Simon Bookish pens first volume
Respected underground composer, vocalist, musician and remixer Simon Bookish is set to release a collection of songs, entitled Unfair/Funfair, on the Use Your Teeth label...»
Articles
John_Brainlove has written the following articles:
Bell Orchestre at London Bush Hall, Sat 25 Mar
As the brass sound starts to rise, the crowd goes quiet. It's a warm, full sound coming from all around the room, from multiple moving sources, hard to pin down, but then it suddenly starts coming from right behind me, and I turn to see a member of Bell Orchestre (dressed all in white and wearing several glowing lights) playing gentle, ringing notes on the French horn...»
The Knife - Silent Shout
The Knife refused to play live for a long time. They said it's a throwback to the old days of rock 'n' roll, and not something that belongs to the digital age in which they find themselves living. »
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Gold Lion
Gold Lion - it is, depressingly, a tiresome piece strummy FM trash with annoying bullshit words and declawed kick-arse sections that completely fail to kick even one bit of any arse. This saddens me, more than I thought it would.»
Why?, Danielson Famile - I'm Slow But I'm Sloppy / Did I Step On Your Remix?
Choppy 12-string acoustic guitar and tight loops of marimba give it an exotic fairground atmosphere, and Daniell Smith's loose, stylish vocal lollops along next to the zig-zagging arrangement, with the rhythm scrambling, diving and clicking over in the background amicably.»
HK119 - HK119
Removed-ness is an approach that can work, if the music is there to back it up, for example in the case of Goldfrapp (at her best), or Beth Gibbons of Portishead. But there has to be a hook, beyond just going through the motions - some kind of real investment of effort, emotion or creative spark. And I can't find it here.»
Trash Trash Noise Next Door (Adaadat party) at London Corsica Studios, Fri 17 Feb
There's an enjoyable oddness in watching a totally weird top hat throat-drum man perform tricksy vocal contortions... Welcome to the Adaadat Records party, a marathon all-nighter in darkest South London with no less than 14 back-to-back performances from the label's wonderfully nuts roster of artists...»
Germlin epidemic
Fantastic genre-smashing laptop chaos urchin Germlin is hitting the road running on his first UK tour this March. The tour features a changing selection of other acts from the Adaadat label including DJ Scotch Egg, Ove Naxx, Doddodo, Gulpepsh and several other weird and wonderful purveyors of glitching electronic strangeness. »
Reading The Books
Like when you're exposed to a sequence of images flashing by too fast to see properly, and you just know that all of those images are being stored somewhere in your brain, The Books' music is teeming with information. Crackling, disembodied lines of dialogue swim up briefly through the pungent mix, vanishing just as quickly as they arrived. Songs subtly build, constructed from quiet percussive clicks and microbeats, bows sliding over cello strings, plucked guitar notes (often treated - looped, glitched and reversed); whispered vocals sit against the constant flow of words and samples gleaned from the detritus of recorded history. The result is a delicate web of sound, low-key, bombast-free and humble, bristling with content and potential.»
Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
What a dreamy girl. See: Beth Orton in a dusty cowboy hat, guitar case covered in flower stickers slung across her back. Beth Orton in faded denim hotpants, hitchhiking the American highways. Mercilessly stealing indieboy hearts with her saucer blue eyes and wispy summer hair, last night's brown eyeliner and chipped blue nail varnish, cross-legged in dirty trainers, playing under the shadow of a tall swaying tree on an endless summer afternoon...»
Goldfrapp, Hot Chip at London Brixton Academy, Thu 09 Feb
Alison Goldfrapp strides out onto the glowing soft focus stage like a tightly wrapped pop present, super confident on glittering silver platforms and a black micro dress, under a cloud of curly blonde hair...»
Germlin - Youth Pixxel
Is this "chip tunes"? No. This is Better. Faster. Harder. Fish AND chip tunes with extra fish and chips. Bipcore. BOOMCORE! WTFcore. I think I'm having a panic attack.»
Giant Drag race around the UK
Annie Hardy and Micah Calibrese return to the UK in February to tour with The Cribs.»
