Aeternal Flux II

  Here’s another heaping helping of instrumental invention from guitarist Neil Smith, this time with the Slate Trio. It’s a Bristol-based outfit for which fellow  The Brackish member and  drummer Matthew Jones teams with Smith and bassist Alex Heane. Octo is reminiscent of the kind of deviant jazz Eric Dolphy pioneered with Out to Lunch in 1964; cubist blocks of rhythm and harmony staggering precipitously as much as free flowing, with as much implied pulse as straight meter. The rhythmic scaffolding that Jones and Heane erect is not so tantalizingly wobbly as Richard Davis and Tony Williams’ efforts for Dolphy, but plastic enough for Smith to append other materials he has affinities for: psychedelia, systems music, motorik, funk and Afrobeat. As the title suggests, Octo features eight substantial tracks – none under six minutes in length – that combine composition and improvisation in novel ways. For all its title suggests despondency over a declining welfare state,...

  The Liftmen, a post-punk/psych band from Bristol led by the prolific guitarist Neil Smith, has a new album out after a decade-long hiatus. The tracks sound fully formed, benefiting from slow development out of initial sessions at bass guitarist Jim Barr's J & J studio. It’s their third album and the first released on Space Heater Recordings. Golden Token is a departure from their previous Twisted Nerve releases where Rasha Shaheen took lead vocal duties over post-punk reminiscent of Young Marble Giants. The harmony vocal approach that Smith, Shaheen and drummer James Whitby-Coles adopt for this album is the sort of thing Ween may have done as a one-off song experiment, but only these Bristolians have the bottle to turn into an album-length practice. Psychedelic precursors of punk are lower-level floors lighting up in the elevator these pranksters have commandeered. The rinky-dink guitar loop at the start of opener ‘Will You See’ taps into a long and verdant strain of Engli...

    Michael Rother performs a mixture of Neu!, Harmonia and solo material for the final show of the retired MONA FOMA festival with Hans Lampe, Franz Bargmann, and Vittoria Maccabruni. The late Klaus Dinger, Rother’s original Neu partner and inventor of the duo’s influential motorik beat, is present in image; his hawkish features float in granular spectrality from photos projected behind the band. Lampe is the only other original Neu! member being one of two drummers on Neu! ’75 , the krautrock group’s final official release. (The other drummer was Thomas Dinger, Klaus' brother, who passed away in 2002.) Bargmann is rhythm guitarist to Rother’s lead, and Maccabruni joins in the second half of the set to contribute electronics and vocals.  The setlist is taken from the original trilogy of Neu releases – Neu! , Neu! ‘2 and Neu! ’75 – Musik von Harmonia and  Deluxe , the two albums released by Harmonia (Rother’s short-lived mid-70s supergroup with Hans-Joachim Roed...

  Codex Serafini’s second album Mother, Give Your Children Sanity builds on the stylistic foundations of debut The Imprecation of Anima while allowing new variations in tone and accessibility. The saxophone blasts of opener ‘Pitying Them for Giving Life’ immediately bring 70s space rock progenitors like Hawkwind and Gong to mind, but within a context brought up to date with elements from contemporary experimental metal. The mythic portends and ritualistic atmosphere of Belgian doom outfit Wyatt E. or New York’s blackened psych jazz-metal fusioneers Imperial Triumphant suggest parallels for Codex Serafini’s surreal heaviness. According to the band statement: “ This album grew from our shared, deep connection to one another and reflects both the power of nature and the struggles we all experience as human beings on this planet.” Lyrics have become progressively discernable since the group’s 2021 EP Invisible Landscape . The female lead singer (as anonymous as the other members o...

  Pack It in My Liege , the sixth album by Bristol-based avant-rockers The Brackish, exhibits the latest iteration of the multifarious instrumental rock first assayed on their 2014 debut Big Guys . In contrast with the freeform passages of Donor Zone , this Pig Records release demonstrates greater compositional rigour and the tightening of a quartet approaching reinforced steel levels of sturdiness. Brackish sound is ultimately a pliable material; if this release favours drones over jams, the next may see another reversal in polarity. Pack It in My Liege tilts the balance towards control, but with no loss in creative boldness. It features six tracks like surrealist paintings: epic yet contained visions of adventurous weirdness. ‘Welter’ opens proceedings in a suitably stormy fashion, operating from some nexus spanning post-hardcore, neo-psych and math rock; conjuring shades of acts as disparate as Sonic Youth and This Heat. The twin guitars of Luke Cawthra and Neil Smith pla...

    Sliders is a new Bristol-based group that teams guitarist Neil Smith of The Brackish with Chris Langton on drums, Harry Stoneham on bass, and Dan Moore on keyboards. Like The Brackish, Sliders use jazz – in both its compositional and improvisatory faculties – as a catalytic aesthetic to merge various categories of experimental rock (psych, prog, kraut, postpunk, post-rock). Both are instrumental groups that shift between and intermingle heavy and playful tones; there’s an enviable balance that allows grittier, shadier textures to keep the imagination engaged before light-heartedness drifts into mere effervescence. If there’s a significant difference, Sliders lean more into improvisational looseness on their self-titled debut album than the math rock-ish complexity The Brackish can indulge in. Moore is a member of the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble. His Moog Sub 37 Paraphonic synth lines on opener ‘Jumper’ – drifting in and out of the jagged intervals of Smith’s arpeggios – evo...

  The MONA FOMA summer series of concerts has succumbed to the economic pressures terminating many Australian music festivals. Although Dark Mofo remains to enliven the Tasmanian winter months, it’s lamentable to see the cessation of a program that had the advantage of a balmier season for performances on the Museum of Old and New Art’s spacious Berriedale lawns. Since its inception in 2009, organiser Brian Ritchie made it his mission to entice Hobart’s residents with an eclectic range of experimental artists such as Philip Glass, David Byrne, Ryoji Ikeda, Julia Holter, Pierre Henry, Tyondai Braxton, Mdou Moctar, John Cale, PJ Harvey, and Antony Pateras, among many others. The inclusion of renowned American free jazz and poetry group Irreversible Entanglements for the second last show is a fitting summation of the institution’s cultural ambition. While this penultimate concert has its languorous moments, the febrile Fire Music energy on display for at least two-thirds of its length...

  Avant rock duo Ensemble 1 from Brighton, UK have just released a new live video from a gig  earlier this year  at London's New Cross Inn. The piece performed is 'Guitar, Bass & Drums I', a reworked version of a track from their debut album.  Joe Potts: Guitar, Laptop Tom Way: Drums  The track is also available in an audio-only version on Bandcamp and can be found here:  https://ensemble1.bandcamp.com/track/guitar-bass-drums-i-live-at-new-cross-inn

  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-psyc...

    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 tec...

  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 se...

  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...