Posts Tagged ‘dance music’

Megafragma / New Concordia / Kid Kid Squid – The Black Horse, York, 1st October 2026

Posted: 3 October 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ is playing just before Kid Kid Squid start, and I find myself on a rare reflective trip on how times have changed. I was in primary school – aged eight – when it was released, my school reopened on the evening that the full-length video was aired on the BBC so we could all watch it on a TV on a trolley in reception. Even at that young age, it felt like a moment in musical history. No musical release is such a global event now. Not even half-time at the Superbowl has a sense of occasion which comes close. Culturally – in no small part on account of the advent of streaming, but also the absence of music on television now, which means that the promotional video has far less reach and impact – music has come to be treated like sonic wallpaper. Do people really listen to Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, or is their bland fare simply amiable background? Come 2015, a headteacher is forced to apologise after showing the ‘Thriller’ video to some primary-age pupils (age seven and eight) because, according to their complaining parents, they suffered ‘night terrors’ afterwards.

I expect the members of Kid Kid Squid, David and Katy – who emerged from the rocked-up dance covers act The DDK – will remember the release of ‘Thriller’ well. How well they remember the 90s is probably another matter. It’s evident from their penchant for banging beats that they spent some time having it large during the rave years. Having tried out their brand of driving techno with live guitar at an Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) night a few months ago, this is the duo’s first gig proper, and they’ve got things pretty tight. The first track is a bit Utah Saints, but with more of drum ‘n’ bass leaning – and the drums and bass are both thunderous. Are they rock with rave beats, or rave with rock guitars? However you slant it, the sound is outstanding. Crisp and clear, the beats are pounding and the heavily processed guitar is like a tweaking Roland TR303. Midway through, they drop their eponymous track and it simply explodes both in energy and volume – and while the chorus of ‘We ain’t no kid and we ain’t no squid!’ might not be the pinnacle of poeticism, it’s good fun – and factually accurate. These things matter. The set culminates in a frenzy of flange. That’s good fun, too, and that’s a fair summary of what KKS are about: not so serious, hi-NRG, fun times.

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Kid Kid Squid

I’m not sure what happened to the Old Concordia – apart from the Polish-built sailing training vessel which capsized and sank off the coast of Brazil in 2010. Sturdy drumming and soaring guitar definite their alt-rock sound. They’re solid and then some, and it’s a remarkably confident debut (they’ve both played before, and together, but this is their first outing as a two-piece). Atmospheric passages fill the space between songs, thus avoiding awkward silence or – worse – awkward chat and banter. They must have poured some hours into rehearsing to come out this fully formed. I’ve no idea where the bass was coming from. The drummer isn’t wearing headphones, so there’s nothing to indicate a click track or sequencing, but there must be something happening behind the scenes. Maybe it’s simply the power of the mind and some kind of magic. But what’s behind the scenes is immaterial, really. Out front, we get blistering guitars, chunky riffs and some of the most incredible drumming. Verdict in short: amazing. Horsemusic have done it again in introducing us to another act worthy of national attention.

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New Concordia

Megafragma are a relatively new act, but comprising some old faces, including, on guitars, Alexander King, of Glass / The Sound of Glass – quite possibly one of the most preposterously pretentious bands I’ve ever witnessed. But hey, he’s only the guitarist and backing vocalist, right? Right.

They rock up in red jumpsuits: that’s ok. The Wharf Street Galaxy Band, one of the finest acts to evert emerge from York / Leeds wore red boiler suits. And these guys are tight. Polished. Slick… They’re an amalgamation of post-rock, post metal, post post… which is actually pretty cool. But they do go a bit punk-pop and demonstrate some emo leanings, which is less so. Still, I could let that go… There’s a niggle here, and I need to chew on it while I dissect.

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Megafragma

More than just a click track, they have electronic drums augmenting the live kit. The bass is a bit buried in the mix, but still, they sound super-slick, anthemic, arena-standard and the drums – which are technically faultless – are well up in the mix and propel the songs along with a dynamic force. This is not your average pub-gig band, and the set is loaded with the wow factor. But the songs… pause and exhale… are quite forgettable. As the set progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is very much a case of kit over content. More like Middlingfragma. They sound immense, but hollow. Technically superlative, but missing some essential ingredients, namely soul, and passion.

