Another lovely week out there, and another heap of new wax in the shop! A whack of Japanese electronic reissues. The new Black Midi. Another killer ambient jazz record on International Anthem from Carlos Nino. And many more tasty slabs. Come on down for a dig! The music speaks for itself here and it speaks volumes.
Remembering it now, it seems to me he was wearing a woolly jumper despite the summer heat. He laid all of his instruments out on the grass, I think there was a recorder, a guitar maybe and various boxes and pedals. The details of my memory are hazy but I can bring the feeling of the music to mind. Some of what he did seemed scrappy or confusing at first. But when everything came together the effect was transporting. There was a deep feeling of English-eccentric melancholy mixed with a commitment to the distressed, ragged edges of sound.
Most of all there was a keen, if slightly obscured, sense of melody. His new record brings that afternoon back. Here again are songs like scraps of remembered conversation and hooks of melody that break apart and fall together as the the sun dips behind the hills. Their songs are here and gone, gauzy, blank and romantic. This record is a brief heady waltz through a hall of mirrors.
Drum machines tick past, oil and water synths swirl by and and a sleepy solemn voice sings. The reflections of 40 years of art-school electronics are pulled and twisted into new shapes. The LP sees the London three piece at their most direct. Hellfire picks up right where Cavalcade left off. Musically, Hellfire builds on the brutality and intensity of Schlagenheim while also drawing on the more melodic elements that weave through Cavalcade.
But his work in the s has expanded into aesthetic dimensions approximating the UK shoegaze genre of the s and incorporating influences from world music, especially Middle Eastern and Brazilian music. File Under: Rock Buy Here. Mastered by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering. Available on vinyl again for the first time since the mids. God Save the Queen: By the time Exposure had been released in June Robert Fripp had already embarked on one of the most unconventional tours to support a new record that had ever been undertaken; record shops, offices, public spaces, canteens, planetariums and, later, some conventional venues and theatres.
