You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2009.
My review of Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Distortion from last year has somehow become the most read review on this site since its inception. If I knew that was going to happen, I might have done a better job of it. Left out all that nonsense about Indiana Jones, for a start. Where exactly was I going with that? I hope that at least a couple of readers have stuck around since then, long enough to experience the unedifying sight of me salivating once more over new releases from the house of Drumm. Read the rest of this entry »
The Caretaker’s Persistent Repetition of Phrases was one of those albums that everyone seemed to be talking about last year, even if only around 500 people actually owned a copy. Until a recent repress, I wasn’t one of them. It is, of course, a masterpiece; a fascinating (and quite disturbing) musing on the subject of brain conditions, full of deeply haunting and hazy repetition, songs playing on deeply degraded internal loops. A new album is imminent, but in the mean time he has slipped out this incredible 6CD set which you mustn’t let slip by. Read the rest of this entry »
A heat haze was hanging over London, far removed from the drizzly murk of last Friday. People were sunbathing on the exposed low tide shore down below the South Bank Centre (you aren’t on the Riviera! That is the Thames, for heaven’s sake! Look at those things floating by in the river – they are…they are…actually I have no idea what they are, but they may be radioactive so I’d be careful if I were you). And here I was about to lock myself up in a dark room for three hours for the first of two Touch special events taking place in the space of a month, this time featuring the substantial combined talents of Fennesz, Rosy Parlane and CM Von Hausswolff. As you can imagine, I was quite happy with my lot. Read the rest of this entry »
Given the choice, I opted for the more melodic charms of Bonnie Prince Billy rather than the dense dissonance of SpaceShipp from the Ether Festival‘s eclectic ragbag of delights. Coming after the skull-scraping soul-scorching terror of Saturday night, I’m glad I did. I initially wrote off Bonnie Prince Billy’s latest album Beware as countrified hokiness, but through repeat listenings have found that the tunes therein are some of the strongest he has written in years. And the country stuff isn’t that bad; surely if can tolerate 70s Neil Young, I can tolerate this. Read the rest of this entry »
Just thinking about this Second Layer-promoted show filled me with a sense of deep foreboding. Not because the music was going to be terrifying (which it was, but more on that later), but because I knew I’d be spending three hours on an uncomfortable church pew, trying not to think about needing the toilet (was anyone else there for the Tony Conrad concert? My bladder still bears the scars). Read the rest of this entry »
The first gig I went to when I moved to London in 1997 was Mouse on Mars (supported by Fridge, iirc). So if, on the way home after this Ether festival performance on the South Bank, I had somehow managed to throw myself off the Hungerford Bridge to drown in the swirling Thames below, the symmetry at least would have amused me. Read the rest of this entry »
Finally managed to get hold of a copy of this. Pretty, isn’t it? The “album reviews” tag with which this post is lumbered doesn’t come close to doing it justice. I swear that when my copy first arrived, I spent an hour just stroking it. And then another hour wiping off my dirty fingerprints. Only then did I began thumbing gingerly through the contents of this new edition of the Rune Grammofon retrospective book, with new interviews and artwork by Kim Hiorthoy. It took me another day before I remembered about the 2 CDs that were secreted within the folds of the jacket. Read the rest of this entry »
As you can probably tell from the preceding posts, I’ve been overdosing on a certain musical form somewhat over the last couple of weeks. Well, you know what it is like with minimalist dealers – you may go to them only looking for an eighth of Eno, but before you know it you have a full blown addiction and are desperately scraping around for the crumbs from Christopher Hobbs’s Crumbling Cookie. Rather than going cold turkey, I’m weaning myself off gradually with this pair of new releases on the ever-reliable 12k label. Read the rest of this entry »
Three days gone, one to go – stay with me, we’re almost there. The last day of the World Minimal Music Festival was to run the gamut across the whole spectrum of minimal music, from solo performance to large ensemble, fun to philosophical, absorbing to absurd. From major players such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley to lesser known composers Tom Johnson and Christopher Hobbs. Minimal music. Maximum variety. Read the rest of this entry »
After two excellent days of minimal classical music, something rather different. The Amsterdam jazz and improvised music venue Bimhuis sticks out over the IJ looking like it and the more classically-minded Muziekgebouw have been surgically spliced together. As a statement, it is an important one, signifying the equal cultural importance of the arts of spontaneous and non-spontaneous composition. I suppose the London equivalent would be grafting something like the Vortex or Oto onto the Royal Festival Hall and demanding that they play nice. I don’t know if improvised music in the Netherlands was ever in the cultural and geographical ghettos that it finds itself in over here, but ascending the stairs to the comfortable seats and stunning views of the Bimhuis for this adjunct to the World Minimal Music Festival, I couldn’t help but admire the dignity that the people of Amsterdam are now affording it. Read the rest of this entry »
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