Posts Tagged ‘Experimental’

Vamberator – Age of Loneliness

Posted: 5 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Imagine having your album release scheduled many months in advance only to find the release date crashed by The Cure’s first album in sixteen years. Imagine you’re not only an act likely to appeal to Cure fans, but your act features a former long-serving member of The Cure. This is the true story of Vamberator, the duo consisting of Jem Tayle, formerly of Shelleyan Orphan, and Boris Williams, Cure drummer from 1984 to 1994, and sometime contributor also to Shelleyan Orphan.

The album’s title is telling and possesses a certain resonance. Much has already been written on the contradictory impact of social media, and the idea that while we’ve never been more connected, we’ve never felt more isolated. Scrolling through endless snaps of people’s holidays, parties, nights out is a hollowing experience, and one that’s anything but inclusive. Of course, you want to be pleased and happy for these people sharing their experiences as they live their best lives, as is the parlance, but inside, you’re being eaten away as you’re confronted with your own mundane, grey existence.

If anything, the pandemic heightened the agony for many: half the population was basking in being work-free, spending days baking bread and discovering new hobbies and bingeing on Netflix, while the other half was battling their way into work, or juggling work and home schooling, or simply trapped indoors on their own – or worse. Virtual drinks via webcam and group WhatsApps and streaming gigs were poor substitutes for the real thing.

And now we’re supposedly back to normal, but it feels as if something has been lost, and possibly lost forever. Our lives have become more distant, more disparate. In my own experience, it simply seems harder to co-ordinate meeting with people, and while some people seem to be so busy with their social lives it’s a wonder they can remember what the interiors of their own homes look like, their busyness leaves some off us at home, disconnected for weeks at a time. I am not alone in being alone: for many, the creeping sense if isolation and loneliness weighs heavier than ever before. This is truly The Age of Loneliness.

I’ve begin with the digression in order to contextualise the point at which I arrive at this album, having spent the last few days – like a lot of people – immersed in the melancholia of the new Cure album, having not seen proper daylight for the best part of a week and struggling against the urge to hibernate.

The single release ‘Sleep the Giant of Sleeps’, which came out in the summer, showcased an energetic embracing of myriad firms, and I myself described it as ‘a mega-hybrid of alt-rock, post-punk, and psyche.’ It set a level of expectation for the album and despite being born from a place of comparative darkness, the spark of experimentation and joy of creating illuminates the recesses of Age of Loneliness.

‘I Used to be Lou Reed’ kicks the album off in a flurry of strings and takes flight with a quite poppy flavour. It’s got horns and string and synths bursting all over, and there’s a slick funk groove which emerges after a minute or so… but despite being there, there, and everywhere, from James Bond to crooning 90s indie all in the space of five minutes, nothing feels forced or corny. Wish-era Cure meets Pulp might not sound like the ultimate pitch, but prepare to be pleasantly surprised.

Shades of negativity colour songs with titles like ‘I Need Contact’ and the title track, as well as ‘I Don’t Want to Cut the Grass’, a paean to lethargy which drifts and lilts like a Kraftwerk piece, but with the drollness of late Sparks. ‘Pilgrim’ brings tints of Beatles-esque twanging and some Eastern shades alongside elements of psychedelia. With loping rhythms and layered instrumentation, the title track slips into a groove worthy of late 80s Wax Trax releases then swerves unexpectedly. ‘I Need Contact’ is a sparse piano-led ballad, and its simplicity in itself is affecting. ‘Creature in My House’ begins haunting and ominous, before swinging into an electropop glam stomp which shouldn’t work, but does. This is true of much of Age of Loneliness.

Being predictable is not an accusation one could level at Vamberator: Age of Loneliness is ambitious, and bold. Sometimes it goes over the top, but it’s forgivable, because instead of playing it safe, as musicians of their experience often do, Tayle and Williams have tested their limits here, and they’ve emerged victorious.

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Ashley Reaks – The Body Blow Of Grief

Posted: 4 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

As is the case with his collage artworks, there is a sense of physicality about Ashley Reaks’ recorded work. His album titles tend to be brief but evocative, visually or otherwise: Compassion Fatigue; Track Marks; Growth Spurts; Winter Crawls… these are titles which evoke a sensory response – a shudder, a shiver, a skin crawl. The Body Blow Of Grief – Reaks’ fourteenth solo album – lands with an impact before you even arrive at the music itself.

I suppose – as is often the case when it comes to any music – there’s a personal element to my response here, and I make no apology for this. As I have touched on elsewhere, art is personal, in that it elicits a response which is unique based on a multitude of factors, ranging from life experience to emotional state and the mood of the moment. But the very phrase, The Body Blow Of Grief, lands like a punch in the stomach, and I’m aware that, while recently bereaved, having lost my partner of twenty-two years and adjusting to life as a single parent to a twelve-year-old, I am acutely sensitive to things which many others wouldn’t be. And yes, grief hits like a body blow. It knocks you, hard, socks the air out of your lungs and leaves you feeling weak, dazed.

