Epic 45 – Weathering – Make Mine Music - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Every generation feels it witnesses the slow death of its culture. Arriving in the glens in 1773, Johnson and Boswell were advised the real highlanders disappeared twenty years earlier. And having decamped to Cornwall in the fifties, the artist Ithell Colquhoun observed an apparently vanishing way of life in her memoir The Living Stones. Closer…

Sandra Cross – The MMs Bar Recordings - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Making weekly London to Leicester rail journeys, Sandra Cross secretly taped hundreds of buffet announcements, and edited them into this thirty minute piece. Focusing tightly on the small, and usually unvarying, list of fayre generates a maddeningly mundane musicality. Seven minutes in the unprecedented non-availability of hot drinks suddenly seems catastrophic. Different announcements, with vastly…

Lol Coxhill and Alex Ward – Old Sights New Sounds - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Enter free improvisation’s world of no tunes jazz through this gateway recording. Coxhill and Ward play soprano sax and clarinet respectively, both trustworthy blowing instruments, and the four decades age chasm between them reveals free improvisation as a shared language for both initiators and inheritors. The cd sleeve uses cinematic conceits to expose the process…

Various Artists – Trojan Presents Dub, 40 Deep And Heavy Hits - July 2011 July 17th, 2011

Trojan’s catalogue of reggae classics re-emerges in another series of compilations, now under the ‘Trojan Presents’ banner. This re-packaging process has been ongoing for over a decade, but this latest petit dejeuner de dog is a doozy. In the Seventies, Jamaican engineers with an instinctive understanding of sonic drama stripped existing recordings of distinguishing features,…

Dennis Hopper Choppers – Be Ready - July 2011 July 10th, 2011

An English musician sits on the outskirts of the Spanish desert town of Tabernas, where Italians shot American cowboy movies on now abandoned sets, and concocts a widescreen country rock record influenced by the mariachi hued soundtracks bashed out to accompany them. Scott Walker only sang themes to two Spaghetti westerns, Joe Hill and The…

Advisory Circle, The – As The Crow Flies - July 2011 July 10th, 2011

On this exceptional album’s inner sleeve, a sixties bypass bisects a prehistoric earthwork, and the folklorist Ronald Hutton discusses seasonal rites. Within, a set of tuneful, tonal, slices of clean and cold electronica hums with post-war optimism, warped by echoes of the transcendentally bland music that underscored Seventies architects’ pitches for concrete car parks. The…