In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…
Category: indie
Brutalismus 3000, the Berlin electronic duo comprised of producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, call their music “nu-gabber post-techno punk.” They deride Berlin’s techno scene as painfully serious and “unstylish,” cringing at ravers self-styled as revolutionaries. They shoot music videos with happy crews of children smashing and spray-painting TVs. And if they had to write a manifesto, they’d title it “Fuck Shit Up” (or “We’ll Kill a CEO”).
This devil-may-care attitude befits the duo’s loud, aggro, in-your-face music: scrap-metal synths and air-raid sirens, jackhammering hardstyle kicks, and banshee shrieks that sound like they’re being shredded through chopper blades. Brutalismus 3000’s second album, Harmony,…
Pressing play on Spacemoth’s new album is like stepping into a ‘90s Magic Eye painting: Everything suddenly becomes 3D, jumping off the page in a blur of motion. Infectiously catchy from the get-go — all Day-Glo synth splodges, fuzzed-out guitar, boxy drum workouts, and strawberry bubblegum basslines — Inward Eye is both instantly gratifying and wrapped in deeper meaning. At its heart, it’s a paean to journeying — on the road, inside your mind’s eye, and to other cosmic dimensions, all while you ponder things like “Do We Exist?” and how to communicate through a paper cup.
That Maryam Qudus wrote most of the record in the back of a tour van while traveling across the U.S. with psych rockers La Luz makes sense. Who hasn’t felt their most creative when…
…Nixon Boyd hails from Ontario and has been playing in the indie rock band Hollerado since 2007. Hollerado make a much different brand of indie rock than Boyd’s solo stuff — infectious anthems laced with power-pop ecstasy. When Boyd was almost finished with his debut solo album Every Time We Turn a Corner, the bag with the hard drives containing the album was stolen from his car, and he started over.
…The title track, which serves as the opener, has an almost surfy atmosphere to it, à la Mac DeMarco at his calmest. As with “You Will Always Get Away with It,” the irresistibility is in the repetition of the refrain, which in this case is just the words of the song/album title. But he draws out the phrase by repeating the word “turn”…
Purgate’s latest release, Leavings, has a simple yet effective formula. Take a short abstract motif, and let it loop for a few minutes.
These motifs, however, are synthesized from melodic fragments, static, distortion, and other unusual features. And the looping varies each of them slightly across iterations.
Purgate is Frederic Arbour, also known as the label head for Cyclic Law. Thus, he is intimately familiar with dark ambient, industrial, and adjacent genres of music. His efforts on this album only provide a respectful nod toward those established forms before heading out in new directions.
‘Cinders’ opens the album with shards of airy, floating synth grounded by a pulsing rhythm. ‘Ashes’ is even more focused on repeating,..
The album November 89 comprises a selection of very early GAS tracks, some of which date back to the late 1980s. They were first released in 2008 as a CD insert in the art book ‘Wolfgang Voigt GAS’, published on Raster-Noton.
Just like the photographs in the book, these pieces are early precursors that would evolve in the ensuing years with the albums ‘Zauberberg’ and ‘Königsforst’ into a style-defining, audiovisual “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) comprising hypnotically focused forest imagery and an abstract, psychedelic wash of sound created by alphorn and bass drum.
…As the title suggests, it was mostly, remarkably, made in ’89, back when Voigt was finding his feet between techno, house and…
It’s easy to romanticize New York nightlife — and sometimes you might wonder if it’s cheesy to do so. After all, the late David Mancuso’s foundational Loft parties have been the center of embittered schisms and fights over branding that call into question their founding ethos: “Love Saves the Day.” But what would New York City be without a little conflict, eh? And there are still plenty of true believers in the fiercely independent, dizzyingly multicultural, polysexual spirit that has kept people dancing in the half-century or so since Mancuso first blew up balloons and tuned on his huge hi-fi. Key among them are the Love Injection crew — conceived by Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele at a Loft party, and who are determined to keep the spirit alive through zines, record…
If the sepia-toned photograph of a house on a hill is any indication, proun’s debut LP Maybe Luck is about revisiting memories, working through them and standing on the other end with a different perspective. The Austin-based trio’s main songwriter, Jamie Weed, also the band’s guitarist and singer, works through the tumultuous feelings that came with her gender transition.
Originally written solo on a nylon-string guitar, when mapped out with bassist Dante Zatto and drummer/engineer Alex Peterson, the songs on proun’s first album become a touching exploration of what it means to accept yourself, even if that means pushing past others’ expectations of who you should be.
Weed began writing this album with the title…
There’s a certain charm to an after-school band. In an age of industry plants and X Factor it-boys, listeners still crave the intimacy of bedroom pop and the rough authenticity of garage rock.
Atta Boy has carved out a home between the two homegrown genres, and no wonder: the LA band’s four members met in middle school, formed the group in their early teens, and released their debut album, Out of Sorts, around the time of their high school graduation.
After an eight-year hiatus spent pursuing other interests — one of them being a starring role in Yellowstone and another in Top Gun: Maverick — the band reunited in 2020, returning with a tighter, more layered version of the sound that made Atta Boy a cult favorite in the first place.
…The live release all hardcore Devo fans have been waiting for, Nitrous Nightmare demonstrates a band harnessing their artistic greatness in the purest of forms. This mythic performance captures Devo perfecting some of their most iconic concepts in the raw. Expertly restored, this live recording makes for a thrilling experience, it also captures Devo as a lightening rod for hostility.
