Before we get going here, I should take some time to address the fact that a number of records on this list actually came out in 2018. I know - ancient, right? A couple of them I even picked up when they were repressed by the label after a period of unavailability, which I suppose technically makes them reissues, even. At the end of the day though, WHO F-ING CARES? When the gap between recording and release dates can stretch into years, does it really matter? This is a list of reasonably contemporary music that I discovered and played a lot in 2019, the existence of which made me happy and in some sense… reassured?

Reassured about what, I’m not really sure, but I’ll leave the the-end-is-nigh drum beating for another day (it’s getting pretty mainstream now anyway, so perhaps my work on that score is done). Suffice to say, if you and yours are lucky enough to inhabit lands not currently on fire, under water or under heavy bombardment – happy new year! In previous years, I’d have added something about not being under the yoke of some pea-brained tyrant, but we can’t expect miracles, I suppose.

And, finally, I’d like to close things off with a reminder that last year saw the death of a number a people whose work meant a great deal to me, both in the realm of music and beyond. Roky Erickson, David Berman, Dick Dale, Larry Cohen – gone but not forgotten. Please take a few minutes to click on those links and remember them at their best.

Now let’s get on with it.

1. Grey Hairs – Health & Social Care LP
(Gringo)





Essential rock music for dark times. Back in October, I said:

“At the risk of repeating myself from past reviews, Grey Hairs make proper modern rock music, reclaiming that horribly loaded phrase from a place of the map which finds it bracketed between moustache-twiddling sub-genre re-enactment societies and shit that sounds like The Foo Fighters. In doing so, they stare down cold the expected bandwagon of influences, they address the world in which we live with honesty and insight, they conduct their band business with integrity, and, they rock, in a manner both profound and disconcertingly literal.

If you find yourself sick of a life full of dodgy cabling and dented speaker cabs, crowded dark rooms full of pints and germs, please listen to ‘Health & Social Care’, and remind yourself what the point is.”


2. Psychedelic Speed Freaks – s/t LP
(Black Editions)




Whisper it please, but you know what - on reflection, I think I might actually enjoy this even more than the old High Rise records, if you can believe that. Back in June, I ventured to characterise it as;

“..one of the most exhilaratingly extreme rock albums of the modern era, sitting comfortably next to the MC5-meets-AMT carnage of Feral Ohms debut from a couple of years back, even as tracks like ‘Night Seer’ – my personal favourite here - dial things back to a sleek, pulsing urban beauty that nigh on defies description, recalling the exquisitely nuanced blare of Martin Weaver’s work in Wicked Lady, whilst closing track ‘Immaterialized’ finds Narita grinding the gears of a shining, ectoplasmic hog for an eternal run down the post-earth highway, ol’ Jasso’s voice breaking into a Lemmy-like croak as space-rock oblivion beckons. It’s a monster.

Fuzz guitar fanatics who value raw sound, inventive playing and sonic extremity over expensive, brightly coloured boxes and multi-tracked compression - or indeed, unrehabilitated rock fans who just want an excuse to grind their drunken heads into the ground like some kind of human corkscrew - both need to get on this immediately.”


3. Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society – Mandatory Reality 2xLP 
(Eremite)




The very nicest sounds that the nicer half of our world has to offer. From November:

“Central to this music’s appeal is the fact that, rather than drifting off into abstraction, the tracks remain anchored around simple, almost child-like melodies – endlessly appealing harmonic phrases picked out on some string bass and glockenspiel-type things (practically none of the instruments my ears tell me are present on this record are actually listed on the credits), lending the music a feeling of warmth and accessibility that any open-eared, human listener should be able to appreciate.

If this can indeed be deemed a ‘drone’ record (and the proposition is questionable, though ‘In Memory’s Prism’ has tended to get played in the time and place I normally reserve for drone records), then it’s certainly not a “cold depths of interstellar space” type proposition – more of a “come on in, make yourself at home, would you like a cup of tea?” kind of deal, like walking into a stranger’s living room for the first time and immediately feeling so much at home that you feel you could spend your entire life there.”


4. Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings 2xLP
(International Anthem)




A good few dozen varieties of raw musical talent, thrown together by Mr McCraven like some mad cake mix, taking that ‘boom-bap’ nouveau-jazz sound to stereotype-defying heights of senseless beauty.

From July:

“Like many musicians within this milieu, McCraven plays as if he is as much influenced by hip-hop and electronica as ‘classic’ jazz, but his smoked-out, head-nodding 4/4 style, occasionally diverging into patterns of skittering, Ninja Tune-y rim-shots and weird double-time experiments, remains well-judged, never degenerating into cheese, and always serving to enhance, rather than detract from, the fine work of his collaborators. And make no mistake, accessibility should not be confused with any lack of depth or legitimacy in the performances showcased herein, which, I would contend, often hit a level that even the most hardline free improv/extended technique partisans would find difficult to dismiss. […] a compelling and – dare I say – inspiring listen; an album I can easily imagine be fetishised in years to come as the sound of a very particular, and I’d venture, very positive, set of cultural time & place circumstances crystalising – temporarily, at least - into something really special.”


5. The Bevis Frond – We’re Your Friends, Man 2xLP
(Fire)




You’ve gotta love someone who sticks to their story, and god knows, The Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman has certainly done that – ‘We’re Your Friends Man’ could have come out immediately after fan favourites like 1990’s ‘Any Gas Faster’ or 1991’s ‘New River Head’ and no one would have batted an eyelid. The same mixture of elements that has sent me on a heavy duty trawl through the Frond back catalogue in recent years – disarmingly direct, pretention-free song-writing, sturdy DIY rock arrangements spiked with trace elements of folk and psychedelia and gargantuan quantities of unashamed, Hendrix-via-Mascis lead guitar heroism – can be found here in spades, the formula unchanged and undimmed by the passage of time.

Like most Frond releases, this is a pretty mammoth venture – twenty full length songs stretching over eighty plus minutes – and whilst there are, as always, some iffy moments here and there, it’s a tribute to the strength of Saloman’s writing that at least two thirds of these numbers demand repeat listens, his capacity for twisting his own experiences and insecurities into compelling new shapes lending the material a great deal more mileage than this kind of relentless introspection would normally achieve.

The playing from the currently full band line-up meanwhile is, needless to say, exceptional, keeping energy levels high throughout, and the fact that a group who’ve been doggedly plugging away across the decades can still hide Greatest Hits-worthy nuggets like Theft, And Relax… or the title track deep within the double digits of their umpteenth album’s track-list is nothing short of remarkable.


6. Aggressive Perfector – Havoc at the Midnight Hour LP
(Dying Victims)




I’m not sure I if I can put this much more clearly than I did in my brief write-up at the start of December, but – HEAVY FUCKING METAL. If you like it, you’ll like this.


7. Kamaal Williams – The Return LP
(Black Focus)




From that same December post:

“Williams likewise seems to be daring us to start pulling comparisons to Herbie and Stevie out of the hat at some points here, but unlike the old masters, he seems deeply concerned with texture more-so than technique, seemingly ripping his organ and synth through a chain of effects that would make a guitar shop employee blush, building up deep, tidal washes of wah, tremolo and delay which keep the music sensuous, multi-layered and engrossing, bringing a disorientating psychedelic swirl to proceedings, whilst his tightly wound, hand-brake-turn interplay with Brown and McKenzie adds a sense of swaggering danger, undercutting any accusations of mere dinner-jazz noodling; you can almost feel the cold eyes of Miles overseeing this shit when things get way out there on the second half of stunning opening cut ‘Salaam’.”


8. Sarah Davachi - Let Night Come On Bells End The Day LP
(Recital)




And yet again, from December:

“The feel here is nuanced, timeless, eternally resonant – like mainlining the form and contents of a small yet beautiful Alpine chapel through your ears. Emotionally speaking, we run the gamut here from ‘Buhrstone’, which flirts with indulgent, melodic melancholia, to the twelve austere minutes of ‘Hours in the Evening’, as cold and affectless as the ancient, clammy stone wall of that aforementioned chapel.