Reaks’ music very much sounds like his artwork looks: a collage, a collision of styles, disjointed elements overlayed unapologetically; instead of smoothing over the joints, Reaks revels in the ruptures. Because this is where the vitality of life is found.

‘Home is Where the Hurt is’ may be a fairly obvious piece of wordplay, but the album’s opener digs deep into this seem, one which is a rich source of material in Reeks’ exploitation of trauma and its effects. ‘I can’t really feel what’s real’, he confesses against a backdrop of dubby bass and honking horns, before a shuffling beat settles into a tidy groove. It’s a bit Interpol meets Madness before lurching into post—rock territory and tapering out in a rippling tingle of layered guitar.

While the topics may be heavy, The Body Blow Of Grief is remarkable for its levity, its musicality, it’s easy tunefulness. I don’t mean necessarily that it’s all air and light – because it really isn’t.

There’s some quite tight, choppy, indie guitar on ‘No Place In The Nature Of Things’, a song that squirms and twists its way through almost seven-and-a-quarter minutes.

‘Somewhere To Hide Among The Swarm’ takes the bold step out into the swarm to offer some-full-on progressive rock flavours.

Across the course of the album’s eight tracks, Reaks walks through the familiar territory of previous albums with leaning toward dub and post-punk, but ventures into altogether newer territories with some spaced-out prog-inspired explorations, and ‘Hobbling Like A Refugee’ has an eighties feel that unexpectedly delves into electropop and AOR. It’s not polished to the levels of the 80s rolled-up jacket sleeve bands, but it alludes to the slickness of the era, but the dark lyrics are a stark and uncomfortable contrast. ‘Mongrel Nation’ is a slice of chunky post-punk laced with the bombastic excesses of Muse and a few jazzy twists.

The last track, the eight-minute epic ‘I’m Not a Fossil’ is a multi-faceted, multi-headed monster propelled by some strong technical dtrumming.

As always, Reaks presents us with an album that’s complex and layered, but The Body Blow Of Grief feels like a step up in the ways it opens horizons to new levels of boldness and ambitious sonic vistas.

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‘It’s going to be epic…’ The Foenale is near: JG Thirlwell interviewed by John Wisniewski

Posted: 2 November 2024 in Interviews
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Intro: Christopher Nosnibor

Interview: John Wisniewski

Images: individually credited, via Foetus.org

It’s been over forty-five years since Melbourne-born James George Thirlwell washed up on English shores, and having played some keyboards on the album No Cowboys by post-punk act PragVec in 1980, he embarked on what would become a truly remarkable and lifelong musical journey of his own.

Along the way, he’s released no fewer than eleven studio albums under an array of variants of the Foetus moniker, not to mention quite literally dozens of other musical vehicles from big band (Steroid Maximus) to more experimental instrumental work (Manorexia) and almost everything in between, not to mention powerful collaborations with Marc Almond (Flesh Volcano), Jim Coleman (Baby Zizane), Lydia Lunch (Stinkfist), and the late Roli Mosimann (Wiseblood), to name but three of many. And then there are the numerous scores… and yet whatever he turns his hand to, his work has a certain distinctive style, a sense of drama.

Foetus may have been on hiatus since 2013, but at the age of sixty-four, Thirlwell is showing no signs of slowing down. John Wisniewski managed to catch a window in the man’s relentless schedule to ask about his myriad projects past, present, and future…

JW: Did you formally study music, JG?

JGT: I briefly learned cello and percussion when I was a kid. But I was very slow with sight reading.

Later I just taught myself everything from instruments to recording, programming, scoring etc.

Tell us about your first music project, Foetus. What did you want to present?

The initial catalyst for Foetus was to create something totally by myself, where I played wrote and produced everything, as a reaction to the democracy of playing with other people. I wanted to make the music in my head and the music I wanted to hear. I also wanted to create artifacts, a work of art as a multiple where everyone owned an original. It took me a long time to be able to fully realize what was in my head. I’m still not always successful with that transfer process.

How did the Lydia Lunch collaboration come about?

I knew Lydia’s work and was introduced to her when she moved to London in about 1982 through the Birthday Party. At first she asked me to write her a press bio as I had been writing fanciful bios for the Birthday Party! First I played sax with one of her projects which we toured with in Sweden. Then we started writing songs for something called The Hard Diamond Drill, which was never realized. Then we created Stinkfist and went on to make Immaculate Consumptive. We became involved romantically and moved to NYC together. I was with her until about 1989 / 1990.

Any favorite music artists?

Many favorite artists, it changes daily. I become obsessed with someone for an afternoon. I like to hear new things all the time. I am a cultural sponge. I publish a monthly playlist on my Tumblr blog. https://jgthirlwell.tumblr.com/

What inspires you to create?

