, he’s well aware of what modernism lets him draw by implication. ‘I Hear It In The Rain’ has feeling in plenty, but doesn’t lay out its secrets that easily.

During Five Pieces For Piano, Bryan Pezzone’s soft playing presses oh-so-gently on our ears. Fink’s music emerges from Pezzone’s piano so delicately that it hardly disturbs the air, as silent as night-travelling stealth ships, yet it sets reactions moving. The musical voicings are widely spaced, just dissonant enough for a shadow of doubt. The melodies are simple – songs from a sleepy child on the road – and it’s Pezzone’s exquisite touch on both keys and pedals that brings out Fink’s intentions.

The sparse sketch of Passing sounds like Debussy, but also like worksong. Its tentative descending melodies touch down in firm but unsettled chords – displaced, jazz-shadowed. Constrained by its skeletal melodic discipline, Mode uses space instead to ask its wordless questions, which remain unanswered by the rising minor-key bass arpeggio of Fragment and the two-note treble alternation which rings on and on – absently, a long-ignored alarm that’s forgotten both urgency and reason and instead beats out its worn, relaxing ritual. For Echo, two cycles of elegantly picked-out notes overlap each other, engaging not like machine parts but like two people caught unwittingly in a loose parallel. The fifth and final piece, Epitaph, draws the harmony together. The sustained, rising rumble of each decaying bass note holds the attention, while a melody in the mid-range takes up the implications of a death song.

This is not about feelings being directly manipulated. Fink’s music induces them, drawing into the gaps and implications between the notes. A lot of it is timing: the attuned sensibilities of a performer and a composer both inspired by the subtle, near-telepathic interreactions of small-group jazz. More of the slender, yet involving, same can be found within Two Preludes For Piano. The first of these, Image, keeps that same poise between amnesia and raptness as the Five Pieces do, tiny details slipping past the pared-back structure of Fink’s notes. The second, Wordless, heads further into the tundra of forgetfulness: the tenor- and soprano-range parts thoughtful and reassuring, but set just far enough apart from each other for disturbance, fading unresolved into the deep evening.

When Fink and Pezzone leave the piano’s subtle, powerful dynamism, they favour the celesta – an instrument which demands (and produces) an exquisite clarity, but with soap-bubble fragility. While the instrument is chillier and less robust than the timbrally similar Rhodes piano (the jazzer’s usual choice for the otherworldly), Fink turns this into a virtue. Initially, For Celesta seems as physically ephemeral as a frost-painting – bright points glimmering on a window – but grows by degrees as Pezzone brings out the full resonance of the instrument’s range. A beautifully sleepy melody grows, reflection by reflection. It’s precise, yet weighted oddly by its slow ebb and return of acceleration; and by the sudden unexpected welling-up of emotional and physical volume midway through, before returning to its soft contemplation.

Elsewhere, Fink’s moods are less compressed and matter-of-fact titles are left behind for more poetic names. On Living To Be Hunted By The Moon (which could be a nod to Gurdijieff’s mythology of soul-eating moons, or to even older fears) Fink builds a landscape of powerful but distant sampler drones. These slant across the sky like angled, endless, featureless walls, each one eerily bisecting the former with a disquieting geometry. Underneath this beautiful and subtly oppressive canopy the marvellously expressive Marty Walker purrs and throbs all-but-subliminal lines on his bass clarinet. It comes across as a supernatural play of light represented in sound, but once again Fink’s near-narcotic sense of subtle disassociation comes into play. His soundscapes hover overhead like a deferred threat, or like a beautiful, cruel and thoughtless god – something to be crept past; something of predatory attentions, carefully evaded.

No such emotional deferral happens on the album’s title track, which is also it’s haunting and lovely finale. Everything that has been promised (or hidden) elsewhere on the album settles home like final snow, or final tears. Where all else has been sparse and minimal, I Hear It In The Rain is luxuriant and gently cathartic. Dreamily slow, founded on Fink’s pedal-point of bass guitar and the gentle rocking motion of his bell-like keyboards, it’s shot through with fluttering orchestra-sized samples of tremulous cellos, blending with the soft rushes of Morris’ gongs and bell trees. Rick Cox’s electric guitars (teased into hallucinatory smears by sponge or glass implements) buoy up the spectral and blissfully desolate melodies, dissolving the emotional suspense in one long resolution; dissolving you too and easing you out through your opening window up into another warm and solitary Los Angeles night.

Words aplenty… I could go on and on to you about the restraint and wisdom in Michael Jon Fink’s work, but what gets me every time is its sheer and honest beauty. There’s a disciplined mind at work here: it’s also one which is in touch with such universality of feelings that praising his deft economy and musical grammar seems reductive. I could pin him down further for you, but what matters might be beyond by reach – though, even as I finish this, it’s come filtering through the air to reach back to me again. Simple. Special. Indispensable.

Michael Jon Fink: ‘I Hear It In The Rain’
Cold Blue Music, CB0004 (800413000426)
CD/download album
Released: 18th June 2001

Buy it from:
Cold Blue Music (CD) – various downloads available from Amazon and similar.

Michael Jon Fink online:

Tags: Bryan Pezzone, California (USA), celesta music, Cold Blue Music, Dan Morris, gemlike sparkle, kinda blue, Los Angeles (USA), Marty Walker, Michael Jon Fink, piano music, Rick Cox, songs that sound like dusk

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, album reviews, ambient music, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, experimental music, instrumental music, minimalism, reviews

REVIEW – Laughtrack: ‘Amusements’ single, 2001 (“counting the change and failing to come up with comforting answers”)

12 Aug

Laughtrack: ‘Amusements’

Amusements is a majestic but famished slink across rain-dirty pavements in the gaudy heart of town: redolent of grime and darkness, and with disturbed puddles wavering neon reflections at you. A techno dub-groove catwalks its way from start to finish, toying with all the time in the world: whether the wire-wool guitars are beating themselves against it or whether the sound is being gulped away to reveal the skeletal machinery of bass and beat prowling onwards. A thin but insistent vocal hangs at the heart of it: “I can’t tell you no lies / We’re moving into a new kind of life – / a strange new world, a comfort zone / where nobody has to be alone.”

It’s a lyric which almost sounds as if it ought to be bobbling along on top of a corporate anthem: but which, in this context, sounds as if it’s shadowing the giant corporate hands which can pat you on the head in one pass and scoop away your world with the next. “Why have you sold the future, why have you sold the past?” questions the chorus. “Is it for our amusements, ‘cos nothing is meant to last?” Someone’s standing on the edge of the kerb, swaying on their heels, counting the change they’ve been returned and failing to come up with comforting answers.

If the original Amusements resembles a rocked-up ‘Mezzanine’, the Severance mix (done with “avant-hardist” MEME) flings the drums into echoing relief and carves the groove into a zombie stomp, Garbage-style. Grating peaks of sub-bass and further sandstorms of psychedelic guitar crackle somewhere between Chapterhouse, Suicide and Levitation – sleekness savaged into life by noise and interference. No words, but an implacable, forceful indifference. The deal’s done – it’s time to bring out the heavy lorries.

Slide round the corner, and things are different. The torch song atmosphere of Left Standing implies Goth-cum-trip-hop, but also a take on Billy Mackenzie at his most open. It’s the brittle piano chording, that cavernous sway of arrangement around the lamp-post glow of a solitary microphone; the hints of theatrics and sincerity interlocking fingers and squeezing for luck… or in desperation. That said, it doesn’t follow the Mackenzie trail entirely. There’s an absence of helium operatics and peacock posturing. Instead, the almost-buried voice of Joe (Laughtrack’s mastermind) catches at the same blend of clenched unfunky indignation as Roland Orzabal at his most vulnerable; and even breaks at the same preacherly point.

This time Joe’s not mourning a way of life, but a person: and although the burden of grief is shared, the empty space that’s been punched into his life is obvious. Joe sounds exhausted and angry as he confesses “I really don’t care for very much these days, / but the living is easy in a pointless way. / You left us standing, and now everything is hard to say…” Thankfully there are compensations, new reconcilations, new solidarities to be found in the face of it: “I tell my friends ‘don’t be so scared’… / You left us standing, and that’s something we’ll always share.”

It’s Laughtrack’s unease – their sense of huge forces and emotions moving behind the immediate business of life – that draws you back to them. This is dark, luxuriant pop to tease apart with the fingertips and pry into; something that suggests stories in the same way as the more oblique moments of no-man or Smog. And Laughtrack’s simple but oddly unsettling name (raising questions every time you consider it) suggests a writer intelligent enough to be aware of the frame surrounding whatever he does.

As Laughtrack roll away off into the night, they’re being quietly trailed by gumshoes who are after some more answers.

Laughtrack: “Amusements”
Contrary Public, CONTPUB001 (no barcode)
CD-only single
Released: 2001

Buy it from:
Best looked for second-hand.

Laughtrack online:

Tags: creeping horror, Laughtrack, London (England), one-release-only artists, songs that sound like dusk, urban frowning

Comments 1 Comment
Categories 2001, alternative pop, alternative rock, dream pop, electronic, pop, rock, synth pop, trip hop

August 2001 – EP reviews – Spratleys Japs’ ‘Hazel’ (“halted by the tiniest thing”)

10 Aug

Spratleys Japs: ‘Hazel’

More songs brought out of the woods in a bloody enormous bucket, then? A bucket that’s small enough and big enough to hold the moon and all the stars in the night sky, in one drink of water…

‘Hazel’ is a single, of sorts. It’s a little taste of Spratleys Japs, the youngest bud on the twisty family tree of Cardiacs. If you believe some of the yarns being spun about them, then they’re a cunning trans-Atlantic bud, gene-splicing Cardiacs’ abrasive brand of psychedelia (in which punk squawk and London brick-ends collide with a particularly rowdy mediaeval minstrels gallery) with singing urchin Jo Spratley and a gaggle of American high-desert rockers called the Rev-Ups. If you believe some of the other rumours, the hybrid songs that resulted were recorded in a spooky little shack deep in damp, spidery New Forest darkness: head Cardiac Tim Smith going outlaw as he pulled them all together with an audience of rats and a tenuous umbilical of dodgy power lines. Hence my strange intro back there. Hence the babbling.

(Anyway, Cardiacs lie. It’s best to remember that.)

Regardless of rats or forests, Hazel sounds neither young nor American. It’s a stately, ghostly, mouldering-castle fanfare – tear-blown strings, brass, kettle-drums and harps. It wheels massively in the sky like a planetarium show, or booms out low and ponderous like a ritual march. Just as it seems to have settled into its dinosaur vastness, it’s halted by the tiniest thing… Jo’s child-size voice, squished and distorted to a ghost-broadcast tinniness. She sounds seasick, she sounds strained and flattened as wallpaper; and she’s keening out a desperate minimal anti-tune from some dusty corner, words smeared beyond recognition. Everything (bar a shimmering, failing wall of high Mellotron) just stops – dead. Then the Jo-ghost fades, nervous guitars stir the air, and the orchestra pours in again. It’s the same tune, but transmuted somehow from its original pomp into something overwhelmingly compassionate. Then it all happens again. Then it happens no more. What they’re getting at defies the workings of my brain; but it digs up my emotions, as if it’s forking up mulch.

Two other songs – Curfew and the sleepy, knotted Secret, both voiced scratchily by Tim – are closer to the usual Cardiacs bashes. They clamber, jagged and monkey-like, around the whole-tone scale. They’re like folk songs forgotten in the womb, carrying a scolding kind of order in their baroque keyboard structures and the little child-choir voices. Perhaps they deal with more complete stories, on a more human scale: one of the Gothic scenarios which bubbles up is about a woman desperately trying to muffle a pealing bell, using her own body to hold off her husband’s execution. But it’s elsewhere that Spratleys Japs are really active on the borders of instinct: where they’re at their most stimulating. No answers. Exposure. A little fear. Good medicine?

A jarring change of gear after the spooky grandeur of Hazel, Home is just upsetting. There’s not much to it – just some captured seconds of studio chatter during which Jo breaks down into a panic attack, whimpering and gulping like a scalded child. Tim and sundry other SpratJaps leave the tape rolling, heartlessly, as they prepare for the next song. It’s intrusive, it’s claustrophobic, it’s horribly naked. It could well be a prank. But along with Hazel, it does get to the back-ways of the heart. Sometimes Spratleys Japs do this with a soothe, sometimes with a jolt, but they do it as if they’re twitching a curtain aside to reveal something outside the normal angle of view: something beautiful, terrifying or wondrous, but unquestionably there. Something which changes you just by being seen.

Spratleys Japs: ‘Hazel’
All My Eye And Betty Martin Music, AME CD002 (502127203848)
CD-only EP
Released: 2001

Get it from:
Cardiacs official store or second-hand.

Spratleys Japs online:

Tags: creeping horror, Hampshire (England), head spins gently, Heidi Murphy, Jo Spratley, listening to women, London (England), Mark Donovan, men and women singing together, songs that sound like dusk, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, The Rev-Ups, Tim Smith, Tim Smith's Spratleys Rats (Spratleys Japs), Viv Sherrif, word salad

Comments 1 Comment
Categories 1999, 2001, EP reviews, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, reviews, rock

July 2001 – EP reviews – A Girl Called Eddy’s ‘Tears All Over Town’ (“torch songs set to low glow, fanned into sudden flares by a crack in control”)

31 Jul

A Girl Called Eddy: ‘Tears All Over Town’ EP

One of my small daydreams of alternate pop history involves Clare Torry. Having raised the hairs on the back of my neck with her ecstatic singing on Pink Floyd’s ‘Great Gig in the Sky’, she wouldn’t have slipped away anonymously. She’d’ve gone into the studio with songs for herself and produced at least one album with that voice, that understanding set free. When (on Francis Dunnery‘s ‘Close My Door‘) I first heard Eddy Moran’s arresting wordless vocal soaring skywards – twisting, keening, cracking and surging – I felt that same hair-raising chill. Flashed straight back to the same daydream.