On Halloween 1975, Devo took the stage at the WHK Auditorium in Cleveland, in a supporting capacity for jazz legend Sun Ra, to perform for a raucous crowd dressed in the finest of Halloween cliché. Already riding high on Nitrous Oxide and booze supplied by the sponsoring radio station, this unaware horde was expecting to see a slick cover band churning out renditions of…
The word “meditative” is as groan-inducingly overused as a descriptor for ambient music as a word can be, yet there’s really no better way to understand the work of M. Geddes Gengras. Amidst a sea of modular synth noodlers more content to show off their equipment than to make something meaningful of it, Gengras’ deep focus on carving out spacious, lived-in sonic worlds with his instrument, and his ability to transport his listeners to those mysterious places, has never wavered. His latest album Guest List represents a major departure from the solitary world-building of his previous work, bringing in a bevy of collaborators who leave no stone unturned in exploring every last corner of his sound. The result is an uncharacteristically cluttered soundscape…
When artists become big enough, they become increasingly defined not by their actual work, but what we want their work to be. We begin to think of artists as inseparable from certain qualities and judge the work from these references. This paradox looms large when listening to Exhale, the collaborative album by Batu and Donato Dozzy.
The two artists have become veritable underground institutions: Batu and his label Timedance indelibly shaped the contemporary UK techno landscape by infusing the genre with a wide variety of sound system variants. And what is there left to say about Dozzy? His name by itself is shorthand for psychedelic techno.
With the bar set that high, it’s easy to go into Exhale with preset kudos. But what makes for…
The Brazilian religious and musical tradition of candomblé is a rhythmic barrage. Originating in the 19th century among enslaved west Africans, candomblé manifested in music as a ritual practice of drumming circles, where polyrhythms were hammered out to induce possession by spirits. Athens-based archival label Flee presents a treasure trove of this ceremonial music from a community in Salvador in the late 1980s, alongside a series of ingenious remixes made by contemporary artists.
Side one of the album hosts the field recordings. Hazy, unbalanced and full of tape hiss, the 10 ritual compositions pull listeners into the frenetic environment in which they were recorded. It is as if we are sitting next to the tape recorder…
Broadside Hacks have quickly established themselves as the UK’s premier folk conglomerate. As a London-based promotion company, they’ve hosted some of the most innovative darlings on the contemporary scene. They’ve also been doing the Heimlich on some classic albums – arranging star-studded presentations of Mike and Lal Waterson’s masterpiece ‘Bright Phoebus’ and Mark Fry’s ‘Dreaming of Alice’, as well as retrospectives of the music of Martin Carthy and Incredible String Band in some of the capital’s most glittering venues. They also find time to run a record label that houses some of the more gleefully weird trad artists in the UK (Milkweed, Goblin Band, Spitzer Space Telescope et al). Tinderbox, the debut album by Bristol-based multi-instrumentalist…
Key to World Peace, the second album by Australian musician Sam Perry, aka Prophetic Justice Ministry, is an odd bird: Sometimes it rattles and churns, synth and drum machine scraping up against each other like ungreased pistons; at other points, it floats like fog, sounding a little like the creeping, elegant scores of Angelo Badalamenti. It frequently feels like a DIY folk record, not least when Perry, who was raised in New Zealand, faithfully covers Lana Del Rey’s “Mariners Apartment Complex” with a distinct Kiwi lilt. Uniting these decidedly disparate moods is a keen sense of atmosphere: Key to World Peace sounds like it was recorded live in some kind of emptied swimming pool, Perry standing at one end and his recording equipment at the other. The resulting…
Las Robertas make a move away from the surf and garage influences of the past on 2026’s All We Need is Now, adding a third guitar player, and diving headfirst into dream pop. The Costa Rican band were very good at raucous garage rock and moody psychedelia, they also prove to be really adept at big, bouncy dream pop. They splice it with shoegaze, Brit Pop, Madchester, and indie rock, while still keeping a little bit of swirling psych in the mix. Not surprisingly with three of them in the band, the guitars are the star of the show. They are huge, taking turns jangling, chiming, crunching, and threatening to rip the speaker cones to shreds, but never overshadowing the wide-open melodies or the vocals. Mercedes Oller’s lead vocals are the calm inside the storm and when…
The term tropicanibalismo has been circulating within experimental music scenes in Colombia since at least the early ’00s, broadly encompassing new and innovative approaches to coastal popular and folkloric music forms. Cumbión Planetario is Bogotá-based duo Rizomagic’s newest contribution to this tropicanibalismo landscape. Rooted in cumbia (with a particular nod to languid, Monterrey-born cumbia rebajada), perhaps the most emblematic Colombian music and dance genre, the slow-motion music of Cumbión Planetario is distinctly contemporary.
Hints of dub, a deeper camaraderie with music that might be termed IDM, and particular investments in the idea of cosmic tuning serve as important contours. Group members…
Though vaguely considered along the lines of noise, space rock, dream pop and psychedelic, The Telescopes have consistently expanded boundaries, colouring outside the lines with possibility. This house has many rooms, embraced across genres, influential to many, all embracing, in an orbit of its own. Static Charge is The Telescopes’ 19th studio album since the group’s inception in 1988 – and their 7th release on Tapete Records.
After a three-month tour of the UK and Europe, the all embracing sounds of The Telescopes return with a lean blitz of seditionary hits. Take a jolt of Static Charge and step beyond the realm of natural vision. Stone age beats, outsider sounds, low end disturbance unite in resistance to the new weirdness of existence.