Tag: reviews

Book review: Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked

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Two book reviews for the price of one. Read before a re-watch of David Fincher’s Zodiac because these were instrumental in its creation. My advice? Stick with the film. There’s a little repetition in the reviews because REPETITION IS WHAT YOU GET FROM READING THESE BOOKS, BUCKO.

ZodiacZodiac by Robert Graysmith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cartoonist-cum-chronicle Robert Graysmith has a pretty decent retelling of the Zodiac killer story here. As well he should, given he was working at one of the newspapers to receive ciphers and cheery letters from the murderous astrology fan. Continue reading “Book review: Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked” →

What Is Music? @ Gaelic Club, Sydney, 12/02/2004

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WHAT? YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP.
Festival artwork, 2004.

This is an older review of mine, presented here for archival purposes. The writing is undoubtedly different to the present, and the review style may differ between publications. Enjoy, if that’s the right word. 

What Is Music? is a festival that’s been running since 1993 and aims to show gig-goers that there’s more to music than three chords and the truth. Judging from the mixture of baffled and ecstatic faces seen in The Gaelic Club this evening, the education continues.

As punters entered the room, Matthew Chaumont was already well under way. Seated in front of the stage, manning a couple of computers, a mixer, and what appeared to be a large speaker attached to a couple of metres of industrial ducting. Apparently called Metaphenomena, the piece was a series of bowel-shakingly low tones with a satisfyingly dirty texture. Continue reading “What Is Music? @ Gaelic Club, Sydney, 12/02/2004” →

Alan Moore and Tim Perkins: Angel Passage (2002)

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Alan Moore and Tim Perkins: Angel Passage (re:)This is an older review of mine, presented here for archival purposes. The writing is undoubtedly different to the present, and the review style may differ between publications. Enjoy, if that’s the right word.

Angel Passage is an odd disc. It’s a studio reworking of a performance Moore and Perkins presented as part of the Tygers of Wrath concert, presented at the end of Tate Britain’s William Blake exhibition. And as such, it sits in no-man’s land; it’s not a run-of-the-mill spoken-word album, nor is it a cast-recording album. It’s a weird hybrid, like reading Moore’s meditation on Blake’s life while ghostly music that’s not quite separate floats through the air. Occasionally, it’s problematic — I just want to hear what he’s saying, dammit — but for the most part, it adds a well-judged air of mystery. Continue reading “Alan Moore and Tim Perkins: Angel Passage (2002)” →

Nerve Net Noise: Meteor Circuit (2002)

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This is an older review of mine, presented here for archival purposes. The writing is undoubtedly different to the present, and the review style may differ between publications. Enjoy, if that’s the right word. 

No two ways about it, you’re either going to love Meteor Circuit or think it’s the most annoying con-job going in electronica. Nerve Net Noise, a Japanese duo, take homemade oscillators and basically let them play themselves. They claim to be going for the middle ground between planned and unplanned, suggesting that there’s a kind of life created here. Then again, their liner notes also make links between the creation of the world and their music, in a display of whimsy that elsewhere would annoy, but here appears to fit entirely with the project: machines playing themselves, humans acting merely as scribes. Continue reading “Nerve Net Noise: Meteor Circuit (2002)” →

Dirty Three: She Has No Strings Apollo (2003)

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Dirty Three: She Has No Strings ApolloThis is an older review of mine, presented here for archival purposes. The writing is undoubtedly different to the present, and the review style may differ between publications. Enjoy, if that’s the right word. 

She Has No Strings Apollo arrives as Dirty Three celebrate ten years together, playing dives and festivals and introducing gobsmacked punters to their particular blend of distortion-fuelled neo-classical gypsy heartbreak. It’s the product of fatherhood, abortive recording sessions and long sojourns as backing musicians for luminaries such as Nick Cave or Will Oldham. And more than any recording before it, it seems to nail the sound — and, more importantly, the sense of communication between players, the “feel” of things — in a way that their other discs haven’t.