I’m luckier in my dreaming sometimes. Although, for her debut EP as A Girl Called Eddy, she’s not repeating the magnificent Torry-esque splendour that turned my head the first time, Eddy has found other ways to chill me. Her songs could’ve waltzed out of the ’30s, or the ’60s: torch songs set to low glow, fanned into sudden flares by a crack in control. Cool heartbreak in her voice, she’s like a more ambiguous Tracey Thorn. Not someone who’ll glut her despair centre stage: she’s more like someone who you might catch staring at you piercingly from beside the bar, quiet, wise and intent.

‘Fading’ does its bit to draw back the curtains of sorrow. A fragment of Blue Nile lushness, slurs and fake orchestra, it revolves like a ferris wheel trailed by a puff of New Orleans trumpet. Cinematic, but less so than ‘Soundtrack of Your Life’; which – set on capturing the swinging ’60s side of Eddy’s imagination with its bossa lilt and breezy “bah-bah” chorus – doesn’t follow the torch course so closely. But beyond its cigarettes, its memories from film and old photos, its gushes of grand Mellotron and sitars, it has its centre of bereftness. “If ignorance is bliss, then seal it with a kiss, / but it was never supposed to end like this.”

‘Heartache’ – eased along with upright bass, a mascara-slur of brush drums and soft dips of weary piano – brings out the real phantoms of loss. “You’ve seen his face somewhere before. / Now you know for sure / that you can call him heartache – yeah, you can call him that,” Eddy breathes. “Yeah, you can call him heartache – you’ll never get it back.” Ragged memories and the force of erotic imagination are where these particular ghosts live, and Eddy’s well aware of it.

A ghost of another kind haunts ‘Girls Can Really Tear You Up Inside’ – the spectre of a vanished, never-known father. Like the bewildered girl in the song, Eddy simply pieces together scraps. Yet the result is a reverie carrying its own kind of romantic longing – “she’s heard you sing / and that your eyes are very, very, very blue…” In this web of connections and betrayal, there’s as much lurking passion, fear and anticipation as there is in any straight love song. Eddy reveals this, trace by trace, as she rides an elliptical path to its frightened heart, addressing the vanished man as she does so. “Why do you run, / why do you hide / from all you are?” Eddy muses, a dreamy voice of conscience and excitement amongst the traffic noise and the strums of an almost blues-y harpsichord. “You’re just a man, but she could tear you up inside.”

The greatest crack in the cool comes with her take on Stephen Bishop’s ‘The Same Old Tears’, recorded in her Greenwich Village kitchen in a flash of inspiration, with just an acoustic guitar and a divine echo. “Seeing you as an old photograph, it hurts too much to laugh,” Eddy sings, midway between croon, tears and laughter, before soaring off into a beautiful blue plate-cracking keen – “But I’m all right, I’m all right…”

Just for a flash, you see to the knot of the problem, and need know no more. Wanting more is different, of course. Eddy knows this – and, listening to this EP, so do I, now.

A Girl Called Eddy: ‘Tears All Over Town’
Le Grand Magistery, HRH-021 (6 16656 00212 3)
CD-only EP
Released: 31st July 2001
Get it from: (2020 update) Le Grand Magistery; or stream via Deezer, Apple Music or Spotify. Different versions of Heartache and Girls Can Really Tear You Up Inside appear on the eponymous debut album by A Girl Called Eddy.
A Girl Called Eddy online:
Homepage, Facebook, Myspace, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Last.fm, Apple Music, YouTube, Deezer, Spotify, Tidal, Instagram, Amazon Music

Tags: A Girl Called Eddy (Eddy Moran), Francis Dunnery, listening to women, Stephen Bishop, women of heart and mind

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, acoustic pop, blues, bossa nova, cool jazz, cover versions, EP reviews, jazz, jazz-pop, Latin dance, pop, reviews, singer-songwriter, soul pop, swing

July 2001 – album reviews – William Maxwell’s ‘Cardinal Points’ (“a delicacy and poise John Williams would admire”)

26 Jul

William Maxwell: ‘Cardinal Points’

Of course, no American musicians ever bear grudges about the demand for fake country bands to fill America’s bars. Nor about the rules of economics and averages, which mean that most professional rock or jazz musicians have to spend a significant part of their career biting their lips while propelling a Formica hoe-down tune towards a beer-splattered dance floor.

William Maxwell’s composition, Bass-ically Country, has nothing to do with this. Nope. It must be a coincidence: the way he keeps pulling his multi-tracked bass guitar out from the cage of those diddly riffs and hilariously plodding walking-blues lines and firing it up into more interesting concepts (a snappy little Stanley Clarke line; a crashing feedback-drenched heavy-metal solo; a dawnlit ambient moment) only to have it yanked back into line and back into the walk.

For about four tongue-in-cheek minutes, you’re getting a portrait of Dreamy Bassist with Ideas locked in combat with Insensitive Band, losing most of the battles but not giving up on the war. Maxwell (generally found playing bass for pan-European/Celtic proggies Tempest) has obviously been there and done that, and is able to laugh at it. Inevitably, Bass-ically Country brings back memories of the late-’80s bass showman Stuart Hamm and his rollicking banjo-slap pisstakes. Some of the aforementioned Dreamy Bassist’s little lines are quite silly, after all, though the naiveté is charming.

In reality, Maxwell’s a much more thoughtful musician than this jokey sketch of bassline frustration suggests. As for dreaming… Well, while the sonic ambitions of his ‘Cardinal Points’ album are sometimes held back by budget (and by too much reliance on predictable synth presets), they’re still very much audible. Deploying his armoury of four-, five-, six- and eight-stringed basses (and backing himself up with some cosy keyboards and percussion), William sets out to explore a typically Western American breadth of music. Melodic electric jazz, New Age, funk-rock, Celtic and light prog influences all gel together. Even the dreaded country music is welcomed into the stew.

Though Maxwell shares Hamm’s taste for transposing classical music onto electric bass, he has a far greater understanding of his source material. His version of Scarlatti’s Sonata In D – baroque harpsichord music arranged for a choir of multi-tracked basses – is particularly impressive. It demonstrates a real understanding of both Scarlatti’s ecstatic mathematics and of that fussy enthusiasm that’s part of the harpsichord sound; while cunningly adding a smidgen of American swing (straight out of Chet Atkins’ Classical Gas). The gently blossoming study of Sweet Dreams (drawing on his early classical guitar training) sees Maxwell pluck a six-string bass with a delicacy and poise John Williams would admire.

Still, technique is a secondary matter on ‘Cardinal Points’. Despite Maxwell’s dexterity, he isn’t offering us a player’s album. He’s as happy when playing a child’s melody or chord wash on synth as he is executing twiddly turnarounds on bass. His true interest is in composition and arranging – his basses are dragooned into illustrating his musical ideas, not flying along on top of them. Rather than pursuing The Great Solo, he spends his time on constructing latticeworks of harmonic chimes, or on an agreeable rumble of conversing fretless and fretted instruments.

The Gold Rush is one of the only moments where Maxwell gives in to any boy-racer super-soloist desires. Fortunately, he does this with jollity instead of arrogance; building himself a piece of music full of skipping strums and curvy chromed planes of distorted EBow sustain, which bounces like an off-road vehicle. Rich Bradley injects a shot of serious jazz, providing a burst of antsy soprano sax (Dave Liebman style) to explode over Maxwell’s heavy popcorn slap. More frequently, ‘Cardinal Points’ sits happily in that comfortably idealised pastoral-prog idiom inspired by bands like Happy The Man or Montreux. Although Carol From An Irish Cabin (its watercolour synths dampening a politely romantic fretless bass) is a step too far towards Windham Hill wallpaper, both The Big Bird and Early Morning Rising follow the path more fruitfully; working in folk melodies and pinches of fuzzy overdriven jazz-fusion to their relaxed, innocent arrangements.

It’s sweet, but not as interesting as the experiments in sparseness, space and counterpoint elsewhere. On Not Tonight I Have A Headache, delicate layers of bass harmonics, thumb pianos and gongs inter-balance each other in a chime of mechanisms; while more basses brew up a blurred but rather beautiful dialogue of growls and stoned-cat noises to rise up behind it. Every Time takes the same kind of chiming bell effects and applies it to a gentrified jazz ballad (with an elastically expressive fretless melody to the fore).

Best of all, there’s the stately (and ever-so-slightly-psychedelic) jazz-rock march of Cardinal Points itself, demonstrating just how much Maxwell prioritizes composing and realizing music over spotlight hogging. Few bass soloists would share their best piece with another top-drawer bassist, let alone two (Harmony Grisman’s sidekick Tami Pallington and the increasingly legendary Michael Manring). Even fewer would make the piece dependent on the subtle collective interaction of all three musicians, rather than on lick-trading.

But that’s exactly what happens here. Pallington builds a silvery canopy of deftly clanging harmonics over Maxwell’s rich twilight orchestration, clarinet-style EBow lines and trick-stepping rhythm. Manring’s own response to Maxwell’s musical hospitality is to turn out one of his finest ever signature melodies – a musing solo slithering luxuriously around the fretboard like a stretching cat in a sunbeam, extending notes into passionate vapour trails via his own EBow. A generous response, it’s one of the high points of a generous album.

William Maxwell: ‘Cardinal Points’
Maxtrix (no catalogue number or barcode)
CD-R only album
Released: 2001

Buy it from:
Best obtained second-hand, or enquire via William Maxwell homepage.

William Maxwell online:

Tags: bass guitar music, Michael Manring, multi-instrumentalists, Rich Bradley, Tami Pallington, William Maxwell

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2001, album reviews, classical fusion, instrumental music, jazz fusion, reviews

April 2001 – EP reviews – Pushuan’s ‘Va Va Voom!’ (“gleaming teeth, waggling eyebrows and go-faster stripes”)

30 Jun

The carefree voice sails back: “Too fast to live, but too young to die. / Undertaking, in overdrive.”

Pushuan used to be the model-gorgeous frontman for glam-punks Vago, but apparently all that time he wanted to be a glamorous hybrid of James Hunt and Steve Harley; all gleaming teeth, waggling eyebrows and go-faster stripes. If not, the title track on his debut solo EP is one of the most enjoyable piss-takes I’ve heard in a long time – a perky paean to motoring excess that ought to be on perpetual repeat on Jeremy Clarkson’s Discman.

With the talents of fellow Vago-ist (and onetime Cay member) Ed Sonsino bolstering the music, ‘Va Va Voom!’ has all the bonkers retro thrill of a fat-motored dragster rally: firing pistons every which-way as it wobbles along, and pushing every cheap disco-rocker button in sight with its cheapo drum machine and raunchy guitar. Pushuan adds to the fun by singing half of it like a grease-monkey and the other half in ludicrous, free-associating posh-Biggles rapping – “hot pant, ball-bearing, gasoline, strip-tease, / party here, party there, posh glad rags; / Martini, Pina Baeur, suntan, October flower, / pedal to the metal on booze and fags…” It’s got the same “fuck you, we’re rich” playboy attitude as champagne and charlie served off a hot engine cowling. If it wasn’t so roaringly camp and you weren’t laughing so hard, you’d be firing grenades at it.

Pushuan is, in fact, ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ on wheels and guitars. As much in love with wriggling his way into the in-crowd as he is with reducing the same scene through parody. The wacky agri-punk blast of ‘Cow’ aside (a goodbye kiss to Vago), this well-crammed EP is steeped in gossip-hungry pop and sardonic whispers. Beyond its hilarious analogue-disco gurgle, ‘The Boy with the Best Disco Tits in Town’ (“looking good, and he knows he’s it… / He puts the F.U. back into fun,”) paints a gleeful picture of the heartlessness of tastemakers. “He’s rolling with the homies and he’s got you in sight, / and you’ve got to be fit to keep pace. / But you’ll get nowhere near the sybarites, try as you might, / if he doesn’t like the look of your face.”

In his more rocking guitar-heavy moments, Pushuan picks at the disaffections and discontentments that fester further from the centre. ‘Clothed Coition’ sarcastically breaks down the horrible jaded slither from sex-thrill to sex-chill. “When a blue eye no longer suffices, / when all that comes to mind are a list of vices, / is it something we can use to slide? / Or is your saddle so high you won’t let me ride?” In particular, Pushuan’s advice for the dumped in ‘Specialise’ is fashionista culture par excellence: a “go, girlfriend” moment where the secret weapon turns out to be shoes to kill for. “You want to make him bleat? The answer’s at your feet… / So you lost your stud, went to your best bud, want to drink her blood… / There’s no need to blush: yeah, you’re looking lush. / You can rely upon what you’re standing on… / Taunting like a tart, make a brand new start. / Baby, must be art – when you specialise.”

Maximum bitchy glam magic.

Pushuan: ‘Va Va Voom!’
Bluefire Records, BLU18 (no barcode number)
CD-only EP
Released: April 2001
Get it from: (2022 update) Best obtained second-hand. No download re-release to date.

Pushuan online:
Homepage

Tags: Ed Sonsino, Pushuan, Vago

Comments 1 Comment
Categories 2001, dance music, dance pop, disco, EP reviews, glam pop, pop, reviews, synth pop

June 2001 – album reviews – Marty Walker’s ‘Dancing on Water’ (“a leading light in bass clarinet”)

10 Jun

Marty Walker: ‘Dancing On Water’

Blowing thick darkness, cheery reed-chatter and diva moans with equal facility, Marty Walker has earned himself a New Music name as a leading light in bass clarinet. Over eighty pieces by diverse composers have been written specifically for his particular gifts, and he’s effectively the in-house reedsman for many of the “California school” cadre of composers. For ‘Dancing On Water’ – his first release under his own name on Cold Blue Music – the California school returns the favours. Works from five of its members – the blissful voice-music of Daniel Lentz, the plotted-out ellipses of Michael Byron, Jim Fox’s expansive impressionism, Michael Jon Fink’s lonely, romantic grace-of-few-words and Peter Garland’s percussion-slanted Native American leanings – all juxtapose in different ways with different aspects of Marty’s interpretative approach.

