My as yet unnamed record label feature…

…just keeps on going on the gLASSsHRIMP show, which is broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM on Wednesdays from 9.30-11pm. So far this series I’ve featured Type, Digitalis, Tartaruga, Not Not Fun, Touch, Miasmah, Editions Mego, Thrill Jockey, Ghost Box, Tapeworm, Hospital Productions, Olde English Spelling Bee, Family Vineyard and Leaf, playing a mixture of classics, new material, and even a number of pretty exciting exclusives. Tonight is the turn of Sheffield’s exciting Singing Knives label, and next week John Chantler from Room40 will be coming in for a chat and to play some freshly-pressed goodness.

You can stream the show from 9.30pm tonight here, the label feature should start some time after 10pm. And no, it isn’t archived or repeated, so don’t miss it, I don’t care if Mad Men is on TV at the same time…

Jana Winderen, Energy Field (Touch)

“I can live at sea! The sea forgives all! Unlike those mean old mountains. I hate them so much”. I wonder how many albums on Touch Homer Simpson had heard before he came to that ever-so-slightly life-changing conclusion. Very few, I suspect. A number of releases on Touch have had maritime themes, including BJ Nilsen’s The Short Night and Fennesz’s The Black Sea, although most celebrated may be the field recordings (if you can call under the sea a “field”) of Chris Watson. These records are fascinating explorations of the mysteries of the ocean, but leave you with a distinctly unsettled feeling, unsure about what exactly you’ve just heard, but in no doubt about the sea’s awesome dark power. To this collection of releases we can now add Jana Winderen’s Energy Field.

ETHER FESTIVAL: To Rococo Rot and Hans Joachim Irmler, AGF and Gudrun Gut, Vladislav Delay and Polar Bear at the QEH, 23/04/10

To celebrate St George’s Day I took myself along to an Ether festival event billed as “Berlin Sounds”. Given their front pages this week, that is probably enough for the Daily Mail to paint me as a Nazi. Not sure what effect it’ll have on the opinion polls in the key marginal South Bank seat, where the entire population of London was otherwise engaged in much more Mail-approved behaviour (i.e. getting smashed on litres of Pimms) on a fabulous Spring evening.

ETHER FESTIVAL: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music Trio at the Royal Festival Hall, 19/04/10

Lou Reed walked into a hall that had been humming to itself for twenty minutes, four guitars propped up against amps creating a pulsing malevolence. He looked much older and frailer than I was expecting. Glasses perched on his gaunt face, he shuffled over to the source of the billowing noise, and began carefully inspecting the equipment. A sound engineer (and can you imagine anything worse than serving as sound engineer for the famously grumpy and particular Lou Reed?) stood nervously just to his right, like a condemned man awaiting execution. After some fiddling, Lou seemed to be “happy”, or at least “no more unhappy than normal”, and picked up one of the guitars to begin an extraordinary show which was to turn the clock back decades, and even put a smile on the curmudgeon’s face. This performance was of a very different Metal Machine Music to the 1975 original, but one equally full of thrilling and indeed youthful experimentalism.

ETHER FESTIVAL: Glass and Gorecki at the Royal Festival Hall, 17/04/10

Note the date. Looking west towards Heathrow, London’s skies were empty: no planes, no vapour trails. Thanks to the emissions from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull, London’s bird population had the skies to themselves. I hope they appreciated it. Across London gigs were being hastily cancelled and rescheduled, but thankfully this Ether festival performance went ahead, including a European premiere of Phlilip Glass’s Violin Concerto No.2, and a revival of one of the most significant pieces of classical music of recent years: Gorecki’s Symphony No.3.

ETHER FESTIVAL: Varèse 360 Day 1 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall 16/04/10

The Southbank Centre’s Ether festival advertises itself as the “annual music festival of innovation, art, technology and cross-arts experimentation”. Which is a pretty broad spectrum, I’m sure you will agree. This year’s lineup in particular is a bit of a ragbag, featuring quite a few events which could have been part of a typical Southbank programme, with some oddities programmed round them. The Varèse weekend feels like a continuation of the excellent series celebrating modern composers which has taken in the likes of Stockhausen and Rihm so far, whilst the Gorecki event was clearly pencilled into the calendar long before the festival had begun to take shape.

Richard A Ingram, Consolamentum (White Box)

The name Richard A Ingram may be unfamiliar to you. How about if I told you that he was the guitarist in Manchester prog-metal band Oceansize (where he goes under the name “Gambler”)? Nope, me neither. Well, never fear, I’ve exposed myself to the horrors of Myspace just so you don’t have to (the things I do in the name of “research”, I hope you appreciate this). And, blow me, these guys seem to be a “big thing”, having supported the likes of Faith No More and Smashing Pumpkins. They have over 28,000 friends. That sounds a lot. To put that in some sort of context, I went to the myspace of another Manchester musician prone to featuring on the pages of this website. Seasons Pre-Din has precisely 43 friends on his Myspace. He is doing it all wrong. He should form some sort of prog-metal band. Someone should tell him.

Autechre and Russell Haswell at Bocking Street Warehouse, 10/4/10

My memories of this late night low-light event are somewhat fragmentary. The first is of the approach, down a nondescript side street off Cambridge Heath Road. As we got closer, you could feel the ground trembling. A rattle, getting louder. Giant metal warehouse doors were shaking. Truth be told, I was pretty fucking scared. That was partly due to the fact that I’d never seen Autechre live before, and was doing so with some trepidation due to incredibly mixed reports about this tour, about how dreadful the Manchester show was, about how incredible Brighton was. Or was it the other way around? It may even have been both, simultaneously. I had however seen Russell Haswell before, so had some idea of the terror that awaited me there.

Mats Gustafsson, Phil Wachsmann and Pat Thomas at Cafe Oto, 09/04/10

I noticed that a bit of money has been spent on Cafe Oto recently. Some new speakers have been attached to the roof. And, even more importantly, the brass pipe to the right of the stage which drips water when the venue gets a bit hot and humid (i.e. most nights) has been boxed off. So they must be doing pretty well. This fact is also borne out by the lineups they’ve been able to attract this year, giving multiple night residencies to musicians of the calibre of Matthew Shipp, Peter Brotzmann, the Sun Ra Arkestra and Mats Gustafsson. And what is particularly pleasing about these residencies is the opportunity it affords the artist concerned to try out some different things over the course of their stay. Gustafsson grabbed this with both hands, using the first night of his two night stay at Oto to do something quite different to what I was expecting.

Broken Deer, “White Woman” video

Further to my Olde English Spelling Bee label feature on last week’s gLASSsHRIMP radio show, here is a (proper mental) video by OESB artist Alice Cohen for the track “White Woman” from the forthcoming album by Broken Deer called POLARAURA. I’m looking forward to hearing more of this.