Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

I was away when he went. Just wanted to acknowledge the passing of a beautiful creature.

Posted by poacher in music at 22:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Posted by poacher in music at 13:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thanks to everyone that came to this. It was a great night with a genuinely lovely atmosphere, and the 4 sets were all pitched perfectly. Apologies for not being able to speak at the end - it was partly down to the IPA and mostly down to Oli's amazing set. Stay in touch for details of the next one (matt dot poacher at gmail dot com), which will hopefully be sometime in the early part of the new year.

And cheers to Gianmarco Del Re for the great footage.

Posted by poacher in music at 21:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

To find out this years' winner, visit The Liminal - there's a little clue below...

If, as the man says, we are all David Toop now, then somehow **** must be the neurons, or maybe the writing hands. There’s always been something of Toop’s style in **** – the exploratory nature, the episodic open-endedness, the almost propulsive sense of stasis. And **** is the very epitome of all this. On its 5 tracks, **** has somehow stepped through the gaps between the beats and discovered a new Mandelbrotian layer of complexity and calm. He gives each track space to breathe and unfurl to a logical conclusion, unafraid, particularly on Parts 3 & 4, to allow for long passages of inertia. But even these periods of inertia are alive with a kind of crackling creative energy, an energy stirred and kneaded by the calm monologues of Vengeance Tenfold. The other word I keep wanting to use is ‘shamanic’ – it’s daft and overblown language, of course, but there is something increasingly mantric and psychedelic about the direction **** is heading. He’s one of our most intriguing explorers at present, and **** might just be the best thing he’s done.

Posted by poacher in music at 22:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Title: Spindle and the Bregnut Tree
Artist: Ix Tab
Label: Ix Tab

Spindle and the Bregnut Tree is an unsettling listen. Unsettling because it’s strange at a basic sonic level and unsettling because it feels so profoundly personal. There are worlds woven into these tracks and this depth of abstracted emotional content seems to make the music vibrate at a molecular level and as such expand beyond the available sonic terrain. The 12 tracks are pieced together from recordings made as far back as 1987 and ‘collected in a variety of locations, mostly midway between the deepest West Country hallows & the skaen boundaries of the 303’ so the collection also functions as a kind of aural incunabulum (here be monsters) – though I’d be dubious as to how useful it’d be as a dowsing tool to locate specific places. It’s a difficult job to merely describe how the album sounds, as these feel as much like landscape eructations and captured neuronal blips as anything else; but, if pushed, this has elements of Richard James’ early psychedelic explorations and the outer reaches of Coil’s more nocturnal experiments. (Or, more obscurely, the feedback from some afterlife machine onto which ‘they’ uploaded the combined yammer of Balance and Sleazy’s consciousnesses.) There’s also something of the analogue bubbling of Cluster, particularly on the 18-minute epic of ‘Oggle Hatch’ which resolves out of a welter of psychic babble into a beautifully simple synth refrain. But influences aside, this is very much a unique project with its own peculiar sonic idiolect, and it’s a project that clearly deserves to be more widely heard. Go forth.

More minimals over at The Liminal.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 17:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)