Everything. I have so many ideas, it is an infinite renewable resource. I also have a hungry legacy and I have to make sacrifices to its insatiable maw.

Another legendary early collaboration was with Nick Cave. How did that one come about?

The Birthday Party broke up. Nick was looking to work with other people and we were friends. We wrote the music for one song together, which was Wings Off Flies on the first Bad Seeds album. When he came to record that album I went to some sessions, but drifted away as I was in the midst of a big bout of recording of Foetus material, the sessions that became the Hole album. A bit later we had the Immaculate Consumptive project – Oct 1983.

Do you like collaborating with other artists?

I have gotten better at it.

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Photo by Marylene May

What was the experience like working with Marc Almond and Trent Reznor’s material?

Marc is very open minded and works very fast and is excited by music that challenges him and stretches the boundaries of what he has done. So that is stimulating. For Trent I remixed two of his songs, “Wish" and "Mr Self Destruct". I did my work on it, mutating the original material. he wasn’t involved. He liked what I did.

Do you like to work within different genres of music?

You may have noticed one of the hallmarks in my music, is that I combine multiple styles often within one song.

What are you working on now?

New Xordox album Terraform, Venture Bros Volume 3 and Foetus HALT should all be out in 2025.

Also under way are two albums of symphonies for chamber orchestra, and album of soundtracks I have written for Ken Jacobs. An EP with Laura Wolf, a triple box of music I created for sound and art installations. Hopefully another Archer soundtrack album. And much more.

Why do you have so many projects on the go (and how do you manage it)?
I like to work in a lot of styles and on a lot of projects in different forms – solo pieces, ensemble pieces, multi channel, electronic, acoustic, vocal, instrumental. Concert works, classic songs, scoring. I have a lot of ideas to get out of my system. There’s no one project that can harvest everything. There are things that I get out of my system with Foetus which are totally different to the place I am in when I create a sound installation, or a soundtrack,

My projects are usually staggered, which is to say a lot of projects in different states of completion. So I shunt them all along and they get completed in different paces. Then new ones sprout up. I couldn’t just work on one thing.

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Do you ever take time out and what do you do to unwind?
Yes I stop to watch movies, see art and travel. But my work is perpetual motion, I don’t need to unwind from it. I believe in being creative every day. That’s also manifested on ideas I have for visual art, photography etc
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I’ve read elsewhere that the upcoming Foetus album, as the title alludes, is slated to be your last. What can we expect from it?
Tying up forty five years of Foetus is no mean feat and I have been working on it for seven years. There are parts that make it seem like a continuum and other parts that have never been done in the Foetus context. It’s going to be epic.

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Catch up on JG Thirlwell’s output on his Bandcamp page.

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Howie Reeve and Friends – Leaf in Fog

Posted: 1 November 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Innis Orr / UR Audio Visual / Redwig / Bar Marfil – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Glasgow’s Howie Reeve could never be accused of being predictable, or dull. His musical output is eclectic, experimental, and more than that, it’s often spontaneous, energetic, and in-the-moment. His last release, in 2022, was a set of songs created with his (then) ten-year-old son. Before that, there was a live recording of Chassons (that’s Cathy Heyden on alto sax, practice chanter, tin whistle, and Howie Reeve on electric bass) performing at Le Maquis de Varielles, a document which captures ‘Both of us grabbing whatever else is to hand and occasionally ululating.’ This time around, there’s a whole host of accomplices doing more or less the same to lead the listener on a wild ride. Indeed, Leaf in Fog finds Reeve working with a substantial number of friends in order to realise this ambitious and wide-ranging work.

The title – and cover art – carries connotations of the natural world, perhaps a sense of drifting autumnal melancholy, but the actuality is something altogether more jagged, dissonant, tense and disorientation. There is an earthiness to the songs and their performance, but it’s rent with the kind of twists and spasms that tear the fabric like a psychotic episode.

‘Microscopic Liberties’ starts out – and concludes – as a work of ramshackle lo-fi acoustic folk that’s not quite folk but not quite anything else one could pin down as belonging to a specific genre either. In between, there are blasts of howling noise and slanting guitar slaloming askew across a wandering bass groove. There are moments where it goes a bit Pavement, others more They Might be Giants… and it’s only two and a half minutes long. ‘Water Catalyst’ follows immediately, and tosses in elements of prog, neofolk, medieval minstrel folk and jazz.

‘Apotrope’ may be but an interlude with a running time of a minute and twenty seconds, but it’s a sharp honk of straining horn, a fragment of dissonant jazz swirling in an ambience of voices and then some sing-song poetical narrative… it’s hard to keep up. The compositions, the song structures, border on the schizophrenic, or the aural equivalent of Tourette’s, but instead of being unable to hold back the ticks and sputter ‘tits, fuck, cunt, wank’, Reeve can’t leave a song to just drift along comfortably, and it’s always just a matter of time before spasmodic bursts of all hell break loose.

