Muhal Richard Abrams with Fred Anderson and George Lewis – SoundDance - June 2011 June 11th, 2011

When jazz got serious in the sixties, Muhal Richard Abrahams’ Association For the Advancement Of Creative Musicians facilitated Chicago night club turns’ migrations to art lofts. On the first disc of this double set, the octogenarian pianist duets with Fred Anderson, on his final recording. The misunderstood saxophonst died last year, his bold choices often…

Various Artists – Messthetics 108 South Coast DIY ’77-’81 - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

The Messthetics series assembles extremely raw punk era ephemera, culled from demos and cassette releases, into documents of distinct regional undergrounds, this time making the case for a South Coast sensibility. The airy, post-pop of Chichester’s Indifferent Dance Centre should have blossomed; Portsmouth’s Parasites sound utterly inept, but O.D. Baby’s has a haunted grandeur; from…

Gnod – Ingnodwetrust - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

Gnod, sometime collaborators with White Hills (above), underpin echoing guitar and bad dream vocal snippets with metronomic Krautrock rhythms. Ingnodwetrust’s two offensively single-minded epics are available on vinyl or as downloads only, the band looking from their Salford lair towards the future and the past, oblivious to the decaying present. The twenty minute, monochromatic splurge…

Barry Gray – Stand By For Adverts - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

Barry Gray’s best known for his bombastic Thunderbirds score, but Trunk records offers the incidental music aficionados that deify him the Holy Grail with this previously unissued trove of eighty-one of Gray’s advertising jingles. The inclusion of five different attempts to summon the spirit of Hoover’s Keymatic washing machine with oscillating electronica suddenly reveals him…

White Hills – H-p1 - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

Great! A new White Hills album. Objectivity is suspended as the Brooklyn four piece grind their guitars, heavy Seventies Detroit scum punk style, whilst keeping a stormy weather eye on appropriate egghead art strategies. Thus, the seven minute locked groove of The Condition Of Nothing, a super-dense hard rock drone, abruptly dissolves into the bell…

Stewart Lee: Comedy messiah - June 2011 Chortle - By Hazel Humphreys - June 2nd, 2011

All comedy is essentially divisive. If jokes have an essential direction and attitude, there’s always going to be someone who’s not happy with the way a joke is going and how it’s getting there. For example, I cite the scientific research conducted by Channel 4, which found that 99.99997 per cent of the human race…