Welcome to the new-look Freq website. It’s taken a while to transfer everything over from the old Freq, which has been in need of modernisation for some years now. All that and a huge number of new reviews from writers old and new, and it’s taken a while to get everything together – starting from July 2009 until the first days of 2010… but here it is, and future updates will be both plentiful and frequent.
Please scroll down and on for the most recent bunch of reviews; the archives index for 1998-2009 are here while there is an A-Z index here of everything posted so far.
The bulk of the record reviews 1998-2008 are in the following pages: Continue reading …
For a supposed “Land of Song”, Wales has thrown up surprisingly few truly great musical mavericks over the years. Sure there’s been John Cale and David R. Edwards, and maybe Gruff Rhys and Brian Lustmord but that’s about it. It may then raise an eyebrow or two that despite her scant handful of releases to date, I wouldn’t hesitate to add relative newcomer Cate le Bon to that exclusive club.
I was taken by complete surprise last year when Le Bon followed up her lovely but largely conventional psych-folk 10” EP Edrych yn Llygaid Ceffyl Benthyg with a remarkable debut album, Me Oh My. Its haunting songs avoided categorisation and elevated the album to my favourite and most played release of 2009 – and a serious contender for best of the decade. Having seen and increasingly enjoyed her in various support slots over the past few years, I was excited to find Cate le Bon was playing a headline gig in a small upstairs room in my home town as part of a short Welsh tour, warming up for her imminent American debut trip.
Support act Y Niwl are almost certainly the first ever Welsh-language surf instrumental band and play with an infectious vigour and knowing authenticity that takes even the most ardent euromodernist back to his high school senior prom. Y Niwl remind you just what a good idea The Ventures, Dick Dale and Link Wray were in the first place, and may well be the best live dance combo in the country at the moment… I’ll most certainly be booking them for my graduation party come 1963!
Cate le Bon’s versatile four piece combo shares one member with Y Niwl – guitarist Siôn Glyn, a combined Sterling Morrison and Roger McGuinn of the Welsh music scene who has previously sprinkled his understated guitar magic on the likes of Topper and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and here provides the perfect foil to Cate’s idiosyncratic compositions, alongside a drummer and bass player who are both adept at switching instruments to suit the needs of a particular song. Cate herself flits between keyboards and acoustic and electric guitars with a detachment simultaneously awkward and otherworldly.
Sonically akin to how the Velvet Underground might have sounded had Nico held on long enough to front their third album, the group build fittingly brooding and earthy settings for Cate’s unsettling song-play – imagine Syd Barrett gender-reassigned as Angela Carter …or even vice versa. Her disquieting worldview is captured beautifully on the great “Hollow Trees House Hounds” video that comes as a bonus in the special Rough Trade Shops edition of the album (but which can be found on YouTube).
The songs set off familiarity against experiment in as finely balanced a way as The Faust Tapes or The Modern Dance, constantly shifting perspective to avoid being pinned down. “Shoeing the Bones” grooves along like Neil Young circa Harvest with Cate’s country-blues picking underpinning her plaintive lament that ‘These are hard times to fall in love’ while “Hollow Trees House Hounds” rocks to an almost Ron Wood-style Faces/Stones riff, yet whenever things threaten to get comfortable, up springs a disorientating wall of guitar dissonance or a totally off-kilter keyboard line to throw everything up in the air and see where it lands. All the while, ingenious songwriting prowess is complemented by a striking mastery of vocal phrasing that leaves the listener hanging on every syllable and imbues even the most abstract lines with a profound authority.
The set climaxes (pre-encore) with “Terror of the Man,” a feast of foreboding anchored by a ponderous prog riff worthy of Van Der Graaf Generator. Way heavier than the album version, this is a great set closer that gains more weight with each performance. Cate le Bon might not become a household name – she’s far too interesting for that – but I would put money that in twenty years time, she will be lauded and anthologised in the latest rewriting of rock history. Let’s just hope she gets the chance to make lots more wonderful music between now and then.
Shane Fahey is an ex-member of the seminal Australian post-punk combo The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast, whose much sought-after late 70s and early 80s output has recently resurfaced on a couple of anthologies focussing on the releases of the M Squared label. If anyone was wondering what the group’s synth player has been up to since then, this release at least partly answers the question.
Shane Fahey has worked as an acoustic engineer ever since the eighties, and has collected quite a library of field recordings, as this solo album aptly demonstrates. The Slated Pines consists of seven pieces which all involve the weaving together of various environmental recordings, analogue electronics, tape loops and the use of found instruments such as ‘crunched fluoro light tubes’ and ‘rolling 44-gallon drums’. Fahey is ably assisted on the project by Tom and Jamie Fielding and in one part, by Miss Siu, who contributes “non-consonant vocalisations of Egyptian Book of the Dead!”
The resulting soundscapes are both varied and immaculately captured, as might well be expected given Fahey’s background. To me, they work best when foregrounding the grainy atonal pulsations of the vintage synthesizers, particularly the unmistakable throb of the inimitable Korg MS20, where they could well be a lost antipodean kraut-cousin to Zweistein or Kluster. On the (slight) downside, some sections can seem a little too precious about the fidelity of the field recordings, almost verging on a kind of avant stereo demonstration disc at times, although at no times does the CD become anything less than a thoroughly engaging journey through a series of sonic environments and a most rewarding way to spend a spare 53 minutes.
For most of the twenty-eight years since Lustmord’s debut, the lot of a devotee has involved much twiddling of thumbs between infrequent releases and little chance of catching the man live – the portentous date of 06/06/06 seeing his first (and to date only) live appearance since the early eighties.