From among chaos, occasionally, moments of quite affecting musicality emerge: the pick and strum opening of ‘Shop Window’ is whimsical and at the same time somehow sad, and continues to be so even when chaos and discord and bleeps and whistles collide like a speeding juggernaut travelling in the wrong carriageway, obliterating the acoustic serenity. ‘Evidence’ begins subtle, slow, a dolorous bass trudging through lugubrious strings and a sparse, simple clip-clop rhythm. The vocals veer between light and lilting and wide-eyed and tense as the instrumentation switches and slides through a succession of unpredictable transitions, before ‘Trouser Tugger’ goes full Trumans Water, but with a more muted, bedsit indie feel, leaving you dazed and bewildered at the end of its clanging, jolting three minutes.

The songs on Leaf in Fog are predominantly folk songs at heart, and the core elements expose moments which are often quite touching and pluck at emotions which are just beyond reach, beyond articulation, obscured, perhaps, by fog, but equally obscured by fret buzz and crackles and crazed strings and horns and an endless array of additions and interruptions.

It would be impossible to pretend that Leaf in Fog is in any way immediate or especially accessible, and the truth is it’s likely simply too much for many. Like Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, there’s so much going on its dizzying and difficult, and requires a lot of focus, and energy, to listen to. But Reeve – with more than a little help from his friends – has conjured a bold work, brimming with charm and mysticism, imagination and madness. Venture into the fog and explore, but do tread carefully.

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BMH – Sink Techno Song

Posted: 31 October 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Mortality Tables – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Some time in the last decade or so, genre distinctions simply exploded to the point of obsolescence. People – many people, and I won’t deny that I’m not immune or above doing so – will spend endless hours quibbling over categories. Is it post-punk or goth? It is doom or stoner doom? Country, or Western? Or both? It does seem that the ever-fragmenting microgenre, once the domain of dance, with its infinite focus on detail, has more recently become a battleground within metal – but then, a friend recently described an act as being ‘Jungle adjacent’ and I felt my brain begin to swim. What I suppose I’m driving at is that artists themselves are breaking out of genre confines and the place we find ourselves now is a point at which anything goes. But listeners – not to mention labels and journalists – or perhaps especially labels and journalists – find themselves clawing desperately to define whatever it is. There have to be benchmarks, touchstones, comparisons. We’re simply not attenuated to music which doesn’t conform to some parameters or others. This is one of a number of reasons that I tend to try to focus my attention on what a work does, what it actually sounds like, the sensations and emotions it elicits and other more tangential provocations – because the way we respond to music tends to be personal, and instinctive, intuitive. One may react immediately, and enthusiastically to a punch in the guts from an overdriven guitar, or may instead feel a greater emotional stirring from something soft and delicate, be it an acoustic guitar, a harp, or a flute. In summation, one’s first instinct is not to assess whether or not those opening bars belong to a specific microgenre, at least when it comes to a ‘blind listening’ experience.

But then there’s always a spoiler, and here I find myself facing a ‘spontaneously-created acoustic punk techno EP made with a dripping tap’. What the hell do you do with that? How do you prepare for listening to something so far beyond the outer limits? Personally, I start by pouring a large vodka, and putting the light off.

The EP features four tracks; two versions of the title track, plus two versions of the longer ‘Water Sink Song’. The former centres around a relentless thudding beat, clearly derived from a dripping tap, with swishing, swashing, gurgling watery noises and other scraping and thumping and crashing incidentals. There’s nothing quite like taking the sounds from one’s surroundings and manipulating them in order to forge new sounds, and new sonic experiences. It’s life, but not was we know it. Or, perhaps it’s too close to life as we know it.

“Matt Jetten and I made the track in the sink at work,” says BMH’s Kate Bosworth. “The tap was leaking and we managed to get to it minutes before the engineer did. The original is in mono, but our mate Stuart Chapman (Terminal Optimism) suggested we ‘do a Beatles’ on it and bring it into stereo by duping and layering and adding effects etc. All in all, the process was very quick.”

‘Water Sink Song (End Dark Train 21st October 2024)’ features a haunting vocal which drifts mistily over a swampy swell and a thick wash of static, as well as more watery sounds, like heavy rain and swashing, glooping, the disconcerting sounds of ingress in a storm. The shuddering electronic rhythms call to mind Suicide, but with an esoteric folk twist; one can almost picture the performance of a pagan ritual at a stone circle in a torrential storm – but then stammering vocals cut through in a rising tide of mains hum and buzzing electricals. Synths buzz and crackle at the fade. The ‘Original’ version (17th October 2024) is more heavy rainfall and water running from a roofs onto gutters – or the sound of a number of men urinating hard onto a corrugated shed roof. Thuds, clatters, clanks, trickles and sprays, a bottle or jar filling at pace; the incidental sounds, the additional layers, are wet and uncomfortable.

