You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2007.
How long would I need to listen to The Necks to get them to perch happily at the top of my Last FM most listened to artists chart? Let’s see. Up there currently we’ve got Tim Hecker with around 200 plays. So that shouldn’t be too hard, should it? Or it wouldn’t be if the Necks didn’t have a penchant for releasing one-track hour-long albums. I figure that at my average listening rate per day it would probably take me over a month. However it would be a month of the most sublime improvising piano/bass/drums trio on the planet, so it might be worth a go. Read the rest of this entry »
Ah, the Luminaire – that most peculiar of venues, designed so that if an event sells out only about 25% of the people attending will see anything at all. Armed in advance with this knowledge, particularly in light of the fact that this was Stars of the Lid’s first London show in around 6 (six) years, you would of course decide to get there pretty sharpish and park your bum on the steps down the front. Read the rest of this entry »
Bush Hall is a chandelier-lit oasis in an area lined only with fast-food emporiums, ticket touts (Mos Def at the Empire, the rather forbidding building next door to which is pictured above) and at least one too many identically-named tube stations, so visiting it twice in just over a week was a bit of a treat. Doors on time tonight, and no free-for-all for seats either, so all was to my liking. And the opportunity to further attempt to digest the rich pudding of songs that was Efterklang’s Parades album was to be welcomed too, assuming there was room after the bigos and golobki I’d been washing down with vodka at Patio on Goldhawk Road. (Took my mind off the then impending house move too, which is currently rendering my internet access somewhat intermittent - apologies if blogging is somewhat lighter than usual). Read the rest of this entry »
Newcomers to this place may, as well as wondering what the funny smell is and who that mad-haired chap in the corner is talking to, be thinking that this is some sort of 1970s-themed blog. There were all those krautrock references peppered throughout the White Rainbow review, there was the Miles Davis box set, umm, “review”, and now this, which couldn’t be more 1970s if it had the date “1974” in the title, which in fact it does. Read the rest of this entry »
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, in particular those kind people who send me, quite unbidden, all manner of shiny round things to use as coasters, I’m only reviewing things that have more than one disc and come housed in metal boxes. A much smaller and more minimalist case this one, both in terms of the packaging (I wouldn’t advise storing your sandwiches in this) and the music. Read the rest of this entry »
In which The Wire’s series of 25th anniversary gigs rumbled to a close – that would be rumbled in the noisy sense but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in the fighty sense of the word. More on that later. I suppose the omens were there – walking down a dark and rain-lashed Great Eastern Road, while once again (again!) getting lost and managing not to find Cargo. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m sure it said on my tickets that doors opened at 7pm for this Wire XXV / No-Signal night of avant-jazz. So I was surprised to get there at 7.15 to see some closed doors and a queue. A queue with the luxuriantly moustachiod Boredoms dancer at the front, looking rather restless and impatient. Rather than standing around in the freezing cold, we went for a drink somewhere warm only to find upon our return to the venue that not only were the doors now open, but that we had missed Archeti and Wigeti; further the venue was laid out with rows of seats, and there appeared to be a top-heavy bums/seats ratio. Bugger that, we thought, we’ll sit down the front; after certain events earlier in the day I was both ill-tempered and very much in the mood to lie on the floor and mong. Read the rest of this entry »
Ten uses for the Miles Davis Complete On The Corner box set: Read the rest of this entry »
To those of us who are too young to remember them, it kinda feels like the 70s didn’t actually happen, like they were something that Rick Wakeman invented while he was in the pub nursing a pint of John Smith’s and absent-mindedly writing rude words in the Sun’s two-speed crossword. But, apparently, top scientists have proved that they did in fact happen, probably by carbon dating Damo Suzuki or something, and, after the verdict in ELP v mapsadaisical (2005 SLT 499 per Lord Clarke: “I am bound…to find that the absence of the particulars in question from the very detailed Note, 6/9 of process, rendered it ineffective as preventing the adjudicator’s decision becoming final and binding in terms of Clause 66”. Ouch, that stung) I’m not allowed to question that fact in print any more. Read the rest of this entry »
Tonight’s Wire XXV show marked the end of an exhausting run of 5 gigs in 8 days for me, and as good as they have mostly been – in fact, tonight’s was up there with the very best - I’m actually quite glad to see the back of them. It might give me time to tackle what is probably a mounting backlog of CDs I should be reviewing (I’ve totally lost track). So, for old times’ sake, one last restaurant recommendation for the week: if you find yourself in the Holborn area, perhaps needing to kill some time before a gig, you could do worse than trying out the bulgogi and kimchi at Korean restaurant Asadal – age old recipes served freshly and with fire and spice; much like tonight’s performances in fact. Read the rest of this entry »
