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Freq has been running in various forms since 1998, and this iteration has been around since 2010, with an archive of older material available too. Please scroll down and on for the most recent reviews; see also the archives index for 1998-2009 below while there is also an A-Z index of everything posted so far. The bulk of the record reviews 1998-2008 are in the following pages: Editions Mego
Okay. It’s not really cracking. I’ve heard marketing gloop that suggests that this sounds nothing like his previous stuff. You’ll probably be pleased that this isn’t the case. This still (mostly) sounds like a Nick Gutterbreakz (I met him when he was still Gutterbreakz; he’ll always be Gutterbreakz) production. The characteristic DNA is here: the wobbly electronica, the arching loops, the dissolves and the static, the hums, the Lee Perry segues into dubDubdub but Continue reading Ensemble Skalectrik – Trainwrekz [...]
Thrill Jockey
The album chimes in with insects buzzing and well, chimes. Mr Jones must have waited for just the right time in the evening to capture the grass bugs chorus in full hazy summer night flow. As well as singing summer bugs, thunder Continue reading Glenn Jones – My Garden State [...]
London 15 May 2013
As I enter the darkened room Black Magician are already creeping into their set. Haunting organ underpins some massive doom-laden riffs that hang in the air like the smell from a charnel house. Their sound is a mixture of huge Black Sabbath-style chords with eerie keyboards and a vocalist who sounds like he’s screaming from the very pits of hell. Their set Continue reading Moss/Purson/Black Magician (live at The Underworld) [...]
Front & Follow
This box set is a collection of nie EPs from a host of incredible artists, all working within the confines of some strange call & response routine which sees invited artists submit audio clips into a central pot, which is then distributed around the group for them to do with as they see fit. At least, that’s what this box set is supposed to be. In another reality this is Front and Follow’s collective phantasy, an arc of triumph. This is the illusion of a series of collected EPs, an illusion so pervasive/persuasive that Continue reading Long Division With Remainders – Collision/Detection [...]
Carrot Top (N America)/Loose Music (Europe)
The Handsome Family deliver stories in their songs which seem almost always like age-old tales but are cunningly crafted in the here and now. They’ve chosen an older type of Americana to base the music on, seriously strong on bluegrass and Appalachian traditional tunes, melodies and harmonies. On Wilderness, for the first time, I’m finding myself hearing that these tunes sound like those in other Handsome Family songs. Continue reading The Handsome Family – Wilderness [...]
Glacial Movements
As listens go, this one is often quite oppressive, and there’s no denying that Baker has captured an Continue reading Aidan Baker – Aneira [...]
Oaken Palace
“Drown” is a melancholic reflection, entering at a slower than Low pace, Leah Buckareff‘s bass plumbing suitable depths while Aidan Baker‘s hushed words are softly, semi-distinctly intoned in multiple layers of mourning for – or from? – a watery grave, one which blossoms into minor-key flowering as the guest strings of Peter Broderick‘s violin and Angela Chan‘s viola join a cleansing wash of fuzz guitar. The Continue reading Nadja – Flipper/Caudal – Forever In Another World/Adoran – Adoran [...]
MVD Video
Continue reading Bath Salt Zombies [...]
The Third Golden Age of Welsh Pop™ shows little sign of abating any time soon. Following his contributions to Cate le Bon‘s two extraordinary Cyrk releases and Euros Childs‘ sunshine classic Summer Special last year, Stephen Black now unleashes his own long awaited fourth album as Sweet Baboo. Originally from Trefriw in north Wales’ Conwy valley, SB has long been an integral part of the Cardiff musical community that includes Cate, Euros, H Hawkline, Richard James and Gruff Rhys, who can often be heard helping out on each other’s records. Their individual records bear little relation to any musical fashions but neither do they sound like each other, although a common aesthetic can, I think, be detected. Continue reading Sweet Baboo – live, interview and album feature [...] Bureau B
Continue reading Lloyd Cole & Hans-Joachim Roedelius – Selected Studies Vol. 1 [...]
27 April 2013 Out here on the periphery, the phrase ‘sole UK appearance’ instinctively elicits grumpy mutterings about ‘privileged Londoners’… after all, nobody ever does ‘sole UK appearances’ in north Wales!’ But what’s this?… Michael Rother presents the music of Neu! and Harmonia at Helsinki… Tilburg… Krems… St. Petersburg… Wrexham… Wrexham!?!… surely not THAT Wrexham? It turns out to be true – the recently established Focus Wales festival have eccentrically booked Mr. Rother and Charlotte Church as joint headliners for this year’s festival – I’d wager a decent sum that it’s the first time the two have shared a bill. Rother’s foray into revisiting his back catalogue a couple of years back as Hallogallo featured an all-star line-up that included Sonic Youth‘s Steve Shelley. I only experienced that via YouTube – it seemed very good stuff, but not exactly Neu! Continue reading Michael Rother presents the music of Neu! and Harmonia (live at Central Station, Wrexham) [...]
Mute
The album comprises a suite in three acts, pieced together from songs and musical snippets of Harvey’s, interspersed with covers. The songs mostly alternate between the originals and the covers, forming a conversation between Harvey and his influences and contemporaries. The sound palette and arrangements will be familiar to anyone who has followed his past work with any interest; Harvey’s skill at judging just what to leave out is Continue reading Mick Harvey – Four (Acts of Love) [...]
Yesmissolga/Acid Cobra/Lumberton Trading Company
Continue reading Acid Cobra – Petrified Minds/Art-Errorist and Acid Cobra – Cold Waters [...]
Rustblade
“Askayama Shita Moeru”‘s harsh snowstorms kiss your senses with unintelligible yells and scrubbed perspex; it sounds Continue reading Merzbow – Kibako [...]
