Artists - C

C

Calexico - Even My Sure Things Fall Through
Label: Quarterstick Format: CD

Spanning most of the musical history of Calexico, a band highly reminiscent of duo Joey Burns and John Covertino's previous bands, Giant Sand and especially Friends Of Dean Martinez, this EP combines unreleased tracks with remixes of previously-released material, some European B-sides, and three CDROM videos to make an almost definitive collection of Calexico's southwestern-Texas-Arizona-tinged music, all on one compact CD. While the majority of the material here is original Calexico, there's also a wonderful cover of the American Music Club song "Chanel No. 5" that's so heartbreakingly rendered that it blows the first version clear out of the ballpark. The remix of the trumpet-heavy "Banderilla" is also wonderful, as is Two Loneswordsmen's remix of "Untitled III."

-Holly Day-

Calexico - Hot Rail
Label: City Slang Format: CD,LP

Calexico are not trying to be subtle in any way with Hot Rail. From the Mexican Mafia gang tatoo font to their immediate delve into Mariachi horns on track one, it is apparent that this is border town type music for lovers of the desert from a group named after one very such crossing point. Mercifully they shy pretty far from sounding too Country, too Tex-Mex, and instead weave and swing through more classical SouthWestern themes of lone flowers and desolate vistas. Very cinematic, Hot Rail does conjure up beautiful melacholy pictures of lonely windswept horizons with rolling tumbleweeds, though due to some gratifying versatility, the views could be as easily taken for Italy as Arizona. One track, "Fade", gives vision of a wanderlusted cabellero exploring the alien backstreets of Detroit and picking up some very smooth Jazz- just to freshen up the horses a bit.

Joey Burns throws voices out that range from sounding like Violent Femmes to being a dead on impression of Slint. One must love vocals in with all this music and it is the voices that keep this from being just another ambience-filled lovely brain soundtrack. And there is sooo much music in here. Ten musicians play about twenty instruments as well as sourced sounds and recordings. Even without the vocals, Hot Rail contains such full sonic richness that nods must go out to Convertino and Burns for their production skills and to Nick Luca and Craig Schumacher for their recording efforts as well as their contributions to the sounds they not only capture but helped to create. Madeleine Sosin plays an amazing violin throughout almost half the tracks which changes the music utterly and is so recognisable where it exists, and missed where it does not.

Recent sell-out shows are evidence of the sweep of appeal Calexico have found. Indeed the rails are hot and recommendations high. Loads of musicians are being compelled to combine the swank variables of classic American sounds but few can claim the success in vision achieved on here.

-Lilly Novak-

Mira Calix - One On One
Label: Warp Format: CD,2LP

This record rocks, thats the simple way to put it. Other record labels must hate the way Warp casually goes about releasing albums that are just so damn good. One on One is the debut album of South African Chantal Passamonte, AKA Mira Calix, recorded in the seclusion of relatively icy Sheffield where she goes about her musical business as occasional in-house DJ for Warp.

OK, why is this album so good? Go buy it, thats the simple answer. Trying to describe what One on One sounds like is an exercise in futility. Each track would have to be broken down in turn. Mira Calix has a distinct style, but thats not to say each track is a variation on the same theme. Few electronic records have this much diversity; each track launches out into a new direction.As a general pointer, I could say it reminds me of fellow Warpsters Autechre, but that metaphor is becoming increasingly redundant these days. After all, pretty much every Electro track that isn't a pumping dance floor filler tends towards Autechre emulation. Anyway, just as Ms. Calix looks like she's heading towards the territories mapped out and then redesigned by Messers Booth and Brown, she breaks off abruptly and lays down some serious drones drenched with her digitised vocals. Comparison defeats the point, this is Mira Calix in her own right and she's busy defining her own style of Electro.

Nne on One is ethereal at points, then it becomes mechanised, then all too human, then a whole host of other styles and impressions too long to list, an often all at once. Chantal Passamonte has produced a debut album that isn't merely good, it's better than that - it's great.

-Les McQueen-

Campfire Songs - Campfire Songs
Label: Catsup Plate Format: CD

This was apparently recorded on a porch in rural Maryland with the bare minimum of equipment ; acoustic guitars recorded live on three mini-disc recorders and some field recordings added later. This is a very different approach to alternate group identity Animal Collective's earlier releases but it isn't some kind of "American roots revisited" music. There are virtually indecipherable vocal incantations over hypnotic guitar strumming while sounds of the outdoors infiltrate these recordings in the form of bird sounds, wind and rain. I was briefly reminded of certain tracks by Set Fire To Flames.

It is in places a weirdly compelling, if somewhat fractured or dislocated sound. Guitars and voices pick up a theme and repeat it, varying and mutating it. This works best, for me, on the last track "De Soto De Son" where the vocals are nearly in harmony over the ostinato guitar figures. It creates an unreal soundscape reminiscent of open spaces peopled by the wraiths of drifters and lost souls. Disturbing and attractive by turns, it is something I couldn't walk away from, though I can't say I actually like it. Though I don't think it really matters whether or not you like some music, you just know it works and is saying something that you have to listen to. It becomes a little more amorphous and abstract as it progresses before returning to those near harmonies and mellifluous pluckings.

If you wont a little lo-fi music that tampers with song structures and plays with mesmeric acoustic rhythms this could be what you're after.

-Paul Donnelly-

Orlando Careca & Herb Legowitz - 42 Cows In Town
Label: 66 Degrees/Thule Musik Format: 12"

Orlando Careca is a legendary Chiléan football player who's decided to try his hand at House music, in association with Herb Legowitz. I can't fault the man, he's totally succeeded. Ok, it's possible that Careca has absolutely nothing to do with this record - I`ve heard a rumour floating around that the Chiléan soccer ace yarn is a bag-o-shite. It doesn`t change my opinions in the slightest.

"42 Cows in Town" is throbbing Deep House. It's groovesome, is strictly functional, it has all the right House ingredients in all the right places. It doesn't challenge or extend the borders of house one little bit either. This track does all the things you'd expect House to do, and it does them well. I`m not sure what else to say. Now when's Luther Blissett's Drum & Bass album out then?

-Les McQueen-

Wendy Carlos - Beauty In The Beast
Label: East Side Digital Format: CD

It's hard to tell how much of this disc is what initially seems. From the outset, it sounds like an amazingly futuristic and progressive record to have come from 1986, which is when the album first came out. However, the liner notes mention that this has been "restored and remastered" by Wendy Carlos for the 2000-date release, and so I'm thinking that a lot of the cool, echoey choir effects are recent additions, or were cleaned up very significantly from the original 16-track Dolby recordings.

Whatever the case, this is very cool, and it's obvious from the free way these "songs" are put together that Carlos was having just a blast experimenting with the expanding synthesizer technology that was almost on the verge of replacing "real" instruments in the early to mid-80s. The pieces are full of computerized blips and squeaks, bells ringing, fake horns, and haunting piano melodies, like faraway circus music at times, and mangled tribal chants at others.

-Holly Day-

Chris Carter - Electronic Ambient Remixes Three
Label: Conspiracy International/World Serpent Format: CD

At last - the official Throbbing Gristle Dub remix album! Yes, really - Chris Carter has selected twelve of his rhythm tapes from the heyday of the group, and reassembled them into cyclical Ambient versions, and given them new titles in the process - "Heathen Mirth", "Generic Terrorists", "The World As A War Film", etcetera.

The results are definitely textural listening, and bear very little immediate resemblance to the TG songs and sonic assaults from whence they came - instead, loops and repetetive shimmers and shudders uncoil in darkling mode, as electronic processes are worked on the source tapes and squeezed out into sinister atmospherics and lambent dreamscapes. Naturally, the subconscious stories Carter evokes are not exacly pleasant at times, and the wheezing threat of "Hamburger Man" brings the visceral presence of "Hamburger Lady" down to the level of half-felt presences and ominous sounscraping. Likewise, the spare bass keyboard groans and warbles which remain as "Not On The Heels Of Love" are offset by horripilating electronic presences which run the frequency range down the spine to the bowels with a combined sense of chilled pleasantry and ominous, headlight-frozen dread.

As with many ambient recordings, a little volume helps a lot, especially when the chopping , nearly percussive loops of "Indisciplined" splutter into polyrhythmic life wreathed in crawling analogue synth squirms. "Still Talking" churns slowly to the decaying delay as a crisply paranoid technological Gamelan, while "Someone Came Over Here" becomes a reverb-heavy synthetic pulsation of exalted Zen vacancy interspersed with distracted melody and shrouded in distended acoustic detritus. Stripped bare of the rest of the group like this bears suitable comparison to an autopsy in sound, paring back the skin of each song and flensing down the fat, if perhaps with a subsequent amount of emotionless clinicism. Still, these remixes expose stark skeletons of often considerable beauty and even occasional grandeur in their dissected gruesomeness.

-Antron S. Meister-

Chris Carter - Small Moon
Label: Conspiracy International Format: CD

Fourteen years after his last solo studio project, and a triumphant return with Cosey to the stage as part of the Drifting festival in London, Chris Carter dons Acid guise for this upbeat CD of thoroughly Nineties dance music. Energetic, throbbing with gorgeous analogue synthesis as much as the customary digital enhancements and production values which underpin so many allegedly retro recordings (while reel-to-reel tape has it's good points, hard-disc and sequencer make things so much more contollable...), Small Moon is on a psychedelic mission, navigated by one of the pioneers of Trance music.

Still, given Carter's antecedents, it's not the run of the mill Trance on offer, but a finely-crafted sequence of tribal rhythms, bass splurges and sensurround cycles to melt the brain and move the limbs. It's quality which is on offer here - Carter knows just how to get the most from a beat and its hypnotic properties - from start of "Arcadia" it's a deep trip which is forthcoming, and one which sweep away into hyperspace before too long.

The mood is far from monotone either, with ambient passages in between the floor-fillers - just like those comparative ingenues Eat Static, this is music whose purpose is drenched in intent to summon shamanic states, without being particulary nice, twee or Hippyish about it. It's also music which demands volume and space and crowds to acheive it's full-on purpose - ecstatic rapture even. Having said that, more contemplative tracks such a "Reazymn" are probably less effective on a dancefloor than through headphones, or for general chilled-out situations, and the Dub-like passage of "Soho...3am" uses a recording of a thunderstorm (from 1980...) to make the stratosphere wobble, with interspersed sirens and other environmental sounds. Cosmic? Certainly.

-Freq1C-

Cartertutti - Cabal
Label: CTI Format: CD

What is the difference between Cartertutti's first album, and Chis Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti's previous releases as Chris and Cosey? Well, the main thing is that there is a yet further developed edge to the electronics, the music flowing with a sound which comes perhaps from software more than hardware, though to be sure the cornets, guitar glissandos and occasional harmonica are ever present at key moments in the mix. Cabal presents a development of their sound, one which plunges yet further into the psycholgical undertow with a feeling of abandon, like falling backwards blindfolded onto an unknown absorbent surface and bouncing uncertainly back up into air.