Happily, in contrast to most creative trajectories, the old contrarian seems to have grown more prolific during his third decade in the business, releasing new material during most years of the noughties. Startlingly, the past eighteen months have brought a further acceleration of output, with the [OTHER] album and its associated releases [THE DARK PLACES OF THE EARTH], [BEYOND] and [OTHER DUB] appearing in fast succession as well as a series of remixes for prog-metal giants Tool and the indispensable D is for Dubby collaboration with Tool offshoot Puscifer.
Grumblings on the web suggest that many of Lustmord’s older ‘industrial’ fans, to say nothing of his recent post-Tool ‘rock’ fans, look upon his forays into dub with bemused disapproval if not open hostility. The direction comes as no surprise, however to long-term followers who have known him as a keen and knowledgeable dub and reggae fan since the mid-seventies, so it should be no more of a surprise that he turns out to be very good at it himself.
[TRANSMUTED] is a limited edition 12” and is the first Lustmord vinyl release in a quarter of a century. Both sides feature remixes of tracks from [OTHER], one by Justin K Broadrick (Jesu / Godflesh / Techno Animal) and the other by Lustmord himself. Guest appearances from ex-Tangerine Dream member Paul Haslinger and Tool guitarist Adam Jones make this Lustmord’s most collaborative project in some time.
Broadrick’s side transforms “Dark Awakening” into “Dub Awakening” – an eight and a half minute slow motion paranoid walk through dystopian landscapes at the edge of town. Broadrick evaporates Adam Jones’ original guitar parts into the kind of clammy grey cloud formations that make Jesu’s work so alluring, introducing metallic dubstep beats and slightly irritating buzzy synth lines that are sparse enough to see off any danger of a groove developing.
Flipping the record, Lustmord provides “Er Dub Us”, a ten and a half minute remix of “Er Ub Us,” a track already appearing in several very different mixes across recent releases. This is the best of the lot though, pumping that already seismic bass ever deeper, sucking the listener into the vast corners of some forbidding sonic subterranea. Lustmord’s forté has always been in creating detailed and persuasive virtual worlds, sculpting seemingly abstract sounds into tangible, almost visible terrain, a talent no doubt honed to precision during his past work in Hollywood sound design. In “Er Dub Us”’s bottomless chasm, rimshots ricochet past your ears as the ghost of Link Wray drifts in from some distant chamber of the labyrinth, all the while the relentless suction of the bass pulse drawing you ever further into the void – this is dub as all enveloping inescapable vortex.
Having been neglected for too many years, dub has found saviours in the most unlikely places. Not too long ago, Moritz von Oswald’s remarkable Rhythm and Sound project showed that Berliners still remembered how to do what seemed forgotten in Jamaica, and now it’s the turn of a Los Angeles based Welsh ex-pat to show them how it’s done. Whereas von Oswald fashioned his airy dub around a low-density post-Kraftwerk titanium frame, Lustmord’s more brooding model seems hewn from slabs of raw obsidian and tarnished gunmetal.
It would be wise to grab this limited 12” while you can, but also be sure to check out the man’s other recent output.
If John Peel were still with us today, he would undoubtedly love Monkey Island. Straddling the aesthetics of his own Dandelion label and his beloved Ron Johnson Records, this Hackney-based group may be the hitherto undiscovered (and indeed unsearched for) missing link between Stackwaddy and Stump.
Opening instrumental “Back to the Stoneage” could be an out-take from Beefheart’s Mirror Man had The Magic Band been imbued with the finesse of Mötörhead. Once singer/guitarist Peter Bennett begins contemplating the relative qualities of different “Birdsong” on the following track, however, the group at once slots into that perennial no nonsense school of peculiarly British grimy jagged dada belligerence recently celebrated in John Robb’s Death to Trad Rock book. Flitting between punk, blues, garage rock and even sea shanties, Monkey Island batter their influences into crude shapes with brutal stop-start limb twisting rhythms, a sharp humour and a visceral punch that is captured perfectly on Luxe et Redux’s sonic immediacy, recorded as it was in a single day.
The CD comes with a lovely eight-page booklet of original artwork, which the group are keen to point out is printed on recycled paper. I look forward to getting a chance to catch this lot live as soon as possible!
Murmurations sees guitar noise dronemeister Urthona teaming up with London based electronic boffin The Asterism to create some wonderful alchemy on two long pieces inspired by the natural world in the West Country.
Although a CD release, Murmurations is conceived as a classic vinyl LP, with side one’s 24 minute “River Severn Bore” incarnating the relentless natural power of the said tidal current, layers of distorted guitar and analogue electronic drones melting into a fluid and enveloping rush of sound as it mercilessly gains a fearsome momentum tumbling down the estuary. By the end of the piece, the grainy sonic surfaces become so visceral, you can literally scratch them with your nails, like a feral snotty nephew of John Cale’s pre-Velvets drone experiments or perhaps Merzbow at his most ‘rock’.
Metaphorically flipping over the album, we are faced, in true Ash Ra Tempel Kosmische style, with the side two chill-out of the 20 minute title track, a meditation on the autumnal sight of murmurations of starlings gathering together into flocks above West Country wetlands. What could easily have become merely decorative and inconsequential gains gravity from the dissonance and dark grain of the sonic textures as they build incrementally into a claustrophobically dense lattice that could be early Tangerine Dream had they favoured the horse-drawn cart to the space rocket.
