.jpg)
Tuesday, 24 June 2025
Monday, 21 April 2025
Friday, 28 March 2025
Review - Dice Machine – Dice Machine
Dice Machine – Dice Machine (Primitive Light Recordings)
(Out Now)
A debut single from producer, musician
and songwriter Drew Five and fashion &
music photographer Michael Daks under the name of Dice Machine brings
together a wide range of influences ranging from John Kongos to Marc Bolan to
80s pop.
With Five on bass and Daks on guitar, both share vocals on
this pounding rock-pop adventure which tempts great promise of things to
come. Sliding scales akin to the opening
of Duran Duran’s Planet Earth and a nuanced nod to OMD’s Genetic Engineering
sit perfectly next to each other whilst the digits and letters
F3224YR7BDQT37J669 are read out – hidden meaning or random meandering is
unclear.
It's a refreshing piece of music, having both a poppy hook
and an edgy outlook and stinks of professionalism and confidence. Boy-oh-boy is it addictive!
Roll the dice.
primitivelight.bandcamp.com/track/dice-machine
Review - Sketching Venus – An Impermanence
Sketching Venus – An Impermanence
(Out Now)
There’s a fabulous discipline behind Mortality Tables. Everything seems precision planned and executed perfectly. In the nicest possible way, it’s an experimental music geeks wet dream.
In essence, the label centres around field recordings by founder Mat Smith which are then deconstructed, remixed, manipulated, etc… by an array of artists which have in the past included the likes of Gareth Jones, Rupert Lally and Simon Fisher Turner. Less is often more but the quality and engagement is immense.
Recent release, An Impermanence by Sketching Venus (aka Smith himself) encapsulates the label to a tee. A fifty-four minute recording made during ‘a maintenance visit to an open-plan bank’s rising security screen system’ is presented in its raw form and is a bizarrely listen. We hear the sound of voice chatter and keyboard patter whilst alarm’s sound off in the background and create a live collage of sound.
This isn’t music, or is it? At what point does noise become music and when does music become noise? It’s personal choice of course but it does open up the joy glands to the sounds that surround us every second of every day and listening to them can provide comfort and disturbance in equal measure.
Look out for The Impermanence Project which will run throughout the rest of 2025 as it promises to be a complete sensory initiative.
https://mortalitytables.bandcamp.com/album/an-impermanence
Friday, 7 February 2025
Review - The Tearless Life – Conversations With Angels
The Tearless Life – Conversations With Angels
(Other Voices
Records)
Out Now
From the embers of the criminally underrated Vukovar come
The Tearless Life, a rebirth of sorts, a new life. No compromise, ploughing a furrow in their
own field, Conversations With Angels is the celestial start to something galactic. Surely.
There’s a slightly commercial edge to the sound but not in a
repetitive, predictable way but more in that each track flows from one to the
next, beautifully. Instrumentally, there is power and melody in
equal measure, vocally it is competent and well-timed. There are squealing synth excerpts over
powerful drumbeats and off-kilter basslines with dual voices which add a depth
and a slightly unsettling ambience.
Call it cult-pop if you like, call it inducing psychoactivity,
Conversations With Angels is certainly a trip best listened to as a complete
piece rather than individual tracks. It leaps from genre to genre unafraid to
experiment but confident enough to be comfortable in its own skin. You really couldn’t ask for more from a debut
album.
Review - Sad Man – Dark Ambient Collection
Sad Man – Dark Ambient Collection
(Self-Release)
Out Now
You might know Andrew Spackman as Sad Man or The Dark Jazz
Project or Cars From The Future (and probably more) – it seems he has a pseudonym
for almost every genre he releases music in.
The latest offering from Sad Man comes in the form of a compilation of
tracks from previous albums and serves as an excellent taster to the talents of
the man.
By definition, dark ambient consists of drones and resonances,
rumbles and rhythms, distortion and noises and has its roots in the 70s with
the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Tangerine Dream and the soundtrack of David
Lynch’s Eraserhead. In practice - as with
this fifteen-track collection - there are no boundaries, instead Spackman has
free reign over pulsing, looping plunderphonics which enthral and entice.
The opening ‘Play’ seems to gather every influence together
in one nine-minute collage and the closing ‘Torke’ has moments of conventional ambient
interspersed with sections of hybrid chaos.
Dark Ambient Collection is available as a name-your-price
album via Bandcamp and if you can spare some loose change, it’s well worth
chipping in a few pieces of your local currency.
Thursday, 16 January 2025
Review - Ashley Reaks - The Body Blow Of Grief
Ashley Reaks - The Body Blow Of Grief
(Self release)
Out Now
There’s a unique familiarity about a new Ashley Reaks album. The tight arrangements, the superb poetry and
of course, amazing artwork, the latter of which is no exception on The Body
Blow Of Grief, are staples for his massive work output.