Cabal continues along the mind-expaning pathways Cartertutti have explored since their Throbbing Gristle days, woozy rafts of sound floated on rumbling chords and beatless rhythms, the myriad webs of echo effects as important in (dis)establishing a hypnotized sense being set of out of time. This drift from sensory state to occasional bouts of dub weightlessness, of grounded bass-loop solidity, of waking dreamstates and peripheral audition is characteristic of the duo's work, and one which finds a refined expression throughout Cabal.

To characterise this album as Ambient is at once over obvious and yet still somewhataccurate; it is chilled, often easy on the ear if not the brain, sounds merge and ripple sensually, caressing the nerve endings and receptors. Cabal could easily pass the floatation tank test of languourous bliss-out, but as ever with an underlying sense of unease, an occasional frisson of dread, which finds itself pushed firmly into the lower recesses of conscious comprehension on Cabal, to no untoward effect. Knowing that the lyrics still deal with the borders of sleep and death, of fear and doubt and both Zen acceptance and flinches of paranoia comes sometimes through listening, or from reading the sleevenotes where the words are indistinct, but also from a disquieting presence in the music and sometimes timestretched vocals - and which often remains unstated explicitly. Cabal is a gentle disturber of the zeitgeist, but one which undoubtedly stirs something into the collective unconsciousness which nags softly like a revelation half-forgotten from moments of waking and/or falling asleep.

-Linus Tossio-

DJ Cartman - Disco Pulpo
Label: Grow! Format: 12"

Well, what can I say? If I watched more South Park, DJ Cartman's name might have induced some sympathy. I always seem to miss South Park though, so I guess the sympathy flies out of the window. No, no, no, this just reminds me of Ibiza House too much. OK, thats a little harsh. There's not much signs of the dreaded Handbag here, but to be honest this record still doesn`t do much for me.

-N. Sequiter-

Johnny Cash - American III: Solitary Man
- Label: American Recordings/Columbia Format: CD,LP

What can I say,what should I say....genius? The Man in Black has really done it again. This recording is timeless and truly brilliant. Its based on a stripped down paradigm like the first American Recordings, even though it is slightly more orchestrated. Its not as consistent as the first Rick Rubin-produced offering, but it has more peaks of excellence.

The first master stroke is a duet with Will Oldham, transmuting Will's "I See A Darkness" from a great song to a epiphany of pain and love. Another wonderful interpretation is of Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat", which climaxes in great cascading waves of grand piano...you just gotta hear it. "Would You Lay With Me In A Field Of Stone?",is another masterpiece which has this almost eerie sense of intimacy and emotional weight that is so characteristic of Johnny Cash. The climax of the record is the traditional "Wayfaring Stranger" which uses fiddle and harmonium in a really powerful way. It has a clear quality of moon-drenched nights of yearning for release, of redemptive final realisation. It just doesn't get better than this.

Having said that we must reflect upon the fact that Cash has been playing for half a century and still comes out with something like this in the year 2000. I personally think the work he has done with Rubin is his best. All that experience, depth and wisdom just shines through his voice. It is something that has to be experienced.

-Dag Luterek-

Patric Catani - Attitude PC8 (AKA Hitler 2000)
Label: Digital Hard Core Format: CD (2LP)

New DHR shit! New DHR shit! You should all know by now what that means - enough fucking decibels contained within a little silver disc to bring down any number of thousand-year Reichs, and look damn sexy while they`re about it! And boy, in this year when defacing a statue of Churchill (a man who, incidentally, saw the use of mustard gas on the Kurds as completely reasonable on the grounds that they were a barbaric and uncivilized people- hmmm. Sound familiar to anyone? No, well, I must just be one of those paranoid fuckers who talk to themselves on the bus) is considered a crime more heinous than shooting a guy in the back with an unlicensed gun (killing him in the process, incidentally) in public opinion, then boy do we need it. This time round it's Patric C, the closest thing EC8OR have to a George Peppard as Hannibal Smith figure wearing the Ché beret, with this `ere fucker titled Attitude PC8 on CD and, just to keep `em guessing, Hitler 2000 on the vinyl. And whoah, does it Rock. (That was, incidentally, a rehetorical question, meaning I already know the answer, thanks, and that answer is fuck yes!) The vinyl's title is taken from a Boys From Brazil sample which kicks the whole thing off, before launching into that trademark DHR "all the drums and all the bass but bunged into a box and repeatedly machine-gunned until they`re dead, then, and only then, strapped up with explosives, reanimated, and made to walk into your local Nazi's house and shit on his pillow before exploding in a righteous blaze of anger" kind of groove.

There is, of course, some respite, although I use the word in its broadest sense."Comonomyhouse" isn`t as loud, but it's very sinister and keeps sounding like it's either going to burst out into sonic chaos or Steven Stapleton's gonna turn up and perform brain surgery on you. Yes, it's that good. Restraint? Yeah, Catani can do that too, as long as you let 'im use lots of spooky sounds and cool echoey effects, and even if you don't, he will anyway. So fuck you. Then you`ve got "Cows", the most innocuously-titled piece of music since Ghostface Killah's "Fish". Only this is better, a kind of hard-beat distortathon with distinctly dodgy undertones which I can't really describe. Buy it. Now. Elsewhere, there`s "Vectracks", which is just way cool, like a cross between Bomb 20's glorious "Made Of Shit" and the occasionally-brilliant Aphex Twin's moment of occasional brilliance that was "Ventolin". Alternatively, think Alec Empire's Nintendo Teenage Robots if he'd not been quite such a purist and let himself use some effects. I liked it (We Punk Einheit), by the way. You'd probably hate it, but then, you're probably a twat.

Back to the hard beat (God, don'cha just love that people are doing that again, albeit discreetly? I mean, just look at the Primals these days!), "Risky Sexual Practice" sounds like Front 242 were giving a party and some dodgy House pianist from the early Nineties popped round, only to get spiked with Ketamine and shagged by a herd of robowildebeest (yes, I firmly believe there are such things- they were invented by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and are the reason why the moon landings were faked. They needed an alibi, y`see - "Creating rapacious new cybernetic organisms? Not me, guv. On the fuckin` moon, weren`t I?")

The whole thing is topped off with "Don`t Try Blowin` Smoke Up My Ass", which manages to do all of the above at once, and the title of which, according to an American friend (note I said "AN American friend", not The American Friend, `cos that's a movie with Dennis Hopper in it, and I don`t know it personally so probably wouldn't follow its advice) actually means "don`t bullshit me" whereas I was, up until then, taking it literally and thinking "okay, I won't then; I'm sure I can manage that" which sounds ace and then ends abruptly. Oh, and all you closet fascists who like DHR stuff out there, if there are any such freaks, buy this, 'cos all yr cash goes straight to anti-Nazi campaigns too. Then fuck off.

-Deuteronemu 90210, self-styled so-called anarchist, for thirty quid and a packed lunch-

Patric Catani - 100 DPS
Label: DHR Format: CD,12"

Hardcore, hardcore and more hardcore from one of the (extremely hardcore) Ec8or crew. From the opening blast of "My Shame" onwards, Patric Catani deploys shuddering bass loops, filtered cacophony and protesting machine noise extracted from technology under duress, demonstrated perfectly by the evocatively-titled sludge monster "Flesh Dissolves In The Acid Of Light". What's more, as this is part of DHR's Limited Series, he gets to mess around outside the structured album release, and is also much longer than a single at 45 minutes on CD.

For all the clattery breakbeats and thundering drum sounds, there's a touching, squittering sweetness to nauseous tracks like "Radio Stations Inside My Head" or "Operape," as the sound of the ether and the faint tracks of surface glitches get pummelled by the devious, relentless noise assault. Queasiness seems to be the order of the day, as with the lunch-regurgitating break and distorted "Fuck you's" and transfigued melodic snippets of "You Hate Me, I Hate You," leavened with a cathartic dose of explosive mechanoid aggression. Each moment of relative calm prefigures another battering, and Catani works the balance between total noise-out and adrenal rush with skill, slipping in a revivalist chant or demonic sermon as the mood sees fit. Cataclysmic, throbbing and perfect for subduing neighbours who think that booming swingbeat is the way to enliven a party.

-Freq1C -

Cativo - Jack Knife Power Bomb
Label: Position Chrome Format: 12"

Cativo is apparently chums with Panacea, and has been known to DJ at airports - which sounds like a good idea, and no doubt showed Brian Eno a thing or two about the kind of sounds appropriate to places usually filled with paranoid security warnings about leaving possessions unattended with consequent danger of Bomb Squad demolition, hardcase customs officialdom and confused travellers in search of their luggage. "Jack Knife Power Bomb" starts off all melodic, and then brings in the elements of harshness which make for a righteously kicking Drum & Bass stormer. Franticly rewound beats, synths readying for takeoff, snares propelling everything into warp-speed and space-shot vocal samples - and then the bass-drops and whirling blades of timestretched treble make all complete in a most expansive manner.

"Another Vision" has decidedly more wobble to it; opening with a gut-churning selection of attenuated bleeps and swirls, Cativo is intent on taking things into unsettling areas, sneaking tearing bass squalls up from behind and bringing the rhythmic elements in from the side until they all meet in a pre-arranged consolidation of the sound spectrum. Shivery (former) string samples and half-identifiable vocal shimmers make for good accompaniment to the rapidly accelerating kicks and breaks; the orgasmic moans aren't even out of place for a change, as there's quite a sensual element to this track which makes perfect sense, especially as the prolongued pounding recedes into fragmentary trails of residual, clinging cymbal-snippets.

-Freq1C-

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus
Label: Mute Format: 2CD

No question has ever divided the civilised world more than this one: "What did you think of Nocturama?" For every devotee willing to bask in the righteous glory that was "Bring It On", there's a hater who's all too keen to remind you of the less-than-spectacular "Rock Of Gibraltar". Me? Well, I liked it. Except for "Rock of Gibraltar", obviously. That was shit. That said, if a band with a career as long and varied as Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have only managed to record one song in that whole time that makes me reach for the Skip button, they've gotta be doing something right. It also means this review isn't going to be particularly impartial.

And then Blixa Bargeld left. Surely it must all have been over at that point? But no. Like Phoenix from the... from the... oh yes, Phoenix from the X-Men, Bad Seeds have emerged as a really fucked-up superhero who can destroy entire planets when in a bad mood. (Not to self- Don't buy similes off that dodgy bloke in the pub again.) And this is no tentative dipping of the Blixaless foot into the water: they've curled into a ball, waited until you're right under the board, then dived right in with a double CD. A whole seventeen new songs. And bloody good they are too.

Accompanied for the most part by the London Community Gospel Choir, Nick and the boys storm through an epic set that spans pretty much their whole career, while chucking some ideas out in interesting new directions. From the moment Abattoir Blues starts, you know it's not gonna be The Boatman's Call, that beautifully understated late-night meditation of yore. No, we get Get Ready For Love, possibly the angriest Gospel number ever recorded. "Praise Him till you've forgotten what you're praising him for/Then praise Him a little bit more" shouts Cave, and the cathedral fills with fire and brimstone. And you know they're back. Much of Abattoir Blues is similarly inyerface, but don't be too fooled by the thematic differences between the two CDs, much hailed as a 'straight' Bad Seeds album and a collection of love songs. There's plenty of beauty on show on Abattoir Blues, and a fair bit of insanity on The Lyre of Orpheus, whose titular track displays an interesting reading of classical mythology, with Orpheus merrily causing havoc with his home-made Lyre Of Doom like some demented mythical Invader Zim, until Eurydice finally threatens to "stick it up your orifice".