Newcomers to this place are probably beginning to think it is a London restaurant review site. Apologies to those who really couldn’t care less about where I fill my belly before gigs (and in particular those who live in the geographically obscure area known as “outside London”). Anyway, as I was seeing Beirut at the Roundhouse, a trip to a Russian/east European restaurant in the Chalk farm area seemed logical. And as the Ukrainian beef goulash ladled out at Trojka was probably my highpoint of the evening, it would be wholly wrong of me not to highlight it. Read the rest of this entry »
I’d been having some very mixed feelings about coming to this show, mainly because I knew that on the other side of London Tim Hecker was playing in the ICA. I already had these tickets when that was announced, and while I could have just ditched them and headed to the West End, I decided to have a little faith in my initial instinct to buy these. I do find a lot to like in the records of Grouper, and Upset the Rhythm had done a pretty bang-up job in assembling an interesting-sounding line up for the event. And it was in a gallery, just down the road from Brick Lane, so I could at least amuse myself with curry and art, couldn’t I? Read the rest of this entry »
Just back from a visit to one cold, filthy, hellhole of a place full of people who dress oddly and look a bit vacant, known as the North of England*, and straight to another in the form of The Old Blue Last in Hoxton. The occasion was a Last FM-sponsored start-of-tour event featuring the hairy Japanese psych-rockers in their current incarnation as Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO. When I entered the venue the band themselves were sitting behind their merchandise stall, and a couple of them behind their massive overgrown barnets. A quick look through the CDs on offer showed three labelled as “NEW!”, which is testament to the band’s oppressive release schedule. Read the rest of this entry »
Since I purchased it at the most enjoyable Touch 25 evening the other week, the only times this new CD from Sweden’s BJ Nilsen has left my CD player are when the machine has gone en derangement, and I’ve been forced to eject it to shout obscenities at its dumb, tongue-lolling, metal face. If the machine was any more reliable, I’d be tempted to solder it shut with this inside and listen to it on repeat forever, or at least until they introduce the by now seemingly-inevitable eco-tax on stupid shiny dial-faced boxes, and then I’m flinging the thing out of the window and into a bush and scarpering into the night. Read the rest of this entry »
I finally lost my Vortex virginity last night with a trip to see the Necks play in this lovely venue, finding it perched incongruously amongst the dozens of ocakbasi restaurants and curious clothes shops which constitute Dalston’s glamorous Kingsland Road. Read the rest of this entry »
This is one of those releases where I could just go on and on about the innovative, minimalist packaging. I’m not going to do that, for several reasons: 1) It is a Raster-Noton release, hence superb design is pretty much par for the course; 2) Colin will pop up in the comments reminding me that I promised to write something for hardformat about my favourite pieces of music design and I haven’t done it yet; and 3) It’ll give me more space to write about the music (yes, well spotted, I’ve managed to waste a paragraph anyway). Read the rest of this entry »
So the band are called WZT Hearts. But apparently, we are to pronounce that Wet Hearts. WZT. Wet. Wzt. Wet. Doubleyouzedtee. Wet. Wizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt. Weeeeeeeeeeeeet. Nope, I’m not having that. You don’t come round my gaff, steal my teabags, pinch my girflriend’s bum, put my CDs back in the rack in the wrong order, and then take liberties with my language like that, you hear?
Oh, but then again this is really good. It opens with one of the year’s best Fennesz-inspired (damn, I need a new Fennesz record, I’m grabbing anything that sounds remotely similar and clutching it to my busom like a kleptomaniac nanny) pieces in “Hassler”, an epic buzzy thing which is overtaken by waves of distortion until it is a ragged ship, until the drums of death strike up, until the machines fail with a shriek, and until it goes down with all hands drunk and oblivious.
The album never quite reaches those heights again, which is probably as much a function of Newtonian physics as anything – there is so much friction playing against momentum, dragging and scraping and grinding against the chainsaw guitars of “Lava Nile” and the vocal splinters of “Hearth Carver”. This kind of lunacy will inevitable elicit comparison to NYC rabblerousers Black Dice, but in truth WZT Hearts deserve their name to acquire a reputation of its own, other than for the aforementioned reasons of linguistic nonsensicality. I may forgive them that in time, but I’ll never forget.
Thread Rope Spells Making No Sense is available now from Carpark.
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