I can’t grumble too hard: three high-quality bands for £0, and pints in proper glasses for £5.20. This is where it’s at.

Isn’tses – Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole

Posted: 9 September 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 14th August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Working under the Isn’tses moniker, London duo Lisa McKendrick and Tim Drage have spent more than a decade sculpting noise with their own unique slant, evolving not only their own methods and methodologies, but their own circuitry, perhaps most famously the ‘Chernobylizer’, a compact yet devastatingly powerful noise-generating device.

The notes which accompany this, their latest release in a prodigious and ever-expanding body of work, describe Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole as ‘raw and chaotic’, departing from noise alone to deliver a work where ‘a mix of complex beats, textures, unpredictable sounds and frenetic rhythms enter the music, at times with melody and screamy vocals as they push the boundaries of electronic music,’ and finally summarising it as ‘an intense mind-bending spacey journey of wild explosive emotion and sonic textures.’

It contains ten compositions – songs would be a hell of a stretch – the titles of which either seem purposefully incomplete and therefore impenetrable, or otherwise oblique, apart from those which include references to ‘rave’. There is certainly an abundance of heavy-duty pulsating electronic beats and whoops and cheers and yelps crop up with a certain frequency. But if this is to be considered in any way a ‘dance’ album, it’s in the context of late 70s and early 80s electronica – the warped groves and unsettling, detached vocals of Throbbing Gristle circa 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance. The beats are industrial strength, but shudder and stutter, pulsing through fuzzed-out, distorted synth waves and an endless array of extraneous interjections. Demented shrieks and wailings rise though the thick atmosphere towards the end of the first track, ‘Sol Receiver’, and ‘I Spit on Your Rave’ only amplifies their commitment to melding propulsive beats and throbbing synths and melting them together with a sonic haze and disconcerting sense of psychopathy.

The majority of the pieces evoke a kind of derangement of the senses, repetition and disconcerting discord conjuring a trance-like evocation – but it’s dark and murky, and there’s a thick, squelchy analogue feel which contributes to a sound that feels more like the drug-induced hellish nightmare of a cult than spiritual transcendence. The thumping, clumping stomp or ‘Freekfall’ is nothing short of purgatorial, and you want to escape, but you find your limbs are leaden and limp, and you can’t move as you find yourself staring into a swirling vortex, even when you close your eyes. There is no escape.

‘Undo Fear Biases’ is an unadulterated seething miasma of heavy noise propelled by a palpating myocardial spasm of a beat, while ‘Free The Party’ is centred around an interview or some other monologue about the days of rave culture. In contrast, ‘I’m Not The’ is the soundtrack to the rave where the trip is bad, man. It’s like hearing The Prodigy and some shit shoegaze indie at the same time while your brain is exploding one lobe at a time and the fragments form small vortices as they cascade from your ears. Pleasant, it is not, and the same is true of ‘Do Or Die’, with its sonic allusions to ‘Discipline’ and ‘Whorl of Sound’, and which escalates to something akin to the detonation scenes in Threads. Total sonic annihilation, absolute obliteration. Sitting here with only a beer, my head is beginning to spin and my stomach is slowly starting to churn. This isn’t accidental: Isn’tses understand the impact of frequencies, and the way sounds interact.

Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole is by no means especially harsh as noise goes, but it is relentlessly, unyieldingly hellish in its conception and execution. It’s no criticism when I comment that this is hard work and a difficult album: it’s supposed to be. But why is the churning, shifting, reverberating discord of Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole more challenging than a screeding blast of continuous harsh noise? Everyone’s brain processes things differently, so I can only speak for myself when debating this, but it’s more often than not possible to allow waves of noise to wash over and flow across the mind, to go with the flow, as it were. Dance music is different in many ways, but by the same token, it’s easy to process a steady four-four beat, particularly when it’s the constant, consistent bass thump which defines the majority of dance music – it’s that beat, and that consistent tempo, which makes it music for dancing. You zone out the extranea, and focus on that core element. And that’s the common ground shared by dance and noise when it comes to how we process it – by zooming out and focusing on something within it. This isn’t possible with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole. Everything about how each piece is assembled is built on continual disruption. There’s nothing to latch on to, there’s nothing consistent. Yes, there are rhythms, but they’re jarring, riven with irregularities, or what the brain will likely perceive as irregularities, and there’s so much else going on, disconnected and disjointed sounds flying in all directions, that any attempt to filter them out and focus is impossible.

Back in the late 70s, much of what Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire were doing was inspired by the tape experiments of William S. Burroughs, and the proposed methods for psychic warfare using sonic weaponry as detailed in Electronic Revolution and The Revised Boy Scout Manual. There’s a palpable sense that with Throwing A Shoe Into A Black Hole, Isn’tses are returning to the origins of industrial music. And what’s remarkable is that even now, it’s absolutely devastating. Complete sensory overload. A derangement of the senses.

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King Midas – Blanco

Posted: 13 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Fysisk Format – 17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

King Midas’ seventh studio album is the follow-up to their 2013 Norwegian Grammy-winning album Rosso. Thirteen years is quite the gap, although such spans between albums seem rather less unusual now than in times past. In the 90s, the five-year gap between The Stone Roses eponymous debut and The Second Coming was painted by the press as being longer than an eternity, but the last few years have seen acts return after absences of a quarter century or more. The fact is that many artists find themselves mired in life and in dayjobs, because it’s hard to make a living from music alone, and regular work and raising families aren’t compatible with creative work, and especially not with touring. And so it is that Blanco arrives more than thirty years after their first EP, From the Pipeline, in 1994, and notably, they report that the band ‘still consists of founding members Ando Woltmann and Per Vigmostad who share production credit for Blanco’.

According to the duo, ‘Blanco is an album about emptiness, partly inspired by Belgian cold wave music from the early 1980s, by the noise cancellation in BMW models from 2023/24, by New Age as a concept, by the novel Lanzarote by French author Michel Houellebecq, by Rod Stewart on his way home from a party in the wee hours and by yuppie Scandinavian businessmen in all forms’.

This seems like a curious array of inspirations, and I can only comment with any real knowledge on Michel Houellebecq’s typically bleak and anticlimactic novel and Rod Stewart, whose 80s work haunts me on account of childhood memories if my mother dancing to awful, awful songs ‘Baby Jane’ and Atlantic Crossing still got played far more often than was healthy. But then, I was also exposed to dangerous levels of Phil Collins and Tina Turner, which probably indirectly explains my immersing myself in writers like Houellebecq, who I arrived at on the publication of Whatever, which was described by Tibor Fischer as ‘L’Etranger for the info generation’.

According to their bio, ‘Blanco marks a brand new start for King Midas – a tabula rasa, a blank slate – where all methodology, instrumentation, composition and production are untried ground, and all paths have been trodden anew’.

‘Sunrise’ is a drifting sprawl of muiltitracked autotuned vocals which quiver and warble over some expansive, semi-ambient synths. It’s novel and vaguely entertaining, but you hope to dog that the album gets better, and mercifully, it does, conjuring expanses of quite claustrophobic, beat-driven electronica.