Not to say that both albums don't have their poppier moments- the single "Nature Boy" looks like it has a very good chance of getting Nick another (sadly Kylie-less) go on Top of the Pops (possibly to be the first performer thereon to use the phrase "Sappho in the original Greek". I can hardly wait), while "Breathless" has more than a little of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" running through it. Only with a much less rude title. Lyrically, he's rarely been better, or, for that matter, wittier. Paradoxically he's at his best here on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", a song about writer's block, in which he reassures himself that “John of the Cross did all his best stuff imprisoned in a box/And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote "Chinese Rocks", somehow managing to claw his way up to sit with both of them.

"Fable of the Brown Ape" sees him making a welcome return to the storytelling days of "Your Funeral, My Trial", and is just plain weird into the bargain, while "Babe, You Turn Me On" has that Barry White-esque spoken thingy like he did on "Slowly Goes The Night", although I very much doubt the Walrus of Love ever used the phrase “brutal nesting habits�, unless he was trying to pull David Attenborough at the time. Having started with the angriest Gospel song ever, the whole shebang finishes with quite possibly the most mournful-sounding use of a Gospel choir singing “Rejoice, rejoice� I've ever heard. God, and I haven't even mentioned "Messiah Ward", which is gorgeous, or the fantastic bit at the end of "Hidin All Away" where it all kicks in as he leads the choir in a chorus of "There is a war coming", and it gets all apocalyptic in a way no amount of shock-rock teenage Metal bands ever could. Or... or the bit where... or... ah fuck it. It's great. That's all there is to it.

About ten or eleven years ago, at a promotional appearances at some record shop in London to big up Let Love In, he silenced a heckler with the memorable “We're a middle-aged rock band, playing middle-aged rock music for middle-aged rock fans�. It was bullshit then, Nick, and it's still bullshit now.

-Deuteronemu 90210 dedicates this review to the late Biscuits-

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds- The Best of...
Label: Mute Format: CD, 2CD

There's a problem I always have with "Best Of" albums. To me, at least, they always bring to mind images of motorway service stations, racks filled to overflowing with Greatest Hits, The Very Best Of, or, worse, The Best (insert allegedly zeitgeist-defining noun here) Album in the World, Ever!. They suggest something a little too posthumous, a little too much like an obituary- "Here are their best songs- forget the rest and forget the future!" But the Bad Seeds? I mean- the Bad Seeds? The wonderfully shambolic, beautifully idiosyncratic Bad Seeds, inventors of a whole new brand of suave; lounge for lifers, uneasy listening? Where do you begin?

Well, with "Deanna", obviously- rockabilly heaven by way of Route 666, Charlie Starkweather playing the blues- if ever a song summed up what the Bad Seeds are actually like (or were, way back when), it was this one. The frenzy of The Birthday Party harnessed and locked into a more traditional groove, "Deanna" is what the '50s SHOULD have been like, but weren't allowed to. A more perfect start to a compilation there has never been- lock all the doors, hide your valuables, shut your family in the cellar, the Bad Seeds are in town and they aren't taking prisoners!

The choice of tracks is interesting in itself- for example, "Where The Wild Roses Grow" (in which the boy Cave smashes poor defenceless Kylie- KYLIE! The sheer AUDACITY of the man!- in the head with a rock), literally the "greatest hit" is kept until (almost) last, forcing punters only interested in market shares to subject themselves to such delights as "Tupelo" (wherein John Lee Hooker's blues of the same name becomes an apocalyptic meditation on the Messianic birth of Elvis), and "The Carny", Cave's take on the whole Faulkner Deep-South-As-Location-For- Gothic-Romance (as opposed to Deep-South-As-Klan-Haven) scene.

Basically, without wishing to sound in the slightest bit "objective", if you like the Bad Seeds, you'll love this album. But you'll probably own all the songs on it anyway. And if you don't, then buy it anyway, just so you'll have something cool in your record collection when you have friends round (and for the extra CD of live recordings on the limited edition - Ed.).

-Deuteronomy 90210-

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - No More Shall We Part
Label: Mute Format: CD,limited 2CD

It occurs to me as I listen to this new effort by Nick Cave that I might like to have never heard of him. In fact I add up the years and it has been at least nineteen since I first did so. I think I have loved him ever since. No one is able to express such ugliness and cynicism in such a beautiful way. I am sure that he has been responsible in part for the viceral red-tinged view that I take on love and devotion. Always just one fine line between loving and loving to death. Always a proof in poetry that love and hate are nearly the same thing. That there is a matrimony between life and death which will almost never be denied by hope or other sillier sunnier notions.

I did resist liking this album. Opening song "As I Sit Sadly By Her Side" features Mr. Cave making a vocal attempt so far from how I am used to hearing him. O, how difficult it is to accept change. I really, literally, cringed, though there is nothing wrong with the voice he is using, it is just different. A friend once said that he doubted Cave would ever be happy until his records were listed with the likes of Sinatra and Leonard Cohen. Male vocalist. Superstar. The man wants to be a crooner. I never understood the statement, I always thought of Nick Cave as the best of crooners. And I doubt he will ever be happy at any classification. Perhaps my friend was right and this stretching of the vocal ranges is an example of his desires. I wonder then if he was unable to keep it up, or if there is just something special about that song because all the others do sound just like Cave always sounds. His voice playing like a violin and finding all the curves and waves of sound that one just doesn't expect so that he never sounds just like everyone else. Forcing words into rhymes where they just should not fit. Finding melodies that round over the physical body not unlike a network of blood rich veins. Easy enough to sing with, easy enough to be soothed by.

The album also contains the rabble-rousing songs done to nearly a Nick Cave formula; religious angst, Gospel arrangement, foot stomping defeat of glory. "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow" is to be released as the hit single, allegedly, though the swelling of "Oh My Lord" is a bit more to my own liking. Cave always puts his heart right out on the examining table, despising of organized religion, a great loving of his own God. Bitter themes from And The Ass Saw The Angel are reiterated in "God Is In The House", which tells the story of a town absolutely smothered in purity, drowning without any true love. In fact, most all the songs tell a good tale and reading the lyric sheet is as expected from Mr.Cave, always like reading a really good collection of short stories. The musicianship involved in No More Shall We Part is impeccable. Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey stand by Mr.Cave and equal him in music for voice. Anna and Kate McGarringle provide lovely female backing voices (though not nearly enough). Also, the limited edition double CD has two extra tracks and an MPEG video as the bonus.

Basically it is as I said before, all just what you would expect from an epic Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds production. I do think it will have a stronger impact on the new inductees it calls out to Cave's wailing than it does on us old die hard fans though.

-Lilly Novak-

Monte Cazzaza - Power Vs. Wisdom, Live
Label: Side Effects Format: CD

A recording from All Hallow's Eve, 1991, on KPFA in San Francisco. Chains and hooting, drums, crowing. A witches' speech from Shakespeare is played - bubblebubblebubbletoilandtrouble and all that. Eye of newt, et cetera. Much incantation. Mark of the devil - Mark of the devil! From the trailer to the film of the same name. "The rack...the claw...the tongs! Devices that made death a welcome pleasure! Every torture device authentic - actually used at one time!" There is a certain theatricality and showmanship that has been missing from experimental music, in several corners.

"Where is the love to be found?" And with showmanship comes sentiment - which is not necessarily a bad thing - especially concerning six eyes from hell. Following this is the answer to the question "What is death?". Invaluable information - another hallmark that has ceased in release, to a great degree. The inserts and leaflets accompanying such early recordings - where are they now? And putrefaction begins. A treatise on psychotechnology follows. Synthetic sounds smoke the background, wafting hither and that, never overwhelming the provocation of thought from words transmitted. Melody over a feminist chant. And the womb is a happening place, you fucking stud! "Don't believe in witches? You'd better believe in the Virgin Witch - she'll blow your mind!"

The strange thing is that we speak so seldom to each other about this often-lonely business of experimental music - but recognition of these sound samplings = well, we must have some kind of common ground! Some final comments about the performance, and then two tracks from 1980 in England. As with any historical document, the impact - the direct impression - is difficult to gauge in the dark light of day. To-day, at least. Leeds Ripper Song. First/Last. At last.

-David Cotner-

Ccru - Nomo
Label: Syzygy Format: CD

Created for the Syzygy project at The Beaconsfield in South London in Spring 1999, Nomo shows all the signs of having been created under the influence of one of the more amous semi-legendary creations of this century, none other than Great Cthulhu himself. Opening with a cod-prayer to Nomo, the CD proceeds to delve into the watery abyss with a soundscape of creaks, drips and murmured vocal fragments, conjouring the fog-bound reaches of a Lovecraftian marine horror story. The injection of suitably ominous samples on the subject of sub-aqua, subterranean dwellers in darkness adds to the atmosphere in an effectively spooky manner.

Dreamlike washes of sound, layered booms and attenuated descriptions of lurking horrors abound in the run up to the materialisation of a pulsing electronic beat which develops some tumbling breakbeats among the recursive echoes - it's rather as if some of the moody collages of NoN or The Hafler Trio had been remixed; which can only be a good thing. When the boom-box Dub clatter kicks in properly, the effect is darker than most Drum & Bass, which is still geared towards the dancefloor in some manner - this is more concerned with the primal aquatic threat of immersion in various forms, even bringing in the Millenium and its discontents along the way.

There seems to be some relation between this project and notions of the Black Atlantic, the history of the middle passage and the African Diaspora, linked in with aspects of the Capitalist system as a all-devouring, lurking manifestation of Cthulhoid monstrosity, demanding sacrifice in the water to feed its own desires. Whatever the intentions, the results are quite effective in their murky evocation of gloom and (even) doom, in the sense of fate, and the resulting interplay of darkling shadows as represented by the babel of disembodied voices, gurgling wet sounds and abstracted trails with the organised rhythms of the beat which keep the primal Chaos at bay - while never quite disentagling itself from the fascinating pull of the unheimlich.

Contact Katasonix for ordering details.

-Freq1C-

James Chance And The Contortions - White Cannibal
Label: ROIR Format: CD

In the late Seventies and early Eighties there was The Pop Group to brink the Funk to Punk in Britian; but in New York the beandleader of the Wave alongside No which brought Jazz and other grooves into the wake of three-chord noise and upfront attitude was Mr James Chance and his backing band, the rather special Contortions. For this collection, originally released on cassette as Live In New York in 1981, the group consist of members of Ornette Coleman's ensemble and Defunkt - not forgetting the Discolitas on backing vocals.

Overall, the quality of these recordings captures what must have been a fearsome live experience. This fire doesn't so much as express itself in the noisiness or intricacies of the playing (though there is some of the former and plenty of the latter) as through the whole created under the raggedly soulful vocals of James Chance. Above all, the essential feel of a live show is conveyed - this is not a selection of studio recordings captured faithfully on stage, but a full-on, in the room sound which takes on the qualities of documentary and time(less) machine as appropriate.

