Thursday, June 14, 2012

caressing my cochlea lately....




It's been a good year for  Lieven Martens, or Lieven Moana as he is billed here.  His LP for Underwater Peoples, Canto Arquipélago, was, I noted a while back, probably his best since 2009's  On Seafaring Isolation... (which was also reissued on CD this year by Fonal). But this C38 for NNA Tapes A Star Maker, Strange Dreams, and Clairvoyance is even more his best since 2009'S On Seafaring Isolation...  Especially the spacey incantatory vocal stuff. 



The latest from Hiroshima-based Paul Thomsen Kirk, a/k/a Akatombo, falls between two stools, or rather, between two posts: post-punk and post-rock. A good place to fall. 


An Analord-type move, this new offering from Bass Clef  -- embracing the relative limitations of analogue, the same set of tools used by the Detroit and Chicago people. And it pays Analord-level dividends. Improbably fresh even when that exhausted instrument the Roland 303 hoves into earview. (Oddly, I recently picked up a copy of the novel that inspired the title Reeling Skullways, Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head, which I always meant to read during my s.f. fiend teens but never got around to).




New signing to Kid Shirt/Hacker Farm's "nano-label"19F3. Very vaguely puts me in mind of.. Gavin Bryars.



The difficult second album. The roughage is all there, the chewy tunes aren't giving themselves up as freely and instantly as with Jewellery. But I'm confident they will.


Fresh as they were, Halo's offerings of last year had a definite tang of early-mid Nineties about them: R&S, Ken Ishii, and so forth. Quarantine is a lot less taggable, to the point where the thought occurs, at several junctures: is this actually a New Sound?


Hyperdub, running things, pt 2.  Cooly G's debut starts off a little languid, but then spirals out into dubby cascades of psychedelic erotica. One of the songs is a Coldplay cover, apparently. Which one, I don't want to know


 

In a text for the Mark Leckey retrospective at the Serpentine last year, I averred that the audio component of "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" was "a remarkable piece of sound art in its own right". Here it is, on vinyl
 



More sound art, on vinyl. INA-GRM gems reissued via Mego's new imprint Recollection GRM.



Might be mistaken here, but this LP has been unavailable for decades, right? I've only ever had it on cassette, taped off a friend. Wyatt's 1970 debut solo album, for CBS, which apparently at one point was considered one of the labels for "progressive  music" . Now reissued by Esoteric, a division of Cherry Red.

and there's other stuff ..

Ariel P's Mature Themes (very good)... and Ku Klux Glam naturally

Woebot, Hallo, obviously

the Ad Hoc compilation (or parts of it, it's bloody long, something like 46 tracks!) ...

the if-I-were-Carpenter-ism of Drokk...

Shackleton's Music For The Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ ...