Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i UNCUT

INSTANT KARMA! THIS MONTH’S REVELATIONS FROM THE WORLD OF UNCUT “DISPATCH rider by day, rock photographer by night”, scooter boy Alec Byrne spent 10 frantic years at the epicentre of the London scene, hanging out with Hendrix and Jagger backstage at Top Of The Pops, shooting by the catwalk at a T.Rex show and at many other key soirées around town between 1966 and 1976. His images aren’t that familiar, though, since he emigrated to California in the mid-’70s and put his photographs into storage. After 40 years, a studio fire, a flood and an earthquake, these potent images have returned to circulation via London Rock: The Unseen Archive. It’s available now, from Virgin Books, for £50. The splendid vision of Marc Bolan is also a useful reminder that Uncut’s…

Incoming! Our latest Ultimate Music Guide is on sale now and celebrates the formidable career of the late Tom Petty. As usual, you can expect new reassessments of all the albums plus rare archival pieces drawn from the pages of Melody Maker , NME and Uncut … Just as Uncut went to press, David Byrne confirmed news of his long-awaited new album during a special event in New York’s New School Auditorium. American Utopia is due March 9 on Nonesuch and finds Byrne joined by a typically eclectic array of collaborators, including Brian Eno, Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never), Jam City, Thomas Bartlett, Jack Peñate and Sampha... Plenty of Uncut-friendly acts…

LUCY DACUS Historian MATADOR Rising star Dacus lives up to the hype with this warm, self-deprecating collection of alt. country songs – the six-minute opener, “Night Shift”, is highly recommended. SOCCER MOMMY Clean FAT POSSUM After last year’s comp of Bandcamp demos, here’s Nashville songwriter Sophie Allison’s debut proper – a scuzzy, off-kilter indie set that, at its best, recalls early Cat Power. CAVERN OF ANTI-MATTER Hormone Lemonade DUOPHONIC The third album from Tim Gane’s Berlin-based trio is another fizzing mix of electronics and motorik beats – epic, ’80s-leaning opener “Malfunction” is a particularly sublime 16 minutes. KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD Gumboot Soup FLIGHTLESS Those guys finally live up to their promise of releasing five full-length LPs in 2017 – this one scraped in on Dec 31. The…

GOODBYE BREAD DRAG CITY, 2011 Recorded meticulously over five months in a friend’s basement, Ty’s first truly great album finds the garage noisenik cleaning up his act. “I Can’t Feel It” and “California Commercial” channel Lennon, Syd Barrett and West Coast psychedelia for a baked satire on Californian living that draws its curtains to the sun. MANIPULATOR DRAG CITY, 2014 Before the appearance of Freedom’s Goblin , Manipulator was Ty’s grandest statement to date – a 17-track double album mixing up string-laden waltzes (“The Singer”), glammy T.Rex shimmy (“Tall Man Skinny Lady”) and some nuclear-powered guitar detonations. No song exceeds the five-minute mark, and each one feels finely honed. TY SEGALL DRAG CITY, 2017 Ty’s second self-titled LP forgoes home recording and overdubs for an as-live, full-band…

Damned Devotion is a beautiful record, Joan – but it’s so sad. Are you doing OK? My resting place is a state of melancholy, but I’m always dancing on top of it! Maybe I push that further on this record. You hear a lot of pain. But, to answer your question, I’m really good. I’m just finding better ways to express the pain. Listening to the record for the first time, I wrote down “Goth R&B”. Does that make sense to you? Ha – that’s great! But “damned devotion” , you know, I think you feel that in soul music. The desperation, the fatalistic this-is-never-going-to-work-out vibe. In my work this is more slanted into the “this is definitely not going to work out”, which may…

What can you tell me about setting these songs to music? Are you writing with these particular musicians in mind? I write the songs alone on guitar, and then I start playing them with the others. That is a huge moment, usually. The energy of that first jam is nearly always incredibly revealing. Each member of the band has a very deep and peculiar style of playing, which is a total gift to a songwriter like me who has few ideas beyond the chords and the rhythm and the words. It’s like floating a spark out into a six-dimensional field of fireworks, and I get to revel in the beautiful display that happens. They are my cosmic firework family. How important is place to you? Could you have written these…

2HB (1971 demo version) An extended oboe and drum intro emulates the sounds of the Casablanca souk as the Mk I Roxy take on Ferry’s homage to Humph. Almost three minutes longer than the released version, but surprisingly coherent, its oddest feature is an extensive duet between Mackay and a recorded version of himself, a measure of how tape manipulation was a Roxy mainstay from the off. VIRGINIA PLAIN (BBC session, 18 July 1972) Days after recording their debut single, Roxy recreated it for a BBC session, the concise guitar break from the seven-inch morphing into a one-minute Manzanera solo, Johnny Thunders sloppy but utterly ecstatic. Roxy publicist Simon Huxley’s guide to decoding “Virginia Plain” is one of the highlights of an exceptional accompanying booklet. SEA BREEZES (live at the…

You’ve changed one of the album titles. I reverted back to the original name of The Seventeenth Century for the album Let The Snakes… God, I can’t even say that title, I just can’t bear it. I don’t know why I changed it, I don’t know why I went there. You should always stick with your original idea, it’s always the best. There’s that story about Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream commenting on the original title, too. When I took it to the [ Creation ] office, he was there and he was like, “What are you calling it that for?” [ Laughs ] “What does it mean?” At that moment, I knew I’d made a mistake, and…