What's even better is the group's take on "I Feel Good" and "That Old Black Magic" - standards made fresh in the rawness of the sound itself, and the distinctly anarchic interpretations. Where Funk had sometimes got itself locked into a commercial groove at this time, here the emphasis is on pushing the boundaries while keeping the feel and rhythms one the one at all times. When a track stops, the need for more is suddenly apparent - a mark of quality if ever there was one - and the moodswings from slow honking sax and drifting drums of the slowburning version of "King Heroin" can whirl off into the swinging groove of the title track with distracting, hypnotic ease. So much so, that when things really start to take off for "Money To Burn" and the explosive "Contort Yourself", the slip into high gear and the controlled chaos of the brass section (including some quite outrageously, but perfect, interjected trombone bellows from Joe Bowie) makes for a satisfyingly energetic conclusion.

-Antron S. Meister-

Changes - Legends
Label: Taproot Productions Format: CD

The acoustic guitar streams forth stories of those olden days. Is the heritage of centuries ago transmitted through certain lineages? Can memory be perfectly preserved from generation to generation? Are folk memories a trait that contributes to the survival of the fittest? "Calling forth for us to go..." The end of the recording makes the CD player emit and sad and hollow sound...finis.

-David Cotner-

Sylvain Chaveau - Un Autre Decembre
Label: Fat Cat Format: CD

Chauveau's solo piano compositions featured here bear a superficial resemblance to some of Satie's work. Limpid chords hover then slowly disappear leaving their impressions like faint tracings of light in a darkening room. But there is more to this short recording. Along side the uncluttered piano he uses samples and little shreds of electronic noise and field recordings. For example on "Neuf Cents Lunes" there is surface crackle and other small sonic distractions to edge the music away from the soporific.

On the four short "Granulation" pieces there is a range of electronic sampling with some snatches of voice but the piano is absent. Further samples are introduced into the keyboard meditations on "Il Fait Nuit Noire A Berlin" and "La Lettre Qu'il N'Envoya Jamais". By way of complete contrast the final track is given over to the equally unadorned accordion of Vincent Pouplard which is redolent of early twilight in a small French town.

The overall effect of these pieces is quite melancholy but still attractive and at just over 23 minutes I felt I would have liked some more.

-Paul Donnelly-

Chicks On Speed - ...Will Save Us All
Label: Chicks On Speed Format: CD

Chicks On Speed, at first sight, promise to be one of those bands who, like DIY products, can claim to do exactly what it says on the tin - hands up who expected a Lolita Storm-style feminist Digital Hardcore kind of sound? Well, maybe just me, then. Opening with a fake ad a la Negativland, COS launch out into a plethora (does 13 count as a plethora? Well it fucking does now) of eclectic songs and styles, ranging from the noisy ("For All The Boys In The World") to the slightly scary ("Kaltes Klares Wasser") to the... well... just downright fucking (knowingly) cheesy ("Glamour Girl", take a bow!). On the way we meet Sheep On Drugs (remember them? Chicks On Speed seem to...), The B52s (yes, those B52s, whose "Give Me Back My Man" never sounded quite so fucking warped as it does here), and the ghost of Sigue Sigue Sputnik (yes, yes, I know, but it's all so much better than I'm making it sound).

Taking no shit while still making taking no shit sound fun and bouncy, this is an album with something to confound everyone. Whether fucking around with The Normals "Warm Leatherette" or pretending to get all cutey and girly on "Little Star" before informing us that "The Pope he says you really smell", Chicks On Speed (whose press release takes pains to point out that these Chicks aren't literally On Speed- at least not all the time, which is good, `cos if I want an hour of insane sincerity about various bollocks and an inordinate amount of licking one's own lips then I know people to hang out with already, OK?) seem to delight in the wilfully perverse- the aforementioned "Glamour Girl" leaving no stone unturned in its quest to out- Waterman Pete, whereas tracks like "Mind Your Own Business" and "The Floating Pyramid Over Frankfurt That The Taxi Driver Saw When He Was Landing" seem content to kick around the legacy of DAF, but bunging in the surprise substitution of a sense of humour, barely beating the kitsch element in a hard-fought match...

OK, enough of the football analogies - apart from anything else, I can neither stand, nor understand, anything about the fucking game. Why watch sports when you can stay in and listen to Chicks On Speed? The future of post-post-post-feminism starts here.

-Deuteronemu 90210 On Booze & Cough Syrup-

Chicks On Speed/Kreidler - The Chicks On Speed/Kreidler Sessions
Label: Chicks On Speed Format: 12",CDS

The teaming up of Chicks On Speed and Kreidler has brought two intriguing groups into proximity with mixed results. The conversational, storytelling style of the three Chicks On Speed works rather well with Kreidler's somewhat quirky Eighties-influenced electronic brightness, and both groups blend their respective eccentricities together neatly. "Sliding Down Your Ribcage" offers a dose of sexuality more erotic than sleazy on an unfolding laid-back stream of consciousness, both "La la la" lyrically and musically, as the tune wrings further lateral effect from the groove.

There are the twinklings and staccato blips of "Frequent Flyer Lounge Song", offset with lurching bass and "do do do-doo" vocals and arch observations on dancing, which comes closest to being a floor-friendly Pop song when the refrain of "Dance/music" is repeated to a progressively more Funked-up bleepathon. Oddest of all is the hissing and crackling interpretation of Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue's "Where The Wild Roses Grow", with the vocal parts sung by all parties (with male and female voices switched) quietly through a distant distortion to an increasingly dissolute backdrop of muted chords and dribbly glitches. As a bonus, the CD single also contains a short video of the participants hanging out in the studio together while working on the tracks.

-Antron S. Meister-

Wild Billy Childish And The Buff Medways - Medway Wheelers
Label: Damaged Goods Format: CD,LP

After the previous two releases by Wild Billy Childish and the Buff Medways I was starting to form the opinion that the Buffs are one of those bands where, like Mötörhead, every album is basically the same. Indeed, I remember buying a new Mötörhead album as a teenager and reading through the track listing managed to predict accurately what each track would sound like. And this impression was in no way diminished in Billy C's comment about the last Buffs album, 1914, where he suggested that there was absolutely no progression from its predecessor, Steady the Buffs. And, in spite of the fact that 1914 is a fantastic album, he was perfectly right. However the Buffs' latest offering, Medway Wheelers, is different, is a progression and is also a fantastic album.

The current incarnation of The Buff Medways, retaining Wolf Howard on drums and yr man Childish on guitar and vocals, has been augmented by Graham Day, of the seminal Medway beat group The Prisoners, replacing Johnny Barker on bass and vocals. The group dynamic remains that of a tight Garage power trio - even something of a Medway supergroup what with Howard from The Prime Movers and James Taylor Quartet and Childish's key role in just about any Chatham based garage band you care to name. Day's backing vocals move the Buffs a few degrees in the direction of the 60s revivalism of his previous band, but the Buffs remain something of a punk reinterpretation of The Who.

The new direction is not immediately apparent as we put the album on first time: "The Man I Am" strongly resembles "Troubled Mind", the opener from Steady The Buffs, but with Blues harp wailing from Jim Riley and a simplified chorus groove. But it's the chorus, where Graham Day's vocal backing open up the harmonic structure of the track, that hints at the changes to come. This is one of those Billy C tracks where the poet once more eulogises the enormous chip on his shoulder - a chip which just grows and grows. In the next track, "A Distant Figure of Jon", the chip is back, this time saturated with insecurities emanating from a father-figure: mentor, super-ego, godhead - "A person who I can't see who is the boss of me." Musically here we're firmly into 60s Pop-rock, scuzzed up by guitar and bass mashed by lo-fi Vox PA and Wolf Howard's full-on drum assault.

In the next track, "Karen With a C", not lyrically one of the more interesting pieces of the album, the drumming is again fantastic: powerful, acrobatic, aggressive - it's hard to underestimate the importance of Howard's backbeat. But in "22 Weeks" we are back into the fluent Childish narrative voice. A crap job and its ensuing fallout thirty years ago still bug our hero. Some might say, "get over it, Childish!" But where the poet can transform these unresolved memories into such sublimely catchy Garage Rock, this reviewer is rather glad that he hasn't. And it's this lived-in experience that lifts Childish head and shoulders above a hundred young Turks scrabbling for his Garage crown. The anger, bitterness and wit are never simply a posture - perhaps in places this "write what you know" formula feels somewhat laboured, but it's in the tracks where the specificness shines out that this album takes on the mantle of greatness.

After a Link Wray-ish instrumental, "Dustbin Mod", one of the finest examples of this specificness comes out. The album title track turns his mother's stories of a cycling club in the mid-Forties into a unique Garage-pop anthem. It's an unlikely subject for a Rock'n'Roll number - you just don't talk about your mum in Punk Rock, unless you're complaining that she stops you from going out late at night. Particularly effective is the build-up of tension in the last verse - "they thought they'd never get there" and accounts of cycling accidents in traffic, followed by the triumphant final chorus. But this track is covered in more detail in another review on this site, so we'll move along through the album. "Lie Detector", like "Karen With a C" is a far more typical Punk Rock stomp - perfectly effective but lacking in that spark of the next track, "Private View", in which the chip on Childish's shoulder takes on the art establishment. Here again where the poet takes on a subject that he feels strongly about the wit and anger shines. However the track which follows, "The Poets Dream", is for this reviewer the best track on this album. Musically it resembles one of those delicate 60s Flower Power pop songs, something like The Lefte Bank's "Pretty Ballerina". There's a definite chiming twang to the guitar line and the middle section feels like it could easily use a sitar break. And the Eastern promise doesn't stop there: the description of the lover "she brings jewels and flowers, she smiles and devours" simultaneously puts us in mind of Kali, the destructive aspect of the Hindu goddess, as well as the dark woman of the Song of Solomon. Quite a different love song from "Nurse Julie" on the 1914 album.

"You're Out The Band Sunshine" is a particularly meaty number in which Graham Day's farty bass gives it some oompah. It's another incident from the Billy C archives, perhaps a love tangle in the days of Punk and The Pop Rivets, back when he'd "bought this guitar I couldn't afford and wrote twelve songs with three chords". It romps along at a fair pace, but it's followed by the angular "Poundland Poets" with an effective chug resembling The Fall at their most agreeable, celebrating tatty Chatham Poundland chavvy rubbish, but also accepting it as part of their Medway heritage, with an art-rockiness not unlike "We Are All Phonies" on 1914.

So after having dealt with all of the Billy Childish staples: art, family, history, anger, alientation, poetry and transcendence, The Buffs leave us back in the playground with a final chug through The Who riff directory. "I'm Glad I'm Not Like David Wise" recalls the struggles of the unpopular kid and his wealthy tormentor. The chip on the shoulder is back, but when we imagine what David Wise might be doing today: he's certainly not an internationally recognised painter, poet and Punk Rock prophet. For a lesser artist looking backwards in this way would be fatal and frankly slightly pathetic, but it works for Childish, and the proof of the pudding is in this album, which holds together coherently both as a recording of one of the key garage bands of the moment as well as a jewel in the Wild Billy Childish backcatalogue.

