After six years of being just a title on the Beta-lactam Ring Records website, I was losing hope of this album ever materialising. There was the danger that if it did ever arrive on earth that it would be an anticlimax but thankfully I can report that it is one of the best realised Nurse With Wound albums yet. Steven Stapleton and his crew, including first mate Andrew Liles and chief of engineering Colin Potter, voyage through the outer limits of The Outer Limits and Sun Ra's most cosmic offerings. Influenced by those haunting electronic soundtracks of vintage Sci-Fi, Stapleton guides the U.S.S. Nurse With Wound through the furthest regions of the universe, documenting spatial anomalies and creating some of the best sounds audible in the Milky Way.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Celebrating 30 years of Nurse With Wound and inspired by Faust's 49p album, The Faust Tapes, categories strain, crack and sometimes break under their burden as Steven Stapleton and company step out of the space provided to create a best of compilation like no other. Featuring loads of familiar music but all in a totally new context this “party mix” is great fun; surprise juxtapositions of material and trying to identify the sources of the various sounds make for a nerdy but highly enjoyable hour of listening.
The latest from Leyland James Kirby is not only his best album to date, it's one of the best ambient albums I've heard in the past decade. It is both the culmination of Kirby's past efforts as The Stranger and The Caretaker and also his point of departure from those projects. Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was takes everything I love about Kirby's previous work and infuses it with a greater diversity of ideas, moods, and colors.
Richard Skelton has been quietly amassing a small but deeply devoted following for the last five years with a series of beautifully packaged self-released albums under a constantly changing series of guises (the best-known of which being A Broken Consort). With this, his second release for Type Records under his own name, he seems poised for much wider recognition as one of the most vital and singular artists in underground music. This is one of the most beautiful and essential albums that I’ve heard this year.
This reissue of their sixth album (not including those done with Brian Eno) is a most welcome sight. Often overlooked in favor of their '70s output (understandably considering how good those albums are), Curiosum remains a curiosity in the Cluster back catalogue. It is quite different to their earlier works, less serious sounding than previous albums. However, the variation of styles and approaches on this album means it comes across as more of a compilation than a fully fleshed out album. Yet, I argue that its disparate nature is part of its charm.
While the artist roster reads like the authors of an academic journal, anyone who has had their nose in modern experimental/electronic music surely knows most, if not all of the participants listed. While originally issued in the early parts of this decade, this massive collaboration of guitar innovation and laptop artistry predates many of these artists' best known works and it shows that even in these salad days, these guys were (and still are) at the top of their game.
Working alone, Marchetti has solidly established himself as truly a shaman of sound. His combination of worldwide field recordings and subtle treatments has created a world that is both alien and familiar, warm and harrowing. Here working alongside Yôko Higashi, the two weave sound that goes from the industrial realm into the wilds of Africa, and then back again.
The original FM3 Buddha Machines appear to have struck a chord with the members of Throbbing Gristle (a number of them appearing in some of Chris Carter’s gear photos on his Flickr account) so it is no surprise that they have created their own version with the help of Christian Virant. Containing 13 loops from the TG arsenal and redesigned to look far more stylish than previous models, Gristleism is a slimmed down Buddha with teeth.
Combining country, American surf music and the classic Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtracks, this album sounds like a lost gem from the '60s. However, this trio (supplemented by some seriously cool guest musicians) are not just an ersatz tribute to the past. This is a brilliant homage to these various styles of music that has buckets of enthusiasm and passion to make up for its lack of modernity.
The world does not need another black metal band but the guys from Liturgy don’t care. This is fine by me as this is one of the best albums in the genre for a long time. Consolidating the ground won via their Immortal Life EP, the group has expanded in size and in scope. Instead of focussing on a scary aesthetic and not coming up with decent music, they have gone the opposite route of 99% of most modern black metal groups and actually made music worth listening to.
