A few days ago I happened to stumble across a list of Eight Great Minimal Electronic Records You Need to Hear. Minimal techno – if it’s what you could call the music on the list – is something I haven’t listened to a great deal so I thought I’d have…
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Aphotic and portentous, Richard Skelton’s new album has been played around these parts for a week. It’s magnificent. I’d even go so far to say that it’s a significant piece of modern music. The gloomy, droning soundscape evoked by Skelton on this album is perfect for both this time of…
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Just when you thought it was literally the end of civilisation, The Young Knives (or, more properly) Young Knives without the “The” any more have released a new album, Barbarians. And. It’s. Rather. Good. Indeed. Their last album was something like 7 years ago. It’s very very welcome. Their earlier…
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Standout tracks: Kristallo, Heimatklange, Tanzmuzik. Ralf und Florian was the fourth Kraftwerk album. Like Tone Float, Kraftwerk 1 and Kraftwerk 2, it’s not available for listening other than Youtube or a bootleg. Schneider called their first 4 albums “archaeology” and there seems to have been no desire to re-release their…
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standout track: Autobahn It was the news of Florian Schneider’s death that compelled me to spend some time listening again to Kraftwerk. I suspect that Schneider was the source of David Stubbs’ identification of the “deep sardonic comic sensibility that always lurks beneath the surface of Kraftwerk”. If you’ve ever…
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I almost missed this. Wire has a second album, 10:20, out this year. And it’s absolutely brilliant. Unlike Mind Hive, their most recent album – which I thought was their strongest in years – this one seems to act as a compilation of re-recorded, reworked songs from old albums or…
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This month’s Electronic Sound has a heartwarming tribute to the enigmatic Florian Schneider, who died earlier this year. The piece, by Stephen Dalton, gives an excellent account of Schneider’s role in Kraftwerk. It’s particularly good in establishing the nature of the tensions between Schneider and Ralf Hütter that eventually led…
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Tremendous. Wire’s new album is atmospheric. Autumnal. Claustrophobic. Menacing even. It’s like the nights drawing in. For me, it’s very much a brutal soundtrack to the period we’re currently living through. Droning guitars and dark-ambient synths (developing from their 2016 album, Nocturnal Koreans and 2017’s Silver/Lead). Newman and Lewis sing…
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Here’s some music I’ve been listening to this month that’s new to me… of at least I think it’s new to me:
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