The collections of ‘rare’ T. Rex material to have appeared in the years since Marc Bolan’s death in 1977 by now dwarf the official output released during his lifetime. Although much of them are deeply inessential, and sometimes indeed unlistenable, carefully sifting through these volumes of out-takes and demos unearths some gems that actually surpass the official releases. The alternative versions of Electric Warrior and The Slider for instance, strip some of Bolan’s most iconic tunes of Tony Visconti’s homogenising production to reveal the startling simplicity beneath. 2007’s Bolan at the Beeb box set featured a wealth of great takes recorded mostly for John Peel’s Top Gear, but seeing as Peel and Bolan mutually dropped each other when T. Rex hit it big, the collection grinds to a halt in 1971, just as the group achieved massive success in the UK and set out in search of the same in the US. Spaceball serves to continue the story where Bolan at the Beeb left off, comprising five radio sessions recorded in America during the group’s peak years of 1971 and 1972.
This double CD package is not set out chronologically – disc one contains two sessions from 1972 (L.A. on 15th Feb and Boston on 11th Sept) while the second disc has two New York appearances from April 1971 and one from Chicago that December. The logic of this becomes apparent on listening – although the 1971 recordings are the more interesting from a historical point of view, it’s the first disc that provides the more enjoyable listening experience.
The 1971 tour was the first appearance of the full T. Rex electric line-up, yet in the confines of a radio studio, the rhythm section is sidelined, the 8th April session starting with solo Bolan versions of the new songs “Cosmic Dancer” and “Planet Queen” before the rhythm section hit in for wild versions of oldies “Elemental Child” and “Jewel” and a strangely low-key reading of current hit “Hot Love.” The following week’s appearance (April 15th) is stripped down further with Currie and Legend completely absent and Bolan and Finn improvising freely around three Electric Warrior songs and Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t,” the highlights being an unhinged version of “Cosmic Dancer” with Finn going wild on what sound like a collection of plastic cartons and “Get It On Blues,” with its bizarre ad-lib lyrics bearing little similarity to its related hit single. The third ’71 session is Bolan solo whilst on a December promo visit to arrange the following year’s tour and is comparatively lacklustre and lacking in fidelity, despite the exaggerated enthusing of the DJ.
By February 1972, the group were back in the US and the session for KDAY in Los Angeles on the 15th is a total joy, with a solo Bolan having obvious fun introducing songs from The Slider and Electric Warrior and displaying his unique alchemical talent for creating the most insubstantial songs ever written and convincing you they are the greatest things you’ve ever heard. It surely takes genius to tie couplets like ‘What’s it like to be a loon? / I liken it to a balloon’ or ‘Got giraffes in my hair / and I don’t care’ to the most basic chord changes and deliver them with such authority that he has you nodding your head and concurring ‘yes, me too Marc!’
Still trying to crack America six months later, the Boston session on Sept 11th sees Bolan somewhat worn down by the effort and petulantly chiding the silly Americans for not understanding how great T. Rex are when ‘we are the biggest group in Europe – it’s a fact,’ and bemoaning that the record business doesn’t like him because he gives the kids too good a deal. The songs played here are again solo renditions and include an early preview of “Left Hand Luke” and the “Beggar Boys,” with it’s immortal lyric ‘Myxomatosis is an animal disease / But I got so shook up mama that it ate away my knees’, which would later be recorded for 1973’s Tank album. Even without the tone of the accompanying interviews however, they sound a little tired compared to the buoyant February versions.
Although mostly Bolan solo, Spaceball is a fascinating document of T. Rex at their peak, away from the UK hysteria and stripped of the studio gloss that we are more familiar with. Clearly, the majority of the collection will be mostly of interest to hardcore completists, but the eight songs from February 1972 provide an album’s worth of material as good as anything else in the catalogue, so even if you only listen to the rest of the set once, it’s worth the price for that alone.
Hailing from Copenhagen, Slaraffenland have made an album that seems quite out of time without sounding in the least bit dated. Their sound is at once infectious and fidgety – a restless pop music that harks back to the days when groups had too many ideas to stop and spend any time polishing any of them into blandness, moving on to the next song before the last one had fully imprinted itself on your consciousness. If we want to look for antecedents to Slaraffenland’s deft and jittery craft, we probably have to go right back to XTC, Eno (circa Before and After Science) or maybe James’ early Factory singles, a time when art-school archness could happily co-exist with melodious populism.
Polyrhythms and vocal harmonies are lovingly captured with a sympathetically sparse production that resists all temptation to smother the life out of the songs… it’s such a rare treat to encounter a record that so effortlessly communicates both intelligence and joy.
A folk group from Essex recording a concept album about the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway seems an intriguing though ultimately self-defeating idea. After all, isn’t the idea of folk music that it reflects the culture it comes from, rather than holiday snaps of exotic locations? Actually, it turns out that the two areas share a large amount of common folklore, dating back to Viking times, and there has long been maritime contact between the two regions, including singer Kate Denny’s grandfather seeing active service in Lofoten in WW2.
The group have developed snatches of traditional melodies common to both locations to write their own song cycle that musically fuses the styles of both places. Denny’s up-front singing is effectively set off by a sparse instrumentation of accordion, violin, mandolin and banjo alongside some beautifully arranged vocal harmony parts.
Lofoten Calling illuminates a route via which folk music might develop in the 21st century, avoiding both isolationist stagnation and Real World-type forced post-modern integration, acknowledging cultural globalisation but building on specific historic connections and avoiding the kind of insipid ethnic lucky dip that results in abominations like the loathsome Afro Celt Sound System and their wretched ilk.
The cavernous space of Koko, once known better in the days of music hall and indie rock dance club as the Camden Palace, turns out to be eminently suitable for hosting bands whose raison d’etre is shifting air pressure through the application of low end to the somewhat notoriously loud speakers of the PA. Koko may not exactly have the acoustics of a cathedral (or even the natural reverb of the Norwegian church which hosted SunnO)))’s excellently immense live double LP Dømskirke),but the tiers of balconies also provide plentiful vantage points for the audience to get a full view – and earful – of the proceedings.