The disc’s feel could be put down to the fact that it was recorded — after a couple of months of live workshopping — in just three days at Les Instants Chavires in Paris. And it shows; the tunes have a sparseness in places that bespeaks freshness — these are songs that have no fat on them. They’re fresh from the source. Continue reading “Dirty Three: She Has No Strings Apollo (2003)” →

Book review: The Fool’s Journey

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The Fool's Journey: the History, Art, & Symbolism of the TarotThe Fool’s Journey: the History, Art, & Symbolism of the Tarot by Robert Michael Place
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Published to coincide with an exhibition of tarot art curated by the author, The Fool’s Journey sits in a weird position. It’s a little too complex to be just an exhibition catalogue, but it’s also too slender to be a fully-considered work on the tarot. (Place is a respected artist, tarot scholar and has written more lengthy works on the cards, lest it be thought I impugn his credentials as a well-researched writer.)

Part of the difficulty with the book is that I think it’s a little user-unfriendly, at least as far as the layout goes. It’s a larger-format book, which is excellent for the graphics, but the text pages are one-column and stretch the whole page, making navigation difficult and reading a little tiring. I believe it’s a self-published work – the publisher’s address appears to be the author’s – so that explains some of the errant typos that appear through the work. It’s not a deal-breaker, though it does knock the faith in the work a little.

The good, though, is the amount of graphical reproduction on hand. Continue reading “Book review: The Fool’s Journey” →

John Hudak & Jason Lescalleet: Figure 2 (2001)

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This is an older review of mine, presented here for archival purposes. The writing is undoubtedly different to the present, and the review style may differ between publications. Enjoy, if that’s the right word. 

Take one NY-based sound artist (Hudak) and one New England-based composer (Lescalleet). Give them a load of recording equipment, an audience and place the whole shebang inside a Massachusetts chapel in the middle of a snowstorm. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? Thankfully, such preparations have resulted in a recording of such incredible beauty that it will make you believe that there are benevolent gods watching over those who explore what constitutes music. Continue reading “John Hudak & Jason Lescalleet: Figure 2 (2001)” →

New split 12-inch review

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My review of If, Bwana and Gerald Fiebig’s split 12-inch on Attenuation Circuit has gone live at Cyclic Defrost. You can listen to excerpts from the record here. 

Gerald Fiebig’s ‘Sustained Development’ features the same reedy organ tones, but with more organisation. They’re constructed in waves, creating a feeling of motion, of tidal drift. It’s a slow-burn piece, but seems more at home in the ambient Nurse With Wound part of the world; its slow iterations and feeling of bobbing, rising waves would sit well with any fans of NWW’s Salt Marie Celeste.

Read the rest here. 

New Yellow6 review

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Another Cyclic Defrost review has gone live. It’s a write-up of Yellow6‘s 5 EP, part of Silber Records’ 5 in 5 project. Five minutes, five songs. A buck to download. 

‘5.2’ sounds like Sling Blade-era Daniel Lanois, while ’5.3′ brings to mind Charlie Owen’s guitar work on Louis Tillett’s Midnight Rain. ‘5.4’ brings a venomous, plodding chunk to the mix, coupled with a howling noise which manages not to upset the measured, clean chord pluckings that command attention, leading to the EP’s final Godspeed You Black Emperor guitar-neighbourhood track.

The review is here.

New Carl Kruger review

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My Cyclic Defrost review for Carl Kruger’s Sexist Tranny (out on Silber Records) has now gone live. A brief sample?

The prevailing feeling of the recordings – and their provenance is unknown, buried in multiple layerings and laptop manipulations – is that of deep space, or of machinery talking to itself. Opener ‘Dead Biz Novelle’ is the sound of gigantic terrestrial radios, tuning from bogs to the vistas of cold space. ‘Bead Hell Oven Zit’ is a record of someone dropping their keys down the back of a DEC PDP-9 while it complains, loudly.

Enjoy.