Corsica Studios, London 25 April 2013
Proceedings began with a screening of Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée. It seems a little superfluous to review this, one of the most influential sci-fi films ever made: it is the subject of whole books of analysis (see here for one), although is perhaps best known nowadays as the basis for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. It concerns a man who has survived an apocalyptic war and is coerced into being an experimental guinea pig within a community of fellow Continue reading Guapo/Stars in Battledress/ Disinformation/La Jetée (live at Baba Yaga’s Hut) [...]
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So, here we are again. I think I’ve reviewed in some way every Ekoplekz release – even if some of them were just 140 character yelps in the empty rooms of Twitter – and now, for the first time there’s signs that Nick’s relentless pursuit of his sound is cracking. Slightly.
The Sprummer has burst out in full bloom here in Blighty. That’s no typo. Spring forgot to happen this year, so we’re enjoying blossom trees and warmer evenings. Saying that, we had a hailstorm yesterday. Never the less we’re enjoying abundant daffodils growing in our parks and meadows. My Garden State is the perfect music to listen to whilst riding a bike and looking around at all this sprouting nature and being reminded that once again “Oh yer, summer actually exists!”
It had been a while since I was last at The Underworld in Camden. At one point I almost seemed to live there, seeing some great doom bands week after week, so it’s always good to come back here. And what a night to do it on, a night of diabolus in musica with three of the hottest bands around.
There’s buckets of finely congealed empathy here, beautifully presented. Front And Follow is an unusual, old-fashioned label, not quite made for these times. And thank God for that.
Aptly titled, this latest album from Rennie and Brett Sparks is like a beautiful life sciences lesson. Packed with facts I presume are correct, and I wouldn’t argue with songwriter Rennie’s instructions – one can learn an awful lot about beasts of our world. The worst beasts being of course ourselves, mankind.
Aneira appears as one long track, and this time round it’s simply Aidan Baker on his own with a twelve-string acoustic guitar. This is a piece which is far more isolationist than that simple statement might at first appear, as Baker uses the instrument as a sonic generator to produce a whole host of glacial textures and tones. While the sound of steel strings is still evident in the rustling, shimmering noises, their twanging rustle sometimes brings to mind the wind rattling the ice-clad rigging of a wooden sailing ship stuck fast in ice, as do the ominous groans and drones which shudder and heave at the low end.
Oaken Palace is a different kind of a label, as for a start it’s a charity, and all profits from each of its vinyl-only releases go to an environmental cause of the artist’s choice. Since Nadja have decided to support Whale and Dolphin Conservation with their album, it only seems right and proper that the LP should be titled Flipper.
Bath Salt Zombies sets out its stall pretty early on; which is just as well, seeing as how it’s probably not really for everyone. It opens with a great animated spoof public information film about the dangers of bath salts (the drug, not the actual toiletries) which sees a trashy teen given the drug by a foul-mouthed Satan, with predictable murderous consequences. By the time the announcer says “Bath salts may seem like a crackerjack time, but believe you me, sonny Jim, they’re nothing but a menace”, you’ll probably have a fair idea of whether you’re going to like this one or not. And then, before the opening credits, we get some drugs, some gratuitous nudity, a couple of murders and an idea of just how low-budget
It’s been a while since 2010′s I Am a
Bureau B’s mission to ensure that one in every two CDs in the world feature Hans-Joachim Roedelius continues with the most unlikely collaboration of his career to date. Lloyd Cole is best known, in the UK at least, as the man who took a slickly polished dilution of ’80s indie-pop into the proper charts with hits like “Perfect Skin” and, err… I don’t seem to remember any of the others. It appears that he also released an electronic instrumental album in 2001, inspired by Cluster‘s Sowiesoso, which Roedelius heard and liked. It was another ten years before the two met in Vienna and decided to collaborate on an album by sending files back and forth to each other.
Mick Harvey‘s official biography says that he “has always thought of himself primarily as a collaborator” – understandable given the success of his collaborations with PJ Harvey, Rowland S Howard and Nick Cave, and in a way, Four (Acts of Love) can also be seen as a collaboration, although of a quite different nature.
Amaury Cambuzat‘s début solo outing as Acid Cobra (while not playing guitar in Ulan Bator and one iteration of Faust) finds him hopping figuratively onto horseback for the opening guitar looper workout “Il y a des Cowboys!” The Western vibes blow dustily into the widescreen soundscape he plays, all descending figures circling like buzzards rising on a thermal to gain height for the annual migration path from the desert into the high plains. Drifting with a purpose seems to be the order of the day, and Cambuzat’s guitar has rarely sounded more evocative. The soundtrack motif is not accidental either, and the 13 pieces on the album are all written to accompany Cambuzat’s series of paintings
Disc one of Kibako, and “Nigatsu Nijuugonichi”‘s abrasive banquet of blow torch and bruised industry is definitely a room clearer. Lurching around in shifts of attacking energies, fearsome, intense – full of percussive dynamite snipping at squalling hordes. It’s a weird kind of rapture, overwhelming the senses with spiky shards, enforced further by the screaming inferno of the following track “Operation Musashi.” Those clashing hertzological blizzards taking Schoenberg‘s gasps of tonality to their ultimate conclusion as a golden garbage of percussiveness under-runs a frantic exorcism of melody. Jackbooty BPMs hitting hollow snarings, drum solos spiralling off in quartzy whirls of dentist drill and Venetian Snares fuckeries of tempo.
To Corsica Studios, for an intriguing evening of films and performances to launch Guapo’s new album History of the Visitation, a tremendous release that maintains the consistently superb standards set by this London-based instrumental rock outfit since their inception in the mid-90s.