Month: October 2012
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The Blackswords: Episode 5
The dice were not favouring Rajir. He looked at yet another fistful of ones, twos and threes, taunting him from the table, and threw a handful of coppers at them, standing. ‘I’ve had enough of this, you whoresons,’ he grumbled. ‘Your luck could change at any moment, sir,’ said Falcon,…
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Mere – Mere (dark-ambient improvisation)
Improvisation is a complex matter, and often a contentious one: some degree of musical freedom is usually identified with it, to the extent that freedom is sometimes regarded as its defining characteristic, its essence, or indeed as the thing itself. Thus some more partisan free improvisers would not really regard…
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Jumble Hole Clough – Three Bags Of Madder (ambient)
Relating music to place can be a tricky business: music, after all, is a non-denotational language, or if it denotes anything, it denotes itself. Of course there are specific associations related to recognisable phrases or sounds, and music often involves verbal elements which can point our aural responses in a…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
The green, pastoral idyll of the English national myth, the archetype of England that is reputed to ramble gently through the rolling downs and valleys of a harmonious rustic hinterland, is bollocks. The countryside in which it is supposed to be found is not a place with which the majority…
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Melanin 9 – Magna Carta (hip-hop)
It winds me up somewhat, on occasions like National Poetry Day, or in public discussions about poetry among the mandarins of the cultural elite, that the richest, most diverse and thriving field of poetic endeavour is more or less completely ignored. The academy thinks it owns the word ‘music’, and…
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Goya – Demo (stoner metal)
Drugs. Weed, hash, blow, smoke, tea, skunk, green, charas, gear, pollen, bud, sensemilla, kif, oil, dope, black, pot, marijuana, cannabis. I don’t wish to imply that Goya’s music is one-dimensional, but this is very clearly the central inspiration for their creative activities. So much so, that their Bandcamp page is…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
If you describe Tamara Parsons-Baker’s practice as a formula, it doesn’t inspire much excitement: simple, mainly diatonic guitar strums; emotive vocals; songs about unsuccessful love affairs; we have heard these elements before. However, the five songs on Lover proceed from a somewhat more warped perspective than this formula might suggest,…
Oliver Arditi 