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This memorable live collaboration between one of the world’s most explosive drummers and a titan of the UK jazz scene bizarrely came about from a random meeting at an airport in Portugal during Corsano’s lengthy tour with Björk. As expected, the result is some absolutely incendiary free-jazz flame-throwing, but with some unexpected surprises thrown in too.
This reissue of ACR’s Factory Records swansong captures the band at the height of their popularity and influence, spearheading (along with New Order, Quando Quango, and others) the dancification of the celebrated Manchester indie scene. While inventive, funky, and certainly a proto-Madchester touchstone, it doesn’t hold up quite as well as their Simon Topping-era earlier work (perhaps because dance music evolves a hell of a lot faster than punk). Of course, I am very much predisposed to "tense and brooding" over "funky and fun," so I may not be the target demographic here. Still, I suspect that this is probably the sort of classic album where you had to be there to fully appreciate it.
The album starts with a soda can being opened: the click of aluminum as the tab is pressed down, the tsssh sound of carbonation being released into the air, the hissing fizz of cola. It ends with the sound of the can being crushed and thrown to the ground with a rattle and clunk. In this caffeine-fueled, densely layered and politically charged audio collage, we are taken on a ride through the billion-dollar advertising campaigns for Pepsi and Coke, the vagaries of the cola wars, celebrity endorsements, and torture. While Negativland are not generally known for their catchy hooks, upbeat rhythms, and memorable lyrics, Dispepsi remains a great "pop" album.
This split 10" EP pairs two great examples of contemporary bands carrying the grindcore torch into the 21st century. Both Drainland and Grinding Halt modernize the genre in different ways; one slows it down to a menacing crawl and the other keeps the tempo up while challenging the genre’s clichés. Together, the two sides of this EP make for some heavy and thrilling listening.
Prins Thomas's solo debut full length is a long, evolving, synthesized dream shuffle through some heady landscapes. His expertise makes sense of the fluid mind-body connection in the music of dance, psychedelia and German electronica.
Diane Cluck seems like more of a force of nature than a mere singer/songwriter. She is the rare archetypal artist (without ironic quotes) though whom something pure and true flows, a category in which I’d also include folks like David Tibet, Jandek, and Christina Carter. It doesn’t quite matter which genre such people inhabit, as the sheer force and otherness of their personalities is enough to be compelling regardless of how they cloak themselves in artifice.
After years of hearing about the mythical NWW but never actually hearing them, I finally broke down and ordered this album (then an expensive import) when I was 19. Despite the kitschy title and cover art, I was still completely caught off-guard by the cartoonish and self-indulgently absurd music within and immediately dismissed it as something so dreadful that probably only a Zappa fan could like it (I remember trading it to a used record store for a Carcass album or something later that same week). Many years later, with a somewhat broader mind and some increased context, I decided to give it another chance.  I still find it cartoonish and willfully annoying, but it's also kind of crazily inspired.
The methods used by Jonathan S. Podmore and Peter Hope on Dry Hip Rotation were quite oblique as far as strategies go. Storming the studio with little more than a few scrounged AKS synths, a violin, harmonica, and whatever else happened to be lying around they managed to smash together their art punk masterpiece in a mere six days, presumably so they could rest on the seventh. The majority of the music produced on the album does not even come from sources generally thought of as musical instruments. Everything from a Creda 400 tumble drier to toilets and scaffolding pipes are used (Joe Meek would have been proud). The outstanding lyricism and vocal performance of Peter Hope coupled with Jonathan’s tape loops (several meters in length) make for a riveting listen.
Taken from a live performance at the impressive St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh last year, this collaboration sees Colin Potter teaming up with Michael Begg to create everything from a rich, heavy blanket to a delicate spider web of sound. Over the course of the performance, they continually force us to shift our attention as they move across a range of soundscapes. Unnatural vibrations collide with vaguely recognizable field recordings, making a sublime hybrid between the real world and a fantastic alternative to day to day listening.