On several of these pieces, Marty gets to stow away his bass clarinet (along with all of its invites to the New Music party) and bring his B-flat clarinet out from under its cousin’s shadow. The close-up duets of Peter Garland’s two-part Dancing On Water sets Walker down next to William Winant and David Johnson’s four-handed marimba. The music neatly folds Mexican folk melodies into minimalist discipline: the marimba clinks with sharp solemnity, both childlike and gamelan-esque. It’s a wily dance of toys, slicing the simple cadences up with unpredictable yet precise spaces. While the clarinet traces similar curves up through the arpeggios, Marty invests it with warmth plus infinitesmal bluesy slides and fades from small-group jazz: a wink in the midst of discipline. Moonlight is the meditation afterwards – a tremolo marimba twinkling like water underneath a much sleepier, dreamier clarinet, Marty coaxing utter expressiveness out of Garland’s clipped material.

On Daniel Lentz’s efflorescent Song(s) Of The Sirens, Marty’s ten overdubbed clarinets are matched by ten overdubbed pianos (played by Bryan Pezzone, another Cold Blue loyalist). But rather than being slaved to a rigid percussive regimentation, all twenty instruments are worked into Lentz’s familiar fascination with overlaid, overlapping vocal fragments. A sensuous undulation of slightly disfocussed pitches are linked by Pezzone’s summery, waterfalling spirals of virtuoso piano; a squadron of tiny icicles falling on the ear.

Amy Knoles’ sighing, narcotised voice (doppelgangered and folded into blurry harmonies and elisions, stacked like sated bodies) provides the siren’s role. This reaches us as a meandering stream of single spoken words – “lips”, “let”, “love”, “air”, “sweet”; “to”, “our”, “listen”, “touch”, “voices”, “you” – all of which are lifted and displaced from their sentences, suggesting an erotic, subliminal hypnosis. As digital manipulation slowly brings the intent into focus, full sentences and melodies coalesce from the haze. Marty’s role here, though, is simply as one (or ten) of the ensemble dreamers, voicing Lenz’s drowsy vision via the clarinet’s sleepy yawning tones. By the time of the stirring, ecstatic finale of piano rolls rumbling out of the trance, he’s not even there anymore.

In the end, it remains the bass clarinet that provides the best bridge between Marty Walker and the composers who seek him out. It’s on that instrument that his expressiveness achieves its most fascinating levels. Certainly it’s fascinated Michael Byron, whose composition Elegant Detours has the most obsessive interest in Marty’s abilities. Byron, however, seems more interested in Marty Walker as a performance mechanism rather than as an emoter. Trapped inside an implied run up a three-octave whole-tone scale, Elegant Detours scurries in super-compressed bursts to explore the possible patterns available. A workout of bass clarinet extremes (from tiny puffs of air to sweeps across its whole range) it ends in lung-bustingly sustained wails knifing the attention to the wall, almost physically painful to listen to. Marty rises superbly to the technical challenge, but it’s frantically clinical. The music seems to feast on itself; like competitive weightlifting, or like laying bets on the frantic mice attempting to escape from a lab maze.

Using far fewer games of structure, Jim Fox demonstrates that he understands the empathy in Marty’s playing. Fox usually works with quiet, beautifully ominous nightscapes and slow-creeping tonalities, and his piece – Among Simple Shadows – is no exception. Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith blows a transparent and hushed last-post of a tune, which Marty shadows like the last hum resonating from the throat of a gospel bass. Bryan Pezzone’s piano flaps weightlessly in the wind, and casts anxious repeating clots of melody after the mingled brass and woodwind as they move through a dark-blue spectrum of emotions from quiet grief to undefinable hope.

Of all the composers, Rick Cox might have the most fellow feeling for Marty Walker. After all, throughout On Tuesday that’s his own contra-alto clarinet playing in counterpoint to Marty’s bass model. This chokingly slow four-movement duet has more than a tinge of swamp-blues to it – like the last notes restlessly clinging onto the grass tussocks after the funeral procession is long gone and the coffin rests in its mausoleum, floating above the bayou. With both instruments burring and smearing towards the bottom of their ranges, there’s a sense of exhaustion. As with much to do with the blues, there’s also a feeling of unfinished business.

David Johnson (on vibraphone this time) returns to help Marty tackle Michael Jon Fink’s micro-concerto As Is Thought/Aurora. This time, they make a trio with orchestral harpist Susan Allen. A tense set of precise unison arpeggios, venturing warily out into space, are connected and soothed by Marty, whose jazz-inflected way with the shaping of his bridging phrases counters the music-box abruptness of the other instruments. As the piece’s initial trepidation melts, like the dissolution of fear, Allen’s harp comes more to the fore. Each instrument softens, progressively handing the others a tiny cadence of notes to repeat – a canon which clambers on like hands swapping grip-space on a rope, continuing to move outwards.

Overall, ‘Dancing On Water’ reaffirms Marty Walker’s excellence as an interpretative musician, providing a set of multiple masques – or masks – for him to excel in. Still, I’m left uncomfortably whetted and slightly unsatisfied. His generous illumination of the music of others draws me into hankering after other aspects of his musicality – the creator, the improviser; the Marty Walker who’s drawn on his own music to provide that illumination. Hints of this are dotted all over ‘Dancing On Water’ in every cunningly bent note, in every hint of intelligence drawn from outside – even in the times when he steps back into the ensemble, upstaged on his own record.

There’s power in a name. Perhaps Marty Walker’s name, and his musical identity, has become too powerful to let him play second fiddle on his recordings. ‘Dancing On Water’ certainly showcases his talents, but in comparison to other Cold Blue albums – each firmly stamped with a composer’s identity – it feels like a picture of a man grown just a bit too big to comfortably wear other people’s handed-over suits in his own house.

Marty Walker: ‘Dancing On Water’
Cold Blue Music, CB0005 (800413000525)
CD-only album
Released: 5th June 2001

Buy it from:
Cold Blue Music

Marty Walker online:

Share this:
Email
Print
Tweet
Share on Tumblr
Reddit
Like Loading...

Tags: bass clarinet music, California (USA), California school, clarinet music, Daniel Lentz, David Johnson, drift and float, gemlike sparkle, Jim Fox, Los Angeles (USA), Marty Walker, Michael Byron, Peter Garland, William Winant

Comments Leave a Comment

Categories 2001, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, album reviews, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, experimental music, instrumental music, New Music, reviews

REVIEW – Holy Roman Empire: ‘Dante’s Inferno’ single, 2001 (“a glorious Moulin Rouge gesture”)
27 Apr

Holy Roman Empire: ‘Dante’s Inferno’

“Well, you got so down you went to town and bought a brand-new top. / They can take your will to live but not your will to shop. / Try to eat more ‘cos you’re hungry, and less because you’re lonely, / and don’t let that feeling fade away…”

Oxford pop pixies Holy Roman Empire seem cheerful to sell themselves as being crap. Their press-kit is full of reviews slating their appalling clothes, their mimed performances, their (allegedly) pitiful singing and their clunky tape recorders hidden inexpertly under keyboard stands. Yet they don’t half shoot themselves in the foot by coming up with such good songs.

Bloody hell – if this had shown up in 1989 it would have swept all before it. Not every song blends – so successfully – lyrics like a playful junior Morrissey with mock-pomp Carter USM Casio orchestrations and rounds it off with the cruising freeway feel of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. Back then this would have been a small Holy Grail for student radio, ghosting through every university bar across the land. Here and now it can only settle for being classic, timeless pop – whatever the clothing.

In case I’ve not made my point yet – Dante’s Inferno is marvellous. It’s one of those rare songs which fey critics, hung-up on the sublime disposability of pop, always whiffle on about. Well aware of the ludicrousness that lies at the heart of obsessive passion – and of the dramatic pretensions of pop music – it still goes at it full-tilt because it knows that that’s all that matters. (As a bonus, I can still believe in the song even as I reel off this kind of posturing shite… that’s high camp for you.)

Holy Roman Empire ‘s Ste Fleming and his two foils sigh as milkily as Prefab Sprout and deftly nail the paradox of all-consuming unrequited love. “You go to the doctor, and the doctor feeds you pills. / You know you need them, but you need the pain they kill. / All because you lost somebody, but never lost the feeling, / and daren’t let that feeling fade away.” Inevitably the other two songs are anticlimactic after this glorious Moulin Rouge gesture. After all, how do you follow up a song which has a ringmaster on the chorus?

Still, Holy Roman Empire can quick-march a long way on what they’ve got. What they’ve got happens to be a batch of cheesy keyboard puffs, an upbeat chirp of melody, a vocal style best compared to a pomp version of Rod, Jane & Freddy, and some of the sharpest lyrics this side of Paddy McAloon’s teenage-fluff drawer. I Bleed Petrol (punctuated by cute car-crash sound effects) could almost be a children’s singalong. Then again, there are lines like “city kids with sicknesses, and flowers placed by roads, / melting polar icecaps and the flooded southern coasts”, suggesting that the trio have made a noose out of a skipping rope and are trotting out in search of a symbolic motorist to lynch.

No Tomorrow is a bizarrely happy-sounding love song about… yes… everything turning out shit in the end. It’s a fiddling-about with goodbye ribbons as the city burns. “I was sort of wishing – yeah, I was kind of hoping, / as the ground got closer, that my parachute would open (but no…) / ‘You have to be strong now: you have to let me go,’ / so it’s off with my head and it’s on with the show.”

You have to reckon that as long as that tinselly backcloth is still there, Ste Fleming will stay happy. Supercheese wins out, then – and mighty tasty it is too.

Holy Roman Empire: ‘Dante’s Inferno’
Bluefire Records, BLU017
CD single
Released: 2001

Get it from:
Best obtained second-hand.

Artist online:

Share this:
Email
Print
Tweet
Share on Tumblr
Reddit
Like Loading...

Tags: bedsit melodrama, cheap drum machines, Emma Empire, Emma Killick, Emma Yendel, Holy Roman Empire, Le Emu Tavern, Martin Ungoed Jones, men and women singing together, Oxford (England), perky chirrup, Ste Fleming

Comments 1 Comment

Categories 2001, alternative pop, pop, reviews, single & track reviews, synth pop

April 2001 – EP reviews – The Scaramanga Six’s ‘Are You One of the Family?’ (“shrouded in threatening, paranoid twilight or caught in the jaws of mean streets”)
27 Apr

The Scaramanga Six: ‘Are You One of the Family?’
Sidle into the world of The Scaramanga Six carefully. When it’s not simmering in darkness or in the threat of chucking-out time aggro, it’s shrouded in threatening, paranoid twilight or caught in the jaws of mean streets. There’s a jagged, brutally slashing organ; guitars that bludgeon and swipe; heavy beat-downs of choruses; and voices that crack and fray nastily with the surge of the music. This is hard-centred pop music, made by five tough-looking guys in suit-and-ties and a woman who looks like the gang boss’ daughter, taking her own team out to batter the husbands of her schoolday rivals.

Or maybe it’s in the mind. Though the Scaramangas seem steeped in a very English, Godfathers-style violence of petty brawls, drink-fuelled action (“give me some courage, and make it Dutch”) and frustration penned-up in hometown limits, they aren’t numbed by it. Instead, they use it as the spur for a fierce, dramatic rock with the fierce intensity of Pixies, Cardiacs or – most precisely – Six By Seven. There’s an explosive force to Paul and Steve Morricone’s band that equals that of Nottingham’s hard poets of anti-glamour. And if they’re not as sophisticated as Pulp (another ready comparison) they’ve got bigger claws.

The jerking brutality of Are You One of the Family, in which Paul’s grim vocal balances on shards of gasping organ, sets up this EP’s general atmosphere of dirty surrealism. It’s a nightmare of social claustrophobia in which “everything is family – / the cars that pass, the crazy gas that’s surrounding me” and where “everything you see and do / comes back to someone who you are related to.” A place in which there’s no escape from surveillance: “a man will stop and ask my name / I needn’t answer – our names are the same. / I have cousins in the trees; / and, in the bushes, uncles watching over me.”

Ladies and Gentlemen is also family business – ostensibly, it’s a sentimental song, but Paul sings it with a battleship-grey clang which suggests that someone at the party will be going home in a box. “We are gathered here today, in a room sitting comfortably. / Let me shake your hands. / You want to be entertained, you want to be out for fun / and there is someone amongst us here / who I can never forget.” Beyond the funereal organ and the leaden-weight crash of guitars, nothing actually happens… but the Yorkshire Mafiosi atmosphere soaks the air.

Relief from this tension is briefly found in the pop-eyed psychobilly of Grasp the Candle, in which Steve Morricone is let off the leash to trade screams with guitarist Julia Arnez, going for the debaser vote in a shambles of scuzzy drums, Birthday Party crashes and throbbing veins. “I’ve been sharing my bed with the drones from the hive, / I think I’d rather be buried alive… I hear you moaning and groaning – / my love is ripe for the dethroning.”

For Disenchanted Melody, the tension is back – although this time it’s in the even-more implicit shape of a hushed, mantric Slint-meets-Velvets thrum; a hauntingly sour psychedelic vocal drone, filled with foreboding. A guitar sets up a ceaseless metallic shiver behind the murmuring, harshly lovely harmonies and the gathering darkness of the words. “Night collapses suddenly… disenchanted melody / gently washes over me – / the sound is there, / the sound of air…” Even before the final burst of clanging guitar racket and hellish chorale, the air’s been sucked away around the song, whipped off down the streets where the family prowls.

This is a dark and powerful band, who hang around like a threatening cloud even after the music stops.

