Cast adrift, bobbing, gently atop thick black waves. Discordant guitars drifting in from some No Wave fight between their angular selves and James Chance’s rejected saxophone – still smarting and throwing her weight around. Stars fill the loft’s decaying rafters. The building creeks with the mass of the black waves; crashing apologetically into its crumbling interior walls. The halls echo with the far off call of a high-priest, caught out by time and stuck at right angles to this world. His insightful sermons trapped in the space between doorways.

Dull Knife, the label behind the wonderful Indian Jewelry / Future Blondes split 12″ from last year, are delighting once more with the dub-infused gem that is the Roman Holiday album by Balaclavas. Full of the sort of urgent rhythm section that haunts Liquid Liquids dreams and sax solos straight from the Ze Records book of just-the-right-time-to-be-deployed plays. Get it here.

Balaclavas – Night Worship

image by David Jien

Space black dub, glimpsed through the ragged hole in the ancient, accursed church. Gothic spires reaching their slate tips towards an impossible confluence of angles like so many claws grasping at the heavens. The church heaves on its precipitous hilltop with the coming of the drums of industry. Shaking the stones in their ancient slumber yet devoid of mechanical source. As if the air were geared and the stale moisture were its fuel. From its damned catacombs the nameless voice of anguish lends its dulcet tones to the cacophony until the building itself is oscillating with the irrepressible music of the night.

Water Borders come from San Fransico.  They’re everything your provincial English scribe DOESN’T think about San Fransisco. Like Coil putting out records on Hyperdub, lost to the temporal seas and found, washed up in that pastel coloured port to haunt its wharfs – a West coast Miskatonic region. For all its demonic pomp there seems a smile, sometimes wry, sometimes ecstatic behind that processed vocal. A great wink from the vastness of deep, unknowing space.

Water Borders – Akko