-Iotar-

Label: Pigdog Format: CD

Splattercore HipHop noise terror in the Ambush or DHR stylee, Cho'pin delivers the beats in great big wadges of bassy distortion with a leavening of scuzzy effects to make the speakers groan in protest. With a predeliction for Skiffy bleeps and regurgitative trills left to make tracks for their own sake, and the ever-ominous boom box lurking on the horizon, Minkus is quite good at irritating ears and threatening the stability of windows.

Take "My Brother The Robot" as an example track - it has a buzzing robo-vocoder vocal loop which drives itself into brain-splitting repetition, some grinding noise to set the teeth on edge, and also knows how long of that is just about enough for listening comfort. And in between the rewound swathes of scratchy scum, there's time for some lethargically downbeat HipHop loops with piano and guitar accompaniment of "In The Body Without Organs (Suite)" - a Deleuze & Guattari-referencing trio of modal reflectivity, or the distrait pitch-shift sample setup "My Brother The Drug Addict".

Still, the main emphasis here is on noisy, heads-down chugging and swirls of flanger fallout which reaches some splendid levels of anti-Funk on pieces like the short slouch of "Too Cool, Too Dance, To Dance" or the churning paranoiac sludge which is "Act Mad". There's headfirst Drill & Bass mania too in "Attack Of The Cho'pin Children," and it all shuts down with "Arose", a 22-minute welter of dolorous noise. Even considering the ear-bending effects of the latter, Minkus shows abmirable restraint and variety in its (ab>use of the dynamic properties of music machines under pressure.

-Freq1C-

Chris And Cosey - The Essential Chris And Cosey Collection
Label: Conspiracy International Format: 2CD

The title really does say it all - this is a collection of 31 Chris And Cosey tracks from twenty years of releases, and they pretty much are essential for anyone who wants to know what the duo sound like. From the rrrrolling percussive swoon of "Exotika" to the preacher-sampling post-Throbbing Gristle thump and reverb of "Put Yourself In Los Angeles", the compilation takes a trip (or two) through C&C's highly influential take on Electro, Techno and Electronica, bringing 12" rarities "Obsession" and "Synaesthesia" to CD among old favourites such as the haunting "One Minute More" and the ominous dub harmonics of "Raining Tears Of Blood".

While a track like "Obsession" sounds decidedly dated on one level, there's an air to Chirs And Cosey's work which takes it into darker and more dangerous areas than most of their contemporaries. Cosey's lyrics, warm with firm sexuality and more than a hint of polymorphous perversity at one moment, icily desparaging (as on "Dancing On Your Grave") the next, uncoil a complex of human emotions and states of mind at the more extreme ranges of experience. Their music invokes trance states, otherworldy dreams of love and lust, built with clinical precision to extend and promote the hallucinatory rhythmic properties of deepy-involved dancing. Using early (now vintage of course) analogue and digital equipment to the full, they often pulled and tweaked new forms into being among the voluminous dross which largely characterized Eighties electronic Pop music. The Nineties selection has a different feel again, wavering from doomy atmospherics to subtly-inflected Trance-heavy drum machine stomps wafted through with a fog of shimmering effects and the ever-sensual voice of Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Taken on their own merits, many of the swinging beatbox classics like "Blue Velvet", "Vengeance" or the passionate slow dance chorale "Dr John" retain an eerie dancefloor charm, redolent of smoke and black drinks in underground strobe-filled chambers - and no, it never really did die or go away. Now that the Eighties and early Nineties are undergoing some sort of revival and reappraisal, it's a fitting time to bring out the contribution that Chris And Cosey made out from the underground again.

-Freq1C-

Chris & Cosey - Exotika and Take Five
Label: CTI Format: 2CD

With some kind of Old School Electro revivial finally being promoted at mass-cultural level, with vocoders and strangely archaic afros back in fashion (after all, they never did really go away - the vocoders, at least), it's only just and right that Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti should remaster (including subtly different mixes of some tracks) and re-release two albums which helped shape the underground electronic music of the Eighties which has now filtered into the wider musical consciousness.

Chris and Cosey often declared their desire to be a pop phenomenon along the lines of Abba in their Throbbing Gristle days, but the mid-Eighties was never really ready for them on that level. What sets this material apart from most of that decade's electronic body music is the warmth of the production, though thirteen years of Acid House to Electronica have by turns embraced, discarded and rediscovered some of the more kitsch elements such as the wobbling bass, reversed hits and programmed drum rolls found on tracks like "Vengeance" or "Relay" or the echoing anthemic vocals of "Dancing On Your Grave". Take the title track on Exotica - a swirling, rolling machine beat of considerable warmth underpins a suitably lush vocal line of few words and much sensuality - which was a bit of a House and Goa Trance hit and incidentally shares a similar mood to the early works of much-overlooked Japanese artist Phew. Similarly, October (Love Song) from Take Five reverberates with the almost atavistic synthetic drums and chiming keyboards of its time, and for this collection the two tracks have been megamixed in Nineties hard-disc style into "Exoctoba", while the obligatory extra unreleased track "Gofex" is a jaunty melange of four-square beat and upbeat tinkling offset by sampled screams of joy or agony.

As with the other formations which followed the demise of TG, Chris & Cosey had an outsider perspective which undercut the simply hedonistic element of electronic Trance music; where Coil explored the scatalogical and alchemical possibilities, or Psychic TV concentrated on the magickally ecstatic (to generalise wildly), C&C combined similar approaches with their chosen path of decadent rhythmic sensuality. Even in the most dated sounding tracks like "Smell The Roses" have a subtle ennui among their chiming keyboards and near-slap bass, while "Love Cuts" stands out as a menacing blend of post-Moroder groove and sinister, minor-key machinations backing up Cosey's disarmingly dangerous vocals, and "Send The Magick Down" is a suitably-Crowleyian comedown piece. For all the vagaries of fashionability, Exotica and Take Five possess sufficient timeless elements to justify their re-appearance, showing that it wasn't all spangles and glow-sticks on the dancefloor in the Eighties as the post-Industrial movement from noise into groove brought along the uncanny and the unsettling for the trip into the all-embracing phenomenon of electronic dance music.

-Antron S. Meister-

Chris & Cosey - Union
Label: CTI Format: CD

Union is a record of Chris & Cosey's stunning return to live performance at The Union chapel in London earlier this year as part of Labradford's Second Annual Festival of Drifting, and reveals a quite breathtaking range of subtleties from the concert which deserve closer attention away from the awesome spectacle of the event itself. Having said that, the acoustic space of the Chapel makes its presence felt throughout, and the nuances of echo and reverberation make for a special auditory experience quite above and beyond the mere usefulness of having a CD to revisit the spirit of the occasion itself.

Emerging from a coruscating realm of fluttering electronic treble and wall-washing bass come the acheing bows of stroked guitar strings in sonorous wells of stretched, coiled sound; the mood is decidedly reverent at first, slipping sacramental vocal calls and whispers into the keyboard chords which provide some kind of modern counterpoint to the (unforunately) silent pipe-organ of the venue. The gradual emergence of tranced-in pulses, arpeggiations and the chugging spread of sometimes darkly brittle oscillations of "Subondare" sets the pace towards a contemplative hypnagogic state - and the intruding chimes of virtual bells makes perfect sense as a whirl of ominous sound appears and recedes in the sublimely full throb of digital half-beats, propelling the set towards the scathing jig-stomp of "Dancing On Your Grave" which marks the show and album's (almost abrupt, given the enveloping, apparently endless, meld of sounds) climax.

Cosey's voice remains as deadpan as ever, describing the more unsettling aspects of inhumanity or chorybantic ecstasy with a detached, clinal viewpoint which makes it only more disturbing - and when "Dr. John" emerges it's from the swampiest of fogs, the most chilled of glooms. Union conveys the atmosphere of the concert quite superbly; Christ Carter's spine-tingling keyboard trills and ever-shifting rhythmic undertow (one cycle ethnodubadelic, the next broodingly organic, morphing into Trance Technoid energy coils - and even Industrially Discofied when the C&C classic "Exotika" emerges from the mix), the mid-range snatches of cornet and sideways-scorching guitar from Cosey; the conjoined, liquid flow of elements into a record which really does add so much more to the experience of witnessing the event itself - a rare feat in a live album. Utterly essential listening in its own right, there can be few better examples of the alchemical reaction between performers, space and audience (whose presence can be felt rather than heard) captured on disc than this.

-Freq1C-

Church Of Carbon - Angst
Label: Disko B Format: 12"

Someone doing up a cover of Bauhaus' Goth-Dub extravaganza "Bela Lugosi's Dead" had better be pretty certain of themselves if they don't want to get the same pasting as some quarters gave the reworkings of Can on Sacriledge. Fortunately Patrick Pulsuinger and Gerhard Potuznik pay both homage and deconstruct the basics into a splattery Electro feats of analogue synths and darkly steaming beats to satisfy the demands of smoke-filled rooms and velvet-lined tombs everywhere. The doomy vocals of the original are given a sinister, slightly frenzied twist by Potuznik, and the underlying breakbeats are equally gutteral, spasming slightly in a twitchy rhythm ever so suited to the consumption of diet pills and vodka.

"New Role" is a tad more lighthearted, with a hugely Eighties tinge to those reedy keyboards, one-finger melody and an echoed Electro main rhythm which trundles along with all the energy of a bunch of wasted New Romantics waving their lacy cuffs in the air just to watch the lasers flicker through to the splayed bursts of analogue synths. That and the progressively decaying vocals gives everything a disturbing resonance of pointy boots and crimped hair. Likewise Red Lorry Yellow Lorry's "Shout At The Sky" closes proceedings to a drum-machine chug and the plentiful application of stringy delay and flange effects to the whispered delivery, and of the Moroderizer(^TM) to the main melody and rhythm - digital handclaps and all.

-Freq1C-

Circle
- Sunrise
Label: Ektro Format: CD
- Alotus
Label: Klangbad Format: CD

Operating at the junction between hard rocking metal and psychedelic space exploration groove melodramas, Circle's sound is certainly enveloping in a total manner with nods to the Kosmische sounds seeping across the other side of the Baltic Sea to their native Finland for the last three decades or so as well as the leather-clad tomfoolery of Judas Priest and the single-minded starship thrum of Hawkwind.

Alotus opens and closes with a couple of ten minute+ metronomic bassline monsters. "Ty�aisten Laulu" gets pulses cycling on self-possessed rhythms and scrawled guitar meanderings of the bong-friendly kind which are evntually joined by some freeform yodelling action. At the other end of the journey, "Potto" brings forth the power of repetition on Teemu Elo and Jyrki Laiho's guitar strings while the muttering continues, touched by the warp of overtone singing which flickers into falsetto life as the chords sharpen into an outpuring of kaleidoscopic sound and Mika Ratto's operatic fury. Bombastic in outcome and lysergic in effect, "Potto" is a sure-fire candidate for tight-trousered headbanging and devil-horn action under the salad lights and smoke machines to the surging riffs many a Loop fan will appreciate.

In between the headbanging and headnodding there's a heap of funkily-drummed low-end cruising from the rhythm section of Janne Peltonen and Jussi Lehtisalo to the bent string psychedelia of "Alotus" itself. Another mini-epic dripping with digital delay time-tunnels and hair-trigger tension built on analogue synth warbles and spacey Jazz-funk wah offset by the seriously disturbing throat splutters and gurgling and a short, explosive finish of a Hardcore Punk style. "Iopetus" chimes in with a glossolalia-led workout through passages of dynamic string-bent reflection and voices from beyond before the ritual dissolution into smeared chaos and a wintery hum. Eclectic as this and the pleasant twin guitar and bass melodious ramblings of the very short (less than three minutes by comparison) "Northern Lights" interlude may be, the album still hangs together pretty well for the most part.