The Scaramanga Six: ‘Are You One of the Family?’
Wrath Records, WRATHCD01 (barcode unavailable)
CD-only EP
Released: April 2001
Get it from: (2020 update) buy CD from The Scaramanga Six Shop; download from Google Play; stream via Deezer, Apple Music or Spotify
The Scaramanga Six online:

Share this:
Email
Print
Tweet
Share on Tumblr
Reddit
Like Loading...

Tags: Huddersfield (England), The Scaramanga Six

Comments Leave a Comment

Categories 2001, alternative rock, EP reviews, garage rock, hard rock, reviews, rock

March 2001 – album reviews – Jim Fox’s ‘Last Things’ (“like floodwater in the night”)
19 Mar

Jim Fox: ‘Last Things’

Renewing his Cold Blue Music label for the millennium, Californian composer Jim Fox has set himself up as its figurehead, although not in a triumphal manner. Pomp and flamboyance wouldn’t sit well with Cold Blue’s explorations in New Music, and this first new release out of the Cold Blue bag doesn’t need to grab attention, anyway. The two Fox compositions on this album (slow-moving, implicatory, atmospheric and deliciously disturbing) surround you instead, like floodwater in the night.

With distractedly moving electronic traces making up the bulk of the music, ‘The Copy of the Drawing’ is rooted in chopped, diced and rearranged texts from letters sent to Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1955 while Los Angeles swelled from backwater to metropolis. These fragments are recited by Janyce Collins in an ice-queen whisper. Her cold lips brush your ear with a beautifully cool eroticism, its detachment only increasing its power. Often phrases are followed by glassy, ratcheting harmonic sound: as if a telescope, smoothly rotating on gimbals, is trying to take a fix on the target the words imply.

Slithering passes of moth-soft electronics slide around the words as if they’re unimportant, part of the ambient backchat in any place of science. Occasionally almost-vocal smudges of transparent noise ring up in (and fall away from) the foreground: although in some respects there is no foreground, just a slow sub-zero swirl of ambient hints, briefly smeared, like time-exposure photographs. Scrapes and subliminal swarms, jump-starting drifting thoughts in the narration; quick-drowning sounds like disturbances in ice-water or the imprints of decaying viola counterpoint and dying Gregorian chant.

Allegedly, ‘The Copy of the Drawing’ is non-dramatic. But Fox’s placement of these words, the stop/start fragments and interrupted clauses (“a jumbled mess – enough to give you an idea”) suggest otherwise. The phenomena of observed and notated science are often invoked with the reverence with which scientists replace religious awe, but sometimes as a kind of anchor (“light is always the same – water is H2O…”) against the misgivings whispered in brief passes elsewhere. “Self-deficient – diffused self – applied phenomena – name – danger lies in the abstract…” Before long we’ve heard statements of meticulous preparations (“I have put it in three different envelopes – airproof, fireproof, waterproof”) and chilly accounts of emotional hallucinations. “I still heard talking – I have heard babies crying and screaming – like in a photo – babies can hear me writing this – the pictures can talk to me – they’re not lonely – and it won’t stop…”

Explicit disturbance is rare, and Collins’ voice remains uniformly glacial whatever the content of her script. Nonetheless, anxiety and revelation are blended throughout, with the prismatic narrative musing on thoughts such as “No-one may ever have the same knowledge – everything running up and in and out.” Certainly there’s disintegration here – a loss of assurance, causality dissolving into “a possibility – there was such a thing – invisibility… before that – all history – it doesn’t seem possible… / it’s closer if you draw a line – on that line – all depends.” At one point, Collins recites a list which explicitly fails to reduce events, phenomena and states of existence to anything tidy. “Stuff – factors – motion – the perpendicularity – the process – the parts of things – the female principles of nature – etcetera – quite incomprehensible due to its invisibility – something that is true – close by – far…”

Covertly, Fox seems to be attempting to reconcile the cosmological with the personal. Collins’ narration of astronomers’ notes seem to take on revealingly intimate suggestions (“thousands of small pushes a second – inertia is very great”) and equates the paths of cosmic debris with those of people (“one of the incoming pieces of matter – there may be more – they may travel together…”) Maybe it’s a reflection of the gravity of cities like Los Angeles – pulling in immigrants, the lost and wandering, accreting mass as it does so. Maybe it’s an idea about scientists allowing the unsettling parallels of poetry and metaphor to sneak into their notebooks and resound in those working lives which they’ve obediently sealed away from personal concerns. This is observatory music, for certain. But the question of exactly what is being observed here is an open question. It’s one which ultimately leaves you without an answer; although perhaps it does leave you with a cold, indifferently sensuous kiss.

With ‘Last Things’ itself, the sky is lowering. An ominous drop, as Fox conjures up not so much a drone of bass synth as a faraway envelope of it (massed over our heads like apocalyptic cloud) and then rings us round with a distant thunderous fence of bass-register piano, rumbling tectonically and eerily, like the harbinger of the great Californian earthquake. Trapped between stooping sky and unquiet ground, we bear witness to a passionate, wordless pieta in which the dominant instrumental voice (Marty Walker‘s brilliantly tortuous bass clarinet) sounds famished, and as oppressed as we are by the press of sound. Walker’s control is remarkable – he travels between delicate, near-inaudible quivers of notes; great wide splits of sound that crack with emotion; and magnificent mournful coyote calls, summoning up visions of friendless desert vistas.

Relief, of a sort, comes from Chas Smith‘s pedal steel guitar. Almost choral in its breadth, it’s the one truly calming element in Fox’s musical painting. It’s a Pacific palliative which voices itself as distant balm to Walker’s painful questioning, or as a glimmer of light on the crack of the horizon. At around the eight-and-a-half minute mark, sounds like distant foghorns appear in the murk to add their own skein of warning and disquiet. More ethereal, less hungry, but hardly less of a disturbing portent are the rubbing glass rods on Rick Cox‘s treated guitar, hanging dying trails of luminescence in the middle distance.

When ‘Last Things’ fades out, the hope of things resolved has given way to a kind of acceptance. We’ve come to terms with the fearsome displacement and anxiety in Fox’s California soundscapes to such a degree that we’ve probably failed to notice that he’s finally resolved the music with a chordal and dynamic shift so subtle as to almost escape notice – like life settling itself in, a warm beast, around the jags, harshnesses and daily warnings of a threatening environment.

Jim Fox: ‘Last Things’
Cold Blue Music, CB0001 (800413000129)
CD/download album
Released: 19th March 2001

Buy it from:
Cold Blue Music (CD) – various downloads available from Amazon and similar.

Jim Fox online:

Share this:
Email
Print
Tweet
Share on Tumblr
Reddit
Like Loading...

Tags: bass clarinet music, California (USA), Chas Smith, Cold Blue Music, creeping horror, drift and float, intimations of ancientness, Janyce Collins, Jim Fox, Los Angeles (USA), Marty Walker, pedal steel guitar music, prepared guitar music, Rick Cox, songs that sound like dusk

Comments Leave a Comment

Categories 2001, 20th century classical music, album reviews, chamber music, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, electronic, experimental music, instrumental music, New Music, reviews, spoken word, West Coast classical music

February 2001 – album reviews – centrozoon’s ‘Sun Lounge Debris’ (“miscellaneous objects picked up on a bright afternoon”)
21 Feb

centrozoon: ‘Sun Lounge Debris’

Interbreeding the subliminal and the upfront, German ambient duo centrozoon first showed up in 2000 with the self-camouflaging, superbly effective ‘Blast‘. Icy and transformative (an album of elusive, subtle yet uncompromising music for a dissolving world), it was a deliberate hollow grail; an eerily crafted emptiness masking or bypassing outright emotion. The occasional fragmentary synth-pop hiccup broke this rule and humanised the duo (like a brief giggle or fart in the meditation), but ‘Blast’ was mostly all hints and invisible statements – a ghost-impression of grandiosity, a sumptuous erasing.

The six tracks of the follow-up, ‘Sun Lounge Debris’ (put out on the quick-release art-rock label Burning Shed rather than, like ‘Blast’, on the more impassively arty DiN) turn out to be the product of a single day’s recording. With ambient groups being what they are, and the rapidly diminishing returns of minimal textures, it’d be fair to expect a series of belated out-takes. Markus Reuter and Bernhard Wöstheinrich could have exposed themselves as blanded-out or hopelessly jumbled: at best re-treading the magnificent, displaced atmospherics of ‘Blast’. Fortunately, centrozoon’s taste and inspiration are very much intact, and they’ve added some healthy lust and humour to the mix.

Admittedly, ‘Sun Lounge Debris’ doesn’t have the quiet and eerie impact of ‘Blast’. The disordered-lifestyle title makes that implicit, whether the centrozooners are suggesting a J.G. Ballard dystopia or simply admitting that they, too, sometimes like to lie around in a mess of crisps, magazines and tanning lotion. The music – disparate and different in its swatch of moods – also indicates that centrozoon aren’t prepared to plough that same impeccable furrow as they did on their debut. In certain respects, ‘Sun Lounge Debris’ resembles a collection of miscellaneous objects picked up on a bright afternoon. However, any randomness is rapidly offset by the connective, collective intelligence which centrozoon exhibit, and by their clear eagerness to develop from their previous wintry and self-absenting perfection and move towards questions and delicate musical quirks.

‘Sun Lounge Debris’ pieces come, roughly speaking, in pairs. Two of the tracks, ‘Tales of Children in Trees’ and ‘Harvest Girls’, reveal depths (or, more accurately, widths) to centrozoon which have previously gone unnoticed. More on those later. The two remaining pairs take inspiration from the texture-based constructions of ‘Blast’ but move the ideas elsewhere.

From the throwaway ironic/pedantic titles, one of these ambient pairs suggests game-playing at work; toying with expectations. ‘This One Will Please You’ could’ve been a ‘Blast’ outtake, were it not for its warmth – it’s a cosmic Mistral, entirely composed of atmosphere, thoroughly sunny and swimmy. The second – the displeaser – is darker, but where ‘Blast’ suggested urban dissolution (chilliness, shapes of buildings yielding to vapour) ‘This One Won’t Please You’ implies some more rural outlines. More forbidding than its brother, it possesses a similar softness: perhaps a musical impression of the darkness hollowed out beneath the forest roof. The sinister side is provided in a sense of waiting for something unknown, something as yet unshaped in the mind’s eye.

Less cohesive – but bolder – than the ‘Please’ tracks, another pair of centrozoon experiments jolts the project into more radical dynamics. ‘In Sable Orbit’ is the most immediately striking of the two. As mushroom clouds of pipe-organ sounds are put through the MIDI wringer, pitches are set afloat in choppy spasms so that they billow in a vast and giddy skyward swell: a scrap of Messaien nightmare trapped in a Zeppelin. ‘Several Chilled Wives’ follows the same approach with a little less alarm. Beyond its lazy, inexorable and monstrous lurches a circular harmony reveals itself, like the boundary of a horizon.

In almost all of these it’s unclear as to which noises are coming off Markus’ heavily processed and looped Warr Guitar and which emanate from the voice-banks of Bernhard ‘s synthesizers. In spite of their very different musical motivations – Bernhard spontaneous and iconoclastic, Markus scholarly and studied – both centrozooners are able to morph together without an evident join, as they did for much of the frosted blend of ‘Blast’. ‘Harvest Girls’ – one of the two serious centrozoon digressions on the album, and the one that gives ‘Sun Lounge Debris’ its explosive, bliss-struck opening – is very different, and shows us what happens when centrozoon let themselves fall open into those two halves.

It’s revealing. While Bernhard blots an immense, swirling, stained-glass flange noise from his keyboard onto the sky, Markus lets rip with a richly melodic overdriven buzz of solo – an ecstatic Robert Fripp whoop. This is the polar opposite to his usual textural playing, with its concealing nature – this is a lusty, ascending and liberated firework spray of rock tensions, as healthy and randy as a summer party. The nasal-toned scurries and wails are closer to the excitement of Vaughan Williams’ ‘Lark Ascending’ or to Joe Satriani’s triumphal histrionics then they are to more expected influences like Fripp or of Trey Gunn, with their devotional dissonance. The joy is unfeigned, but unashamedly synthetic in its plastic textures: you can hear centrozoon revelling in the fact. In response to Markus’ blaze of guileless prog-rock romanticism, Bernhard sends a cheesy synth-pad of concerto strings rebounding off the clouds. Apparently intent on mutilating any of the dodgy presets which he can entice out of his gear, he also offers up an undulating bass synth boom plus a taffy-stretched swathe of electronica which sounds like an evaporating glass harmonica.

‘Harvest Girls’ could be centrozoon trying on the bristly mantle of rock piggery and loving it; but ‘Tales of Children in Trees’ propels them forward into the world of dance. Those smooth swirls of ambience and the synth chuckles could have come from anywhere else in their ambient past and present, but they’re all tossed on a hustle of jazz breakbeats: a thinking pummel, assured and dominant. As an album closer, it suggests that centrozoon are already off their loungers and in fervid motion. If you came by to relax and slob out, you’re already too late. Next chapter engaging…

centrozoon: ‘Sun Lounge Debris’
Iapetus Records/Burning Shed (no catalogue number or barcode)
CD-R/download album
Released: 21st February 2001

Preceded by: ‘Blast‘.

Followed by: ‘The Divine Beast’.

Buy it from:
Free download from Iapetus Records or Bandcamp. Originally released by Burning Shed as a CD-R album.

centrozoon online:

Share this:
Email
Print
Tweet
Share on Tumblr
Reddit
Like Loading...

