Back catalogue: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: When No Birds Sang serves as the sonic Venn Diagram intersection between the caustic death-grind of endlessly prolific noise merchants Full Of Hell and their long-time dreary shoegaze companions Nothing. Following previous collaborations with nihilistic post-rock entity The Body and doom-sludge trio Primitive Man, this latest endeavour offers a far vaster musical dichotomy than previous collaborative outings, with melancholic, distorted clean vocals reverberating against howling shrieks and cacophonous walls of overwhelming, near impenetrable fuzz. Echoing the ugliest experiments of Swans or My Bloody Valentine, yet re-purposed, or rather dragged through a mire of broken glass and barbed wire before being vaulted into a deafening echo chamber; this twisted formula of violent vulnerability could best be summarised as post-grind or deathgaze, and offers little help to the uninitiated.

Review: It's hard to sum up the brilliance of the interconnected bands which emerged out of Dusseldorf in the 90s, but Neu! are about as perfect a place to start as any. Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother left Kraftwerk and, sparring with Conny Plank in the studio, came up with album after album of steadfast, motorik grooves that stretch out for miles on end. You can dive into any part of the Neu! legacy and it won't disappoint, but Neu! 2 is especially wonderful thanks to the visionary approach to remixing Dinger and Rother took to fill up the second half of the album when the label withheld any more money to record the album. Short-sighted of the label maybe, but it pushed the pair to create something far wilder with wrongspeed manipulation - just listen to 'Super 16' and you'll understand.

Review: Don't get it confused; this isn't just a simple reissue of Neu!'s first album, but rather a tributary collection box of the krautrock pioneers' first four albums. And that's not to mention all the new reworks of the debut LP's tracks from various bands whose members double up as megafans - including Mogwai, The National, and Idles. A stonking, lead double-time EBM remix of 'Hallogallo' comes from Stephen Morris and Gabe Guernsey, and sets an impressive-progressive tone for the album to follow.

Review: First released in 1997 as his sixth and final LP project, Colin Newman's Bastard came to the innovative "post-everything" label Swim a good while after the Wire member and electronic experimentalist had already made several splashes in the mitts of the infamous Cartel, the arch-distributor and de facto trade guild giving rise to labels like 4AD and Beggars. Keeping in close knit to such sonic romanticists helped propel Newman's sound into dreamier realms over the years, and this seven-tracker functions as the pinnacle of this tendency. First coming across as a more convincing analogue to contemporaries like Lush, Newman's sound here is less polished and thus more "authentic"-seeming, basking in militant breaks and techstep entrainments and which come blent with incredible pad and amped-up guitar washes. In the in-betweeny moments, we're also met with trip-hop delights resting on the lower-ends of the spectrum; the alien middle finger on the cover says it all, a veritable "fuck you" gestured by an early subject of dance music, a genre that Newman recalls was a misunderstood, much-maligned genre at the time.

Review: The last album by Colin Newman, Bastard came almost a full decade after his establishing panhandle of albums, released across Beggars Banquet, 4AD and Crammed Discs. A driving left turn into dance music, Bastard hears Newman come into his own, not only hearing him embrace then-emergent styles like trip hop and breakbeat for the first time, but also breaking through as the first full-length effort for his very own record label, Swim, established after a parallax-shifting abandonment of conventional song formats and welcoming a new, largely minimal/ambient electronica posse; the likes of Lobe and Silo. The tracks on Bastard reflect an early embrace of dance music in a time of ambivalence towards the arch-genre as a whole, reflecting the wilful keeping-ahead-of-the-curve that Newman and his partner Milka Spigel had by then cultivated.

Review: As part of a new looking back on German art rocker Nico's esteemed career by the indie label Domino, Desertshore chronologically follows The Marble Index, and is her third album, following the prior project's establishing her as an avant-garde artist with one foot in the mainstream, in stark defiance of the the prejudiced poo-poohs that followed her first (baroque pop) album, Chelsea Girl. Desertshore is more of a reconciliation of her prior two projects, bringing back the initial western pop sensibility while now firmly basking in a newfound weirdness-and-she-knows-it. From the opening dark waves of 'Janitor Of Lunacy' to the piano-balladic injection of sadness that is 'Afraid', this is another avant-garde masterpiece by the musician, never justifiably passed over.

Review: Nico's Marble Index was the first album to establish the German musician's home in the avant-garde; the story of the fashion model turned "legitimate" artist is as old as time, yet is rarely told today. In contrast to her first album, Chelsea Girl, which consisted almost entirely of pop chansons, Nico's sophomore LP here tracks nicely with her working introduction to John Cale in his harmonium era, drawing inspiration primarily from modern European classical music, not three-minute hookcraft. Long out of print, this slow-burner of a critical classic now hears a worthy reissue via Domino.

Review: South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: "I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves/whole days roll by, forgetting about the body." Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted r&b, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations - often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure - "the permission to imagine leaving." Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, "talking myself off a ledge." The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: "My first experience with ambient music was church - slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar - even if you don't believe, you feel something."

Review: A fresh, atmospheric sound is proferred by South Carolina singer and producer Nancy Blues in the form of her latest vinyl LP Exit Simulation, in which she cuts through the intertwined hazes of childhood memory and personal psychogeography to produce a veritably ultra-ambient dust cloud of sound in 13 tracks. At its core, the album trickles faintly forth from the watershed that is neo-soul - multi-layering her voice; harmonizing; pitting honest, raw rimshots-n'-crackles against contemporary stylistic cornerstones like lo-fi and night-bussy ambient electronica - all to evoke, convincingly, the mood of stasis in which she finds current solace in her current home of Charleston. Evocative of having found a newfound time and place to reflect, Blues conjures up the weekends of her youth, spent mesmerized at the ambient music of the slow-paced devotionals performed by the local Oklahoman church band.

Review: Sonic Cathedral share the debut album of Not Me But Us, Two, facilitating the Neapolitan duo's astonishing talent for production and pitch-bent melancholy. Made up of Bruno Bavota and Fabrizio Somma (aka. K-Conjog), this new effort blends each of their influences with echoes of ambient, techno, 2000s club culture, postclassical music and hints of post-rock, making for a fascinating electronica cocktail. Lending well to Bavota's usual piano-based pieces, the new collaborative approach, which fed a new interest in analog gear, also resulted in an effective vehicle to process grief and gaze into new horizons for the artists.

Review: The evolution of German art outfit The Notwist is something to behold. Kicking off in 1989 with a metal album, between then and now they've refused to stay still, developing a sound that is truly their own. Gradually introducing electronics to the oeuvre, and discarding of the real heaviness, if you were going to label anything an amalgamation of sounds it's this - indie, electronica, jazz, downtempo, garage rock, lo fi pop.

All of that makes for a particularly formative musical experience on stage. Core members Cico Beck and the Acher brothers, Markus and Micha, consider records to be the starting point from which beautiful things happen live. Concerts are jam sessions that allow ideas to come to fruition, or develop almost by surprise. This is testament to that. Not a live record, but a recording of them reworking tracks from Vertigo Days and one from the soundtrack to One of Those Days in their own hilariously nicknamed studio.