• Various Artists – A Litany of Failures Vol. II

    July 17, 2018 - By 

    To be a contemporary “independent” band in Ireland isn’t merely a genre categorisation, but a complex creative actuality. There’s often a socio-economic subtext to the term, as happens when a multitude of younger or less experienced creatives don’t have the resources to view music as a full-time pursuit just yet. They must therefore look elsewhere to meet the frequently unforeseen costs that stack up when making music – gear upkeep, travel, recording/rehearsal space fees, etc. This can lead to an absence of parity at the level of industry power relations. Simply look at the cultural-economic logic followed by certain festivals…

  • Protomartyr – Relatives In Descent

    October 1, 2017 - By 

    You could be forgiven for thinking that any and all modern articulations of “rock music” have become politically toothless. As a medium, it doesn’t quite seem as suited to critiques of society and culture as it once did. That being said, it seems Detroit four-piece Protomartyr would be inclined to disagree. Relatives In Descent, their fourth album, finds them wrestling with the nature and form of truth, spurred on by the vertiginous, collective sense of History swarming violently around the present. Having recently signed to UK Label Domino, the band retreated to L.A. in March of this year to record…

  • Actress – AZD

    May 9, 2017 - By 

    Experimental music is supposed to try and expand the boundaries of the possible. It’s always something of a gamble, but a thrilling one at that. Actress, AKA London-based experimental techno artist Darren Cunningham, has thus far managed to carve a niche for himself in an area that’s generally quite difficult to stand out in. Spend enough time among his soundscapes and you can begin to easily identify an Actress track – there’s a distinctiveness to his work that Cunningham has characterised as “almost like extreme patenting”. AZD (pronounced “azid”) is his fifth album under this moniker, one that arrived with…

  • Pharmakon – Contact

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    Noise music mostly operates within the sphere of the modern avant-garde, but can be a deeply alienating experience for many; not only because of its tendency to be anti-everything – structure, melody, basic auditory comprehension – but because of its potential to generate actual discomfort in listeners. Despite this, its compositional strategies can be almost decadent in execution – when Lou Reed wanted to release his 1975 double album Metal Machine Music (mostly impenetrable but considered by many to be a pioneering Noise work), he wanted to release it on RCA’s classical arm, Red Seal. Reed, along with many proponents…

  • No Country For Bold Men: The Stormy Psychedelia of the 13th Floor Elevators

    October 31, 2016 - By 

    It’s something of an accepted cultural trope that sixties music was awash with recreational drug use. Acid, in particular, still holds a central place in many people’s conception of the sixties western counterculture as a socio-historical phenomenon, to the extent that anyone wishing to visually document the decade seems obligated to include a montage of marches, hirsute men and women looking a bit glazed, riots, Hendrix, more marches & Nixon – all set to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’. It’s one of those culturally reductive but semiotically useful ways of describing material history, albeit one that leads to sourceless pseudo-proverbs…

  • Label Mixtape: What’s Your Rupture?

    April 14, 2016 - By 

    Running an independent record label can often seem like one of the more concrete definitions of a ‘labour of love’. Brooklyn-based label What’s Your Rupture? (WYR?), founded in 2003 by one Kevin Pedersen, has managed to strike a superb balance in its release strategy – giving a platform to newer bands while simultaneously bringing older artists to new audiences. Oddly enough, the label originally started off the back of the notoriety gained by Pedersen’s stand-up comedy act, but has since gone on to become one of the most venerated underground labels in contemporary music. While fairly discerning in what he…

  • Laura Gibson – Empire Builder

    April 11, 2016 - By 

    There aren’t many labels in popular music that come with as many unspoken assumptions as ‘singer-songwriter’ does. As cultural archetypes go, it’s uniquely malleable and somewhat slippery – images are conjured both of introverted Moleskine-clutching creatives & street-busking dilettantes,  haunting cafés as they wrestle with personal demons. It’s a label that could be reasonably applied to artists across a broad spectrum of creativity/popularity/influence while still retaining its diagnostic value – Nick Drake and Ben Howard are both ‘singer-songwriters’ in some sense or another. There also tends to be a smuggled expectation among listeners that the songwriting of a ‘singer-songwriter’ will…

  • Road To Nowhere: Modest Mouse’s This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, Twenty Years Later

    March 31, 2016 - By 

    What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘driving music’? As musical notions go, it’s one that usually comes with a specific set of aesthetic criteria. Upbeat tempos, big choruses, maybe the occasional indulgent guitar solo. This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, the debut of Issaquah indie rockers Modest Mouse, turned twenty last Saturday. While directly referencing both a long journey and a clear mind, if anything this album is the protracted, pensive inverse of canonical ‘driving music’ – ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ with a dicey hangover. Modest Mouse emerged in the…