SunnO))) demonstrate their mastery of the art of building anticipation, slowly filling the venue with smoke as their intro broadcasts an avant klang of modernist orchestrations, nicely setting an edgy tone as the audience chatter is slowly dimmed by the weight of what is about to unfold. Their speaker stacks are as much the stars of any SunnO))) show, and it’s possible to glimpse the faint, warm glow of the amp heads’ valves through the gathering tenebrous fug. When the cloaked and hooded figures of the band do eventually arrive onstage and strike the first slow chords of their set, the ever-impressive sound of vintage gear pushed to the limits of their sonic power, it is a rare and beautiful chance to be thoroughly enveloped in a physical world of sound.
While SunnO)))’s set is billed as being a complete performance of Monoliths and Dimensions, it’s somewhat difficult for the quartet onstage to recreate the strings and choirs of the album; but no matter, as the show is one of their strongest yet, both in terms of pace and the impressive spectacle the bring with ritual concentration to the Koko stage. Attila Csihar has abandoned his occasionally ridiculous tree-amoeba costume in favour of ragged monkish robes, his uplit face obscured by a sinister cowl as he manipulates a ghastly green spotlight and a gout of endless smoke to ghoulish effect, his hands moving in arcane gestures as his voice spreads a message as mordant and doom-laden as only he can deliver, matching the bass rumble of Hiwatt cabinets with the omnipresent analogue synth drone controlled by Stephen Moore which underpins Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley’s slow-motion riffing.
Together they proceed to stretch out time in new directions, loosening the bonds of signature and key from the limits of immediacy; there is no gratification in the obvious comforts of hook or the merest hint of melody. Instead, they move to rhythms which can best be described as geological, the power of sustain and drone locking into a meditative continuum where the resonant frequencies of the venue are as important as the shuddering bass vibrations which creep from the toes to the ribcage with immediate, present effect. Standing at the front, where the sound comes as much from the backline as from the PA, is the place where the experience becomes immersive rather than simply spectacular – for all the ease with which it is possible to dismiss the sight of men in robes grasping the air in worship of their amplifiers or shrieking imprecations at a cold, heartless universe while bathed in sinister lighting effects and the never-ending billows of fog as being essentially silly, it should never be overlooked that the whole point of a SunnO))) concert is as much a theatrical show as it is a musical gig or even a quasi-religious summoning of darkling forces.
By the end of the set, Attila has switched his robes for a costume decked with mirrors, and he makes ceremonious play with a crown of iridescent glass with which he is eventually crowned like a mordant angelus making play with red laser-tipped fingers through the brainpan of a glass head held aloft, into the green smoke and eventually thrown to the crowd as the final act of a band whose ability to astonish and successfully hold time not merely hostage but at slavering bay through the application of sounds, light, and yes, smoke and mirrors, remains transcendent of the necessity to take it all too seriously in and of itself.
Ever vampiric, the avant-guard periodically replenishes itself on fresh blood in pastures new. Jazz, psych, prog, industrial and Dance have all fallen prey during the past half century, and now it’s the turn of that seemingly most reactionary of genres, metal. The signs had been there as far back as the early 90s, with the Melvins, Sleep and Earth all forging new routes away from rock clichédom without forsaking the initial visceral appeal of the genre, but SunnO))) have taken up the baton with a renewed sense of purpose. Guitarist Stephen O’Malley’s MySpace page reveals his musical influences to include Sun Ra, Iancu Dumitrescu, Mika Vainio, Keiji Haino, Steven Stapleton and Andrei Tarkovsky – this is most surely what we want from our rock gods.
After a decade of increasingly good albums, 2009 saw Sunn O))) release the astonishing Monoliths and Dimensions, an album that managed to be simultaneously more of the same, a huge leap into the unknown and the summation of all that had come before. It enlisted a huge cast of guest musicians without for one second losing the monolithic minimalism that made the group so great in the first place and was quite clearly the best record of the year… I was really looking forward to my first live encounter with the group!
My initial disappointment that the mighty Om were not to be the support act in Salford instantly disappeared upon entering Islington Mill’s claustrophobic stone chambers to be simultaneously immersed in dense smoke, sickly faint green light and the overwhelming sonic storm being conjured up by Swedish sound sculptor BJ Nilsen (in full surround sound). Presumably using the same source recordings he utilised on Storms, his 2006 joint CD with fellow nature recorder Chris Watson, crushing thundercracks errupted from ominous sub-bass drones at earth-shaking volume, sound trails sweeping across and around the room for a good hour and a quarter as hapless punters had no choice but to follow the instructions printed out on the bar to “please point to order.”
The storm grows heavier as the smoke grows denser until the almost unbearable sense of foreboding is partly broken by the sound of guitars being plugged into amps, hinting that SunnO))) may have taken the stage, less than ten feet away but completely invisible in the green fog. A further logarithmic increase in volume soon provides confirmation – time to heed the sign on the wall that reads:
SUNN O)))‘s stage volume can reach levels as high as 125dB. Exposure to these levels can cause permanent hearing damage. PLEASE USE THE EARPLUGS PROVIDED
Popping in the co-ordinated lime green earplugs, the sonic waves flapping my clothes around my quivering body reveal themselves to be Aghartha, opening tune on Monoliths and Dimensions. Surely no other group have used sound in such a physical and sculptural way – this is not music to merely listen to… Sunn O))) are absorbed through every cell in the body… and who knows what kind of mutations it may be inducing in those cells.
