The Raga is most ancient, and spiritual of practices. Passed down from master to pupil over many centuries, it takes several years to master its enlightened intricacies. According to the liner notes of 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat, ‘a typical Raga ensemble consists of a vocal or instrumental soloist, a percussionist on the tabla…
Ariel Pink has all the right in the world to be grump. After all, rather than spending his teen age years getting involved in all sort of Byzantine high school intrigues, drinking and having casual sex, he decided to stay home listening to forgotten gems of cold war pop and soul, taking it all in,…
image by Daniel Kvasznicza Arriving in the hollowed out remains of an old 5 1/4″ floppy disc Gum Takes Tooth‘s percussive noise workouts belie their fragile packaging. Hermaphrodite & Nourishment recalls the tribal rhythms and oscillating noise, the echoey chants and the sense of drifting on a leaking wooden raft through the malaria infested jungles…
There is a balance of anonymity and intimacy here in LA that, although dangerous (i.e roadrage, drivebys, plastic surgery), has helped create one of the most diverse sounding music scenes in America. Tied together by a few brave DIY music venues like The Smell, Sync Space, Echo Curio, and Pehrspace, people from many different walks…
Terror Bird’s ‘Shadows in the Halls’ lends itself to a couple of different interpretations. On the one hand, it could be a lovely portrayal of the way in which sharing your bed can work to assuage the terrors which flow and ebb in the night when it is at its darkest, evil poison oozing from…
Press rewind in the quantum mechanics cassette player and ascertain the lineage of that island in the midst of the Mediterranean which is Ibiza, before it became the destination for hordes of pumped drug tourists and women made of Bronze, before the baggy balearica posse spread across its golden beaches, and in a moment of…
In an alternate 80s pop landscape, where simple synth chords co-exist with the sinister ambient rumblings from the sensory periphery of Italian horror composers. In an alternate 80s where less was really more, where Chicago’s minimalism travelled back in time and co-opted the top of the charts. Here we find The One, slicing through the…
If Lindstrom’s ‘Where You Go I Go Too’ was a love letter to Steve Reich written from a Balearic beach circa 1981, Prins Thomas’ forthcoming self-titled album out in Full Pupp shows the Scandinavian maestro bounding all his warm influences together with muscular motorik lasso. It all sounds like dub edits of Fletwood Mac covering…
2012 is a coming y’all. Not long now before the global grip of the Fourth Reich is slid around our fragile necks and Xenu enslaves us all. The moment when you will have to apologise to the stoner conspiracy theorist that you scoffed at all these years, only to watch his bong-stained body spliced in…
Human Resources have been echoing on repeat across the convoluted labyrinth of tunnels which stretch like the blood vessels of the evil Hydra which is the bunker where we dream our evil dreams, a corrupted Mt. Rushmore carved with the faces of the Great Psychodelians, Delia is there, and so are Mark E. Smith, Blixa…
At the end of ‘All that Jazz’, Bob Fosse, the king of lizard dancers which was obvious inspiration to our favourite late moonwalking alien bids life goodbye in the most grand of manners, surrounded by rotating Metropolis mannequins, a band of feline KISS-lookalikes, dancers clad in catsuits tattooed with a constellation of blood vessels, and…
While most of the world suffers due to global warming, Los Angeles is becoming more tropical in the summer and now gets rain in the winter. So no more droughts and Hawaiian vacations for all. Already the land where fun music like the Beach Boys and Mötley Crüe came from, the propensity for catchy tunes is…
The sounds contained in this post span thirty minutes of our short time on this planet, so the words shall be brief. Here we are offered 3 different paths to enlightenment through repetitive means, that connect the physical to the cerebral with a patch cable long enough to stretch back to the beginning of time….
There are times when you put on a record and a song rings out with an uncannily different tone than the rest of them. You can’t quite put your finger on it— it is arresting, ecstatic, horrifying, and otherworldly– it as though a portal has been opened to the spirit world and you find yourself possessed…
The Long Goodbye is the soundtrack for Dexter if Dexter had been for real, and not some quirky sitcom about the pros and cons of living a secret life as a psycho-killer in sunny Miami. Think instead of an apres garde symphony for that classic moment when Michael Mann brings out the knives. Hypnagogic vision…