Tags: Bernhard Wöstheinrich, centrozoon, drift and float, Gütersloh (Germany), Markus Reuter, touch guitar music, Warr Guitar music

Comments Leave a Comment

Categories 2001, album reviews, ambient music, electronic, electronica, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, improvisation, instrumental music, loop music, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, reviews, sampledelia

January 2001 – mini-album reviews – The Servant’s ‘With the Invisible’ (“art gets made, covertly, in rush-hour”)
22 Jan

The Servant: ‘With the Invisible’

On last year’s ‘Mathematics’, Dan Black (the voice, face and most of the limbs of The Servant) lifted the lid on a peculiar pop world, fascinated by the chasms between reality and imagination and between formal order and animal madness. ‘Mathematics’ was a dance of numbers, monkeys and peculiar people-watching, jamming in suspicions of murder, deranged Bunuel-ish aristocrats and shopping mall alienation. Unusually, its sonic palette was just as wild as its subject matter. It was as chopped-up and mercurial as it was catchy and danceable, emphasising Dan’s omnivorous sampler as much as his peculiar sneer (thin and venomous, but in its way the wildest and most devil-may-care British pop vocal this side of Billy Mackenzie).

With Chris Burrows now recruited to the project to beef up the guitars, ‘With the Invisible’ hints at being a more conventional follow-up to ‘Mathematics’. In many ways, it is. It’s less extreme, more aligned towards the needs of a guitar band: the sounds are much less wild and varied, with less cunningness required to ensure the gelling of the musical ingredients. Hell, it could almost be Britpop; albeit at the Pulp end as opposed to the Shed Seven end. But I’m not convinced that this means Dan Black has shot his artistic wad. In fact, I’ve a suspicion that where ‘Mathematics’ rattled the cage of the fantastical, ‘With the Invisible’ (right down to the title) documents Dan’s interaction with the everyday – the office jobs, adverts, commuter rushes, conspicuous consumption and car ownership that most of us take on continually and take for granted.

Certainly ‘Biro’ is about sulking in an office, your mind scrabbling desperately for escape either in desk-based sculpture, the limited options of the office party (“wet-look in my hair?”) or violent fantasies – “I just killed my new boss / shut that cock up, with a rock, / non-stop in his face, / and what a smug face.” Inevitably, it concludes “it’s plain to you and it’s plain to me, / there’s nothing for you and there’s nothing for me,” but it has a colourful time getting there.

With that admitted, the next question is how to live under those circumstances, if at all. The brass-pumping ‘Milk Chocolate’ is a rebellion, which finds Dan capering under the motorway next to a blazing bonfire. Systematically, he’s burning all of his possessions from hi-fi to furniture right down to his clothes, trying to shake off the packaging of the modern world. But with “milk chocolate pumping through my heart” the contamination of consumption has already reached to the core of him, leaving him with the logical conclusion of joining his own trash on the fire.

Or not. The bodypopping, Prince-like, bubblegum funk of ‘In a Public Place’ suggests an accommodation, even a brainwave to slake that thirst for stimulation. Art gets made, covertly, in rush-hour. “Among stumbling commuters / I think about each step, / not where I’m trying to get.. / In a limited space, / I try to find a cube for me. / With suble changes of pace, / I move through various densities.” There’s even peace to be found – “watching people move, / they appear to groove / with the invisible.”

For a while, our man seems happy in a formal suit and in step with this world. By the time the White Town-ish synth pop of ‘Driving at Night’ shows up – deliberately tidy – he’s possibly taken it too far. “I try hard to be like I’m in an advert / as we descend upon upon the M1.” Before long, though, The Servant are back to poking holes in the fabric of the world again, trying to expose the workings. In the Jam-versus-hip-hop bust of ‘The Entire Universe’, this happens via rampant, tongue-in-cheek paranoia. “How can I trust my own memory? / Did what I thought I saw before occur?” yammers Dan, almost with relief, as flute shrieks and silvery Indian strings zing off the barking guitars. “How can I trust my own family? / Maybe they’ve lied for years to me.”

By the finale, ‘She Cursed Me’, the music is heading back towards the heady mix of sounds that characterised ‘Mathematics’: ironic tinges mixing with intimate pastiche, music box interludes, bright dreamy shifts of mood and texture with a sharp mind manipulating them. And Dan’s narration has moved well clear of city rules, looking backwards to villagey beginnings, the first stirrings of curiosity (“she cursed me with impatience / and I need to follow clouds,”) and the repercussions of actions (“our conversations by the pond / I wonder if they’re still going on – / swimming on the gluey pool, / around the church and up to the school.”)

The Servant are still marching to their own inner promptings; still bouncing on the shock of impulse. Still the colourful alien probe that’s embedded in the mundane. Keep watching.

The Servant: ‘With the Invisible’
Splinter Recordings, SP003CD (5 038622 102326)
CD-only mini-album
Released: 22nd January 2001
Get it from: (2020 update) CD best obtained second-hand; stream from last.fm.
The Servant online:

Additional notes: (2020 update) The Servant split up in 2007. Dan Black moved on to a solo career; Trevor Sharpe has played in Deadcuts.

Share this:
Email
Print
Tweet
Share on Tumblr
Reddit
Like Loading...

Tags: Chris Burrows, Dan Black, London (England), Matt Fisher, The Servant, Trevor Sharpe

Comments Leave a Comment

Categories 2001, album reviews, art pop, art punk, art rock, club music, dance music, dance pop, DIY music, drum and bass, electronica, experimental music, experimental pop, experimental/avant-garde rock, glam pop, IDM, performance art, pop, reviews, synth pop

Archives
Archives
Calendar
May 2024

M T W T F S S

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

« Jan
Blog Stats

207,892 hits

Recent Posts

January 2022 – single & track reviews – Adult Matters’ ‘Blue Car’; Tony Patterson & Doug Melbourne’s ‘Maybe’; Lammping’s ‘Everlasting Moor’

July 2021 – single & track reviews – Yes’ ‘The Ice Bridge’; Brachmond’s ‘Teufelsdanz’; Brainsqueezed’s ‘My Fears in the Night’

July 2021 – single & track reviews – Sug Daniels’ ‘Kintsugi’; Jesse D’Kora’s ‘Far from Home’; No Thee No Ess’ ‘Chorus’

July 2021 – single & track reviews – Lizard Brain’s ‘If Our Eyes Were Blue’; Vi. & sam’s ‘Pressure’; Parnell March’s ‘Therapy’

July 2021- single & track reviews – 2 Lost Souls’ ‘Qanon’; E Rodes’ ‘Isolation’; Pearl & The Oysters’ ‘Soft Science’

July 2021 – single & track reviews – Franz Yusef vs. David Peel & Friends’ ‘How Lucky We Are’; Fatum Aeternum’s ‘Spiders’; The Academy of Sun’s ‘It is Finished When It’s Destroyed/Ghost Foxes’

July 2021 – single & track reviews – Colin Moulding’s ‘The Hardest Battle’; ZOLA’s ‘Glitter and the Gold’; Filed Fangs’ ‘Conduit’

June 2021 – single & track reviews – Obijan’s ‘Ubesvarte anrop’ (featuring Action The Man & Julie); All Cats Are Beautiful’s ‘thought i saw u in the shop last nite’; E Rodes’ ‘Fortune’

June 2021 – single & track reviews – Gabriella Smith/Gabriel Cabezas’ ‘Lost Coast III’; Hot Mustard’s ‘Jerkwater Strut; Ada Moreau’s ‘My Shadow Halts’

May 2021 – single & track reviews – Craig Fortnam’s ‘Ark’; Gabriella Smith/Gabriel Cabezas’s ‘Bard of a Wasteland’; LEYA’s ‘ABBA/Mary’ (Christina Vantzou remix)

May 2021 – single & track reviews – Loud Women’s ‘Reclaim These Streets’; Penelope Trappes’ ‘Blood Moon’; Spellling’s ‘Boys at School’

March 2021 – single & track reviews – Dope Sagittarius’ ‘Define Love’; Makandi’s ‘Dum Dum’; BassLord’s ‘Elephant Talk’

October 2020 – single & track reviews – Yeslah’s ‘Trancefixion’; Treasure Gnomes’ ‘Messages’ (featuring Lachi); GMTA’s ‘Forbidden Moments’

August 2020 – single & track reviews – ReMission International’s ‘TOS2020’; Derw’s ‘Ble Cei Di Ddod I Lawr’; The Forever Now’s ‘Reciprocals’

August 2020 – single & track reviews – Jakko M. Jakszyk’s ‘The Trouble with Angels’; Minute Taker’s ‘The Darkest Summer’; Ivan Moult’s ‘What More Could I Say?/Toxic’

July 2020 – singles & track reviews – Colin Edwin’s ‘First Point of Origin’ & ‘Second Point of Origin’; Bloom’s Taxonomy’s ‘Mount Bromo/United Nations Bicycle Parking’

July 2020 – single & track reviews – Samuel Travis’ ‘Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep’

May 2020 – single & track reviews – Heavy Lamb/Jesse Cutts’ ‘CONFINEMENT-release4’; Jack Hayter’s ‘Let’s Go Shopping’ (Sultans of Ping F.C cover); Billie Bottle sings ‘Ted Hughes – Wind: Upheaval Imminent’

May 2020 – EP reviews – Mikrokosmos/Babyskullz/Cola Ray vs. MUMMY’s ‘CONFINEMENT-release3’ (“mysteries which slip into shadowed corners”)

May 2020 – single & track reviews – MultiTraction Orchestra’s ‘Emerge Entangled’; Stuart Wilding’s ‘Spaces’ and ‘Horns’

April 2020 – single & track reviews – Jesse Cutts/Heavy Lamb’s ‘CONFINEMENT_release2’; Godcaster’s ‘Serpentine Carcass Crux Birth’; Kryptograf’s ‘The Veil’

April 2020 – EP reviews – MUMMY/Babyskullz/Mikrokosmos – ‘CONFINEMENT/release1’ (“the triumph of love over fear and torpor”)

March 2020 – single & track reviews – Jack Hayter’s ‘The Dark End of the Street’; Bijou Noir’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’; Holly Penfield’s ‘Diggin’ It’

February 2020 – single & track reviews – Gallery 47’s ‘I Wish I Was’; Wugo’s ‘Océan’; The Powdered Earth’s ‘Blossom’

January 2020 – single & track reviews – The Powdered Earth’s ‘Hold Your Breath’, Broads & Milly Hurst’s ‘Happisburgh’, Lifeboats’ ‘Hurt’

January/February 2020 – upcoming London folk/singer-songwriter/experimental gigs – Aga Ujma, Yoni Silver, Yael Roberts, Merlin Nova and Sophie Le Roux at Mortal Oil 2 (24th January) plus Aga Ujma and Nina Harries at PinDrop Session (28th February) and Aga Ujma and The Sages at SOAS (21st February)

January 2020 – single & track reviews – Sophie Onley’s ‘Web Of Lies/Broken Doll’, Secret Treehouse’s ‘At Sunrise’, Jakk Jo’s ‘All Dat I Do’

January 2020 – single & track reviews – The Powdered Earth’s ‘The Atlantic’, Simen Lyngroth’s ‘Morning Light’, Marle Thompson’s ‘Expectations’

January/February 2020 – showcases in London with Ragga Gröndal in Earls Court (19th January) and Velveteen Orkestra, Ben Eaton, Hattie Erawan and Matt Ryan in Soho (21st January); plus Blair Coron’s ‘On The Nature Of Things’ quiet evening in London and Glasgow (21st January, 7th February) with Zoë Bestel, Anin Rose, Tom Blankenberg, Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach

January 2020 – upcoming gigs – electronica, jazz and gamelan in Bristol and London – Byron Wallen plays Boards of Canada (17th, 18th January); Bersarin Quartett and LTO (21st January)

January 2020 – various classical concerts in Britain – Manchester Collective’s ‘Ecstatic Dances’ tour with Poul Høxbro in Leeds, Glasgow, London and Manchester (15-19 January); Jamie Akers plays 19th century women guitar composers in London (16th January); Eos Ensemble play contemporary chamber quartets in London (24th January)

January to March 2020 – assorted London gigs – Holly Penfield at 100 Club (8th March) and with Ian Ritchie at the Fiddler’s Elbow (10th January); skewed surf, pop and acoustica with Kenny Process Team, Keith John Adams and The Happy Couple (13th January); Balkan/Gaelic folktronics with Arhai (18th January); plus Minute Taker’s ‘Wolf Hours’ in Manchester (24th January)

January 2020 – single & track reviews – Madrona’s ‘Alone with a Crow and a Pylon’; Madrona & Chris Cundy’s ‘Humming I’ and ‘Humming II’

December 2019 – Arch Garrison and Emily Jones on tour together around England – folk, psychedelia and other familial connections featuring The Steven Morricone Tyranny, We Are Muffy, Libbertine Vale, Little Robots, Berlin Horse, Chlöe Herington, Ian A. Anderson and Pete Aves (11th to 17th December); plus a Jones and Garrison contribution to Spratleys Japs’ Winter Wonderland show in Brighton with Panixphere, Matthew Cutts and Hot Sauce Pony (21st December)

December 2019 – upcoming London gigs – Christmas music as Daylight Music 2019 autumn season concludes with Tomorrow’s Warriors Soon Come Big Band and Junior Band and Loucin Moskofian (7th) and a Lost Map party with Pictish Trail, Callum Easter, Rozi Plain and Glasgow Dreamers (14th); plus a follow-up Lost Map show with Pictish, Callum, Savage Mansion and Clémentine March (15th)

November 2019 – three Tuesdays of (mostly) femmetronica in London – Alice Hubble, Blick Trio and Merlin Nova (5th November), Carla dal Forno and Cucina Povera (12th November), Rachel K. Collier (19th November)

November 2019 – upcoming classical concerts – Duncan Honeybourne premieres Richard Pantcheff in London (6th November); Scottish Ensemble’s ‘Elemental’ tour across Scotland with Aidan O’Rourke and Kit Downes (9th-13th November); Joby Burgess plays SOLO in London (13th November)

