Tag: avant-rock
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Plugged, but not hinged
If you’ve heard of Perhaps Contraption you’re probably under the impression that they’re an avant-garde brass band, and you may even have seen them marching around summer festivals pushing a pram and making noises that are neither plugged nor hinged. Their debut album, ten years old this year, is something…
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Darts & Arrows – Altamira (avant-jazz)
Avant-garde music (and other art) is animated by a narrative of self-definition – it is the privileged marginal, the self-marking other, whose exteriority to the mainstream is established by virtue of the trailblazer’s enhanced legitimacy, rather than its exclusion from the established sites of legitimacy. But one person’s avant-garde, obviously,…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
This album, originally released in 1989, was for a long time the definitive answer to the question ‘what do Thinking Plague sound like?’ It was ten years before In Extremis presented a new line-up and a changing sound to the record-buying public (sans legendary founder-member Bob Drake) – and let’s…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Abject and lonesome mid-fi folk, that drifts across the field of consciousness like a progession of washed-out, dusty photographs, before it becomes quite heavy and ominous towards the end of the album, and finishes with an unlikely cover of ‘Twerk’. One of Uhlich’s Bandcamp tags is ‘devotional’, and there is…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Richard Wileman seems to be going through a particularly fertile patch of late, putting out releases somewhat faster than I can write about them (and the day he puts out something I don’t write about will be a long time coming). After the vigorous collaborative chops-fest (I simplify unfairly) of…
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The Chewers – Dead Dads (avant-rock)
Sections of rock’s avant-garde feel the need to dress themselves in the armour of technical facility, and indeed some of its practitioners are instrumental virtuosi who base their practice on complexity and sophisticated musical structures. Not The Chewers, who are somewhere to the left of even bands like Sonic Youth…
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Ashley Reaks – Before Koresh (avant-rock)
Ashley Reaks speaks from outside. His work is most obviously ‘outsider art’ if you look at his visual work, rather than his music: his collage-based pieces, deliberately ugly as they are (although they are often richly and decoratively patterned), with their disturbing, and frequently sexually explicit iconography, position themselves unequivocally…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Chris Saunders has released several more albums under the Interceptor rubric since he sent me this one, but he hasn’t submitted them for review, presumably because it’s taken me so long to get to this! I haven’t heard those yet, and this is old news now, but Angel In The…
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Orange The Juice – The Messiah Is Back (avant-rock)
The physical presentation of a release is an interesting issue. There are some who would argue that it’s irrelevant, that the only interesting thing is the sound on the recording, that the packaging is an aspect of nasty, dirty, anti-art marketing, or so superficial that authentic music fans shouldn’t care…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
The Stringers are a four-piece from Ontario, that plays rock music of the old school – which doesn’t mean that it’s ‘old-fashioned’, but that it’s pop music, god dammit! This is entertainment, with no pretensions to any kind of creative territory beyond that compass; all too often that can imply…
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Karda Estra – Strange Relations (avant-rock)
The Karda Estra brand has been built on continued invention and creativity: across the preceding eleven albums composer Richard Wileman has consistently and rigorously poked around at the fault-lines of his practice, finding ways to surprise the listener that nevertheless cleave to an established and instantly recognisable aesthetic. Although Karda…
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Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (avant-pop)
There are many ways to do anything. There are musicians that spend their entire career mining one small patch of stylistic territory, exhaustively plotting its possibilities, immersing themselves in its world, refining its vocabulary until their creative utterances are as idiomatic as the language of everyday life. Then there are…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
There’s a gentle oddness to these songs, cradled in gleefully brutal drum machine sounds and fugal laminations of electric guitar ostinatos. The executioner of the latter is subtly ‘off’, in both pitch and articulation, contrasting the fascistic precision of the former, but colluding with it to efface the performer, along…
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Prescott – One Did (avant-rock)
There’s an openness, and a sense of ensemble solidarity, to Prescott, that puts me in mind of jazz as much as it does of the art-rock influences they own up to in their press release; much of the music is clearly arranged in detail, but it feels improvisational, and its…
Oliver Arditi 