Monthly Archive

Too many records, not enough ears; world too big, wallet too small; information sources too many, information receptors limited to a couple of failing eyes and an increasingly forgetty brain.  My excuse as to why certain undoubtedly very good records failed to ascend to the rarified heights of the review pages over here is most likely something along those lines. Read the rest of this entry »

..and a flash machine, obviously.  With those I be hypnotising chickens; hopefully for long enough so that they don’t realise that this is yet another 2007 retrospective post which has nothing new to say about anything.  Once more, in lieu of something substantial, have some fluff: the favourite images to have been created by the photo pixies that have lived in the memory of my digital camera over the last 12 months. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my gig-going adventures this year, despite what some of them (hello, Wolf Eyes; konichiwa, Acid Mothers Temple) did to my ears.  I may have met you there, I was the hairy little fella, who kept quiet during the bands, but between songs was banging on about the restaurant he ate in earlier in the evening (hmmm, maybe I should do a top 10 restaurants of the year too).  Anyway, these are the ones which will probably linger longest in the memory… Read the rest of this entry »

After the crashing inevitability of last year’s chart, in which a couple of highly-paid fancy dan records toyed condescendingly with the opposition, 2007 was a much tighter affair, all solid defence, and in true cattenacio fashion, a sucker punch winner right at the death.  They’ll be dancing in the streets of Stockholm after this, no doubt. Read the rest of this entry »

Having missed the last couple of ATPs, and certainly never dipping my toes into the icy waters of the Nightmare Before Christmas (seaside – yes! December – ummm, no, are you insane?), I’d never been to Butlins Minehead before.  I’d been told that it was “nicer than Pontins Camber Sands”, which is pretty unhelpful, being akin to being described as “less murderous than Stalin”, or “being possessed of more musical talent than Mika” (please note: I have little idea who Mika is, feel free to replace this with the fancy-panted chart-striding colossus of your choice.  I am aware of Stalin’s somewhat less fancy-panted work, however).  So my mind was pretty open, and being pretty open, it chose to fill itself with searingly vivid images of a land full of colourful flying horses and candy floss, the air rich with the aroma of happiness being burnt on sticks and not a single mine, never mind one placed in close proximity to a head.  Minehead was not to be the warzone of the Camber of my diseased and drink-addled recollection (or indeed that of my previous ATP reviews, reviews so professionally written that I managed to get the year wrong in one of them). Read the rest of this entry »

Chinese whispers: I’d heard about Sun City Girl and Sublime Frequencies head Alan Bishop crawling on hands and knees across the Sahara with a battered cassette  in his mouth, tape spooling and spewing out behind him, tangling on rocks and being chewed on by lizards.  And not just any part of the Sahara, but the Western Sahara, a place so fractious that its borders are designated in my atlas by angry zigzags, those denoting a local rivalry so intense that the people on opposing sides of the divide can only look at each other in mirrors with their backs to each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Favourite Kim Hiorthøy sleeve anyone?  His work for Rune Grammofon is iconic, and has been a crucial factor in positioning the label as one of the most consistently fascinating and challenging labels of the last decade.  If I had to, and some day I probably will - voter turnout in general elections is dropping so dramatically in the UK that some day soon it will become compulsory, and from there it is a slippery slope to mandatory voting in X Factor (for Rhydian, obviously), and from there but a short leap to having to make known your preferred sleeve by a certain young Norwegian designer - I would go for the twin suns of Alog’s Red Swing Shift.  No I wouldn’t, I’m pencilling my X next to the chromatic snowflakes of Arve Henriksen’s Chiaroscuro.  Or the blacker-than-blacker-than-black Deathprod box set.  Tell you what, just take me and lock me up or shoot me or whatever you do to wimps like me these days, but I’m abstaining. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Youngs is one of the most enigmatic and singular of artists.  Earlier this year he played on a bill which included the Finnish freak-folk chanteuse Islaja and American minimal violinist Tony Conrad.  Like sometime collaborator Jandek, Youngs plays live so rarely – I don’t think he had been on stage in many years – but here had the courage to sing unaccompanied in a church, and to do so with a passion that riveted all present to their pews.  Such vision has led him to record some startling avant-electronic albums, such as The Naïve Shaman and River Through Howling Sky, and has now led him to record the most enigmatic and singular of folk-guitar albums.  Read the rest of this entry »

Do you really want to know what I think of this? There are plenty of reviews of this out there, most of which are probably written by people who know much more about this junglestep/twoface/dubmonkey/whatever malarkey than I do, and all of which I tried to avoid reading, lest it spoilt my first listen.  Read the rest of this entry »