As with BJ Nilsen’s set, the effect of the rhythmless, drifting intensity is to completely dislocate any sense of time. After what may have been twenty seconds or three hours, (but my watch claimed to be 25 minutes), the smoke has cleared just about enough to spot that there are probably four robed and hooded figures on stage, the core duo of O’Malley and Greg Anderson being augmented by regular collaborators Atilla Csihar on demonic growl and Steve Moore on Trombone and Korg MS20. Despite the absence of conch shell players, harpists, tambouras or Viennese choirs, the quartet manage to admirably achieve the album’s impressive degree of tonal subtlety (if such a word has any meaning at a bludgeoning 125dB). Atilla’s voice veers between sub-bass Milan Fras style proclamations, Blixa Bargeld banshee shriek and Tuvan overtone chanting, and despite the incredible volume, the clarity is such that any listener fluent enough in Sanskrit or Hungarian would have no difficulty at all in making out every word.
At some point, Atilla exits the stage, only to reappear minutes later pushing his way back through the packed audience dressed as a tree, complete with perching crows… As the intensity is unfeasibly raised a further notch, the clash of arcane ritual, un-nerving claustrophobia, physical sonic assault and old fashioned pantomime serves to disorientate perception, fracturing any assumptions of what distinguishes a ‘rock show’ from a ‘serious performance’. In lesser hands, Sunn O)))’s approach would be merely gimmick, but such is the absolute rigour and focus of their mission – apparently even using soundchecks to measure the resonant frequencies of the venue with oscilloscopes and tuning the performance accordingly – that no-one is left in any doubt that metal is in the healthiest state it’s been in since the first Black Sabbath album.
Label: Music Video Distributors Format: DVD (Region 0, NTSC)
Blind Eye Sees All is a true classic of the live music video genre, and now receives a long-awaited DVD release via those thoroughly hardworking people at Music Video Distribution. So why is it essential? Apart from featuring the world'
Brandon LaBelle & Steve Roden - The Opening Of The Field
Label: Digital Narcis Format: CD
One theory holds that picking at scabs or otherwise excoriating the body = self-loathing. What about the pinching and pulling at strands of nature? A dwarfing talcum hum of lighthouse proportions whiles
LA2, London
25th October 1999
Prepared and hyped for Atari Teenage Riot, I was ready to hear loud fast music. What a treat it was that the fun started long before ATR ever came on. Other girls have done this, face it, MANY other boys have done this too, but something just chimes right for Lolita
Label: Freeborn John Theatre Company Format: CD+DVD (PAL)
Originally released in 1996, Freeborn John was Rev Hammer's folk rock opera about the life of English radical “Freeborn” John Lilburne, who fought in the Civil War and dedicated his life to liberty and freedom. A natural subject for Ha
Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London
28 March 2001
Tonight's Wire Session Live promises to present a few intriguing collaborations, and first up on the scene are Jaki Liebezeit and Burnt Friedman. The latter's usual live minidisc setup is enhanced with a Korg analogue synth and anothe
The Astoria, London
4th June 2000
Even just standing waiting for Neubauten to arrive on stage for this Twentieth Anniversary tour (!) is something of an enjoyable experience, thanks to the wilfully obtuse nature of some of the instrumentation and sundry kit arrayed on the platform. So ignoring t
Welcome to the new-look Freq website. It's taken a while to transfer everything over from the old Freq, which has been in need of modernisation for some years now. All that and a huge number of new reviews from writers old and new, and it's taken a while to get everything together - starting from Ju
The Spitz, London
7 June 2001
The Spitz tends to look different every time I go there. Tonight it is a late arrival just in time to see Appliance play their version of Krautrock-inspired Electronica. Projections on small screens around the room show Rand McNally maps of the Great Lakes areas of t
The Peel Sessions Live
Queen Elizabeth Hall,The South Bank Centre, London
19th March 1999
John Peel's here! John fucking Peel's here! And he's still the coolest old guy in England! For his Peel Sessions Live gigs, he's chosen to host a Digital Hardcore Night! AT THE QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL! Ho
Label: On The Fiddle/Proper Music Distribution Format: 2DVD (PAL)
The Levellers are a bit like Marmite, really. You either love them or you can't fucking stand them. I'm pretty much in the former camp, but, also like Marmite, I can go for ages without them. Then one day I'll fancy some toast, and
The Ralfe Band;
The Destroyers;
Guillemot;
The Paetbog Faeries;
Salsa Celtica;
Sild;
Cheltenham, UK
2nd-4th June 2006
Lying in the green heart of the Cotswold valleys is the small town of Cheltenham, where the remains of the emerald giant Wychwood Forest stands. This had been a site for fo
Scratch
The Blue Bar, London
2nd December 1998
Tonight`s first act is in fact a trio of buskers on the tube, ineffectually blasting each carriage with their 30-second cod-Mariachi on accordion, reeds and tambourine. Despite their earnest playing and impressive ability to walk along the moving
After The Deluge
29th May 2000
Jean-Hervé Péron is best known as the former de facto front man for Faust, a group he sometimesseemed to embody the group's chaotic lunacy for in his onstage antics with chainsaws and naked painting sessions. Following his traumatic personal split with the band a
The Peel Sessions Live
Queen Elizabeth Hall, The South Bank Centre, London
3rd June 1999
The ongoing, haphazard selection by John Peel for his live Sessions continues with the welcome return of Stereolab to live performance after an absence of a year or so. Peel comperes in his usual style, jov
@ RoTa
Notting Hill Arts Club, London
21st February 2000
There's a great sense of expectancy generated by Chicks On Speed tonight; buzzing chatter from the West London cool squad building up a tension upon a foundation of eclectic Electro DJing. When the Chicks come on stage in decorated paper
Kosmische Club @ The Garage, London
8 June 2002
