OUT IN THE SOUTH WESTERN DESERT Tucson’s veteran “misunderstood genius,” Howe Gelb has been pushing various permutations of Giant Sand to make the finest mesh of country, punk and free improvisation available for two decades now. But his last album, Chore Of Enchantment, is arguably his most focussed and direct recording to date. If you’re…
In the early 90s multi-instrumentalist Mike Cosgrave was my flatmate in a shared post-student house in Tooting, South London. Today Mike has just released his third album, Deepwater Dropoff, with Celtic folk fusion group Sin è. Early line-ups of the group used to rehearse in our spare room, drowning out afternoon editions of Countdown as…
How does a four-piece rock band set about covering a composition like Yoko Ono’s 1961 Voice Piece for Soprano, a set of notes reading simply – “Scream. 1. Against the wind. 2. Against the wall. 3. Against the sky.”? Presumably, its copyright is infringed by millions of mewling babies or arachnophobic women worldwide on a…
From the late 1950s onwards, guitarist John Fahey has forged a unique fusion of traditional American musics and avant-garde conceits, bending blues and folk templates into new forms and dousing them with found sounds. Today, Fahey is flattered by the collaborative attentions of underground guru Jim O’Rourke, Sonic Youth’s ever-adventurous Thurston Moore and experimental rockers…
Andy Partridge of XTC once described record fairs, and more specifically record collectors, as “smelling of broken biscuits”. Butlocating a mint-condition second West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album or a bootleg of Sonic Youth rehearsing is a difficult job that someone has to do. Be thankful, then, to Phil McMullen and Nick Saloman, publishers…
‘Hair is important,” began Robert Forster, the co-frontman of the Go-Betweens, Australia’s criminally underrated band, in an article on haircare for the Manchester fanzine Debris in 1987. “Hair is placed fairly and squarely upon your head, to be admired and cared for. At a younger age, I almost drifted into hairdressing, and thankfully didn’t, but…