November 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Janushoved’s fifth anniversary party with Rosen & Spyddet, Internazionale, Yuri and others (1st November); Orlando Harrison goes Orwellian at the Horse Hospital with Tone Generator, Imperial Leather and David Rage (1st November); Paper Dollhouse, Daniel O’Sullivan, Flowers At Night and DJ King Knut at New River Studios (2nd November)

November 2019 – Daylight Music 2019 autumn season continues – Bex Burch with Beanie Bhebhe and Tom Herbert, Çiğdem Aslan & Tahir Palalı, Maria Chiara Argirò & Jamie Leeming (2nd); New Music from Wales with Gareth Bonello, Toby Hay, Georgia Ruth, Accü and Richard James (9th); jazz strands with Nils Økland, Kaidi Akinnibi & Lorenz Okello-Osengor, Helena Kay & Sam Watts (16th) and with Jherek Bischoff, Robert Stillman & Anders Holst and Rosie Frater-Taylor (23rd); Matthew Bourne’s vocal showcase with Seaming To, Keeley Forsyth,Polly Gone Wrong, Andrew Plummer and Dorothy Lehane (30th)

October/November 2019 – upcoming London gigs – (mostly) female pop and poptronica and dance – Caroline Polachek (30th November); Kin Leonn and Geiste (1st November); Imogen Heap and Frou Frou (15th November); Kedr Livanskiy and Detalji (21st November), and Yeule at nearly all of these…

October/November 2019 – upcoming London classical gigs – ‘Venus, Women And The Guitar’ (27th October); Emily Howard curates ‘Ada Lovelace: Imagining The Analytical Engine’ (2nd November); Echo Collective present Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ’12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann’ plus Félicia Atkinson (3rd November)

October 2019 – upcoming London rock, pop, noise, dancetronic gigs – Hurtling, Stephen Evens and Junodef (17th October); Gum Takes Tooth and Hyperstition Duo (18th October); Bunny Hoova, Gribs, J.B. Glaser and Halfs (18th October)

October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Retrophonica at the Brunel Museum (13th); Charles Hayward presents Sly & The Family Drone, V Ä L V Ē, Timestretch Alarmsong and Atatat (19th)

October 2019 – sundry classical and postclassical events – Carla Rees’ ‘Solo Flute Quartet: Music for Flute and Electronics’ tour of England and Northern Ireland (9th, 12th, 16th, 18th, 24th October); Xenia Pestova Bennett plays Luc Ferrari and Annea Lockwood in London (29th October)

October/November 2019 – Moor Mother’s ‘The Great Bailout’ with the London Contemporary Orchestra in Kraków, Gateshead, Ghent and London (6th, 12th, 16th, 23rd October), with Galya Bisengalieva and Klein joining in London. Plus further Moor Mother dates in Utrecht, Helsinki and Madrid with Zonal, Eartheater and Cruhda (7th, 11th, 15th November)

October 2019 – upcoming rock gigs in England from mathcore to magic, part 2 – The Display Team’s October tour (with Project Mork, The Mighty Bossmags, Masiro, Lonely Dakota, Mutant-Thoughts, Flag Fen, Spank Hair, Barringtone, Memory Of Elephants, Alter Ego and Vonhorn); a Jazz from Hell concert in Brighton including Son Of Ugly, BallPointKen and Fukushima Dolphin (23rd October); The Hare and Hoofe, The Galileo 7 and Ulysses in London (26th October)

October 2019 – upcoming rock gigs in England from mathcore to magic, part 1 – the Octobear tour with Civil Villains, Goldblume and Bisch Nadar plus Web, Günk, Quiet Lions, Pandapopalyse, Edward Fox and Smack Jack (12th to 26th October, various); the Portals All-Dayer in London including Hawk Eyes, Lost in the Riots, Bicurious, Lakes and Cody Noon (19th October)

October 2019 (and onwards) – various upcoming jazz gigs – Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dreams, Rosie Turton Quintet, Alina Bzhezhinska in London (3rd October); Electric Dreams in Newcastle (4th October); Forq and SEN3 in London (30th October); SEN3 in London and Brighton (1st & 8th October); Jim Rattigan’s October-to-January Pavillon tour of England (6th October onwards)

October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – a London visit for Asuna’s ‘100 Keyboards’ (2nd); psychonauts UnicaZürn step up to save the Horse Hospital (5th); Andrew Heath & Anne Chris Bakker play an ambient evening with Matt Atkins, Andrew Sherwell and Kevin Buckland (6th)

October 2019 – Daylight Music’s 2019 autumn season continues – Janek Schaefer, Joby Burgess and AVA (5th October); Keith Tippett & Matthew Bourne with Tania Chen & Steve Beresford (12th October); We Like We, Otto A Totland, Rauelsson and F.S.Blumm (19th October); Susumu Yokota remembered and reinvented by Isan, Seaming To and The Imperfect Orchestra (26th October)

September/October 2019 – upcoming singer-songwriter gigs – Holly Penfield unleashes ‘Tree Woman’ in California and London (22nd September, 31st October)

September 2019 – upcoming opera – Alex Mills’ ‘Dear Marie Stopes’ in London (21st September); Keith Burstein’s ‘The Prometheus Revolution’ on film in Brighton (24th September)

September 2019 – the start of Daylight Music’s autumn season in London – The Memory Band, Far Rainbow and Ingrid Plum (21st September); Kathryn Williams’ Anthology extravaganza (28th September)

September-November 2019 – upcoming post-folk, electrop, electronica gigs – tAngerinecAt on tour across Britain (5th/7th/14th/20th September, 17th/18th/26th October, 16th November) with Flange Zoo, DIANE, Experimental Sonic Machines, Ed Dowie, La Rissa, Yorkshire vs. Essex, Factory Acts, Slow Knife, Harbingers Drum Crew, Tin Mole, Clusterfuck, Hallulugenia, SIN/RED, Hypnotique, Otis Jordan, Saint Bernadette and She Robot

September to December 2019 – upcoming rock/rocktronica gigs – Teeth Of The Sea and The Utopia Strong live in London (5th September) plus further Teethings in Brighton (with Mulholland), Rochester (with Rekkliner and the closer we are to dying) and Brussels (6th/13th September, 4th October); and The Utopia Strong running cross-country with Matters, EWEI and Reidy Scott Duo (8th September, 8th/11th-13th November, 18th-21st December)

September/November 2019 – upcoming rock/folk/psychedelic gigs – My Octopus Mind on tour in Bristol, London and Lille (5th & 6th September, 27th November), Daniel O’Sullivan and Brigid Mae Power in London (13th September)

June/July 2019 – upcoming London gigs – Jewdas’ summer shindig with Geoff Berner, Fran & Flora and Rokhl Merlot at Balabam (20th June); Sefiroth at JW3 (4th July)

June to November 2019 – upcoming London jazz gigs – Greg Foat Band and Neue Grafik Ensemble at Church of Sound (20th June); Niechęć, High Definition Quartet, EABS and trios with Marcin Masecki and Kuba Więcek for the Polish Jazz London Series (4th July, 16th August, 19th September, 18th October, 21st November)

June 2019 – assorted upcoming London gigs – Block4 and Lynda Beckett’s multi-media recorder concert (15th), Arch Garrison, Charles Bullen and Kavus Torabi play Clapham Library (15th); cellotronics-and-percussion improv with BirdWorld at Wigmore Hall (18th June); North Sea Radio Orchestra, John Greaves, Annie Barbazza and others reinvent Robert Wyatt in ‘Folly Bololey’ (27th)

June 2019 – Daylight Music’s summer season in London, continued – ‘From Call to Choir’ with Dominic Stichbury, Ben See, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Archie and a clutch of chorals (15th June), Piney Gir, She Choir and Oly Ralfe (22nd June); Xenia Pestova Bennett, Ligeti Quartet, Snowpoet, Muted Summer Landscape and the magnetic resonator piano (29th June)

Category Cloud
20th century classical music 21st century classical music 1969 1970 1971 1991 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 a capella acid jazz acoustic music acoustic pop adult-orientated rock Afro-blues Afro-funk Afrobeat agit-pop album reissue reviews album reviews Algerian folk music alternative country alternative folk alternative pop alternative rock ambient music ambient pop Americana Andalusian folk music anti-folk anti-music AOR Arabic music Armenian folk music arsequake art pop art punk art rock Australian folk music Balkan folk music Bangladeshi music Baroque music baroque pop Batwa (Pigmy) music beatboxing bebop bell-ringing & bell choirs big-band jazz black metal bluegrass blues bolero Bosnian folk music bossa nova breakbeat metal broken beats Bulgarian folk music cabaret cabaret rock Cajun folk music Cameroonian music cantatas cantautori Caribbean music Carpathian folk music Catalonian folk music ceilidh Celtic music ceremonial music chamber jazz chamber music chamber pop chanson chaos music chillout Chinese classical music choral music chorinho choro Christian music Christmas music church music circuit bending classical (Western art music) classical fusion Classical music classical songs club music comedy music comic books communiques compilation reviews cool jazz Cornish music country-and-western country reggae cover versions cowpunk Croatian folk music cross-cultural music cross-disciplinary pop crossover crowdfunding campaigns Cuban jazz Cuban music cumbia cyberfunk dance-punk dancehall dance music dance performances dance pop darkwave deep house deep listening demo reviews desert blues devotional music disco DIY music DJ sets documentaries doo-wop doom metal downtempo dream pop drone music drum and bass dub dubstep early 20th century neoclassical music Early Music easy listening editorial EDM electro-acoustic folk electro-acoustic music electro-chaabi electro-funk electro-pop electro-salsa electronic electronica emo EP reviews Ethiopian jazz Ethiopian pop experimental/avant-garde rock experimental music experimental pop fado festivals field recordings film & cinema films flamenco folk-jazz folk-pop folk baroque folk metal folk music folk rock folktronica freak-folk freaktronica free jazz French folk music funk funk metal Gambian music gamelan garage punk garage rock garage soul gay songs gendér wayang general posts Georgian folk music Ghanaian music ghetto bass glam pop glam rock glitch music global bass Gnawa music gospel Gothic pop Gothic rock Greek folk music grime grindcore grrlpunk grunge-soul grunge rock hard bop hardcore hard rock Hawaiian music heavy metal highlife Hindi film music hip hop hot jazz/Gypsy jazz/manouche jazz house music IDM improvisation Indian music Indonesian folk music industrial music industrial rock instrumental music interactive performances Inuit folk music Iranian folk music Irish folk music Japanese court music jazz jazz-funk jazz-pop jazz fusion jazz punk jazz rock Jewish music jump blues jumping jive K-Rock kletzmer Korean traditional music kosmische & Krautrock Kurdish folk music Latin dance LGBTQIA+ music live/concert reviews lookback reviews loop music Macedonian folk music Malawian music Malian blues Malian music mambo math rock mbalax merengue metalcore Mexican folk Middle Eastern music minimalism modal jazz Mongolian folk music motets mumblecore music downloads for free/cheap/pay-what-you-like music drama musique concrete neo-soul neoclassical darkwave New Music New Orleans jazz New Wave rock noise noise rock North African music Norwegian music No Wave obituaries opera oratorios orchestral jazz orchestral music orchestral pop outsider music pansori performance art plunderphonics poetry Polish folk music political music polyphonic singing pop post-bop post-classical post-dubstep post-folk post-hardcore post-metal post-progressive rock post-punk post-rock power electronics power pop previews process music progressive metal progressive pop progressive rock protest songs psychedelic ambient music psychedelic folk psychedelic pop psychedelic rock psychedelic soul pub rock punk-blues punk jazz punk rock R&B radiophonics ragtime rapping rebetiko record markets reggae remixes Renaissance music reviews rhythm'n'blues RIO (Rock In Opposition) Riot Grrl Riot grrrl rock rockabilly Romani (Gypsy) music Romanian folk music Romantic music roots music Rwandan folk music sacred music sadcore salon events salsa samba sampledelia sanjo Scandinavian folk music Scottish folk music sea shanties Senegalese music Sephardic music Serbian folk music shape-note singing show tunes Siberian music singer-songwriter single & track reviews ska skronk slam poetry sludge metal soca song cycles sophisti-pop soul soul-jazz soul pop sound collage soundscapes South American music space-jazz space age pop space rock Spanish folk music Spectralist music spoken word stadium rock steel pan music storytelling Sudanese music Sufi Muslim music surf rock swamp rock Swedish folk music swing synth pop Sámi folk music tango tango nuevo tape loops tech metal techno theatre music thrash metal throat singing tie-ins Transylvanian folk music trash-blues trash-jazz trip hop Turkish folk music turntablism Uncategorized Viking metal vocal music West African music West Coast classical music world & indigenous music worldbeat xöömei yoik Zeuhl
All Categories
All Categories