Circle look worryingly like they're going to play pub-Rock covers of Judas Priest - but fortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Finland's finest space rockers (with the emphasis on the rock) have all the churning drive of Hawkwin
Kosmische
The Garage, London
12th September 1998
A legend or two popped into The Garage, held an audience captive for a couple of hours, and it was just as might be expected - half a trip back in time, and half a slice of something timeless. Damo Suzuki nearly three decades on still has the st
Rachel's - Selenography
Label: Quarterstick Format: CD
Rachel's may be the logical conclusion of the tradition of Tortoise and Slint. This is not to say that they sound like either of these bands, but rather that one may trace an evolution in contemporary American music from a highly developed N
ULU, London
19 April 2008
Merzbow was brutal. That could be the whole review. We went in knowing he would be brutal and he delivered. We came back out deaf, balance impaired, and probably several shades paler. Merzbow, aka Akita Masami, is one of the pre-eminent industrial noise artists and has
The Klinker,
The Sussex, London
17 April 2003
The Klinker! A club to conjour with, and a place to witness the indigestibly strange among the ineffably great. Take The Unseemly Trio for starters, three genially odd chaps who pluck the exposed piano strings of one of two which adorn the back room
Po Na Na's, London
2nd November 1998
Po Na Na's is a bit of a new venue in London, emerging from underneath a pub on the increasingly busy (musically as well as with traffic) Highbury Corner, and decorated in a faux-Moroccan style which actually suits the sounds emerging from The Third Eye Found
Corsica Studios, London
2nd May 2007
Looking like refugees from several different bands who all met up in a jail cell after a drunken night gone horribly wrong, it's north London's finest pirate bar band Owlls, and they really should be playing in Tortuga in the 17th Century rather than Elephant &
The Forum, London
17 December 2009
'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the Forum, not a creature was stirring apart from that seething, thronging mass of goths, punks, crusties and beardy CAMRA-men that only New Model Army seem to be able to unite into one celebratory whole. And the
93 Feet East, London
8 March 2002
Kitty-Yo hit London, taking over the snazzily labyrinthine 93 Feet East venue on Brick Lane for an evening of the label's quality acts and a host of guest DJs from Berlin, London and further afield, one of whom seems to be playing Generation X's "Dancing With M
The Union Chapel, London
21st January 2001
Back at the Union Chapel for another of its most appropriate events, A Silver Mt. Zion playing their coolly Classical and most definitely Goth set from the album "He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms". Union C
Barfly At The Monarch, Camden, London
9th August 2001
OK, so it's a promotional gig for (the once-proud, now suckers of corporate cock) Xfm. OK, so the other bands are yer average guitar malarkey. Fair enough. But if 2nd Gen's on, then why the fuck is no-one dancing? Huh? Answer me that and win
The Scala, London
29th May 2007
Part Chimp not only open with a big, metallic stoner rumble, they compound matters by using almost the exact riff from "Electric Funeral" to confirm that they are coming from a location somewhere between Black Sabbath and The Melvins. So then its heads down for a
The Water Rats, London
27th October 2007
Even though it's about as far from the stuff he plays these days as a non-executive directorship is from a proper job, the spectre of Swans' Cop weighs heavily on proceedings tonight- particularly its mantric repetition of the phrase "THE HEAT… HURTS!
LA2, London
8 July 2004
Digital Hardcore's new signing, Panic DHH, seem to be the hot new thing on the Industrial circuit. Having managed to miss them thus far other than hearing their truly awesome album Panic Drives Human Herds, I had little idea what to expect. Would they be able to replicate
The Spitz, London
24th July 2000
First off, any further mention of the fact that Dry & Heavy are a Japanese Reggae band can largely be dispensed with; so they are Japanese, not Jamaican. Well, there are Reggae and Dub groups from all over now - the Czech Republic, the Basque Country, Texas e
Jackie O Motherfucker - Change
Label: Textile Format: CD,LP
The first time I heard the CD I fell asleep around the end of "Bus Stop", the fifth track, and that's not a meant to be a negative response to the music. It just has a strangely lulling quality about it. There is a lo-fi feel to this tr
The Smell, Los Angeles, California
29 March 2001
The stages faces a room which cages a particular piece of modern art and the reflection is this: levelor blinds painted with barcode marks bracketed by (0) and (1) and a neon word consci divides ousness. White of the eye stares back towards the wh
Bush Hall, London
27th May 2007
It's raining. Not just raining, but absolutely pissing it down. The streets are running with water, and my eyes are so full of rain it takes me fully half an hour longer to find the venue than it should otherwise have done, meaning that by the time I get in, Mr Ha
(Endgame)
Shane Fahey is an ex-member of the seminal Australian post-punk combo The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast, whose much sought-after late 70s and early 80s output has recently resurfaced on a couple of anthologies focussing on the releases of the M Squared label. If anyone was wondering wh
London Fields Lido, London
19 July 2008
Nurse With Wound at London Fields Lido. It just sounds so right. And it was, too: pleasingly strange, charmingly eccentric. It was the culmination of a series of underwater sound events, staged at various venues around the UK under the banner of Wet Sounds
Icarus - Misfits
Label: Output Format: CD
Icarus, AKA Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, are back with the successor to last years Squid Ink album. Misfits is ultra chilled Ambience with heavy glitch content. I didn't see any trace of a track listing for the six tracks on the CD, so any references I ma
Kenneth Gaburo - Five Works For Voices, Instruments, And Electronics
Label: New World Format: CD
Voices and instruments are phrased in very strange intervals, giving the appearance of the cut-up - but, as we all know, it's all in how you say it. Horns, brass, voice, etc. Like wandering through a