At this point in my life, music like this performs an important function, keeping me calm and grounded, and creating an appropriate atmosphere in my quarters during that all-important lead up to bed time. It’s therapeutic in a sense, I suppose. As such, I’m always thrilled to discover a great new practitioner whose work I can keep close to the turntable, so thanks for this one Sarah – it’s out here in the world, doing great work.”


9. Comet Gain - Fireraisers Forever! LP
(Tapete)





This wouldn’t be a 2010s Stereo Sanctity best-of list without the great Mike Vest getting his oar in, and, following the less than amicable demise of Blown Out (about which we remain VERY SAD), Mike’s best shot at deep space nirvana in 2019 came via this postal collaboration with Australia-based drummer Andrew Panagopoulos.

Expanding on the template laid down by earlier releases under the Dodge Meteor name, this must stand as Vest’s most unashamedly Rockist project to date, as he brings chunky, full-on stoner-rock tone to the party, leaning heavily into the riffs as if waiting for some Dave Wyndorf type dude to step up to the mic – but, thankfully, that never happens, allowing Vest & Panagopoulos to instead stretch out and get gnarly.

The eight minute ‘Alien Shit’ in particular is a magnificent cut, a synapse-melting showcase of ultra-fried soloing that finds Vest embodying the album’s title about as completely as is humanly possible, revealing the influence of both Hendrix and Munehiro Narita upon his playing, in yet another absolutely flattening display of unashamed rock n’ roll extremity. In a happier world, they’d hand out sporting-style statuettes for this kind of achievement, and poor old Mike would need to invest in a sturdier set of shelves to keep them all on, in rare moments when he kills the volume and glides back to terra firma.


11. Venom Prison – Samsara LP
(Prosthetic)




From July:

“Hold the presses folks! Here’s our new lead: Welsh metal band fronted by Russo-German antifa / feminist activist play unbelievably intense tech-grind / battle-ready death metal addressing frightening, taboo-skirting subjects of real life concern. As you might imagine, the results are impossible to fuck with, but more surprisingly, they are also super fun to listen to and don’t give me a headache! Whole world rejoices! Story at eleven.”


12. Taras Bulba – One LP
(Riot Season)




Though I was initially sad to hear that Fred Laird had disbanded his long-running outfit Earthling Society earlier this year, after sampling this initial collection of recordings from Laird’s new project with Earthling Society drummer Jon Blacow, the decision begins to make a lot of sense. To some extent I think, Taras Bulba follows on directly from the foundations laid by last year’s fairly astounding MO: The Demon album, vis-à-vis Laird’s apparent desire to move away from the more traditionally rooted British heavy psych/space rock of Earthling Soc’s prior releases, and to instead throw his stylistic net wide, embracing weird and exotic new sonic climes in a predominantly instrumental context.

And, sure enough, this ‘One’ goes all over the place, with otherly tuned and/or otherly constructed string tones predominating on the early tracks, alongside chimes, tabla-like percussion, eerie, looped samples and tape fragments whose mantra-like Middle Eastern atmos recalls Sun City Girls’ “ethno-forgery” approach, before paranoid, sawing strings, sinister/whimsical Czech movie soundtrack chimes and florid late night sax guide us through the spy-haunted neon midnight of, uh, ‘Neon Midnight’, ‘The YO-YO Man’ inaugurates a gleaming, chrome-bumpered ‘Ege Bamyasi’-ish nightmare funk jam, and ‘Rising Lazarus Blues’, the record’s sole vocal cut, returns us briefly to the more (relatively) familiar terrain of a particularly discombobulated under-the-apple-tree psych-folk phantasia, hitting a very particular sweet spot that I think was last tickled way back when by Dead Meadow’s ‘Feathers’ album, or the work of nutty Italian Barrett-devotees Jennifer Gentle.

For a fairly modest and low key initial release under a new band name, this LP covers one hell of a lot of ground, displaying a vivid and powerful sonic imagination and no small amount of skill and ingenuity, suggesting that the sky’s the limit for Laird and Blacow now that they’ve (for the most part) put aside the fuzzboxes and left the trad rock band format far behind.