Books tour
Groundbreaking, experimental "folktronica" duo The Books are due to begin their first UK tour at the end of January.»
Patrick Wolf signs to Loog
Patrick Wolf has at last signed a deal for his much anticipated third album.»
50 Foot Wave washes up five free MP3s
50 Foot Wave have ushered in a new chapter in the development of digital music by making their latest EP available completely free to fans through their website.»
Simon Bookish at London Nog Gallery, Sat 10 Dec
Bookish fixes members of the audience with his eyes, flashing a white smile as he describes yet another new scenario that we find ourselves in: talking to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld about ducks in a park, perhaps. His evocative words draw surreal and funny places around us.»
Capitol K - Nomad Junk
Each piece is draped in layers of samples and noise, organic instrumentation stacked against perfectly imperfect drum loops, record crackle seeping through banjo and synth, harmonies and spoken word running back and forth against the beautifully textured backing.»
C-Jags - Sandy / Putty Boy
'Sandy' gets stuck firmly in your head from the first few lines. 'Putty Boy' doesn't so much get stuck in your head as move in, unpack, put its feet up and ask for a cuppa.»
John Parish - Once Upon a Little Time
John Parish has been around seemingly forever in some incarnation or other - whether as a backing man and co-producer in PJ Harvey's band, or helping out the ever-more-hairy Eels frontman E, or releasing occasional solo records in his trademark low-key fashion...»
Boards of Canada enter Campfire Headphase
Boards Of Canada are set to release their new album, "The Campfire Headphase", this coming 17th October on Warp.»
!!! at London 100 Club, Tue 09 Aug
Nick Offer snarls the words out, then he's in the crowd and people are going fuckin crazy, everyone trying to keep up with him, and his clothes are being pulled open and he's leering dementedly into the sea of raised arms and smiling faces like some kind of sharp-toothed demon hedonist...»
Envelopes - Demon
The first few notes of Demon tangle across the page like the first fat raindrops of a storm bursting on the Pavement, then it's straight into 'It Is The Law'... gorgeous guitars dripping melody and smiles, shimmering with distortion and wry politeness, hop-skip-jumping from C86 to '90s college rock to Right Now, and picking up the best parts of everything along the way...»
Ariel Pink - Worn Copy
'Worn Copy' a hazy, strange and twisted little journey into retro psychedelia. Everything about it sounds slightly wrong, as if it's on tape that keeps speeding up and slowing down, warped and stoned and unstoppably fucked up...»
Patrick Wolf releases arrest statement
Following an awful lot of gossip in recent weeks, Patrick Wolf has released a statement through his PR company explaining the details of his arrest and subsequent bail last year...»
Kevin Blechdom - Eat My Heart Out
PLEASE HOLD BACK ON THIS - C.R "Eat Your Heart Out" is an album drowned in a surreal bontempi-cheese sound palette - ridiculous fanfare trills, nauseatingly fake electric piano, the cheapest electronic handclaps this side of Pete Waterman and more melodrama than you'd find in a week's worth of Family Affairs... so awful that you wanna tear the CD out of the player and throw it away, but so compulsive and catchy that it's just impossible.»
Lee County Killers are gonna getcha
Punk-blues insurgents The Immortal Lee County Killers 3 are due to release their third album, These Bones Will Rise to Love you Again, on September 5th via Funhouse Records, and tour in support of the release.»
Antony And The Johnsons at London Queen Elizabeth Hall, Fri 24 Jun
Watching Antony perform live, watching him wriggle on his stool and lean into the mic, his eyes closed and shoulders swaying, that angelic voice, dipping and soaring and carefully pronouncing every word, the intensity of feeling that he throws behind every note makes much more sense...»
A letter from Envelopes - Clor tour announced
Envelopes have announced a UK tour with Clor in July 2005...»
The Egg - /Forwards
"It's a slick, glossy production that brings to mind a bit of Goldfrapp's slinky pop, a touch of M83's reverb & warmth and a generous dash of Royksopp-style holiday programme soundtrack. Maybe the post-"Play" Moby audience is who this is aimed at."»