It may be that my response is as much coloured – a hazy amber – by my recent experiences of a trip to Castlerigg stone circle in a saturating downpour, and a train journey whereby the train was rammed solid with rowdy football fans, who, unable to make their way to the broken toilets, resorted to urinating in water bottles and Costa coffee cups, which they left on luggage racks and on tables, while cheered on by mates passing more cans of cheap shit lager and a bottle of lager along the carriage.

Jetten’s vocals are breathy, semi-spoken, and there’s a sense that they’ve been recorded quietly in the bedroom of a flat or terrace, trying not to disturb the neighbours. There’s an element of triumph in the tone as Jetten announces the title, as if he’s utterly pumped by the experience – or something seedier.

As an experimental work that encapsulates the DIY ethos, this is a quality example of the kind of weirdness that can only happen independently. It’s perverse, and imaginative, and it’s different. Oh, and all proceeds go to Kidney Cancer UK.

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Album Review and EXCLUSIVE Video Stream: Empty Cut – Allens Cross

Posted: 24 October 2024 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 25th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

In the debate of nature versus nurture, it’s noteworthy how many artists find themselves influenced in no small way not only by their formative years, but also the place or places where they grew up. There’s an entire thesis to be made from this, but here I make the observation because on Allens Cross, Empty Cut – a duo consisting of Douglas Fielding-Smith and Robert Bollard – have forged a work ‘Inspired by their childhood growing up in Birmingham they blend together all their experience and inspirations to create a noise that holds a heavy solid groove mixed with harsh noise and fuzzed out reverbed bass, topped with psychedelic synths, and chopped and screwed vocals.’

Birmingham, the city which gave us Black Sabbath and UB40, the second largest in England, with a population of over two and a quarter million, and has long been renowned for its diversity, and is a truly multicultural melting-pot. It’s perhaps unsurprising that cities like this – in contrast to so many predominantly white, often middle-class towns – are the source of musical innovation: throw in an element of social deprivation, the frisson of frustration driven by class and cultural disparity, and inevitably, this backdrop will fuel the fires of those with a creative bent.

Allens Cross is exemplary: as the blurbage summarises, ‘mixing together drums, bass, samples, effects and vocals they have created a sound that incorporates punk, hardcore, electronica, jazz, drum’n’bass, experimental-industrial and shoegaze.’ It’s one of those that on paper probably shouldn’t work, but thanks to the dexterity if its creators, works far beyond imagination.

It grinds in on a sample looped and echoed across a dirty bass and slow-building beat… and then everything slides into a doomy, sludgy sonic murk. ‘Bloodline; makes for a dank and difficult opening, five minutes of feedback and dinginess sprawling and lunging this way and that, culminating in a manic howl driven by frantic percussion and driving bass.

‘Fidget’ whips up a howl of feedback against a juddering stop/start bass, and with shouty vocals low in the mix, it brings a quintessential 90s Amphetamine Reptile vibe with a hint of Fudge Tunnel… until things take a detour into dub territory in the mid-section. When the noise blast returns, it hits even harder.

With none of the album’s eight tracks running for less than five minutes and the majority straying beyond six, it feels like there’s an element of slog, of punishment, inbuilt. ‘The Well Beneath’ certainly mines that dark seem of metal that plunges underground, but with the contrast of jazz drumming and some quite nifty bass work, at least until they hit the ‘overload’ pedal and everything blows out with booming distortion.

If ‘Fluff’, by its title sounds cuddly, like a kitten, or a bit throwaway, like that which you’d sweep up from the corner or the room, the reality is quite the opposite: a six-minute seething industrial sprawl, it’s slow-burning, dark and menacing, and a clear choice of lead tune… Not, but then again, with an echo of Eastern promise and a certain ambience, and the strains of feedback a way in the distance, it perhaps is the most accessible cut on the album.

We’re proud to share a video exclusive of ‘Fluff’ here:

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Elsewhere, ‘Hymn to Then’ pitches cold synths and rolls of thunder to conjure dark images, a stormy backdrop to an eye-opening hybrid of prog rock, industrial, and krautrock: the result isn’t only epic, but conjures images of Dracula and unseen horrors with its icy atmospherics, while the last track, the eight-minute ‘Shatter’ begins with an eerie take on Celtic folk

Allens Cross is a highly imaginative work, an album that draws together a broad range of styles in a cohesive form. Its impact lands by stealth, building as it does across a range of styles, often creeping under the skin, unexpectedly, to register its effect. Sparse synths laser-cut across distorted, arrhythmic percussive blasts, as a low-level crackle and hum of distortion hovers around the level of the ground. Fractured vocals add to the disorientation, and the experience is uncomfortable. You cower, and will for release, not because it’s bad, but because it’s intentionally claustrophobic, torturous, and so well executed.