Sunrise is a far denser concoction, bringing in additional violin and Moog textures while upping the Rock ante from the choppy opening riffs of "Nopeuskunigas", with Ratt�letting rip to the perpetual grind of a Bluesier guitar-bass-drums backup. Circle haven't forgotten that they're on a mission into outer space though, and while the lead widdling screams out the melodies of the heart stars, the rest of the band fill in the gaps between suns with all the phased electronic and amplified head-trip noise they can collectively muster and the workaday four-four chugalug is subsumed by modems set to stun. This establishes a pattern for the album - apparently mundane Rock methods are pulverised, stretched and looked at in a funny way by the band, from the whooping and whirling winds undercutting the ever-so pastoral acoustic singalong (in Finnish) of "Satulinnut", which comes complete with "la la las" and some unidentifiable swirling sounds.

It would really be quite fun to play "Hautain takaa" or the lurching "Kyl� Suurin Miekka" to unsuspecting Rob Halford-worshipping muscle Marys swinging their leather and studs in the more notorious Metal hangouts of Nottingham, Walthamstow or Mile End and watching them figure out that Ratt�s impassioned growls and vocal histrionics aren't in any way Anglo-American; but they'd feel right at home in a phased mist of heavy guitar grind, clattery drums and indefatigable air-punching keyboard riffs. Then again, there's more than a touch of Can's metronomic groove to "Vaanen Valtiatar" and "Rautakoktka" as well as the Prog-fried choral arrangements of Amon Dl II as each track becomes expansively psychedelic in a heady drizzle of luscious violin skull scraping and synthesizer waves.

The last twenty minutes or so are taken up with some densely-packed conversational layering to the claustrophobic headbanging surge of "Paholaisratsastaja", and a quarter hour run on the Motorik highway in the shape of "Lokki". This latter flows with a steady rhythm, synths and strings sweeping along in the drumbeat's airstream, taking the long way round on the road to hyperspeed accelleration and inevitable massed vocal rush into apocalypse. The conclusion this track and Sunrise as a whole points towards is that Circle straddle their interests in heavy heavy Rock'n'roll and freaked-out Psychedelia at about the right moment of balance - not too much on the Metal side, and plenty of off-scale windtunnel whoosh and whoomph for the thrid eye to look upon.

-Linus Tossio-

Circlesquare - Distance After
Label: Output Format: 12",CDS

(AHEM!Now let me check my notes...) This, my omnivisceral friends, is an EP of three parts and by jingo, what parts they do be! Let's be rational for a moment and take them in order. "Distance After"; the title is, unfortunately, rarely, and easily for the reviewer (moi) very appropriate- however, it's hard to explain why. So I shan't. Instead I'll say that this track has lovely washes of sound, nice and crunchy (but vague)percussion - think "Something I CanNever Have" by NIN, but much quieter. I ended up with a large and exotic sea creature - beautiful, yet strangely unaffecting. Imagine you're at a party, right, and you're peaking on, like, the best acid ever, but you're not allowed into any of the rooms and you're sitting on the landing while someone plays all the good nice bits of Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman and you think "that's quite nice," but then hear the rest of it from the kitchen 'cos you're busy stealing booze...

"Sub Reminisce"- this is the standout track. There`s a nice Trip-Hoppy beat that keeps pissing you off by fading out then coming back in loud on the on-beat- this is, basically, a track that would have huge financial potential if only it would sell its soul, suck Satan's cock (cheers, Saint Bill, you will always be remembered) and do what you keep expecting it to- but it doesn't! Perversely, it stays beautiful, stays lovely, will probably achieve nothing but will sound great while it does it- in a world (my world, it has to be said) where Bill Hicks is Pope, this is the international anthem. Gorgeous.

Now we get weird with a track entitled "Filtering Blue", and if that don't make you think of the boy Eno, then... sorry, how did I start this sentence? Sorry, I`m a bit buggered. Let me just go straight to my notes for this track (because it`s, hey man, closer to the subconscious and, fuck it, means I can go to bed that bit sooner) - OK. Here goes.

(Ahem). A really fucked guy in space lying in a gutter playing a space squeezebox while a space orchestra slowly gather (in a spacey kind of way) around him- with a very slow one-spaceman band providing percussion. One-man (space) band may very well have a concealed acoustic guitar- in fact probably does-, but plays along so as not to get the squeezebox bloke arrested. In the meantime, the space orchestra have developed a whole kind of Gavin Bryars thing, despite the beat, and everyone seems to be getting on fine. Again, this is wonderful, but I really don't know how to sell it to you... how's about this... BUY ITOR I'LL KILLYOU!

PS. This is an EP full of moments that, if heard at the peak of a monster trip, will haunt you forever. 'Bye.

-Deuteronemu 90210 in Dinosaur Hell-

(Editorial note: be very careful in the presence of this reviewer... especially at parties.)

Clang Quartet - Jihad
Label: Silber Records Format: CD

A strange collection of sound collages coming from Scotty Irving, former percussionist of Eugene Chadbourne, Elvis X, and Geezer Lake, among others. Using taped phone conversations, feedback, electronic effects, loops, static, and bits of what sound like Irving lecturing someone or something on music, God, and the spirituality of both - the lectures are especially effective when the voices are jumping from one speaker to another pretty much on every word. The band's name is a misnomer, by the way - this is a solo project, and not an actual quartet. While I like most of this, mostly because it's just plain weird, the lecturing bits kind of turn me off because I don't like to be lectured to, even if it's not exactly directed at me.

-Holly Day-

Vincent Clarke & Martyn Ware - Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle
Label: Mute Format: CD

Vincent Clarke of Erasure and Martyn Ware of Heaven 17 could not be further from their '80s adventures than they are here on this new venture. A gentle countdown leads into very soft Ambient electronics just short of sounding New Age. The tracks are named after colours they represent and the CD is a recording of a whole event featuring colour spectrum experimentalism. Listening to the harpic spinning tones, colours are easily imagined even without the visual show and the piece as a whole is deliciously relaxing, calming, soothing. A colour wheel behind closed eyes is an accessilbe mental image, rotating pastels, swirling cloudlike whites. There are apparently very innovative technologies used to produce all this visual sound, such as the Lake Huron 3D audio processor, binaural recording formats, Animax 3D visualisation software.

It is recommended that one listen to this recording on headphones for full effect. I suspect it would be terrific for use in violent tendencies management clinics, or even just to get one through a sleepless night. It is not hard to imagine that a half slumber state with this as a sound backing could alleviate all sorts of stress and bad dreams. I don't recommend it for driving, though were it broadcast during traffic jams, road rage might be avoided. No, perhaps it is best left for introspective listening. The mental conjuring up of gossamer space ships ever pursuing an illusive state of divinity. It is a lovely example of what can be done with sound that is not big and loud and noisy. I think I must go take a nap now...

-Lilly Novak-

Kit Clayton - Nek Sanalet
Label: ~Scape Format: CD

It's no surprise on first hearing Nek Sanalet that it was chosen to be among the first releases on Stefan Betke's new ~Scape imprint; Kit Clayton shares Betke's interest (as developed in his Pole guise) in the momentous possibilies of analogue synthesis for the production of some bass-heavy grooves. However, the dubscapes Clayton produces are perhaps even more widely spread, taking in some deliquescent vocals among the echoing post-piano sounds and the reverberating frills of keyboad and mixing desk.

There are drum machine chugs and twisted delay controls aplenty though, marking further time in the virtual chambers of reflective, recursive Dub, machine drums and flowing, soothing bass. As the record proceeds, so the definition of percussion and rhytym becomes at once clearer and fuzzier - harder edges on the beats, wobblier on the synths and echo. An increasing urgency beckons attention to the detail of loops and the individual placement of lightly-fried snare in juxtaposition with frazzled melody, all riding on the all-encompassing boom of the undertow. Clayton fully understands and extends the heart and head combination of Dub Reggae - and to deny this music its origins is as futile as ignoring the Rock in its Post- Art- or Prog- flavours - and not forgetting the accretion of 20^th Century and much older cultures and technologies which constantly mesh and refract, having found a particular meeting point in Jamaica three decades or more ago; an aspect which Clayton marks in his Native American album and track titles. But enough digression...

What sets such mixing desk manipulations apart is the materials and influences rather than the methods - sequences and samples are slipped on top, across and around each other and the solid heart of the form itself, taking along Ambiences removed several stages from Kingston, JA (heart and substance), via Detroit, MI (bleep and beat) and the basement bass of Brixton (rewind and colliding boom) , Berlin (chill and analysis) or Barcelona (exiled warmth of analogue purity). The onward march of the Dub Outernational, the spreading and evolution of the recombinant viruses of technology and the trip, continues into the timeless future of electronic boby and mind music.

-Freq1C-

Clean - Room 16
Label: SugarShack Format: CDS

This is the debut EP from a Swiss Pop/TripHoppy quintet and it sounds promising. They mix scratchings, edgy drums and samples with straight ahead `Pop' tunes. Two tracks are `live' and sound a little more raw edged with drums further up front and the scratching breaking in at various intervals. The press blurb talks about `insanely catchy Pop tunes'. Well, I wouldn't go that far and I don't think anyone else will either. The interest lies in the instrumental rather than vocal area. Even though they sing one track in Rumanstch, their native tongue. I'd like to hear more playing and sampling.

So, as a taster it gives some idea of what areas they are going to explore on their first album. I'd be interested to listen to what they can do over more than four tracks.

-Paul Donnelly-

The Clicking Stick - Mocrophone
Label: Rictus Recordings Format: CD

Flowing out from the legacy of The Pop Group as much as more curious diversions such as the manic waste-recyclings of Nurse With Wound or the more freeform Improv poetry of the likes of Ted Milton, The Clicking Stick are an enthusiastically odd bunch and no mistake.

With rhythms and melodies which not only turn on sixpences but are as likely to spit them back with renewed vigour before dropping off entirely into altogether less precisely-followed areas, Mocrophone veritably stumbles from wastrel drawings of characters and sketches of lives and derailed trains of thought. When "Remains Of Remains" lurches on a tape-loop grunt and groan rhythms to the accompaniment of a sparse piano Blues, Martin Longley's rich, throaty drawl has something, bizarrely enough, of Peter Murphy's delivery about it, as he intersperses lists of animals among the lilting runs of electronic keyboards, or later lets his consciousness go streaming into overdrive on "Besotted And Becalmed". Imagine if the members of Bauhaus had lurked as the resident noirish Jazz combo for Bedlam in their interregnum years, peculiar as that might seem - particularly on the loping sub-Reggae wail of "Starsign".