Overground
There is no Underground in N16 - the only way to get there on public transport is by overground train, or by bus - but Stoke Newington has a diverse musical history. In a one-off special, DJ Tango-Mango of the Kosmische Club and the Drones Club explores by way of an audio collage and s
The Scala, London
20th November 2007
This has been a long time coming. Last time I tried to see Jesu (supporting Jarboe, in this very venue) it got scaled down to a Justin Broadrick solo perfomance as Final, which consisted of him hunched over his laptop making incredible noises. Now, while this m
The Garage, London
31st January 2000
It's been seven years since Matt Johnson released Dusk, the last The The album; and barring the frankly bizarre collection of Hank Williams covers, plus a series of dubious rumours, nobody has heard from him since. Until now. Joining Trent Reznor's Nothing la
Constellation
When Toronto's Do Make Say Think emerged over a decade ago, they came over as an enjoyable but slightly generic example of the Canadian post rock scene of the time, seemingly doomed to live in the shadow of Montreal's Godspeed You! Black Emperor, before fading away when the post roc
Interference
Union Chapel, London
30th October 1998
The cold snap is just hitting London in time for this event, set in the chilly North London church (OK, technically it's a chapel, but it looks and feels more like a Gothic construction, all pointed arches and uncomfortable pews) which has pl
The Borderline, London
9th November 1999
A night at The Borderline, a night for Americanism. We arrived too late to hear the first set, a band called Kenny Process Team, so no insights there apart from the appropriate(d) soundtrack feeling their last couple of songs gave me as I took in the set
Royal Festival Hall, London
12 October 2001
Given that this appearance by Faust marks both their 100th live performance since the group's reformation in 1993 and possibly their final show, it's somehow appropriate that the emergency services soon became involved once again. Part of the reason
A Music Club at The Others, London
25 July 2008
Glass used to have more members, but tonight they're a duo who make their presence felt as is, shimmering and rattling their soft motorik way through a set which shows copius affinity for the soporific psychedelia of Spacemen 3 and Harmonia's eleva
Holy Mountain
Restraint is not a word you usually associate with psychedelia. “Excessive”, yes, "silly", perhaps, but “restrained”? Nonetheless Dos, Wooden Shjips’ follow-up to their 2007 self-titled album, is for the most part a very restrained psych record. On each of the albu
Label: Mute Format: 2CD
"Still with Mute Records, the sadly neglected Fad Gadget looks like he could give The Human League a run for their money in the smart electronic pop stakes. His third excellent single in a row previews two tracks for his forthcoming album and features more of his clever,
18 Kingsland Road, London
7 March 2001
18 Kingsland Road is not a squat, but looks a bit like one, or that it once might have been. It's now an art gallery and occasional music venue, with steep leg-endangering staircases twisting into the depths of the improvised cellar bar among the salvaged c
The Tape-beatles - Synthety No. 5: Good Times
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD
Stepping to an appropriately martial, mechano-deconstructed beat, The Tape-beatles' Good Times weaves a mix of political speech snippets, training-film educational banalities deleivered with the wooden certitude of a rigi
Various - Advance 2000.3
Label: Mute Format: CD
What are the folks at Mute up to right now?
Advance 2000.3 isn`t really an album as such. It's a compilation of the up and coming Mute (and Novamute) releases. You won't find it in the shops, unless you work in the shops.
2000.3 has new releases fr
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Casa Del Popolo, Montréal
16 September 2009
Another Alien8 extravaganza at Casa Del Popolo in Montréal: guaranteed visceral jiggling with nice folks who make confrontational music.
A pan
The Spitz, London
26 April 2001
The I/O event at The Spitz was a little bit of a nerd-fest (meant in the best possible way), as several generations of audio technophiles opened up their various laptop computers and let rip with the best in glitchry they could muster for the occasion. To a shift
The Scratch Club
The Scala, London
25th March 1999
First of all, the venue; once upon a time, The Scala was both the worst and best of London's independent cinemas - terrible seats, ropey sound and a generally scuzzy atmosphere, saved by the murals, the cat and a programming selection which i
Label: Music Video Distributors Format: DVD (Region 0, NTSC), HD-DVD
Unlike most of their contemporaries, who play up the “gang” aspect of “gangsta”, the Wu-Tang Clan, while still retaining that element, always seem to be structured more like a superhero team to me, like some crazy kung f
Aalfang Mit Pfederkopf - Mezethakia Mukabalatt
Label: Aalfang Format: CD
Bit of a weird one, this - even by the usual standards. It consists of two tracks, the first ("Geschwärtzte Milch" - blackened milk) lasting four minutes long and sounding a bit like late Swans in strummy guitar instrument
(Gravid Hands)
Leverton Fox have somehow largely cut themselves loose from contemporary cliches. Coming in a gorgeous Crayola-spattered cover, Country Dances is made of equal parts jazzy articulation and jagged electronic invention. Not that there’s anything obviously 'jazz' here, just heavily
Ui - The Iron Apple
Label: Southern Format: 12",CDS
Named in respect of the vitality of the 103-year old owner of the cider house in Pennsylvania where Ui rehearsed for many years, The Iron Apple shows the band in further abstracted territory from their "post-Rock" roots. As ever, the combinat
9, 15, 17, 21 October 2003
The South Bank Centre, London
The Mind Your Head festival for 2003 is subtitled "Exploring new meanings in sacred music", though this seems more of a loose thread connecting the line-up together somewhat tenuously. However, the intriguing double bill which opens the se
(Dirter)
Hmm. Nurse With Wound. Nurse With Wound, Nurse With Wound, Nurse With Wound. What to say? Writing about Nurse With Wound is like trying to nail a jellyfish to the fourth wall. After what seems like over nine thousand albums of surrealist sound sculptures, Stephen Stapleton (and partners