This is perhaps a fair summary of Allens Cross as a whole. It is not, by any means, an easy listen. Enjoyable would be a stretch. But it is utterly compelling.

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Ran Slavin – New Dawns

Posted: 23 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 4th October 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Where does the time go? It’s a question one hears people ask often, and I often ask myself the same. Time, it seems, evaporates when you’re busy simply existing, keeping going from one day to the next, working, paying bills, shopping, eating, sleeping. All the things you want to do, but simply never get around to, for one reason or another.

Where does the time go? All too often, I’ll receive an album well in advance of release, and, because of life, and an endless inflow of upcoming releases and other diversions and distractions, I will take a long breath of relief on calculating that I have ages, weeks, before the release date, to listen, process, and digest the work, to write and refine my review, and still be ahead of time. The next thing I know, I’ve reordered my review schedule numerous times, perhaps drafted a few preliminary notes, and the album’s been out for almost a month.

It was only a little over six months ago that I covered Slavin’s seventeenth album, Oolong: Ambient Works.

New Dawns, we’re told ‘exemplifies Slavin’s nonconformity, commitment and expansion to his cultural roots of exploratory music, through early clicks and cuts electronica and instrumental ambient, highlighting an immediacy and necessity for musical independence, through which he hopes to reach attentive new audiences… The album is more than a collection of tracks. a cohesive blending of diverse influences and sounds into a unified experience. A beginning of a journey. As with his previous projects, New Dawns invites listeners to immerse in a unique and tropic sonic world, where the boundaries between acoustic traditional instruments, post leftfield electronica, east and west, are blurred.’

New Dawns comprises sixteen tracks, titled ‘Dawn 1’ to ‘Dawn 16’, each representing, I suppose a new dawn. Each composition is distinctive, and distinct: there is separation, rather than segue, and this very much determines how this feels as an album – in that it feels like an album rather than a single composition sliced into tracks. And as such, there is a sense that each piece, appropriately, starts afresh. And while the overall experience is mellow and broadly ambient, there are solid features which mark the territory, and actual, distinct instruments, too, which punctuate, and, indeed, provide form and structure to the wispy ambient soundscapes: strolling, jazzy double bass, haunting, twangy guitars, piano, irregular beats, and splashing cymbals all feature… to say they feature prominently may be something of an overstatement, but their presence is clear, and in context, powerful.

Just as the sun rises in the east, so the twang and drone of sitars colour some of Slavin’s dawns, and across the span of the sixteen pieces, the sense of mood changes every bit as the sense of geography. Oftentimes, the dawning is gradual, a slow emerging of gentle light, but then, for example, the more percussive ‘dawn 7’ arrives abruptly and unexpectedly, and simultaneously brings with it more overtly electronic vibes which bring together Krautrock and minimal techno. ‘dawn 8’ brings swaggering avant-jazz wrapped in a cloak of prog rock leanings, shrouded in a murky fog of obscurity. ‘dawn 11’ has the kind of murky robotic minimalism of late 70s industrial, hinting at the point where Chris and Cosey would go on to spawn trance.

Its total running time may be under seventy minutes, but New Dawns is an immersive work, and I find myself drawn deeper into the details as it progresses. And those details are abundant. There’s simply too much going on for this to be considered a truly ‘background’ work: zone out for a second, and something else will prod its way to the fore, nagging and needling for attention, before sinking below the surface, to be replaced by something else. Having found myself drawn into the scrapes and drones, the subtle – and not to subtle – details, the album slips by, and so does an hour and a bit. And that, I come to realise, is where the time goes.

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Sly and the Family Drone – Moon is Doom Backwards

Posted: 18 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 15th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

They’ve been around for a while now, but as yet, there hasn’t been another act quite like Sly and The Family Drone. They’re one of those acts that straddle so many different boundaries and function on so many different levels, they’re impossible to pigeonhole and impossible to pin down. They make serious art delivered with a quirky, tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, and their live performances are celebrations of community and whacky while simultaneously being genius performance art improvisations. I’m by no means being superior when I suggest that a lot of people simply won’t ‘get’ them, and it’s obvious as to why they’re very much a cult thing. But that they’ve managed to sustain a career operating on a DIY basis, booking their own tours, etc., for well over a decade is testament to both the appreciation there is for them on a cult level, and to their sheer persistence and insanity. And their last release was a lathe-cut album containing a single twenty-minute jazz odyssey released via The Quietus.

Moon is Doom Backwards – a wheeze of a title which is factually inaccurate, and of course they know it – is a classic example of the absurd humour which is integral to their being, and it’s a joy to see that they’ve come together with Human Worth, a label I’ve filled many a virtual column inch praising, for this release. And because it’s on Human Worth, a portion of the proceeds from this release are going to charity.