Tags
#BlackLivesMatter 'Organ' (magazine/promoter/record label) 7shades A. Dyjecinski a.P.A.t.T. Abel Ganz Abel Selaocoe Aberdeen (Scotland) Abingdon (England) abrasion Aby Vulliamy accordion music acoustic guitar music Acoustic Ladyland acoustic performance activism Adam Bohman Adam Fairhall Adam Teixeira Adi Tal Admirals Hard Adrian Lever Adrian Northover Adrien Rodes a flicker of Fripp A Formal Horse Afro-futurism Agathe Max Agostino Collura Ahnanse Aisha Orazbayeva Alabaster DePlume Alan Burton Alan Tomlinson Alasdair Roberts Aleksander Szram Aleksandr Scriabin Alev Lenz Alexander Hacke Alexander Hawkins Alex Bonney Alex Groves Alex Highton Alex Knapp Alex Rita Alex Roth Alex Ward Alex’s Hand Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Schnittke Alice Eldridge Alice Purton Alice Zawadzki All Hail Hyena almost acoustic almost sacred Alpenglow Americana Amsterdam (Netherlands) Amy Neilson Smith Ana Silvera Anawan Anders Hillborg Andrea Trillo Andre Canniere Andrew Blick Andrew Booker Andrew Cheetham Andrew Gellert Andrew Heath Andrew Keeling Andrew Lisle Andrew Niven Andrew Ostler (Os) Andrew Woodhead André Jolivet Andy Diagram Andy Edwards Andy Partridge Angharad Davies Angus Macrae Angèle David-Guillou Anji Cheung Anna & The Static Anna Clyne Anna Dellaria Anna Meredith Anna Phoebe Annea Lockwood Anne Denholm Anne Garner Ansuman Biswas ANTA Anthroprophh Anton Hunter Anton Lukoszevieze Antonín Dvořàk Ant Traditions Apocalypse Jazz Unit apocalyptic roars Aqueous Arcade Fire Arcadio Arch Garrison Arctic Circle (promoter) ArHai Army Of Moths Arnold Schoenberg Arthur Lea Arthur Russell Article XI Art Of Burning Water Arvo Pärt Ashley Henry Ashley Paul ASMR Astor Piazzolla A Sweet Niche Atlanta (Georgia - USA) Axes Ayn Sof B. J. Cole Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter) Bad Elephant Music (record label) Band Of Holy Joy banjo music Barringtone Barry Guy Bas Jan bass clarinet music bass guitar music bassoon music Bastard Assignments (event) bastard children of Nick Cave Bath (England) battered hats Battleship Grey Beardyman Bears in America bedsit melodrama Beetles Before The Goldrush (event) Belfast (Northern Ireland) Belgium Bellatrix (rapper) Bell Lungs Ben Davies benefit gigs Benjamin Britten Benjamin Dwyer Ben Sarfas Ben See Ben Woolacott Ben Zucker Berlin (Germany) Bernhard Wöstheinrich Berserk! Beth Jones Beyoncé Biffy Clyro big bands Big Lad (Shitwife) Billie Bottle Billie Bottle & The Multiple Bill Nelson Bing Selfish Birmingham (England) Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) Bishi bitter tang Björk Blackburn (England) Blacklisters Black MIDI Blank Paper Blert Ademi Blind Dog Studio (event) Blood Sport Blowpipe Blue-Eyed Hawk Blueblut Blurt Bobby Barry Bob Drake Bob Leith Bohuslav Martinů book launches Borderless (event) boy and a balloon Bradford (England) Brian Madigan Brighton (England) Brigitte Beraha Bristol (England) British Theatre Britten Sinfonia Brother Portrait Bruised Skies Brussels (Belgium) Bryce Dessner Bryn Harrison Buchla electronic musical instrument Byron Wallen Béla Bartók Café Oto (promoter/venue) California (USA) Cambridge (England) Camden Voices Camille Maalawy Campfire Club (event) Can Canterbury scene Cantor Jason Green Captain Beefheart Cardiacs Cardiff (Wales) Cardigan (Wales) Carla Rees Carlisle (England) Carl Stone Caroline Dearnley Caroline Ross Caroline Shaw Carol Laula Carter Brown Cassie Kinoshi Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed Casual Nun Casual Sect Catherine Lamb Catherine Pluygers Cath Roberts Causings Cavalier Song Cceruleann Cecilia McDowall cello music Cementimental centrozoon chamber ensemble Chantal Brown Chaos Engineers Chaos Theory (event/promoter) Chapman Stick Charles Fernyhough Charles Hayward Charles Mingus Charlie Cawood Charlie Finke Charlotte Bray Chartwell Dutiro cheap drum machines Chelsea Carmichael Cheltenham (England) Cheryl Frances-Hoad Cheval de Frise Chicago (USA) chimes Chloe Herington Chris Anderson Chris Cundy Chris Cutler Chris Haslam Chris Hyson Chris Maitland Chris Mapp Chris Montague Chris Sharkey Christian Hayes (Bic Hayes) Christine Tobin Chris Williams Chris Wood CHROMA Chrome Hoof Cian Binchy Citizen Helene clang Clara Sanabras Clara Schumann Clare Finnimore clarinet music classical guitar music classical harp music Claude Debussy Claudia Molitor Cleft Clementine March Clifford Slapper Clor cloudy harmonies CLOWWNS Club Integral (event) Clywd (Wales) Cocteau Twins Coil Col Ainsley Colchester (England) Cold Blue Music Coldnose Colin Alexander Colin Edwin Colin Webster Colorado Chamber Orchestra communiques Conor Chaplin contrabassoon Conway Hall (promoter/venue) Corey Mwamba Corinne Morris Cork (Ireland) Cos Chapman Cosmo Sheldrake Coventry (England) Craig Fortnam Craig Scott Craig Ward Crawford Blair Crayola Lectern creative misanthropy creeping horror Crime & The City Solution crowdfunding campaigns Cyclobe Dada Daevid Allen Damo Waters Dan Bridgewood Hill Dan Hewson Daniel Chudley Le Corre Daniel James Ross Danielle de Picciotto Daniel Oldham Daniel O’Sullivan Dan Nicholls danny0 Darkroom Darragh Morgan Darren Hayman Darren Morris Daudi Matsiko Dave Fowler Dave Kane Dave Manington Dave Rowe Dave Smith Dave Sturt Dave Whitford David Austin Grey David Bowie David Francolini David Hurn David Knight David Lance Callahan David Lynch David Rhodes David Sylvian David Toop David Torn Daylight Music (event) Dead Days Beyond Help Dead Rat Orchestra Deaf School Dean McPhee Death In Texas Deco Ensemble deconstruction Dee Byrne Deerful Delicate AWOL Del Rio (Tennessee - USA) demos & showcases Denver Derby (England) Des de Moor dEUS Devon Dictionary Pudding (promoter) Diffusion Disco Inferno Divinity Roxx DIY Space for London (promoter/venue) Dizraeli Django Bates Dmitri Shostakovich Dobrinka Tabakova Doctor Who Doedelzak Dollboy Do Me Bad Things Domenico Scarlatti Dominic Canning Dominic Luckman Dominique D'Avanzo double bass music Double Talk Douglas Dare Dream City Film Club drift and float drumkit music dry deliveries Dublin (Ireland) Duke Ellington Dundee (Scotland) duo music Durham (England) Dutch Uncles Dwellings Dylan Jones (trumpeter) EBow Eddie Parker Ed Dowie Edinburgh (Scotland) editorial Edmund Finnis Ed Riches Edwige eeriness Einstürzende Neubauten electric guitar music Electrowerkz (event) Elen Evans Elephant (Alex Hall) Elephant (British pop duo) Eliza McCarthy Ellen Sunde Ellie Ford Ellie Lovegrove Elori Kramer Emer McDonough Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch Emily Jones Emily Portman Emma-Jean Thackray Emmett Elvin Emre Ramazanoglu ensemble music Entropi epic45 Eric Klerks Eric Whitacre Erik Satie Erkki-Sven Tüür erotic songs Ethan Woods Ethel Smyth Eugene Ysaye Evans The Death Everything Everything Evolutia Ex-Easter Island Head Exeter (England) Eyeless In Gaza Falmouth (England) Faust Felix Jay Felix M-B Fence Collective Fenella Humphreys feral snarl fiddle music Finland Fire Records (record label) Fleece Jazz (event) Flies Are Spies From Hell Flowers Must Die flute music Foe Foxout! Fragile Human Monster Show Fran & Flora Francesca Ter-Berg Francis Dunnery Francis Poulenc Frank Byng Franz Joseph Haydn Franz Liszt Franz Schubert free events French Boutik Friends Serene (promoters) Fritz Kreisler Frome (England) Frédéric Chopin fund-raising Future Currents G.P. Hall Gabriel Fauré Gabriel Prokofiev Gagarin (Graham Dowdall) Galway (Ireland) Gateshead (England) Geiger Counter gemlike sparkle Gemma Champ Gentle Mystics gentleness George Benjamin George Crumb George Gershwin George Moorey Georgia Ruth Georgina Brett Gerald Barry Get The Blessing Ghent (Belgium) Ghosting Ghosting Season ghostliness Ghost Mind Giles Babel Giles Swayne Glasgow (Scotland) Glass Glastonbury (England) Glen Byford glorious twitch Gloucester (England) Gnod GOAT Music (promoters) Godzilla Black gone too soon Gong Gordon Haskell Graham Dunning graphic scores Grasscut Grayhound O.C.D. Great Dad Gregor Riddell Grice griot groove Guapo Guildford (England) guitar fingerpicking guitar music Gum Takes Tooth Gus Garside György Ligeti Gütersloh (Germany) H (Heloise Zamzam) H.U.M Hackney Showroom (promoter/venue) Haiku Salut Half The Sky Halifax (England) Hamburg (Germany) Ham Legion Hanna Hartman Hannah Marshall Hans-Joachim Roedelius hardingfele (Hardanger fiddle) music harmonium music harp music Harrison Birtwistle Harry Escott Harry Strange Hastings (England) Hazel Askew Hazel Iris head spins gently Heart Of Saturday Night (event) Heaven 17 Heavy Lamb Hebden Bridge (England) Hefner Heinrich Biber Heldon Helena Massip Helen Grime Helen Vidovich Helicon Helmut Lachenmann Helsinki (Finland) Hems Henry Cow Henry Fool Henryk Sienkiewicz Henry Lowther Henry Purcell Her (Julie D. Riley) Hereford (England) Hey! Manchester (event) Hey Colossus Heylel Hibiki Ichikawa Hildegard of Bingen Hildegard von Bingen Hirvikolari Holly Penfield Horatio James Hot Beef Three Hot Chip house concerts Hove (England) Howard Skempton Howe Gelb Hubert Zemler Huddersfield (England) Human Chain humour in music Hunchbakk Huw Watkins Hypenkrünk Hypnotique Héloïse Werner Iain Ballamy Iain Dixon iamthemorning Ian Crause Ian East Ian Ritchie idesia Idris Rahman Igor Stravinsky IKLECTIK Art Lab (promoters) ILL Imogen Heap I Monster Improvizone Independent Country inklings of disaster Inspiral Trio intimations of ancientness intriguingly mixed bags Iran Iran Ireland Irma Vep Islam Chipsy It Bites Izinde Jack Cheshire Jack Hayter Jake Long Jakko Jakszyk James Allsopp James Blackshaw James Keddie James Larcombe James McVinnie James Murray James Sedwards James Weaver Jamie Hamilton Jam Tarts Choir Janet Oates Japan (band) Jarrod Gosling Jason Sylvan (Jason Carty) Jazz Hastings (event) Jazz Nursery (event) Jeff Williams Jem Doulton Jennifer Lucy Allan Jennifer Walshe Jenni Roditi Jenny Moore Jeremy Young Jesse Bescoby Jesse Cutts Jesse R. Berlin Jesse Rifkin Jessica Cottis JFB jh Jim Bishop Jim Fox Jim Ghedi Jim Version Joby Talbot Jocelyn Pook Jodie Cox Joel Clayton Johannes Brahms Johann Paul von Westhoff Johann Sebastian Bach John Adams John Cage John Callaghan John Coltrane John Dowland John Ellis John Glyn John Greaves John Luther Adams John Macnaughton John Parricelli John Tavener John Wall Jon Andriessen Jonas Hellborg Jonathan Dove Jonathan Harvey Jon DeRosa Joni Mitchell Jonny Gee Jonny Moped Jonny Phillips Jon Poole Jon Thorne Joost Hendrickx Jo Quail Josefin Öhrn & The Liberation Josephine Stephenson Josh Perl Josh T. Pearson Jo Spratley Jovana Backovic Judith Weir Juice Vocal Ensemble Julia Doyle Julian Dawes Julianne Regan Julian Nicholas Julie Kjær Junkfood Kabaret @ Karamel (event) Kabul Golf Club Kagoule Kaija Saariaho Kamilya Jubran Kammer Klang (event) Karlheinz Stockhausen Kate Arnold Kate St John Kate Whitley Katherine Blake Katja Mervola Kavus Torabi Keir Cooper Keith Burstein Keith Moliné Keith Tippett Kemper Norton Kev Hopper Kevin Plummer Khyam Allami Killing Joke kinda blue King Crimson Kings Place (venue) - Kings Cross - London Kingston-upon-Hull (England) Kiran Leonard Kitchens Of Distinction Kit Downes Klavikon Knifeworld Knut Vaage Kraftwerk Kraków (Poland) Kronos Quartet Kuro Lady Maisery LaHost Laila Woozeer Laish Lake of Puppies Laura Cannell Laura Cole Laura J. Martin Laura Jurd Laura Moody Laurence O'Keefe Lauren Kinsella Laurie Anderson Laurie Osborne Leafcutter John Leavenheath (England) Leeds (England) Lee Fletcher Leen leering theatrics left-field d-i-y Left With Pictures Legs Leicester (England) Leonard Bernstein Leon Brichard Leoš Janáček Let's Eat Grandma Letchworth (England) Levitation Lewes (England) Liam Byrne Liam Singer Libbertine Vale Ligeti Quartet Lilith Ai Lindsay Cooper Lip Talk Lisa Fletcher Lisa Jayne listening to women little islands of belief live concert recordings live concerts Liverpool (England) lo-fi Lobelia Lawson London (England) London Composers Forum London Contemporary Music Festival (event) London Improvisers Orchestra London Jazz Festival (event) London Philharmonic Orchestra Lonesome Cowboys From Hell Loose Tubes Lore Lixenberg Los Angeles (USA) Lost Crowns Louisa Stuber Louis Barabbas Louis Barrabas Low Low Low La La La Love Love Love LSO St Luke's (venue) - St Luke's - London Lubomyr Melnyk Luciano Berio Lucy Claire Lucy Farrell Lucy Railton Ludwig van Beethoven Luigi Boccherini Luke Crookes Luke Howard LUME (event) LUME (event/promoter) LUME Lab (event) Luminous Bodies lute music Luton (England) Lyon (France) Lætitia Sadier L’Ocelle Mare macabre Madwort Saxophone Quartet Magic Bus Magnus Loom Mally Harpaz Manchester (England) MAP Studio Cafe (promoters) Marco Blaauw Marc Parnell Margate (England) Maria Chiara Argirò Maria Jardardottir Marianne Schofield Marika Hackman Marina Organ (broadcaster) Mark-Anthony Turnage Mark Beazley Mark Cawthra Mark Dicker Markers Mark Knoop Mark Mulholland Mark Pringle Mark Sanders Markus Reuter Mark Wagner Marmite music Marsyas Trio Martin Carthy Martine Waltier Martin France Martin Wakefield Marty Walker Mary Dullea mash-up Masiro Match&Fuse (event) Mathew Scheiner Matt Calvert Matt Finucane Matt Fisher Matt Gasda Matthew Bourne Matthew Cutts Matt Robinson Matt Scott Matt Stevens Maurice Ravel Max Kutner Max Tundra Melanie Woods Melting Hand Memory Of Elephants men and women singing together Merlin Nova Metamono Metamorphic Michael Bearpark Michael Chinworth Michael J. Sheehy Michael Manring Michael Masley Michael Mondesir Michael Nyman Michael Oliva Michael Price Michael Woodman Mick Foster Mick Karn Miguel Gorodi Mike Bourne Mike Garson Mike Oldfield Mike Outram Mike Pickering Mike Vennart Mike Walker Mike Westbrook Mikrokosmos Milan (Italy) Miles Davis Millie George Milton Keynes (England) Minus Pilots Minute Taker Mira Benjamin Miss Roberts & Rude Mechanicals Mitra Alice Tham Moonshake Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) More News From Nowhere (event) Morton Feldman Morton Subotnick Motherese Muckle Mouth (event/promoter) Mugstar multi-instrumentalists Multi-Storey (promoters) multimedia MUMMY murmur to wail music for cello music for electronics music for string quartet music for violin music tied in knots Musson/Kjær/Marshall Mutale Chashi My Bloody Valentine Myke Clifford My Octopus Mind múm Nache (Edward Wakili Hick) Nadine Khouri Nagoya (Japan) Nasty Little Lonely Necro Deathmort Negra Branca Neil Luck Newcastle-upon-Tyne (England) New River Studios (promoter/venue) New Weird Britain New York City (USA) New York State (USA) Nic France Nick Costley-White Nick Hayes Nicki Maher Nick Roth Nick Walters Nicola Baigent Nico Muhly Niels Bakx Nightshift (event) Nik Colk Void Nils Frahm No-Man Noah Max No Cars Noel Storey Noel Taylor Nonclassical (event/promoter/record label) North Sea Radio Orchestra Norway Norwich (England) Nottingham (England) not what it seems Nubya Garcia Nérija Nøught Oakland (California - USA) obituaries oboe music Oceansize Of Arrowe Hill Oldham (England) Olesya Zdorovetska Olga Stezhko Olie Brice Oliver Cherer Oliver Coates Oliver Pashley Oliver Sellwood Olivier Messiaen orchestral music Oslo (Norway) Otto Willberg outer space over too soon Oxford (England) Paddy Shine Palehorse Paperface Papernut Cambridge Paris (France) Part Chimp Partisans Pat Mastelotto Patrick Boyle Paul Clarvis Paul Hindemith Paul Hope Pauline Oliveros Paul Love Paul Morricone Paul Rains Paul Reynolds Paul Westwood pedal steel guitar music percussion music Percy Pursglove Pere Ubu perky chirrup Perth (Australia) Pete Astor Pete Judge Pete McPhail Peter Broderick Peter Chilvers Peter Gabriel Peter Gregson Peter Hammill Peter Maxwell Davies Pete Robson Peter Sinfield Pete Whittaker Phaze Theory Philip Cashian Philip Glass Phil Maguire Phil Robson Piano Day (event) piano music Picturebox Pierre Bensusan Pierre Boulez Piers Tattersall Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Piney Gir pipe organ music pitch-bending Plus Minus Ensemble Poly-Math Poplar Union (promoter/venue) Poppy Ackroyd Poppy Porter (jeweller) porch music Porcupine Tree Porshyne Poulomi Desai Prague (Czech Republic) Pram premieres prepared guitar music prepared piano music Prescott Preston (England) previews (releases and events) Project Instrumental Pronto Mama Psappha puzzle music Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky quartet music quintet music Rachel Musson Rael Jones Ralegh Long Ramsgate (England) Raphael Lanthaler rarescale rattlebag Ray Dickaty Reading (England) Rebecca Nash Redbus Noface Redolent reissues repostings Resina (Karolina Rec) Retrospective For Love Rhodri Davies Rhodri Marsden Richard Barbieri Richard Barratt Richard Causton Richard Dawson Richard Harrison Richard Larcombe Richard Pinhas Richard Strauss Richmond (Virginia - USA) Rick Cox Rio Kai Robert Fokkens Robert Fripp Robert Schumann Robert White Robert Wyatt Robin Blick Rob Lewis Rob Luft Rob Milne Rochester – England Rockfeedback Concerts (event/promoter) Roderick Chadwick Roger Lloyd Pack Rokenri Rome (Italy) Romeo Stodart Rory McVicar Rosie Turton Rothko Rotten Bliss (Jasmine Pender) Rotterdam (Netherlands) Rowland Sutherland Royston (England) Roz Harding Rozi Plain Rucksack Cinema Rudy Simone Ruins Rumour Cubes Run Logan Run Ruth Goller Ryan Teague Ryoko Ono Salford (England) Salisbury (England) Sally Beamish Sally Davies Salvatore Sciarrino Sam Barton Samuel Hällkvist Sandy Gordon San Francisco (USA) Sanguine Hum Sarah Angliss Sarah Dacey Sarah Jones (Sarah Smith) Sarah Measures Sarah Murcia saxophone music Sax Ruins Schnellertollermeir School Of Noise Scordatura Women's Music Collective screeching vocals Scritti Politti Sea Change Sealionwoman Seattle (Washington - USA) Seb Silas Sefiroth Serafina Steer Sergei Prokofiev Sergei Rachmaninoff Sergei Rachmaninov Serge Vuille Servant Jazz Quarters (promoters) session players go creative Seth Bennett Sex Swing Sharon Gal Sharron Fortnam (Sharron Saddington) Shatner's Bassoon Sheffield (England) Sheila Maurice-Grey She Makes War She’Koyokh Shirley Smart Shirley Tetteh Shiva Feshareki Shiver Shock Headed Peters Shot of Hornets sideways sparrow views sighs Silent Isle Simon Roth singing reveries SKP Sleepy People (Blue Apple Boy) Sloth Racket Sly & The Family Drone Snail Trail Snapped Ankles Snorkel Society of Imaginary Friends Society of Imaginary Friends Soiree (event) Sofia Gubaidulina SOLO (event/promoter) Something Pretty Beautiful songs that sound like dusk songs that sound like summer Sontag Shogun Sophia Sophie Lockett soprano (vocal) music SoundCellar (event) Southampton (England) Spaceheads Stars in Battledress stealth music Steam Down steampunk Stephen Bennett Stephen Dickinson Stephen Dodgson Stephen Evens Stephen Gilchrist Stephen Thrower Sterbus Steve Beresford Steve Bingham Steve Davis Steve Jansen Steve Lawson Steven Evens Steven Wilson Steve Reich Steve Strong Steve Watts Stick In The Wheel Stick Men sting in the tail stormy weather St Pancras Old Church (venue) - Kings Cross - London - England Straight On Red string quartet string quartet music Strobes Stroud (England) Stuart Wilding Stuffy/The Fuses Stump subtle ache subtle humour Sue Lynch Sumer Sumerian Kyngs Sunday Driver sundowner Survival Skills Sweet Deals On Surgery Sylvia Hallett Sylvia Plath synaesthesia Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster Taman Shud Tanya Tagaq Tatsuya Yoshida Tattie Toes Taupe Teeth Of The Sea Terminal Cheesecake Terry Bickers Terry Riley Test Dept. textural guitar music TEYR that '70s shows up Thea Musgrave The Arensky Chamber Orchestra The Blue Aeroplanes the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith The Burns Unit The Cesarians The Cockpit Theatre (venue) - Lisson Grove - London The Crimson ProjeKct The Cry Baby The Cure The Display Team The Earls Of Mars The Ecstatic Music Festival (event) The Evil Usses The Facemelter (event) The Fall The Fidelio Trio The Fierce and the Dead the fine art of sampling The Forge (promoter/venue) The Gift The Glass Child The Great Albatross The Great Electric The Harrison (venue) - Kings Cross - London - England The Hermes Experiment The Holywell String Quartet The Horse Hospital (promoter/venue) The House Of Love The Jazz Café (venue) - Camden Town - London - England The Jazz Market (event) The Kill Raimi's The Leaf Library The Left Outsides The Magic Numbers The Manchester Jazz Festival (event) The Mantis Opera The Many Few The Memory Band The Milk & Honey Band The Monsoon Bassoon The Nature Centre The Nest Collective (event/promoter) Theo The Old Church (venue) - Stoke Newington - London Theon Cross Theo Travis The Pictish Trail The Pocket Gods The Powdered Earth The Quietus (publication/event/label) The Quietus (publication/event/record label) The Real Music Club (event/promoter) theremin music The Residents The Scaramanga Six The Sea Nymphs The Sebright Arms (venue) - Bethnal Green – London – England The Shrubbies The Spiders of Destiny The Stranglers the text is important The Vibrators The Wave Pictures The Wharves The Windmill (venue) - Brixton - London - England The Windsors The Wise Wound The Wolfhounds The Xposed Club (event/promoter) things fall apart This Heat This Is Not This Heat Thomas Ang Thomas Blomster Thomas Bonvalet Thomas Gould Thomas Ragsdale Thomas Stone Three Trapped Tigers Thumpermonkey Thurston Moore Ticklish tidelines Tiger Moth Tales Tigmus (event/promoter) Tim Bowness Tim Doyle Tim Etchells Tim Fairhall Tim Giles Tim Hodgkinson Tim Motzer Tim Parkinson Tim Smith Tim Smith's Spratleys Rats (Spratleys Japs) Tiny Wood Tobias Reber Toby Hay Todmorden (England) Todmorden 513 Toebow Tom Adams Tomaga Tom Atherton Tom Challenger Tom Fox Tom Greenhalgh Tom Harrison Tom Montagliano Tom O.C. Wilson Tomorrow's Warriors Tom Settle Tom Slatter Tom Ward Tonochrome Tony Harn Tony Levin Tori Handsley torrents of sound Toru Takemitsu Total Refreshment Centre (promoter/venue) touch guitar music toy piano music Tpongle travelling hopefully Trembling Bells Tre Voci Cello Ensemble Trevor Wilson tribute concerts trio music TrioVD Trojan Horse Tropic Of Pisces Troyka trumpet music tuba music Tuesdays Post (event) Tullis Rennie Tungg! twangy guitar Twin Peaks Twm Dylan Uiutna (Olmo Uiutna) Ultrasound UnicaZürn Uni Ika Ai unusual instruments urban frowning Ursa V A L V E Val Welbanks Vanishing Twin Vaughan Simons Vennart Vespers Vibracathedral Orchestra viola music violin music viol music Vivien Goodwin-Darke Vivienne Bellos Viv McLean VLMV (ALMA) Vodun W.H. Auden Wacław Zimpel Wakefield (England) wall of sound Warmer Than Blood Warren Schoenbright Warr Guitar music Warrington (England) Warsaw (Poland) Was Is Das? (event/promoter) wasted glamour We Are Kin Westking Music (event) Westking Music (event/promoter) What?! Whispers & Hurricanes (event) whisper to scream Wien (Austria) Will Glaser William Butler Yeats William Cole William D. Drake William Kunhardt William Shakespeare Wiltshire (England) Winchester (England) wind instrument music Witchseason Withered Hand Wokingham (England) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolverhampton (England) women of heart and mind Woodburner (event/promoter) Word of Moth word salad worriedaboutsatan Worthing (England) wounded staggering Wren wretched self-justification Wrocław (Poland) Xenia Pestova Bennett XTC Yahael Camara-Onono Yasmyn Hendrix Yerba Mansa Yes Yoni Silver York (England) Youth (Martin Glover) Yumi Hara (Yumi Hara Cawkwell) Zach Walker Zag & The Coloured Beads Zappa-esque ZOFFF Zoë Martlew Zuno Men Åkervinda Étienne Rodes (E Rodes)
Top Clicks
None