13. Lower Slaughter – Some Things Take Work LP 
(Box)




I’ll confess, when I first picked up Lower Slaughter’s second LP upon its release early in 2019, it struck me as a pretty grizzly exemplar of Difficult Second Album Syndrome… not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with it as such, you understand, but by nixing the easy Rock Pleasure Principle wins of their earlier work in order to undertake some brittle and punishing explorations of break-ups, bad relationships and self-esteem struggles, the band delivered a record which initially felt forbidding and unrewarding – the opening dirge of ‘Gas’ in particular is, appropriately enough, hard work - particularly for those of us who are (happily) unable to relate directly to its lyrical themes at this point in our lives.

Returning to it for a few weeks prolonged exposure later in the year however, expectations duly adjusted, it’s really grown on me. Aside from anything else, the band’s unique, rhythmically engaged riffage still whips, snaps and churns the way it should (the title track is very much what we in the biz are obliged to call a ‘total banger’), the recording/mixing (courtesy of Wayne Adams of Big Lad/Pet Brick/Melting Hand etc) is top notch, and Sinead Young’s voice remains an absolute force of nature.

During the album’s closing stretch on side # 2 meanwhile, the band hit a real purple patch, pushing their sound in some pretty powerful new directions. First, the agreeably energised ‘The Measure of a Man’ wrong-foots us with its startling talk of attacking airships and wolves in the forest (dunno what all that’s about, but it’s, uh, kind of awesome?), before ‘A Portrait of the Father’ hits hard – a pitch black outpouring a familial angst whose brooding, down tempo musical backing cuts straight to the bone, abetted by judicious use of some dubbed out vocal effects - and closer ‘The Body’ delivers a KO with one of the most stunning tracks the band have recorded to date, it’s colossal, neck-sliding riff and doom-heavy rhythmic heft combining with Young’s fearsome delivery for some real force-the-air-from-yr-lungs catharsis; exhilarating stuff.

Still not sure this one will ever get as much play from me as ‘What Big Eyes’ a few years back, but it’s a brave and strong step forward for the band – a convincing dead-eyed stare at an uncertain future, and those last few songs; man, that’s some good shit.


14. Headroom – New Heaven 12” 
(EverNever)



Wherein the rarefied spirit of 90s/’00s Proper Psyche settles over the town of New Haven, CT like a lime green cloud, and sleepy, patchouli-scented ectoplasm pulses through the myriad cables of Kryssi Battalene’s guitar set-up.

From February:

“For all the excess inherent in this kind of guitar-playing, there’s an admirable avoidance of bombast here, a sort of laidback, accidental feel, and a warm, analogue distance to the recordings, which feels very appealing to me, coming as it does at a point in time when all forms of heavy music seem to be constantly upping the ante in terms of volume, compression and general mind-buggering immensitude. As with the Mountain Movers albums, it feels a bit old fashioned in that regard. In a good way, I mean. It’s just a nice record to hang with, if you like psychedelic guitar music. No expectation, no pretence. Just enjoy the sounds, cos they’re pretty sweet.” 


15. Pye Corner Audio – Hollow Earth LP 
(Ghost Box)




Also from February:

“In a sense, Pye Corner Audio strikes me as the hauntological electronica equivalent of, say, a mid-table thrash metal band, or a jazz group who play at local pubs on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that. By which I mean, this music doesn’t send me off on ecstatic reveries or leave me slack-jawed with instant revelation or anything, but it’s solid. It’s there when you need it, it ticks the boxes and does what it does. It’s reliable, like that super-strong wood glue from B&Q.

Listening to the woozy, out-of-sync synth line that opens this LP, you might be inclined to think, well, we already have one Boards of Canada, how badly do we need another? But, as things crack on and Jenkins gets stuck into his trademark MO – essentially stripping the BoC idiom back to its strongest core elements, replacing their somewhat dated breaks-based drum programming with some throbbing 4/4 mutant techno and adding a heavy dose of John Carpenter style dystopian sci-fi dread – I think you’ll be hard-pressed not to give him the nod.”

Labels: Aggressive Perfector, best of 2019, Grey Hairs, Headroom, Joshua Abrams, Kamaal Williams, Lower Slaughter, Makaya McCraven, Oblivion Reptilian, PSF, Sarah Davachi, Taras Bulba, The Bevis Frond, Venom Prison

Okay, so some background is definitely needed to clear up the nomenclature here, before we get into the nitty-gritty.