The album, we learn, was recorded ‘exactly three years ago at Larkins Farm’. That’s quite a lag, but this does often seem to be the case when it comes to homing works of avant-jazz noise-drone. They describe it as ‘a patient, stalking, lurking thing. A properly noir thing, as notable for its long stretches of quiet atmosphere as it is for its pummeling skronk. Sly’s is a strange sort of quietude, though. A “drums heard through the wall”, “disquieting electrical hum” kind of quiet. An “eavesdropping PI”, “solo sax on rooftop” sort of quiet. An attention-grabbing kind of quiet so engrossing that, when our fave neo-jazz wrecking crew actually gets to wrecking – and they still wreck real good – we’re caught off guard, wrong-footed, defenseless. We get run the hell over by The Family Drone’s quintet of bulldozers.’

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who’s been acquainted with them for any period of time. Because whatever one expects from Sly and the Family Drone, they’ll probably deliver, but simply not in the way one expects it.

Containing seven pieces, mostly around the three-to-five-minute mark, Moon is Doom Backwards is more conventionally ‘albumy’ – whatever conventional means when it comes to any format now. And there is, indeed, a lot of quiet on this album, much hush. There are many segments where not a lot happens, or simply a solo sax rings out into a slow-blowing wind of reverb.

‘Glistening Benevolence’ is underpinned by a mesmeric, tribal beat and crooning sax and wiffle of woodwind, at least until the percussion rises into storm-like crashes and the percussion surges around the mid-point, before it tapers, and then splashes to a halt. And then there is quiet, for quite some time, until the drums blast back and there is a sound like an elephant braying in pain. So far, so Sly. It’s pummelling percussion and frenzied honks and toots, parping and tooting in all directions which blast from the speakers on single cut and shortest track ‘Going In’, after which darkness descends. The inexplicably-titled ‘Cuban Funeral Sandwich’ has too much percussion and it too overtly jazzy to be ambient, but it’s a low-key, meandering piece that feels far too improvised to qualify as a composition and it certainly brings the atmosphere – a dark, oppressive one, which gradually builds and horns hoot like ship’s horns and clattering cans rattle with increasing urgency – before another abrupt halt.

If ‘Joyless Austere Post-war Biscuits’ may seemingly allude to some kind of Hovis-like cobbled-street and open-fire nostalgia, the actuality is altogether darker, as more sax flies into the sky on an upward spiral of infinite echo and the drums – building, building, to a crazed frenzy, but at a distance – create a palpitation-inducing tension, before ‘The Relentless Veneration of Bees’ – something which really should be a thing, along with the outlawing of pesticides – wanders absent-mindedly into an arena or ambient jazz, where the drums hang around in the distance somewhere.

There are shooting stars and percussive breakdowns amidst truly tempestuously frenzies jazz experimentation, and ‘Guilty Splinters’ is the perfect soundtrack to this. The closer, ‘Ankle Length Gloves’ is perhaps the most unstructured and uncomfortable of all here: amidst wheezes and drones, it’s the sound of creaking floors and subdued wailing utterances… and nothing but a buffeting breeze.

Moon is Doom Backwards is certainly their sparsest, most atmospheric, and least percussion-heavy album to date, but it really explores in detail and depth the relationship of dynamics, and pushes out into new territories. And while it’s still jazz, it’s jazz exploded, fragmented, dissected, and reimagined.

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Shrimp – Brine Shrimp

Posted: 15 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Panurus Productions – 24th August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

I take heart from discovering that Panurus Productions are as far behind on their PR as I am on my emails and messages. Even if it weren’t for the relentless flow of submissions – I’m looking at an inundation of around fifty a day, via email, messenger, and all the rest, even drops of CDs through the letterbox – there’s still that matter of… life. It consumes all of your time, and it wears you down. It’s an endurance test. Just living is a full-time job. No, it’s more than that. It’s exhausting, draining, it saps your very soul. On a personal level, just the day to day is too much at times for reading emails and listening to submissions. Throw in a dayjob, life and a single parent, and bereavement on top, and simply opening all the email submissions become too much. So arriving at the most recent Shrimp album around two months after its release, I feel ok about that – and by ok, I mean pleasantly calm, which is a rare sensation in the main.

Fucking hell. It’s a monster. It packs four tracks, the shortest of which clocks in at just under twenty five minutes. It’s more than a monster. It’s a skull-crushing leviathan. It will leave feeling week and so drained. It makes predecessor Mantis Shrimp sound like Barry Manilow.

They promise ‘a sprawling mass of free-form guitar, vocals (an associated miscellanea), effects and percussion’, whereby ‘the listener is thrown about the room with the sound, as the initial dirge collapses into a frantic scramble of activity, glitch and movement as the various pincers and claws dart out from the sonic mass. The sound field shifts as elements are isolated or the entire band is channelled through the snare, sometimes in line with the music and others completely of its own accord. Not even the platform you are listening from is stable.

