psychedelia
Kieron Tyler
Choosing such a loaded name is wilful. Scottish trio Haight-Ashbury are going to be identified with psychedelic-era San Francisco whatever they do. Should they wish to extend their musical wings, diversions into drum and bass or metal aren’t going to be easily accommodated. It's just as well then that Haight-Ashbury are top-drawer practitioners of a terrifically attractive dark psychedelia.Their second album (released under the name Haight-Ashbury 2, but they still trade as Haight-Ashbury too) opens with hand percussion, a jangling sitar and a keening, modal vocal line. Rhythm is Mo Tucker Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Richard Norris has been mucking about making strange noises and joining the dots (and sometime microdots) in electronic dance music’s shadowy regions for 25 years. He's had multiple incarnations, from NME writer to creator of proto-acid house with Psychic TV’s Genesis P Orridge (on the 1988 M.E.S.H. single and Jack The Tab album). He was one half of The Grid (with Soft Cell’s Dave Ball) and is one half of Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve (with DJ Erol Alkan); he also worked with Joe Strummer, not to mention having some part in the whole narcotic band-gang messiness that resulted in Screamadelica. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Yemi Olagbaiye is the model of a new generation musician for whom the dissolution of genre categories means not homogenisation but an opportunity for greater individuality. Olagbaiye grew up playing guitar music, then moved on to drum'n'bass, but really found his voice when he moved into a fusion of electronic and organic instruments, inspired on the one hand by UK garage and its offspring (dubstep, grime, funky), and on the other by the neo-psychedelia of Radiohead, Four Tet and Caribou. Watch Blacksmif's "...And the Sun Rose Out"His productions are lush and immersive, but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of last year’s finest surprises was the debut album from Rayographs, a fractured, psychedelic excursion that remains enthralling. Paper Dollhouse is the solo guise of Rayographs’s Astrud Steehouder. While A Box Painted Black isn’t quite the shock Rayographs was, it beguiles.As Paper Dollhouse, Steehouder (pictured right) sustains Rayographs’s spookiness. A Box Painted Black‘s “I Dreamt You More Than Ever” uses the cross-talking effect of vocals cutting in and out that's so effective with Rayographs. Their Amy Hurst contributes a photo to the album's booklet. Nina Bosnic is, on a couple of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Against all the odds, I find myself going into 2012 with a strong sense of optimism. And the reason? I am a born-again rave zealot. I saw it at Outlook Festival in Croatia, I saw it at Sónar in Barcelona, and I saw it at the Big Chill where I was running a stage; participatory, constructive, creative partying, where the crowds go not just to be entertained but to plug into something bigger, to be part of something.Now, I love Kanye West's music with all my heart, but the sight of his latest whining pseudo-breakdown on stage at the Big Chill just seemed like the latest peeling away of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's understandable that people get put off leftfield dance music, given how much micro-genre delineation and dog-in-a-manger protectionism there can be in underground scenes. It can seem a shame sometimes, but then again, these are part and parcel of the fertile creativity and passion that exists around the music, so it's swings and roundabouts. However, there are some areas you're guaranteed not to find frowning chin-strokers, and one of those is inhabited by Brighton label Tru Thoughts, which consistently produces music that's friendly, welcoming and veritably insists you forget nitpicky Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’ve got to love the “I Can Only Give You Everything” riff. Admiral Black do and base their “Got Love if You Want It” around an inverted version on their debut album. Cheese-wire fuzz guitar pulses, Bo Diddley drums bash and a wheezy organ, well, wheezes. From the borrowed title alone, it’s obvious where Admiral Back are coming from: classic Sixties-leaning rock. It's not all scuzz and psych though in the house of Black. “Madman’s Blues” drifts by in a haze and “Crystallised” begs for lighters in the air and a swaying audience.Not to be confused with the Chicago rock/metal outfit Admiral of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making. By his own estimation, his subsequent 1964 road trip from California to the World's Fair in New York with his anarchic band of Merry Pranksters was his finest Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's one electronic sub-genre that is not worth approaching blind it's “tech-house”. Since the late Nineties, it has tended to be the most functional and generic of club soundtracks, a steady, decadent plod, all clean lines and predictable shifts: nothing to frighten the horses or interrupt the steady progress of weekend hedonism. In short, boring. However, there are practitioners who have raised its slowly evolving repetitions to an art form that has life outside the club: the Kompakt label, Chilean maverick Ricardo Villalobos, and Brightonian in Berlin Matt “Radio Slave” Edwards.This Read more ...
joe.muggs
The “remix album” has a patchy history. From bodged-together cash-in collections of already-released B-sides via showcases of hipness (hello Radiohead!) to focused collaborations (Mad Professor's reworkings of Massive Attack being the best known), the range of approaches is diverse to say the least. If anyone can get it right, though, it's King Midas Sound's Kevin Martin. An inveterate compiler, collaborator and shape-shifter with many years' worth of extraordinary sound experiments behind him from industrial metal to lovers' rock, he is unquestionably adept at forcing unlikely aesthetic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago – peaking in 2007 - “cosmic disco” was a brief clubland rage. It came mostly from Oslo and consisted of calm, bearded Norwegian dudes creating a fabulous psychedelic stew of groovy house, Italo-disco, and their own ineffable proggy weirdness. Where filter disco, the unkillable dance-pop sub-genre kick-started by Stardust’s “The Music Sounds Better With You”, has mostly been hugely unadventurous, relying on basic retro pilfering, cosmic disco was always marinated in the deep, druggy pulse of the best nightlife. Names such as Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje rightly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A reverb-swathed guitar picks out a rudimentary surf riff. Drums whack out the Bo Diddley shuffle. The four-to-the-floor bass throbs. Vocals drag the vowels out. As whole, the sound spirals, pulses. At eye-rattling volume, The Black Angels serve up a psychedelia that’s mind expanding, but more about the darkness within than the light without. Their trip isn’t the worst ride you’ve ever been on, but it sure doesn’t take you to the third bardo.We all know the Sixties dream was confirmed AWOL with Altamont, 1969 and Chuck Manson. Although Austin Texas’s Black Angels’s vibe is smack bang with all Read more ...