Sheffield label Singing Knives have gathered together some of the city's more appealing noise/folk underground (and their peers) here showing that it's certainly not a city still in thrall of Warp's legacy and output. The similarity between these acts is pretty loose, but most appear to work within or around the use of traditional forms / instruments, improvisation and drone or a combination of the two styles.
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With their latest album of pastoral folk pop, Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn seem determined to let everyone know where they're from, in case there were any doubts.
The selection of butcher knives that adorns this lathe-cut's cover isn't really an apt representation of its contents. Anyone expecting great slab splitting chunks of noise will be sorely disappointed, this is a far more in-depth and busy release. Creating a no-mans land between noise and psychedelic crystallised drone, this is a restless listen where a thousand Catherine wheel cogs of sound sync and separate.
One of the most underexposed and exciting reggae vocalists today, Paul St. Hilaire delivers the kind of album his associates Rhythm & Sound should have produced this year.
Dressed in black, as ever, this Prurient lathe sits more easily alongside his recent Load release Pleasure Ground than his circuit board slaughter. This track leans a little less on the ripping-out-throats-with-teeth style and more on a knife edge tension tip. This is more like slow insidious mental torture than someone merzbowing your face into a pulp.
The world is shockingly louder after hearing Andrew Chalk's work. This is true of many of his pieces, but seems most applicable to the reissue of East of the Sun. Originally released in 1994 on cassette by OR (Ora's label), the album is as quiet and reserved as they come, teeming with invisible life that always seems just beyond the reach of the human ear. There's plenty going on in these washes of sound, but everything seems consciously subliminal from the second the album begins.
This 2xCD+2xDVD collection easily rivals the This Heat box as my fave boxed collection of vault material released this year. It is a perfect companion to any Fad Gadget/Frank Tovey fan's collection as it has very little overlap with in-print releases and compilations. More importantly, it also serves as an audio and visual testament to the man whose late '70s/early '80s combination of electronics and violence in a pop setting was unparallelled, beyond its time, uncompromising, hazardous, and directly or indirectly influenced nearly every one of the most popular electronic acts of the last quarter century.
This fascinating record shadows an apparently murderous concept with more than enough themic ambiguity, musical invention and sly humor, to make repeat listens essential, if not exactly desirable.
By my account, both at the time and retrospectively, List of Lights and Buoys was the best album of 2004. This follow-up reprises that exquisite debut's delicate melancholia as minimal, often radical, re-interpretations of classic and, at times, even sacred material. How well it accomplishes that is another story altogether.