‘Hidden Life’, with a running time of forty-one and a half minutes is an album in its own right. And it’s dropping tempo mood-slumping jazz with stutter percussion, at least at first. Before long, a slow-driving riff grinds in, and shortly after, it slumps into a drone and a feedback wail, while snarling, gnarling, teeth-gnashing, demented vocals rave dementedly amidst a tempestuous cacophony of… of what, precisely? Cacophonous noise. Everything is a collision, a mess, every second is pulled and pummelled, and it’s like The Necks on acid, only with chronic roar and an endless raging blast bursting every whichway, amidst howls of feedback.

Then you realise that this is only the first track and you’re already physically and mentally exhausted. You are absolutely on your knees here, battered, bruised, ruined by the noise, and still the frenzied furore continues.

There’s mellow, trippy, almost jazz vibe which lifts the curtain on ‘Leaf-like Appendages’, another epic track – but then they’re all epic, all challenging. ‘Maximum Sanity’ brings maximum pain and derangement, as howls and sputters from the very bowels of the very depths squall in anguish. James Watts has a rare talent for creating the most chthonic tones

Brine Shrimp trills and shrills, quills and spins in so many directions. It’s not only a mess of chaos, but a truly wild, and at times hellish, mess of chaos. It’s heavy, and it hurts. It’s Shrimp erupting like the Godzilla of the crustacean world: a monster in every way.

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Isik Kural – Moon in Gemini

Posted: 11 October 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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6th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Isik Kural’s Moon in Gemini is described as ‘a luminous scrapbook of slow-flowing narratives couched in intuitive and symbolic storytelling. Awash in woodwinds and strings, lullaby-inflected lyrics and tender imagery, Isik’s voice moves closer to the listener’s ear on his third album, intoning states of being in which the wonder filled sound of everyday life can be heard and felt. Moon in Gemini is a space for wide daydreaming, where the invisible steps forward and dauntless ghosts play under a hazy lunar light.’

This is a charming proposition, and the actuality proves to be even more so. Moon in Gemini contains fourteen compositions, the majority of which are fleeting, ephemeral pieces of but perhaps a couple of minutes in length: a handful extend beyond three minutes, but none beyond four.

The overall effect, then, is soothing, but the fragmentary nature of the assemblage means the flow is broken, and often the smooth, calming flow is disrupted as compositions end – I won’t say prematurely, because who am I to say when a composition should end, how long it should be? These things are purely artistic choices, and my feeling that pieces here sometimes feel incomplete or abridged is simply a that, a feeling, as much from my desire for more than any clear or objective assessment.

The first piece, ‘Body of Water’ is typical in its soothing, tranquil ways. Delicately picked guitar and mellow woodwind drift and trill with a delicate drip-drop sound, and it’s beautifully relaxing, the sonic recreation of the experience of sitting by a still lake in warm – but not hot – sun while a gentle breeze ripples the surface. I close my eyes and find myself on the edge of a tarn in the Lake District: a happy place, a place of tranquillity, of escape. It’s a place I could spend long hours, and in my heart I believe those hours could extend for days. But it fades out, far too soon – after a mere minute and fifty seconds, the moment’s passed. But this is in many ways just how it is to be sitting by a lake, and sensing a moment of true perfection: just as you begin to bask in it, the wind picks up and a cloud drifts over the sun, the temperature drops and you realise that that perfect moment was simply that – a moment. Moments pass before you can grasp a hold on them. They exist in a momentary flicker, the blink of an eye, and so often, they’ve passed before you even realise they’ve arrived.

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‘Prelude’ is a dainty, sugary, music box tune which exists out of time but is, at the same time, steeped in an ambiguous nostalgia. Precisely what it’s a prelude to, I’m not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters, while ‘Almost a Ghost’ is haunting, gentle, introspective and flitting with fluttering sounds of nature alongside its rippling pianos and low-key, almost spoken-word vocals. Each piece is shimmery beguiling, the supple and subtle layers rippling over one another while on the pieces where there are vocals – and much of Moon in Gemini is instrumental – it’s true that Isik’s voice is quite special, and an instrument in its own right, and also more about the enunciation and, often breathy, bedroomy, about its contribution to the overall atmosphere. ‘Mistaken for a Snow Silent’ is beautiful, and as much on account off its sparse simplicity than anything else.

We hear ambience and chatter around and even through the songs, and these incidentals work well, in context.

‘Gül Sokağı’ is low and slow and possesses a quality that difficult to define The soft woodwind on ‘Birds of the Evening’ is light and airy and mellifluous. The experience is uplifting, and as a whole, Moon in Gemini is sedate and arresting.

To bemoan that an album doesn’t provide everything that I would like is not a legitimate criticism: it’s not a failing on the artist’s part, and I cannot seriously claim a loss of expectation: with Moon in Gemini, provides everything promised, and more. This is a truly beautiful album, and one which has a rare warmth and softness.

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