What also stands out is the lack of unnecessary polish to the production - instruments sound like instruments where that's the appropriate sound to invoke, and anything else like the frenetic sampled rhythm on "Sun Valley Silver Sheath" or "Gas Pocket"'s typewriter and faux-North African string, bass and percussion groove fits into the proceedings with an air of satisfying obliqueness. The resulting live-feeling sound contributes greatly to the atmosphere of the record, as does the lack of editing out of the occasional fumble; it could come from anywhere, even Birmingham (which it does), anytime this or in the latter part of last century. The noises become the music and the scrapings, thrumblings and warbled technology of instruments from banjo to synth become both texture and melody; it feels like anything could happen at any moment. Most often it does, and not in the usual manner that might imply (please feel free to define "usual", but do bear in mind the possibility of typewriters, shaken sheets of thin metal, or what could well be plastic cups as percussion).

Mocrophone has all the hallmarks of a cult landmark in the making; absolutely, essentially timeless in its weirdness, a sneakily fragrant stab at greatness, an impassioned take on blankness. Events get stranger, estranged from the normal resemblances music is so often forced to assume for easy listening pleasure. What makes Mocrophone so refreshing is its complete disregard for making do with niceness; the easy option is disregarded in favour of the lateral. Everyone and their dog's fleas is making records which shunt ragged edges of analogue synth smears against the trombone, mute and human voice under the aegis of the sampler and studio inflections - The Clicking Stick stand out strongly among the throng for their original scrape down the blackboard of post Modern inevitability.

-Antron S. Meister-

The Cliffs On Cape - Falling Frontiers
Label: Cliffs On Cape Format: CD

Remember when goth was a musical force to reckon with, propelled by unstable art-school punks, howling self-destructive mentalists and transgressive performance artists on a diet of vodka and amphetamines, instead of a bunch of conservative, bloodless Eldritch impersonators with stock drum-machine patches, or worse, a pack of nauseating "cyber" kids touting a second-hand bastardization of cheesy Ibiza Trance under the influence of too much ecstasy and Depeche Mode? When bands like the Virgin Prunes, the Banshees and the Birthday Party cast the musical net wide, drawing influences from all over the cultural landscape, rather than trotting out an endless parade of ever more purebred self-referential orthodoxy?

Some of us do, including apparently the Cliffs On Cape, and setting aside questions of eyeliner usage and genre affiliation - no band pictures are supplied, and the photography strikes me more as piss-take than party line - they've come up with a short and to-the-point album that harks back to those heady days, without, thankfully, trying to uncritically recreate them. Diversity is the order of the day here; instrumental opener "I Miss You" owes enough perhaps to Link Wray and the Pixies that, taken out of context, your average Camden Town overgrown adolescent would recoil from it like a vampire from a portion of Chicken Kiev.

And so it continues; jaunty, piano-led "Sky Daddy" could almost be some kind of English Pogues, while "Celebrate" hits an angrier, rockier note that recalls the much under-rated Altered States, and contains the cracking line "Run my fingers through your heart", accompanied by much (too much?) wailing and gnashing of teeth. Meanwhile "To The Sun", another instrumental, resembles the Swans in both its name and its stately, sombre gravitas. Despite its stylistic breadth, the album's all held together by an underlying current of desperate passion and an intelligent lyrical ambiguity, and it demonstrates there's much more to be gained by skirmishing on the borders of genres than by sitting comfortably in the well-protected heartlands.

-Andrew Clegg-

Cnut - Prince Of Shampoo
Label: Angelika Köhlermann Format: CD

Swinging, sometimes wildly, from weird to epicly strange within the space of a few tracks, Cnut consist of Innes Smith's vocals and the music of Dave Graham. Together, they drive coach, horses and probably a Sinclair C5 through the structures of post-post-indie-Beefheartian-somethingorother with an insouciant air of people who just don't give much consideration for convention; or if they do, they're determined to ignore the rules just for the hell of it.

So there are alcoholic warnings about messing with the person behind the decks on "Talking To The DJ", a jangly tune about being a dog entitled "Bonus Extra Track!" and a very lateral singalong, hooks included , in the shape of "Man Is An Animal", in which Smith asserts that men don't want tinned women - or not usually at least. The mood is scatalogically sweltering, with concern for all the favourite bodily fluids and secretions of the childishly-inclined referenced in such moments of pixellated biological pathos as the muscularly downtempo "Yellow Bogey" and chunky post-preset groovers like "Dave's Roasting Weenies By The Pool". The title of this track somehow indicates a subliminal link to the early glorious excesses of Ween, as does the scattered, even soaring, Sixties-style fuzz of Graham's ultimately unhinged guitar work and the sloping off into jazz fusion noodling which follows. Nominal closing track "Nemesis" further adds to this impression, building into a climactic welter of anthemic chord changes, psychedelic-operatic Bowiesque vocals (complete with heavenly choirs) and a kicking start-stop rhythm which is soon swept off into a stratospheric conclusion. It seems the prog heart of Cnut beats fairly strongly under the interest in off-kilter sounds and arrangements, as does an impassioned poetic soul as demonstrated on the wayward torch song "Pretty Picture".

Prince Of Shampoo is uneven in the best sense: wobbly, wavering and far from reasurringly familiar, the album shifts and squirms away from the temptation to get too cosy, too easily digested. Sometimes this is done musically, and as often in the realisation that Smith's lyrics have gone far out into the realms of the usually unconsidered in songwriting.

-Linus Tossio-

Cobra Killer - Right Into A Kick For More
Label: Digital Hardcore Format: 7"

Sampled on a low budget from a variety of Sixties records, and a debut seven-inch release for Digital Hardcore to boot, Right Into A Kick For More finds Gina D'Orio and Annika Trost mashing up their sources into a backing for some fuzzy vocals (toned down from their more usual slots in EC80R and Give Up respectively). "Six Seconds" has a Motown swing, a Rocksteady skank, and sharp, but subtle teeth which could quite easily leave scars. "Try It" was originally by The Standells, but Cobra Killer reclaim it for Punk Rock, digital style. By subjecting the basic beat to the DHR-house fuzz-noise-distortion-reverb-flange-rewind treatment (sometimes all at once), what soul, groove or smoothness the original had is trampled unceremoniously underfoot. Ha!

-Freq1C-

Codec Scovill - Clinical Imperfections
Label: Nonresponse Format: CD

Like a mirror with a slight flaw, the sound on the initial recordings comes through in heatborne waves, wobbling and bent, entering into slightly esoteric fuck music in excelsis. A high pitch, slow and inside, and it's said that this album was worked on for a year before its eventual release. Can time - the experiences, the life lived, the chances and failures - be communicated in any nonverbal way in music or the attendant creation of sound? And how intimate a portrait is the final recording? The cover art is a series of geometric shapes, in shades of dark and light, looking as if carved from a vast mountain, atop which holds the possibility of wisdom but also the probability of snow and more of it.

It's faintly reminiscent of the Kosmische movement in the 1960s and 1970s - insofar as there is a vast, expanding sense of space with these sounds, suitable at low levels and high - well, not that high, I want to keep my speakers! The sense of the cosmic, rather - of drifting, of holding, and of eventual otherness. The rhythmic tapping and clouds of misty tones meld into each other, one after the next after the et cetera.

This is in fact one of the more gorgeous recordings of this year thus far.

-David Cotner-

COH - Iron
Label: Wavetrap Format: CD

From the opening storm-warning of drones ahead, Iron fulfils all the promises its churning digital riffology and humorous dedication to "Heavy Metal fans all over the world" could possibly fulfil. Staccato loops click and swarm from one ear to the next, and possibly invite the application of a third. Deliciously dirty splutters and organic wafts of processed feedback or sample residue distract from the computer-based construction of this almost surprisingly visceral music, and keep the evil within the bounds of good humour throughout.

Intensity is a term easily applied, as is headfucking, brain-melting chaos under control; when a tendril of deep rumbling distortion folds over another pitched to make the harmonics waver with fuzzing noise, the effect is delerious. Tones gutter out, snippets of identifiable sound make bedfellows with lunch-regurgitating vibrato, and the emergent grooves are most definitely on the case. Iron shears itself across the face of laptop nerdism, taking the breath away at times, and sampling it too as it does so. One line of crisply-snipped glitch becomes several fractal arms of pilfered and reanimated throb'n'squeak morphed from sense into buoyant delerium. Gentler sounds take on masks of unheimlich drift, and the process remains invigorated and rarely the same from track to track - though also successfully avoiding clutter.

Not for the faint-hearted listener, but recommended for the unwary to prod them awake, especially as delay-riding bursts of noise open doors multi-layered cursive polyrhythms. Pretty much every sound seems to fit in its own place, no matter how off-kilter it might at first appear, and the dynamics are exemplary in their dissonance. Ivan Pavlov's drastic appropriation of the byways of the best tactics of lumbering Metal and/or minimalist Techno (visceral affect and immediate mind-body fusion for example) and the daunting freeform expanses proposed by the digital interface of music creation and reformation on this record is successful for precisely two reasons. Application of technology to the task of generating recombinant music, and a sense of discordant direction leavened with fun.

-Antron S. Meister-

Coil - The Ape Of Naples
Label: Threshold House Format: CD

The last Coil album proper, The Ape Of Naples marks a tragic end point, a conclusion to one of the more remarkable groups to grace the annals of electronic and deviant music. Completed under the direction of his longtime collaborator Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and bringing together tracks recorded in many locations over the last decade or more, this album marks the last such resting place for the polymorphous talents of Jhonn Balance, killed in a tragic fall down the stairs of his home in November 2004. As Coil was Balance's creation, there can be no more new material, and The Ape Of Naples was assembled painstakingly from pieces completed or otherwise in the difficult months following the accident.

There are glimpses everywhere of the Coil which was and is now done, marked out in 23 years from 1982-2005 by the sleeve notes and in the reprise and returns to the "Teenage Lightning", in the shuddering walking bass of the "Last Amethyst Deceiver", shivering at the memory of "A Cold Cell". The hints and references to places Coil have been before are refracted by Sleazy into a memento, a memorial and a celebration. There is much hidden joy which twinkles softly everywhere in Jhonn's timestretched voice, Balance muttering and wailing, yes and screaming too, of the animal Man on "Fire Of The Mind", the angels and the demon drink, the bloodstream and the heavenly scars which come from "Heaven's Blade"; and always death, death, death. The mystery and exposure of all too human frailties are found too in the treated electronic Coil sound which Sleazy, Thighpaulsandra and Ossian Brown generate together, in the drone of a hurdy-gurdy and in each sequenced groan and wobbly offset bass tone or muted cornet spark: the sound of the possible spaces between hallucination and realisation, where the words have as many multiple meanings as the music(k).

Already as the CD spins past again on a second journey, The Ape Of Naples feels familiar, speaks in patterns which have their limits defined but not set; the promise of exploration is sparked by the forgotten accordion. It is a certainty that each listen will reveal more than the first, second or third. This may be the final Coil album, but some of their best were collections of the out-takes and fragments in any case. There is something of that feeling about the CD, but perhaps only through knowing that it was completed posthumously. The surprises emerge somewhere or other on each track, perhaps in the Waltz time drama of "The Tattooed Man" or Thighpaulsandra's discombobulating orchestrations throughout, maybe in software renditions and extrapolations, in the placement of a vocal effect or the braying of horns and the keening of a chorale to an unexpected rhythm - but this is Coil after all, and who could ask for more?

