Richard Barbieri is a name that needs little introduction, but on his occasional solo albums he calls on his long career in synthesiser technology and sound design to craft highly intricate ambient works that never fall into the trap of…
View More Richard Barbieri – Planets + Persona
Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter 16th March 2017 Article by Tony Colvill This was an evening for dispelling ‘Ghosts’. I say this for many a reason, all with little logic. The eighties were not my decade, musically I did not feel…
View More Richard Barbieri / GRICE
What is this and where did it come from? Landing here with its Beefheartian swagger via a long stay on Planet Speed Metal and with a math-jazz calculator set to stun, this shit is weird and it’s curdled my custard.…
View More Czar – Life Is No Way To Treat An Animal
Back in the days of the tabloid-sized music weeklies, or “inkies” as they were known, for a period from the mid ’70s until the early ’80s the NME was my music Bible. It was The Guardian to the Melody Maker’s…
View More Paul Morley – The Age of Bowie
Two years after their first album, Inflamed Rides, this rather thrilling gathering of enquiring musical like-minds return with Soul Of An Octopus, their first for the always interesting Rare Noise label, and it seems that no little development of their…
View More O.R.k. – Soul of an Octopus
It has been over four years since the relentlessly foreboding Decline and Fall, and Colorado state’s favourite avant rock collective, the marvellously uncompromising Thinking Plague, are back, this time dredging optimism from the depths of black despair at the perverse…
View More Thinking Plague – Hoping Against Hope
I have had this album a while, and it was only thanks to a Facebook friend raving about it that I remembered it, and it was a darn good thing I did, I can tell you. Formed in Rome in…
View More La Bocca della Verità – Avenoth
Further proof to my contention that everyone in Scandinavia is in, or has been in a band is offered by the glorious duo Shamblemaths, who hail almost inevitably from Trondheim in Norway. Simen Å. Ellingsen on guitars, saxophones and vocals…
View More Shamblemaths – Shamblemaths
Blonde On Blonde – Rebirth Blonde On Blonde, despite sounding like they lived on the corner of Haight-Asbury actually hailed from the far less glamorous surroundings of Newport, South Wales. Like many bands of the turn of the ’60s into…
View More Blonde On Blonde – Rebirth / Reflections On A Life
Anakdota are a young band from Israel who take influence from modern electric jazz mixed with an ear for melody and complex rhythmic structure that in places ventures down a route once trodden by Gentle Giant, especially in parts of…
View More Anakdota – Overloading