Back in Tokyo in the early 1980s, bassist Nanjo Asahito and guitarist Munehiro Narita formed the incredibly influential maximalist heavy rock trio High Rise (you can read me waxing lyrical about their recently reissued second album here). One of High Rise’s early songs was named ‘Psychedelic Speed Freaks’, and the late Hideo Ikeezumi subsequently adopted this as the name for his even more influential record label – generally shortened to P.S.F. – which proceeded to release High Rise’s music, alongside that of many other incomparably influential acts in the fields of psychedelic rock, jazz/improv and uncategorisible weirdness, culminating, eventually, in the release of a double CD compilation entitled ‘P.S.F.: Psychedelic Speed Freaks’, assembled as a tribute to Ikeezumi following his untimely passing in 2017. (I wrote about this compilation here, and it has subsequently been reissued on quadruple vinyl(!), also via Black Editions.)

High Rise, meanwhile, split up in the late ‘80s, reportedly due to Narita’s decision to give up music in order to spend more time with his family. Maximalist guitar nuts such as myself however now have cause to REJOICE, as, unexpectedly, 2019 finds the great man returning once again to the world of recorded sound, perhaps inspired by the attention the aforementioned Black Editions label has recently been lavishing upon the P.S.F. catalogue.

Now apparently based in the USA, Narita has teamed up with – and I quote – “a pair of untamed L.A. acid punks” and, displaying a nigh-on herculean lack of originally, he has named his new band Psychedelic Speed Freaks, prominently displaying the P, S and F initials on the cover of their self-produced debut album, which is also named ‘Psychedelic Speed Freaks’.

Got all that clear? Good, because otherwise the resulting confusion could tend to obscure the fact that ‘Psychedelic Speed Freaks’, the 2019 debut album by the band Psychedelic Speed Freaks, is fucking brilliant.

Though essentially offering a direct continuation of High Rise’s blueprint of over-saturated Blue Cheer –> ‘Raw Power’ -> Motorhead lineage rock n’ roll, Narita flies free here from the intimidating ‘thunder-bass’ and blackened production aesthetic imposed by Asahito, and, clearly in command of the faders, he’s got his guitar mixed at what I would personally deem about the right level (and anyone who has ever been fool enough to take my advice on such matters knows what that means).

Whilst new collaborators “Jasso” (bass/vox) and “TJ” (drums) lay down the necessary bare bones of some reassuringly sloppy stoner-punk thud somewhere down the hall, Narita is right up in our face, alchemising their grue into sizzling liquid gold, with his unique approach to lead playing – a heavily fuzz-wahed yet precisely lyrical wipe-out in which individual picked notes are subsumed into a single, wildly fluctuating sine wave of giddy, shrieking energy, bypassing flesh and wood as if ripped straight from some twitching, malfunctioning synapse plugged directly into a speaker-stack – sounding even more aggressive and well-honed than it did back in the ‘80s, if such is possible.

On the tunes on the A side, Narita spends at least some of his time playing chords, falling back into the kind of familiar, proto-Mudhoney riff patterns that characterised High Rise’s material on ‘Lawless’ and ‘End Your Worries’. By the time we get to the B side though, he’s completely off the leash, leaving the bass to hold down the structure as he hits the high end of the neck and solos his way into the stratosphere.

The result is, needless to say, one of the most exhilaratingly extreme rock albums of the modern era, sitting comfortably next to the MC5-meets-AMT carnage of Feral Ohms debut from a couple of years back, even as tracks like ‘Night Seer’ – my personal favourite here - dial things back to a sleek, pulsing urban beauty that nigh on defies description, recalling the exquisitely nuanced blare of Martin Weaver’s work in Wicked Lady, whilst closing track ‘Immaterialized’ finds Narita grinding the gears of a shining, ectoplasmic hog for an eternal run down the post-earth highway, ol’ Jasso’s voice breaking into a Lemmy-like croak as space-rock oblivion beckons. It’s a monster.

