What an odd night last night turned out to be. Autonomy was, so it felt, busier than it has been in a while (I suspect Leicester Pride yesterday had something to do with it), and the crowd were certainly up for dancing. As for my DJ sets, the setlists are below, and for once I […]
This month’s ten tracks I think you should hear.
This week’s Tuesday Ten comes courtesy of two things, really: this article about soundtrack writers, and then Cyanotic’s recent re-working of the Terminator theme. Both of these got me thinking about soundtracks, as somehow I don’t think I’ve ever actually covered them in a Tuesday Ten. But I’m not going for the easy option of just […]
Last night took me to a small, back-of-a-pub gig for the first time in a long, long time. Those nice folk at Drowned In Sound have been running a small handful of “DiScover” gigs at The Harley in Sheffield’s university district over the past year or so, and this gig on the latest DiScover tour […]
This week, it’s time to revisit a list I’ve had partially completed for weeks. It’s all about life in the city. I love living in the city and indeed have done so for much of my life. I love the bustle, the crowded streets, the fast pace of life, and the fact that there is […]
It seems to be an unusual aim in industrial/IDM/whatever-you-want-to-call-it spheres to want to have any flicker of emotion other than rage and anger, although some artists do manage an impressive job of doing so, often by just the use of what would be termed soundscapes rather than including vocals.
A new month, so time for my usual round-up of tracks I think you should hear this time around.
The first half of a barking weekend that saw me at Sonisphere the following day…
After a night DJing at Autonomy, my girlfriend couldn’t make the next day, so one of my best friends joined me to head south to Sonisphere instead. I’d declined the recently-won tickets earlier in the week, but much to my surprise they arrived on the Saturday, and the decision was taken that we should go […]
Ideas for future Tuesday Tens are coming thick and fast at the moment, and indeed I have the core of two more already completed too, and this week’s was a late change of plan, mainly after I realised just how many songs could be included. So the other two I have planned will be held […]
A perhaps predictable subject for this week’s Tuesday Ten: it’s all about space, what with it being the 40th anniversary of the first moon landings this week. I’ve always thought of songs written to be about space travel, or related subjects, to be a very common theme, but in the event it actually turned out […]
It’s hard indeed to describe, or review, what would be termed ‘dark ambient’ in its purest form such as this. It ebbs, it ebbs some more, and doesn’t really flow anywhere except at a glacial pace. It starts out inaudibly, takes nearly two minutes to be heard… But then, when you have forty-one minutes for […]
The early start – doors at 1800 – meant that Leech Woman played to a half-empty room, which was a damned shame seeing as this was billed as their last gig in the UK for some time – main man Alex is moving abroad. There was no room for sentiment, though, as LW roared through […]
It took bloody ages to get there – two hours from Sheffield to Manchester, via Woodhead, thanks to Snake being closed and awful traffic in Manchester city centre, and I managed my first longer distance drive without any problems – but last night’s gig was worth every single minute and then some.
The 90s were a heyday for industrial metal – let’s be honest, few bands have been able to continue a high quality output of this style into this decade, and fewer more recent bands still have been able to keep the flame alive (with notable exceptions being the likes of Interlock and Cyanotic). To confirm […]
It’s time for my run-down of ten of the best tracks I’ve heard in the past month.
Samarkande are introduced on their website as an apparently experimental group that create by way of improvisation, and to “break the rigidity of electro-acoustic and electronic music”. Quite what the latter point means in practice is a difficult one to answer, it seems.
It’s sometimes been hard to reconcile the two facets of Chris McCall’s output. The seemingly ultra-serious music with the joyously insane (and whisper it, *fun*) live shows, but here, somehow, we may have the missing link at last. Like some kind of mad scientist (or inventor?) anything that may work is hurled into the mix […]
A bit of a chance one, this – after exchanging a few e-mails with Mike T. from ADR over an album review, and getting some interesting responses to my first question or two, this was turned into something of a fully-fledged e-mail interview. So here goes…
And now individual tracks..