Reaks, is a modern-day enigma. Only predictable in his unpredictability, he
fashions albums like his life depended on it.
Often disturbing, tracks turn corners and accelerate onwards without
warning, keeping the listener on their toes and wondering where they will head
next.
It’s continually difficult to pigeonhole Reaks – post-punk, jazzy,
improv, prog – there are hints of all sorts.
Maybe a meeting somewhere Beefheart and Bowie, he creates not just
soundscapes but also picturescapes, where his detailed and down-to-earth words create
imagery both beautiful and horrifying.
You really need delve no deeper than opening track Home Is
Where The Hurt Is to witness the diversity of vocals and sounds to see what
lies ahead. The Body Blow Of Grief isn’t just an album, it’s a journey, an
experience, a fifty-minute blast of escapism and a taste of hallucinogens
without even having to reach for them.
Wednesday, 8 January 2025
Review - Gordan - Gordan
Gordan - Gordan
(Glitterbeat Records)
Out Now
Following up on their 2021
album, When Down In The Meadow, Gordan’s self-titled second album is a sonic
experience filled with pulsating drums and throbbing bass married with some
inventive feedback and electronic effects.
The Serbian/German/Austrian
collective of Svetlana Spajic, Guido Möbius and Andi Stecher have assembled a
collection of minimalist journeys into experimentalism with a haunting, almost
horrifying sound.
Opener, Barabinska being case in
point where Spajic’s vocals are stern and chant-like against a backdrop of
tribal beats and reverberating guitars which can’t fail to draw the listener
in. You do get the feeling that at any point, the album could launch into a
chaotic cavalcade of anarchy but, the temptation is seemingly restrained in
favour of becoming the bastard son of Scott Walker’s 2019 album, Bish Bosch.
The exciting rhythms often
spiral into stunning pieces of controlled pandemonium and the most subdued
track on the album, How A Mountain Fairy Divided The Two Jakšić Brothers still
maintains a feeling of innovation and improvisation whilst retaining a sense of
order and regularity.
It can be hard listening at
times but one can’t avoid admitting that the originality contained in the eight
tracks is truly worthy of repeat visits. The prospect of witnessing Gordan in a
live environment is one that really whets the senses.
Review - Park Jiha - All Living Things
Park Jiha - All Living Things
(tak:til/ Glitterbeat Records)
14 February 2025
As with the previous Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022), the previous two Park Jiha albums, All Living Things is a thing of pure beauty.
Playing everything instrument herself – flute, piri,
glockenspiel, yanggeum, bells, saenghwang (amongst others) – Park Jiha takes a
different approach on her new album whereby she incorporates various electronic
instruments to compliment the conventional. The result is a stunning,
minimalist, nine track collection which truly benefits from being listened to
in one sitting to appreciate the intricate soundscapes created.
There is a beautiful natural feel to the album, almost like
sitting or walking outdoors as hints of jazz and ambient underpin an obviously
Korean base. It is the contact with nature that elevates this album, sometimes
simple and sometimes complicated, it echoes the metaphoric steps we take every
day, feeling the dew on our feet from the freshly dampened grass as the fresh
morning air is inhaled into your soul.
Instruments sound like the breeze, like birds, like nature.
Special praise must go to Bloom that proceeds gently on a wave of chimes and
Growth Ring that offers up a slightly livelier tempo on an album that does not
disappoint.
Sheer class.
parkjiha.bandcamp.com
Tuesday, 28 May 2024
Listen! - Erika Tsuchiya & Josh Rodenberg - LF18 / Infinity
Saturday, 18 May 2024
Listen! - mylittlebrother - You Know Better
Mortality Tables - The Engineer
In 2012, writer and Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith (Electronic Sound, Clash, Further.) wrote a short story, ‘The Engineer’. A work of fiction, the story was loosely based on his father, Jim Smith, a skilled mechanical engineer who had spent most of his adult life working in a factory in Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘The Engineer’ represented Mat’s thoughts, feelings and fears about his father’s retirement.
The story was later narrated by author, producer, playwright and poet Barney Ashton-Bullock. 29 artists, working in the fields of sound art, electronic, experimental and contemporary jazz music, were then approached to provide a sound response to a thirty-second extract of Barney’s narration. The order in which they agreed to be involved determined which section of narration they would be asked to respond to.
The collated 29 responses were curated and recorded over the next two-and-a-half years and assembled into a single, 14-minute collage by James Edward Armstrong. Its sprawling, disjointed presentation of short, rapidly-replaced ideas is intended to evoke the devastating confusion of Alzheimer’s, which Mat's father was diagnosed with in 2018.
The sleeve image depicts a teenage Jim Smith on Margate’s Promenade in the 1950s.
Saturday, 24 February 2024
.jpg)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)