Fuzz guitar fanatics who value raw sound, inventive playing and sonic extremity over expensive, brightly coloured boxes and multi-tracked compression - or indeed, unrehabilitated rock fans who just want an excuse to grind their drunken heads into the ground like some kind of human corkscrew - both need to get on this immediately.

---

Bandcamp link.

Label link.

Still available from Norman in the UK!

Labels: album reviews, PSF, Psychedelic Speed Freaks

World Spirituality Classics # 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda 2xLP 
(Luaka Bop)

You might have been forgiven for thinking that, after Alice Coltrane dropped out of the secular music world to devote the remainder of her life to leading the monastic spiritual community she helped found in Southern California, her subsequent recordings of devotional/meditational music might have taken on somewhat of an, uh, ambient, New Age-y sort of character..?

So I had always assumed at least, but, well, time to get wise folks, because there’s not even the slightest whiff of cheese about the extraordinary, unclassifiable pieces assembled here by Luaka Bop. Compromising dense, over-powering monoliths of ultra-compressed electronic textures, massed voices, bone-rattling hand percussion, occasional tambora drones and gospel/deep soul influenced reiterations of ancient Hindu mantras, this is music that determinedly refuses to ever fade into the background, informed by the same uncompromising approach to composition and arrangement that characterised such challenging discs as ‘Spiritual Unity’ in earlier years.

That each track here begins sounding entirely different from the last, yet swiftly engages us in exactly the same kind of sensuous, head-nodding fugue as its predecessor, is testament to both the power and the range of endless possibilities that Alice managed to channel from her spiritual beliefs back into her music.

Existing outside of any of the expected sonic clichés, these are evocations of a terrifying, beatific godhead that has no connection whatsoever to either the Cathedral-reverbed reverence of Western devotion or the mellow, cloud-dwelling man-god of post-hippie Californian spirituality. As with all of Alice Coltrane’s best work, this music feels like peeking through the gold-flecked bead curtain into the cyclopean throne room of a divinity who radiates such love it can crush you like an ant. An endless, throbbing kaleidoscope of sound crushed down to cassette-sized doses of pupil-dilating oblivion, it’s… quite the thing.

I dread to think what ‘World Sprituality Classics # 2’ is liable to consist of, but this is certainly one hell of a good start.


Tokyo Flashback PSF ~ Psychedelic Speed Freaks! ~ 2xCD (PSF)

The death of Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the PSF record shop and label, at the start of 2017 came as sad news indeed for anyone familiar with the exquisite mixture of maximalist psychedelic rock and borderless free sound that his label became a by-word for through its glory-days in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Hitting shelves in seemingly record time after Ikeezumi’s passing, this double CD tribute/fundraiser compilation of unreleased material from acts associated with the label serves as a testament to the strength of the legacy PSF leaves behind, effortlessly transcending the limited expectations that such a rushed, odds-and-sods sort of effort would normally command.

Of course, hearing newly disinterred cuts from core PSF groups like High Rise, White Heaven, Fushitsusha and Overhang Party is worth the entry price alone (the latter in particular provide an awesome re-working of their classic track from the second ‘Tokyo Flashback’ comp, now pleasingly retitled for English-speakers as ‘Now Appearing! Naked Existence’), but, as was often the case with this label, it’s the more unusual, less rock-orientated stuff creeping in around the edges that often proves most beguiling; terrifying, Lynchian noir improv from .es, angst-drenched Korean psych-folk from Kim Doo Soo, minimalist industrial desolation from Reizen, beautifully gentle, heart-felt free-playing from Niseaporia, and the set even ends, poignantly I’m sure, with a Bach violin sonata rearranged for solo guitar by Hideaki Kondo.

All of these cuts are by turns furious, challenging, lyrical and enchanting, opening our eyes to rarely glimpsed corners of a relentlessly creative musical underground that continues to thrive in Japan and Far-East, much akin I’d imagine to the experience Western listeners brave enough to pick up those first imported ‘Tokyo Flashback’ comps must have enjoyed when they first appeared back in the ‘90s.

I’m not sure how widely available this new comp is outside of Japan, but it is accompanied by a lovely bilingual booklet, so distribution to English–speaking territories was presumably an intention, assuming any overseas distributors could be persuaded that anyone would still be willing to buy CDs. Anyway, should you see it on sale anywhere, please don’t hesitate to prove these hypothetical distributors wrong by snapping it up, it’s extremely worthwhile.