The Barbican, London
27 April 2002
Part of the Only Connect series of live events, tonight was self-described thus: "The history of computer games has also been a parallel history of the development of electronic music . . . this evening's performances are less illustrations of these sounds and
Brixton Academy, London
22nd April 2000
I had a T-shirt ready for Death In Vegas. It had the cross-sectioned brain from the cover of The Contino Sessions on the front, with a Levi's logo stamped across it. Underneath was the quote from Bill Hicks about every word from the mouths of artists who a
Bablicon - The Cat That Was A Dog/A Flat Inside A Fog
: Label: Pickled Egg Format: CD
This is an album which contains a wealth of ideas, some of which I hope will be developed further in future work. Their instrumental combinations are inventive as are the range of collage and improvisational te
Dingwall's, London
15th May 2007
It's been a while since The Young Gods have appeared in London, but they're back at last, in support of their new album Supeready/Fragmenté. Dingwall's turns out to be a good choice of venue, allowing for a capacity crowd but without getting stiflingly overstuff
Label: Cleopatra Format: DVD
Yet again, it's a Goth revival. Only a couple of weeks ago, one of the broadsheets began proclaiming black as the new black. The old black obviously not having been quite black enough. So here's Cleopatra, with a bunch of nostalgia and some newer stuff too. Companion
Brixton Academy, London
13 May 2002
Quick question. Have you ever done, like, TONS of acid, read the entire works of HP Lovecraft AND watched Audition, all in one night? No? Well, whoever sorts out Tool's visuals certainly has. So we don't have to. Let's just say "thanks" now, shall we? But of t
(Hydrahead)
For most of the twenty-eight years since Lustmord’s debut, the lot of a devotee has involved much twiddling of thumbs between infrequent releases and little chance of catching the man live – the portentous date of 06/06/06 seeing his first (and to date only) live appearance since
(Éditions Mego)
I first became aware of Sister Iodine when my group Fflaps played alongside them in Lille way back in November 1992. I enjoyed them a lot - they played a thrilling high energy no wave inflected punk rock, full of dissonant guitar savagery, filtered through an inscrutable Gallic n
Akira Yamamichi - Sémiologie
Label: Fire Inc. Format: CD
The word to sum up Sémiologie is pure. Akira Yamamichi has produced on of the purest expressions of sub bass. This is the kind of album you can really share with your neighbours. He does this by working with pulse beats, constructing his
(Midwich)
A folk group from Essex recording a concept album about the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway seems an intriguing though ultimately self-defeating idea. After all, isn’t the idea of folk music that it reflects the culture it comes from, rather than holiday snaps of exotic locations?
![Lustmord - [Transmuted] cover](http://freqzine.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/lustmord-transmuted.jpeg)
For most of the twenty-eight years since Lustmord’s debut, the lot of a devotee has involved much twiddling of thumbs between infrequent releases and little chance of catching the man live – the portentous date of 06/06/06 seeing his first (and to date only) live appearance since the early eighties.
If John Peel were still with us today, he would undoubtedly love Monkey Island. Straddling the aesthetics of his own Dandelion label and his beloved Ron Johnson Records, this Hackney-based group may be the hitherto undiscovered (and indeed unsearched for) missing link between Stackwaddy and Stump.
Murmurations sees guitar noise dronemeister Urthona teaming up with London based electronic boffin The Asterism to create some wonderful alchemy on two long pieces inspired by the natural world in the West Country.
The collections of ‘rare’ T. Rex material to have appeared in the years since Marc Bolan’s death in 1977 by now dwarf the official output released during his lifetime. Although much of them are deeply inessential, and sometimes indeed unlistenable, carefully sifting through these volumes of out-takes and demos unearths some gems that actually surpass the official releases. The alternative versions of Electric Warrior and The Slider for instance, strip some of Bolan’s most iconic tunes of Tony Visconti’s homogenising production to reveal the startling simplicity beneath. 2007’s Bolan at the Beeb box set featured a wealth of great takes recorded mostly for John Peel’s Top Gear, but seeing as Peel and Bolan mutually dropped each other when T. Rex hit it big, the collection grinds to a halt in 1971, just as the group achieved massive success in the UK and set out in search of the same in the US. Spaceball serves to continue the story where Bolan at the Beeb left off, comprising five radio sessions recorded in America during the group’s peak years of 1971 and 1972.
Hailing from Copenhagen, Slaraffenland have made an album that seems quite out of time without sounding in the least bit dated. Their sound is at once infectious and fidgety – a restless pop music that harks back to the days when groups had too many ideas to stop and spend any time polishing any of them into blandness, moving on to the next song before the last one had fully imprinted itself on your consciousness. If we want to look for antecedents to Slaraffenland’s deft and jittery craft, we probably have to go right back to XTC, Eno (circa Before and After Science) or maybe James’ early Factory singles, a time when art-school archness could happily co-exist with melodious populism.
A folk group from Essex recording a concept album about the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway seems an intriguing though ultimately self-defeating idea. After all, isn’t the idea of folk music that it reflects the culture it comes from, rather than holiday snaps of exotic locations? Actually, it turns out that the two areas share a large amount of common folklore, dating back to Viking times, and there has long been maritime contact between the two regions, including singer Kate Denny’s grandfather seeing active service in Lofoten in WW2.
