Album Review – Kristin Hersh – Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

  Kristin Hersh – Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (Omnibus Press 2CD + hardback book) I’ve been listening to/reading Kristin Hersh’s new album/book Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (out on the 28th of October from Omnibus Books) for a couple of weeks now, and it just keeps getting better. I can’t…

Weekly update: the charm of the EP

  This Friday’s weekly musings have a specific subject: the ‘Extended Play’ (EP): Just when the album as a physical format seemed to be dying out, the (somewhat overstated) vinyl renaissance came along, reiterating the obvious; that songs are great, but sometimes a collection of…

Album Review: Rachel Mason – Das Ram

 Rachel Mason ‘Das Ram’ Cleopatra Records (LP) / Practical Records (cassette) Release date: 18 November 2016 Rachel Mason has done so much work in so many fields (performance art/non-performance art/filmmaking/music/etc/etc – check out her website for a cross-section) that it’s easy to immerse oneself in her work….

No hierarchy In the world of sounds: Kib Elektra interview

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Abi Bailey has an impressive list of credits to her name; as a session musician she has worked with Emilíana Torrini, Sylver Tongue, Brian Eno & Karl Hyde, among many others, but her work as a solo artist is even more impressive. Her…

REAL-TIME REVIEWS: YAADON KE BAARAAT (1973)

Something of an experiment; reviewing an album while actually listening to it. As will be seen, the downside of this approach is that there isn’t much time for fact-checking and so forth and it leads to a lot of description rather than actual criticism, but…

The First Monthly Report: January 2016

  Along with some tragic deaths, abysmal weather and so forth, 2016 began with lots of good stuff, some of it inevitably acquired at christmas, like for instance… FREZNO by Tony Stamolis (Process Books, 2008) Frezno is great partly because photographer Tony Stamolis’ hometown Fresno is, or appears…

Play for Today: 9th January 2016

  Today’s playlist is mainly stuff that has been playing since Christmastime, so it’s probably longer than it will usually be: Brian Eno – Before and After Science (1977) Eno’s last collection of somewhat alien-sounding ‘songs’, definitely good, but compared to his first few it’s a bit all over the…

PLAY FOR TODAY

An irregular series, being in the nature of a kind of playlist, ‘now playing’ or similar item, with or without further comment, perhaps to be interpreted as recommendatory, but of course entirely subjective in nature…

Copy? Compliment? Coincidence? Incestuous album covers!

Firstly; if you’re looking at this because of the word ‘incestuous’, shame on you! Anyway, for a variety of reasons, lots of album covers seem to pay tribute to/copy/look like lots of other ones, which is what this is all about. In the early days of…

WAIT! Best releases of 2015; those glaring omissions in full*

*disclaimer; not in full I somehow forgot these eminently worthy records when compiling my end of year list and I couldn’t leave them out. So much for brevity! Gentlemans Pistols – Hustler’s Row (Nuclear Blast) ‘Retro’ without being an exercise in pure nostalgia, Hustler’s Row was that rare…