Search

Follow Blog

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 84 other subscribers

Follow Misfit City on WordPress.com

Blogs which Misfit City follows:
SWOONAGE
TransCultura
Post-Punk Monk
theartyassassin
Get In Her Ears
Die or D.I.Y.?
The Music Aficionado
THE ACTIVE LISTENER
Planet Hugill
Listening to Ladies
www.drunkenwerewolf.com
ATTN:Magazine
Xposed Club
The Quietus
I Quite Like Gigs
Make Weird Music
furia log
The Recoup
A jumped-up pantry boy
backedwith.wordpress.com/
PROOF POSITIVE
We need no swords
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
mapnewz
When The Horn Blows
:::::::::::: Ekho :::::::::::: Women in Sonic Art
Ned Raggett Ponders It All
FLIPSIDE REVIEWS
Headphone Commute
The One-Liner Miner
Yeah I Know It Sucks
Obat Kanker Payudara Ginseng RH 2
poplifer.wordpress.com/
Good Music Speaks
Do The Math
Archived Music Press
The World's Worst Records
Universal Horse
Soundscapes
OLD SCHOOL RECORD REVIEW
FRIDAY NIGHT BOYS
Fragile or Possibly Extinct
a closer listen
Bird is the Worm
www.theequalground.com
Life Just Bounces
Lucid Culture
Aquarium Drunkard
eyesplinters
NewFrontEars