100 words music reviews
Watching the Lijadu Sisters in an interview is like observing two parts of the same brain popping off with thoughts: “If I’m in the kitchen singing a song, and I’m walking towards the bathroom, I hear her singing exactly the same thing”. The death of Kehinde Lijadu in 2019 signalled the physical end of a […]
In 1980, a young Austrian named Konrad Becker accentuated electronic capability amidst the tonal constraints of ‘Western music’. A year later, he acted in Das Boot. Becker is now a lecturer, among many, many other things. A single lecture of his will cast most mainline documentaries to the realm of the rudimentary. Monotonprodukt 02 conveys […]
It’s hard to say how a vocalist ought to be. That said, ‘Any Other City’ is narrated by the most infectiously fun British voice of the 2000’s. The record was mainly made by ex-art students who then returned to visual or written forms of expression. For a moment, each of their artistries met to birth […]
The early years of one of Britain’s most important electronic music labels marked a sonic shift from the tectonic bass of dubstep. Kode9 and his connectors emphasised wiry glitches, massacring samples and testing sounds in a way that upended what electronic music could be. It no longer necessarily orbited around dance or a summit of […]
Punk used to be something you called a deadbeat. Then it was something to do with music. Then it was something else. Now it’s an open field for transgressions of any kind: apolitical, even amoral. Maybe it was always that and the world has changed. In any case, ‘She’s So Cool’ will be one of […]
‘Super Discount’ has slipped into cult status while the lush, hook-heavy ‘French touch’ attained commercial enormity through ‘Homework’ (Daft Punk, 1997) and ‘Moon Safari’ (Air, 1998). As a whole, this quasi-compilation lies somewhere between the two, anticipating the experimentalism of the former and the mellow expression of the latter. The record was originally intended as […]
The Louvin Brothers exquisitely harmonised messages of sin on their most devout record. Born out of the Great Depression, the two experienced a spectrum of turmoil and gaily prophesized the macabre beliefs that beat in their hearts. Ira Louvin could have died two years before the car crash that took him in 1965: his wife […]
This 2002 compilation of Abfahrt Hinwil’s short-lived electronic existence is a sprawling, metallic opus of ambient dance music. As one Discogs reviewer types: ‘(S)trictly digital romance’. This record, put on wax for the first time in May of 2020, exhibits prismatic sonic bursts that are perhaps no more mysterious than the beating steel heart of […]
Despite its warm, fuzzy title, Daniel Rossen’s debut solo LP began public life with two shivering singles: ‘one at a time the lamps died’ he sang. It appears through his writing that Rossen’s lamps broke a fuse after being overwhelmed and he is now learning to move in darkness. ‘You Belong There’ exhibits the ambition […]
100 words music reviews 