As an exploration of emptiness, it works well: the vocals are largely sampled and / or looped, creating an atmosphere of detachment, human sounds without the human presence, while the instrumentation is minimal in its arrangement. There’s no comfort to be found here, no human warmth, just stark monotony, beats that thud on, and on, and on… I never really took to dance music because it felt… impersonal, is perhaps the word which summarises the experience. And that’s despite being a fan of late 80s and early 90s electronic industrial music. Anyway. Blanco seems to take those elements and turn a mirror on them. It is repetitive, impersonal, monotonous… and that’s the comment. And there are flickers where there’s a near-silent acknowledgement. ‘Look’ brings a strongly eighties feel, and things fall into place around the BMW comments with ‘Blaupunkt’. A friend of mine bought an 80s BMW in the early 90s and thought he was flash as hell with his aircon and bangin’ stereo, although we’d be freezing our tits off while he burned fuel at an alarming rate with the aircon on and the stereo sounded shit. I’ve digressed again, but this is what happens with albums which are largely instrumental, and ‘Blaupunkt’ sounds like Kraftwerk nabbing bits of Ennio Morricone and chucking in a bit of New Order circa Movement. It’s pretty cool, and also hypnotic, but also intense.

The eight-and-a-half-minute closer, ‘Infinite Sadeness’ is slow, deliberate, expansive, the pulsating beats which define the album as a whole replaced by altogether sparser, more minimal, and subtler percussion, and with the introduction of flute it adds a new dimension to the sound.

Blanco is varied, and takes some time to come around to. The indefinable absence is affecting, and reverberates around these taut compositions, which emanate a sense of emptiness, assimilating all aspects of its dominant theme. But patience is the key. It’s as a whole that Blanco works.

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Mycrotom – Ratoratiyo

Posted: 2 June 2021 in Albums
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Mongkong Music – mkng-01

Digital release date: 4th June 2021 / Physical release date: 4th July 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Having been introduced to the world of microtonal experimentation around a decade ago, I’ve found a certain fascination in those close lenses on the most minute of details – the musical equivalent of peering through a microscope and seeing objects and life forms on a granular, even cellular level. I’ve also learned that anything that can be rendered or viewed from a micro level, it’s probably been done, or otherwise is within someone’s sites to do, or I simply haven’t found it yet. Take, for example, the ensemble Microtub – not a small bath, but a trio of microtonal tubas.

Mycrotom is not a microtonal tom drum, nor a microtonal extension of the work of the Vegetable Orchestra (a ten-piece collective based in Vienna who make music using instruments crafted from actual fresh vegetables). In fact, the moniker is somewhat misleading, for as the press release notes, ‘Tom Simonetti alias mycrotom has created rather large-format sound carpets in the Bertolt Brecht mechanical engineering city of Augsburg. He now presents the same: soundscapes on which you can go out of work and walk away.’

So, it’s actually about sound carpets. I have to confess that I chuckled a little on reading that, before reminding myself of my own habit of describing works as ‘sonic tapestries’ and going into detail about the ‘fabric’ of numerous compositions – and that was before I listened to the album.

The pieces are built on interesting juxtapositions – sparse motoric beats click metronomically through gloopy synth basslines that could have been lifted off early 80s electro cuts on Wax Trax! while xylophone-type chimes ring out lilting motifs. Extraneous sounds are looped to forge unusual rhythms, and there’s a muddy, murky aspect to the sound that makes it difficult to separate the different elements.

Many of the synth sounds are vintage in style, squelchy, thick, fuzzy-edged, and while the arrangements are sparse, the effect is far from minimalist: there’s quite some density to the sound, and what’s more, a lot of Ratoratiyo pursues quite danceable grooves, and with a hybrid of 90s minimalism and 80s robotix, it feels completely removed from anything human.

‘Logic by Machine’ contains human voices – sampled, distanced, detached – against a sparse, rhythmic loop. It’s anything but comforting, and leaves one feeling even further adrift, alienated. It’s a strange experience that twists at the cognitive filters in unexpected ways. After all, none of the elements are new or particularly unusual – but their assemblage is, and in ways that are difficult to place a finger on. And it’s that difficulty of placement that lies at the heart of the challenge for a listener. You ask yourself ‘how does this fit with my experience?’ and ‘where do I belong in all of this?’ There are no handholds or footholds in terms of emotional resonance, in terms of experience. And precisely what does this convey? The sounds may be warm, but the experience is somehow cold, with a sense of separation.

It’s from this place of distance, a position of removal, isolation, that we begin to explore the spaces of Ratoratiyo, and the exploratory adventure begins.

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