(It’s worth giving a shout-out at this point to the U.S.-based imprint The Black Editions, who have recently embarked on a programme of reissuing the PSF label’s key releases on vinyl for the first time. I don’t actually have their re-release of the first ‘Tokyo Flashback’ comp in my hands yet, but their noble efforts certainly threaten to do a great deal of damage to both my ears and bank balance in 2018.)


Coil – Time Machines 2xLP (Dais)

Whilst I of course respect the unique aesthetic they created around themselves, and their pivotal role in the wider UK 80s/90s underground, I must confess the music of Coil has never really been my cup of psilocybin-laced tea… however, there are few things I enjoy more in life than a fucking good drone, so I can definitely make an exception for this project, which was created by the core Coil duo in collaboration with Drew McDowell, and originally issued in 1998 solely under the name ‘Time Machines’.

And, make no mistake, this is some hardcore drone going on right here. When initially dropping the needle, first time listeners may be irked by the idea that they’ve just paid top dollar for some blank oscillator tones, but their tune will soon change as things progress and the full weight of these pieces makes itself felt.

Though this is utilitarian music, created primarily to aid meditation and ritual, like the Alice Coltrane record discussed above, it is about as far away from ‘background’ music as it is possible to get, instead setting out to capture your ‘foreground’ with the relentless determination of a swarming nanobot army.

This is music designed to completely transform the atmosphere of the environment in which it is played. Each of the record’s four sides is named after a psychotropic chemical compound, and the Coil boys seem to have done their damnedest to actually try to create a corresponding physiological change in their listeners through the sound of each piece.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say they succeed, but they certainly got pretty close. Play this record at appropriate volume, and work or writing becomes impossible. Your concentration will disintegrate, your attention will drift from the screen/desk to some blank area on the wall. Your mind will eventually start to empty, as if someone pulled the plug, and Coil’s stated intention of creating “tones to facilitate travel through time” will start to sound a lot less fanciful. Then, about ten or twelve minutes in, when you’re sufficiently monged, they’ll suddenly twist a knob and drop the kind of bass frequency that will make you cack yourself wondering if a passenger jet is about to fall out of the sky above your house. The bastards.

Needless to say, in contrast to the vast majority of ‘drone’ records I own, this is not something to be thrown on casually, for a bit of relaxation before bed time. If you want to get down with ‘Time Machines’, you’d better cross your legs on the floor, fire up the incense, dim the lights - go whole hog with it and let’s see if we can’t make that clock start to go backwards.


Midori Takada – Through The Looking Glass LP 
(We Release Whatever the Fuck We Want)

Taking a somewhat more personable approach to the art of the drone, this until recently highly sought after disc sees minimal/ambient composer Midori Takada doing her utmost to bypass human thought patterns and instead replicate the ebb and flow of natural sound, utilising an intriguing palette of African and Asian percussion, pump organ, coca-cola bottles, bells and a recorder, along with what appear to be some interesting and unconventional recording/over-dubbing techniques. The results are extremely compelling – so much so that it feels almost crass to waste time trying to convey an impression of them in words. Let’s just say that ‘Through The Looking Glass’ feels like one of those masterworks of quietly unassailable beauty that is likely to just get better and better the more we play it through the remainder of our lives.

Suffice to say, both ‘Mr Henri Rousseau’s Dream’ on the A-side and relatively brief ‘Trompe l’oeil’ on the B are amongst my most-played tracks of the year - absolutely delightful vistas of nocturnal faux-forest ambience, guaranteed to promote relaxed breathing and a general sense of well-being just as surely as the aforementioned Coil record is to fuck with your head. Absolutely delightful stuff, even as the somewhat more baleful ‘Catastrophe’ proceeds to drag us into unsettling realms of pulsating, rhythmic unease.

This record’s extraordinary cover art – by Yohko Ochida – is also worth a mention. Click on the picture above to enlarge and spend some time looking at it. You will be a happier person as a result.


