Posts

JUNGFRAU - S/T

Image
  Hannah Louise Grasskamp’s songs are enigmatic Gothic pop confections, blending euphoric impressions of fairy tale magic with undercurrents of intrigue and threat. Fantastic motifs like ice giants and underwater kingdoms are invoked, but unlike most fairy tales, the songs do not present neat resolutions or a coherent moral didactic purpose. They follow a darkwave tradition wherein imagery from childhood fantasy serves to illustrate adult existential concerns – think Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure at their most conflicted and chilling.  Grasskamp’s Brighton-based band Jungfrau has acquired a new focus with its shrinkage from quintet to a trio featuring the vocalist, Matt McCartney on bass, and Timothy Cottrell on synthesizer, and live and programmed drums. Their new self-titled release features five tracks that herald a directional shift. Shades of hypnagogic pop and darkwave’s cross-fertilization with post-metal now overlay and complement the drone-oriented neo-psych element
Post a Comment
Read more

ENSEMBLE 1 - DELAY WORKS

Image
    Ensemble 1 is an avant rock duo from Brighton, UK, specializing in the exploration of digital delay-based phrasal repetition and heavy, cyclical rhythms. Guitarist Joe Potts and drummer/bassist/composer Tom Way operate on the border line between math rock and prog metal, navigating a Venn zone of intersection teeming with the fractal curlicues of minimalism and durational elements of modern composition. Psychedelic swirls in the mixture tap into a venerable echo guitar heritage, occasionally suggesting an unlikely aesthetic union of Achim Reichel & Machines and Meshuggah. It’s an intoxicating mix that’s hypnotic from beginning to end of the three, lengthy tracks - ranging from nearly 10 minutes to over 23 – that comprise Delay Works , the duo’s latest release on Halfmeltedbrain Records. Opener ‘Distorted Fades’ is an invigorating statement of intent, an avant-metal power drive enriched with the rotational propulsion of 6/8 time. Overlapping layers of extended technique su
Post a Comment
Read more

THE BRACKISH - DONOR ZONE

Image
  Released in September 2023, Donor Zone is the fifth album from Bristolean experimental rock quartet The Brackish. The imaginative flair they demonstrated on their previous 2021 release on Halfmeltedbrain Records, Atlas Day , has transferred successfully back to Stolen Body Records, who released Firm But Fair in 2018. The twin guitar interplay of Neil Smith and Luke Cawthra rests securely as always on the bedrock grooves and transitional dexterity of bassist Jacob Tyghe and drummer Matt Jones. Jazz – the broadest of musical churches – is a crucial ingredient, allowing the cohesion of formal elements in four tracks that successfully combine longform composition and improvisation. The martial manoeuvres of opener ‘Willox for a New Age’, conjure an atmosphere somewhere between John Zorn’s jazz noir concoctions and the polyrhythmic convolutions of Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus. An initially merry, if spiky, tone turns increasingly uneasy with each transition. This track sets t
Post a Comment
Read more

CHRIS ABRAHAMS/OREN AMBARCHI/ROBBIE AVENAIM - PLACELESSNESS

Image
  This collaboration between Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim brings together three of Australia’s most innovative experimental musicians. Although Ambarchi is now based overseas, the trio's improvisatory practice retains a collective identity. This is an artistic interaction developed through years of friendship and enhanced by each musician’s refinement of his own methodology. The grounding of this practice and the open-endedness of the music generates an intriguing tension, a simultaneous augmentation and contradiction of the title’s semiotic chain of meaning. Placelessness is a term coined by Canadian geographer Edward Relph in the 1970s to describe the erosion of individuality of place under modernity. Capitalist imperatives (commercialisation, mass consumption) and bureaucratic standardisation instil homogeneity in the cultural environment. A companion concept in the field of anthropology, describing a similar form of alienation, is the non-place. Marc Aug é
Post a Comment
Read more

ANOCHT-KLAVIER KRIEGER-STRIBORG AT ALTAR, 1/7/23

Image
  This concert provides rewarding insights into the fruitful intermingling of genres that occurs on metal’s experimental fringe. Anocht and Klavier Krieger, two artists from Melbourne, join Tasmanian underground legend Striborg for a series of one-man performances where the theatrics and bleak themes of black metal meet dark ambient textures and mutant synth pop. Anocht initiates proceedings with strategies inherited from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer’s noise metal scene, layering ear-splitting shards of feedback guitar over a low ominous pulse. His 30-minute set is a feverish trail of amorphous themes that shares atmospherics with the dank, tomb-scented exhalations of Gnaw Their Tongues and Abruptum. Tortured vocalising over synth tritones and chitinous squeaks gives way to an even more dour sequence of delay accumulated guitar riffs collapsing into a swirling fog of distorted moans. Klavier Krieger’s set begins with isolated, echo-drenched beats, opening space that will be gradually
Post a Comment
Read more

CODEX SERAFINI - THE IMPRECATION OF ANIMA

Image
  Codex Serafini have found an appropriate home for their first full-length album release. Riot Season, an independent label based in England’s Black Country region, provides an outlet for musicians that share a similar spiritual intensity with the mysterious Brighton-based psych rockers. They’ve shared a stage with Japanese neo-psych superstars Acid Mothers Temple on at least one festival date. Mahti, another labelmate, features members of legendary Finnish avant-rock group Circle. The more raucous elements in their sound have a parallel in Shit and Shine whose 2004 noise rock mantra Ladybird Riot Season has re-released in an anniversary edition. In a manner  fitting  for such eminent company, The Imprecation of Anima sees a broadening and deepening of the mystic energy Codex Serafini has demonstrated on their previous Halfmeltedbrain EP releases Invisible Landscape (2021) and Serpents of Enceladus (2020). The album’s four, longish suite-like tracks evolved out of a year’s worth
Post a Comment
Read more

MULES - ILLUSIONS OF JOY

Image
  The high rise block depicted on the cover of Mules’ new EP Illusions of Joy could be the apex of Brutalist excess. Situated in monochromatic parkland, this hexagonal example of ‘high’ modernism seems to be sitting on a rotational base like a playground carousel. The curtains that cover its front-facing side accentuate an oppressive infantilisation; they could be on the verge of parting to reveal a puppet show of multiple domestic discontents. Is this structure really a bin photographed at a severe angle to look like a towering public housing edifice and whose steel grid design only resembles myriad balcony windows? Either way, this Photoshopped illusion serves well as symbolic counterpoint to singer Tommy Vincent’s lyrical concerns: hegemony, social control, technological addiction, the neoliberal race to the bottom (which, in Vincent’s wordplay, ends in a tie).   The stark image also offers the opposing paradigm to Constant Nieuwenhuys’ concept of ‘New Babylon’ which Vincent re
Post a Comment
Read more