Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel has been infecting ears with his unique amalgamation of noise and drones for over ten years. Always prolific, he has spawned multitudes of massive, monstrous compositions. With an even subtler touch than usual, this time Kneale turns his gaze to the heavens.
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Mogwai's re-mastered debut is an intoxicating mix of repetition, slowly emerging tunes, and violent crescendos. When we add in their use of conversational voices, dark humor, and a penchant for anonymity they resemble (at the risk of sacrilege) early-mid period Pink Floyd.
The first proper Nurse With Wound full-length to come along in quite a while is an album-length exploration of the exotica, kitschy swing and cutout-bin jazz genres that have long been an audio fetish for Steven Stapleton. On paper, the idea sounds great. In practice, Huffin' Rag Blues is sometimes interesting, sometimes laborious, and for a longtime Nurse With Wound fan such as me, largely a disappointment.
As the world of Current 93 is in the midst of rumblings announcing the forthcoming album Anok Pe: Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, this new CDEP was released at recent shows, both a stopgap and a preview of future iterations. The good news for those who weren't bowled over by Black Ships Ate the Sky is that Birth Canal Blues is quite different indeed, and represents a new direction for David Tibet and company.
Windy Weber (of Windy & Carl) tried to release her latest recording on Kranky before releasing it through Blue Flea and Kenedik, but the folks over at Kranky rejected it because it sounded like the sort of thing Nurse with Wound fans would enjoy. This is a crushing and feverish record miles away from Weber's previous work. With Warren Defever helping out, I Hate People sounds absolutely hostile and is one of the darkest things I've heard this year.
Amolvancy's clear vinyl album and sleeve is reminiscent of the movie poster for The Day of The Locust. The music is shrill, cathartic, erudite and primitive: sort of like beating kittens to death with a copy of a French literature anthology.
It’s cliché to say, but realistically, the idea of paying taxes to a government and how said money becomes allocated is a definite part of the human condition in most societies. Nations have been built, nations have crumbled, revolutions have been sparked, all based on the people paying their government to do things that they may absolutely not support. It is no surprise then that when Aranos takes on this all too familiar topic he does so at a roots level that eschews his sonic manipulations for a set of folk protest songs.
Diametrically opposite of the other recent Aranos album, Tax, here is a sprawling 65-minute track of studio processing and electronics wizardry. Different by no means inferior, however, and I would characterize this as a more complex work that has many layers to examine.
In 1971, members of UK group Mighty Baby and a few Californian friends made visits to Fez and Meknes that left a profound and lasting impression. Converting to Sufism upon their return to London, they recorded and released an album as The Habibiyya, or the followers of spiritual teacher Muhammad ibn al-Habib. The resulting music disarms expectation with its reverence, beauty, and sincerity.
For Sublime Frequencies' latest musical tour, Geoff Hawryluk and Alan Bishop set their sights on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. As highlighted in recent new stories about their flooding disaster, Myanmar's government keeps a pretty tight grip on what comes into and leaves the country. With that in mind, I was surprised at how much Western influence is discernible on some of the selections here.