Maki Asakawa – s/t 2xLP (Honest Jons)

One of those “if she didn’t exist, they’d have had to invent her” type figures, Maki Asakawa’s appearance in the assortment of gorgeously reproduced monochrome photographs accompanying this compilation of her early recordings speaks for itself. Swathed from head to toe in black, with neat bangs, heaviest-possible-eyelashes and an ever-present, unfiltered cigarette, she is perhaps most-easily characterised as the Japanese New Wave’s characteristically studied take on an ‘avant-chanteuse’ archetype, perhaps pitched somewhere between Juliet Greco, Anna Karina and Nico, I suppose.

Originally a native of Iskikawa prefecture in Northern Japan, Asakawa’s devotion to the sound of American jazz/blues singers (Billie Holiday in particular) led her to begin performing in Tokyo and Yokahama cabaret clubs, where she soon fell under the wing of avant-garde film and theatre director Shuji Terayama (I mean, of course she did), subsequently picking up a record contract, a formidable reputation a s a live performer and a devoted following amongst Japan’s internationally-minded, left wing student movement in short order.

Truth be told, those anticipating hair-raising avant hi-jinks from Asakwawa’s music will be initially disappointed by the fact that the majority of the recordings presented here remain fairly conventional. For the most part, these are nice songs (a mixture of Terayama compositions, American folk/blues standards reworked for the Japanese language and some Asakawa originals) with strong melodies and pleasant, minimal arrangements, anchored by Asakawa’s defiant and heart-felt delivery, which, though never as gravelly or tormented as her blues idols, nonetheless sits within an unusually low register for a Japanese female vocalist of her era.

Though it would be easy for a casual listener to mistake these tunes for prime examples of enka (the oft-wonderful genre of melancholic, folk-derived pop ballads that dominated the Japanese charts through the ‘60s and ‘70s), in fact Asakawa’s fans and musical collaborators saw her at the time as standing very much in opposition to enka orthodoxy, rejecting the overwrought arrangements, melodramatic sentiments and implicit nationalism of the genre in favour of a more stripped back, “authentic”, Western blues/folk-based approach.

Certainly, the shimmering acoustic strumming, gentle fluting, brushed drumming, smouldering cocktail jazz and tasteful rock/soul jamming showcased here make a pleasant change from the squeaky trumpets and stabbing strings of more commercial enka, even as the uniquely sinuous, serpentine melodies of the genre are still very much in evidence, resulting in a rather beguiling hybrid form that undoubtedly proved very influential on later folk-pop performers such as Carmen Maki and Morita Doji.

Whilst these songs are unlikely to blow many minds in the English-speaking world in 21st century, they are nonetheless extremely fine performances – the perfect accompaniment to a glass of single malt enjoyed on a Sunday evening, and nectar of the gods for anyone with a particular yen for the hyper-specific, monochromatic aesthetic of Japan’s late ‘60s cultural new wave – and the rare occasions on Asakawa and her collaborators throw caution to the wind and get way-out-there (such as on the George Harrison-affiliated raga-rock behemoth ‘Govinda’, or the creeped out downer lament of ‘Onna’) are worth the entry price alone.


Emma de Angelis - Forgiveness b/w Trip/Plankton 7” 
(Finders Keepers)

Hey, did you know that, before she went on to pursue a career as a graphic artist, the young sister of Italio-soundtrack legends Guido and Maurizio de Angelis briefly had a bash at following in her brothers’ footsteps? That knowledge was enough to get me to bite on this short but sweet pair of tracks unearthed by Finders Keepers, and, as it transpires, they’re both absolute bangers, show-casing a heavily rock/psychedelia-skewed sound that allowed Ms de Angelis to trespass upon the oft-male-dominated realm of Italian movie/library music with verve, confidence, and, more importantly, wailing fuzz leads and an absolutely bad-ass walking bass-line on ‘Forgiveness’, wheezing synth sirens on ‘Trip’ and a lovely, plaintive folk-ropck-ish melody on ‘Plankton’ . A very enjoyable six minute palette cleanser and no mistake.

Labels: Alice Coltrane, best of 2017, Coil, comps & reissues, Emma de Angelis, Maki Asakawa, Midori Takada, PSF