The last notes and marimba tones fade to the most peculiar (partial) cover Coil have ever done, a repositioning of sitcom-flavoured campery whose dissonance is best appreciated by discovery and enjoyable recognition, concluding The Ape Of Naples with a solemn cello drone. But the humour which was always there is still present, implicitly and explicitly, amid each and every sorrowful sigh and sussurus, every worshipful glitch and the secreted domains of love.

-Tango-Mango-

Coil, man. What the fuck can you say about Coil that even comes close? Whether they're slowly frying your brain with drones and disturbingly unidentifiable sounds (Time Machines, for example, or the wonderfully bizarre Elph album Worship The Glitch) or beating the shit out of you with percussion and noise (much of Scatology) they plough a furrow very much their own. A cocktail of magick and drugs, of horror and beauty. Songs about Pasolini and LSD. Recent years have seen them fuck way off into the stratosphere, stranger than ever, with that sound you can't describe, that keeps changing, but is always, in essence, Coil and can be recognised as such in an instant.

So this one then. Will it be sounds or songs? Nice or nasty or a vaguely shameful blending of the two? Well what it definitely is is fucking awesome. Opener "The Avatars" is a gloriously chaotic piece of atonal Electronica, while "The Mothership & The Fatherland", with its titular hintings at the Nazi UFO technology theory, is a much more measured affair, new kid Thighpaulsandra (Mellotron meister and long-time Julian Cope sidekick) making his influence known in a track that sounds like something off a Queen Elizabeth album, only spookier. And done by Coil, obviously.

"2nd Sun Syndrome" is where things start to become disturbingly Lovecraftian - sounds seem to bubble up through the floor, and the whole (short) piece just exudes menace and wonder like a motherfucker. By "The Sea Priestess", Lovecraft is in full effect, with Jhon Balance delivering a monologue blending the wilfully surreal ("On the sea-coast of Tibet, Egyptian Aztecs are arriving from Norway" he intones) with the wondrous ("Do not lose sight of the sea") and Coil suddenly begin to resemble the Legendary Pink Dots doing a musical version of old H.P.'s Through the Gates of the Silver Key - scary and awe-inspiring.

Sole concession to actual songs per se, "I Don`t Want To Be The One", is absolutely fucking beautiful. Strings and electronics blend into a backing someone like Michael Nyman could do if he was less whimsical and more - well, more fucked. And evil. Imagine Peter Greenaway making a horror film. Imagine Nyman's soundtrack. Think "fuck, yes!" and listen to this track. It's ace. And that's without even mentioning Balance's characteristically sinister vocals, beginning barely above mumble level and elevating to howls and shrieks by the end. It all leaves you quite out of breath, and you need a good chilling out session. Which closer "MU-UR" seems to offer. Only this being Coil, chilling takes on a whole new meaning, and by the time the fleetingly lovely piano phrase at the end begins to decay and distort, the Great Old Ones themselves could pop over to borrow a cup of sugar and you wouldn't bat an eyelid.

So, thus aurally stimulated (which would sound awfully rude if you read it out loud, so I wouldn't. Especially if you have the vicar round for tea), dear reader, I shall bid you a fond adieu, sit in my easy chair and have a cigarette before going to bed. But - wait - mercy of heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke? No - the rats they can never hear, the rats, the rats, the rats in the walls... IA! IA! SHUB-NIGGURATH! The three-lobed burning eye......... (writing becomes illegible).

Manuscript found by
-Deuteronemu 90210, Professor of music, magick, and generally weird shit, Miskatonic University-

Coil - Musick To Play In The Dark
Label: Chalice Format: CD, LP

Coil have been on a long strange journey into a peculiarly English Pagan folk music, at once urban and ancient, Modern and eternal - and the recent addition of Thighpaulsandra to their collective (un)consciousness has only made things more intriguing. His main contribution to this latest mail-order only album shines through on the Ashra (or even Tangerine Dream...)-like electronic headtrop of the evocatively-titled "Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night" - a piece which shows once again the fun and frolics which can come from the use of simple drum-machine rhythms.

World weary is possibly not the description for Jhon Balance's vocals on this recording - more like world-curious, as he wonders "Are you loathesome tonight?" and ponders the necessity to say thank you to parents before they die - especially for broccoli, in the track of the same name. Musick to Play in the Dark develops some of the themes sketched in the recent Solstice sequence of singles, with dream-state thoughts, growing older and wiser perhaps - have Coil matured in their recent recordings? Not really, for they are a group/organisation/entity/channel which sometimes seems as old as the very hills and downs, and quite as capable of provoking reflective mystification, in an equally fractal, subtly chaotic manner, naturally.

-Antron S. Meister-

Coil - Musick To Play In The Dark Volume 2

Review Feature

Coil - Queens Of The Circulating Library
Label: Eskaton Format: CDS

Immediately the title conjours images of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance driving across the wetlands of Wessex in a peripatetic wagon filled with books and synthesizers. Perhaps this is how this CD was recorded after all - it sounds as if they were spiralling though an electromagnetic storm of drones, a whirlpool of oscillator eddies, and squall of electricity. As they pass over the marshes and into the woods, a commanding presence arrives - the titular Queen herself, berating, scolding and fulminating on the lack of returns of books to her library, the passing of the lender's, if not the volumes', expiry date, all delivered by Dorothy Lewis with the pitch-shift and timestretched ring of otherwordly possession.

The atmosphere created on this release is one of the more peculiar to emanate from a most peculiar group. It's somewhere between Terry Gilliam at his most crazed and the stoned circles generated by the synthesizers of two (or more) generations of electronic acidheads, but with more esoteric intentionality and the knowledge to back it up. Mesmerising, time-dilating, sussurating. Music to play with the eyes shut and to dive right into and come up gasping for air when the last pulse fades away. Enveloping. Disquieting. Familiar and uncanny, part of the soundtrack of the collective unconscious made present through the application of minute and/or gradual shifts in tone and volume, colour and phase, mythological evocations drawn from oscillations. The sort of music to fall asleep to and awake uncertain of whether the dream is continuing.

-Antron S. Meister-

Coil - The Remote Viewer
Label: Threshold House Format: CD

Assembled by John Balance and Peter Christopherson with the early 2002 tour line up of Simon Norris (from Cyclobe), Cliff Stapleton and Michael York and initially only available at those gigs, The Remote Viewer marks an intriguing shift in the scope of Coil's hyper-psychedelic sound. Running on a foundation of Lovecraftian electronics and the sinuous drones of Stapleton's hurdy gurdy and York's Breton pipes, the disc opens with "Remote Viewing 1" and plunges straight into the realms of a musical otherworld.

There are echoes and strands of sounds ancient and modern in the keening of abandoned instrumental invocations; the discordances of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka and the Gnawa Brotherhood Of Marrakesh; Tony Conrad's ultra-Minimalist string microtones; the floating vocal sounds of virtual Mellotron choirs and software words; and upgraded rhythms crossing paths from pre-consciousness to the lysergic regression of the original Amon Dl collective. The mood of the first twenty minute track is gradually ascendant, uplifting on nascent rhythms which mark a timeless propulsive urge as the higher pitches skirl their intertwining reedy summons to the point of all-encompassing brain pan levitation. "Remote Viewing 2" finds slithery, rustling manifestations scraping curiously around a heaving bass drum rumble; the shimmer of feedback and ectoplasmic electronics take on a sinuous gleam of the fringes of dementia in a back and forth clatter of various metals and cut-up utterances.

The third section combines the drones and liquid sample processing together for an epic comedown to normal space, whirring through a stately pan-dimensionally sensual Dervish dance of undulating rhythm and manifesting synthetic texture. As the electronics take hold of the piece they pull in degenerate cycles to the point where it even seems like the neighbours wish to join the by now transformed hypnotic groove. With an emergent bassline proceeding in a latent dubwise direction before the inevitable slow decay into a by now disordered and re-ordered recapitulation, the conclusion becomes a long drawn-out stutter and scrawl into satisfactorily wound up absence.

Part psychotropic jam, part clairaudient Radio Atlantis, there is a feel to The Remote Viewer of parallel times and spaces explored, navigated and enlightened - broad daylight listening seems somehow flatter, tamer, than an audition in the ritualised circumstances of either a meditiation or just the accompaniment of a good old-fashioned bonghit or three. By redrafting the already imprecise definition of their sound once again, Coil demonstrate that stagnation is fortunately not on their agenda, but welcome surprises are.

-Linus Tossio-

Jonathan Coleclough - Windlass
Label: Korm Plastics Format: CD

Jonathan Coleclough has been a musical associate of such soundscrapers as Organum and Colin Potter, and Windlass is his first CD beyond a limited edition release on Robot Records. The album makes extensive use of Ambient drones to darkling effect, and has all the spectral hallmarks of the chilly wastes of post-Industrial head music.

The welling bass tones lurk in murky, but warm, depths as an ominous undertow; it's the mid-range and trebly organ parts which contain the sinister slo-mo dread of horripilation, creeping slyly under the skin to make it crawl with building tension. A mood piece of a single forty-minute tack, Windlass fits easily into the environment, making its presence felt almost rather than heard. There are sampled (or synthetic?) bird calls, extended chimes and fizzing static, low rhythmic wavers in the bass flow and other such developments to maintain the organic texture of the piece - Coleclough is more out to unsettle then lull into moments of relaxation than he is to scare.

Once again, volume is the key to the mood created by listening to this record - at low level it's a background chill-out for more contemplative moments - at higher margins, the boom and drone becomes all-encompassing, even threatening, and not just to glasses or the position of small objects in the vicinity of the speakers...

-Antron S. Meister-

Comae - Comae
Label: Rhiz Format:

A crackling and an occasional guitar strum, and the gentle rattling of beads. Or so it seems. Again, with sounds that are unusual (initially), comes a desire to identify, rather than simply to listen. The tolling of a miles-away bell, and the scratch and skip of vinyl. These identifications come with curiosity and possible ultimate negligibility. Fittingly enough, the "each"/"remain" time coding on my CD player is not working on these tracks. Unidentifiable sounds, in the end, I suppose.

Bells? Bottles? Synthesizers? A rise, and the swift sonic descent and then a lull, like a leaf so green falling from the tree and falling through other leaves on its inevitable death spiral downwards. It lies quiet a while, then returns with sizzling and spatial lowing. "Pavane" ends the recording with possibly a 16 rpm return to the carefree days of Ravel. I miss liner notes. Don t you miss liner notes? I understand the desire to keep things rather mysterious, but, well, shit. However, in the wise words of the Chinese sage Lo Pan, "You are not put on this Earth to get it".

But this is not miserable, life-denying sound. It s as if one has just awoken to see a spinning mobile of jewels hung directly and angelic over one's head.

-David Cotner-

Comets On Fire - Avatar
Label: Sub Pop Format: CD

Setting themselves yet further along the road to retrodom, Comets On Fire's Avatar is something of an exercise in remastering the past of all things Garagey, psyched-up and even occasionally Blues Rock. Where the band have contented themselves previously with the fun and frolics a good old freakout can offer in terms of endge of the teeth feedback and seemingly endless bouts of freeform jamming, Avatar is far more structured and places the (alleged) old-fashioned values of melody and soul to the fore. Which is not to say that they've become less fond