TUBEWAY ARMY Replicas BEGGARS BANQUET, 1979 The Bowie clone comes into his own on this fine second LP from Tubeway Army, the post-punk group Numan formed with his uncle Jess Lidyard on drums and bassist Paul Gardiner. Swapping guitars for searing Moog riffs, Numan conjures a peculiarly English suburban sci-fi with the hits “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and “Me! I Disconnect From You”. 8/10 GARY NUMAN The Pleasure Principle BEGGARS BANQUET, 1979 Arriving five months after Replicas , in Sept ’79, Numan’s solo debut sees this odd young man streamline his electro-pop vision to deliver a fully electronic new-wave classic, full of vigour, Ballardian paranoia and unusual melody. Cold, distant and repetitive, what it lacks in variety it makes up for with two of his finest moments, “Cars”…

JOAN BAEZ VANGUARD, 1960 Recorded in just four days, this was the world’s introduction to Baez’s pure, thrilling soprano. Cool, urgent and sincere, it lit the brightest fires of the folk revival. JOAN BAEZ, VOL 2 VANGUARD, 1961 This album of sad songs and murder ballads showed she was no fluke, elevating traditional music to lofty heights with her crystalline voice. JOAN BAEZ IN CONCERT, PT 1 VANGUARD, 1962 Recorded from various shows in 1961-62, this live album captures Baez at the beginning of her stunning career. Essential listening. FAREWELL, ANGELINA VANGUARD, 1965 While the folk world turned electric, Baez stayed true to her original muse in this haunting sixth album, chock full of Dylan songs. ANY DAY NOW VANGUARD, 1968 Baez continues to be one of the best interpreters…

“LOVELEE SWEET DARLENE” [THE NEW RECORD BY MY BLOODY VALENTINE, 1986] A highpoint of the David Conway era, this marries back-to-the-future ’60s garage rock with lashings of Mary Chain-style feedback. “CLAIR” [ECSTASY, 1987] One of the band’s best ‘transitional’ songs. Gorgeous Byrdsian melodies lurk beneath a bed of menacing low-fi static. “LOSE MY BREATH” [ISN’T ANYTHING, 1988] One of Robert Smith’s favourites. A rare moment of fragility for MBV, with Shields’ otherworldly playing to the fore. “DON’T ASK WHY” [GLIDER EP, 1990] Evidence of Shields’ oft-overlooked songwriting abilities, this is a dreamy Beatlesesque number, until the guitar kicks in at the 3:02 mark. “MOON SONG” [TREMOLO EP; 1991] Rainy day blues recast as noise-pop, possibly contains bongos. “BLOWN A WISH” [LOVELESS, 1991] One of the band’s prettiest moments, built round…

NOVEMBER 4, 1991 Loveless is released by Creation Records; it reaches No 24 in the UK albums chart JANUARY 2004 Reports circulate that a career-spanning boxset will be released, including ‘alternative versions’ and outtakes of Loveless 2006 Shields begins remastering Isn’t Anything and Loveless APRIL 2008 A 4CD boxset of the remastered albums, plus EP and unreleased tracks is announced; promotional CDs are sent to journalists MAY 18, 2008 Writing in The Guardian , Sean O’Hagan confirms he has been approached to write sleevenotes for “a very imminent My Bloody Valentine boxset” JUNE 16, 2008 The given release date for Shields’ CD remasters. MAY 7, 2012 The actual date that the CD remasters are finally released. Disc…

THERE was no eureka moment where free jazz began: like previous developments in jazz’s history, it resulted from players exploring the possibilities implicit yet latent in the music. Certainly, though, figures like Ornette Coleman, whose 1960 double-quartet album gave free jazz its name, and Cecil Taylor were fundamental to its development. It reached, perhaps, its apex with John Coltrane’s Ascension , a devastating mind-meld from 1966, where 11 players reached for the infinite. A number of other great artists seized on the most raucous possibilities of jazz’s newfound freedoms. Albert Ayler, on albums like Spirits Rejoice and Bells (both 1965), took gospelised melodies and exploded their logic, unspooling mammoth lines of gutbucket noise from a swaying, torching quintet. In…

IF metal is a quest for extremity, it stands to reason that there have always been bands out to push the envelope into realms of pure noise. The first real watershed came in the mid-’80s, when the ‘Big Four’ – Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth – pioneered thrash, a harsh, dystopian rendering of metal privileging breakneck pacing and shred guitar. Simultaneously, in the UK, Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror were refining the sound of grindcore, distilling hardcore punk and anarchist politics into compressed explosions of noise. Death metal, as pioneered by US groups like Morbid Angel and Possessed, travelled to Norway and in the hands of Mayhem and Emperor, morphed into black metal – a lo-fi, primitive take on metal perfectly suited to the freezing north. Meanwhile, groups like…

NOISE has become such a fundamental part of Japan’s underground music that it has its own name, Japanoise. But it’s very easy to place the rich culture developed in that country under one banner, turning Japan’s bustling noise communities into caricatures. The reality is far more complex – and fascinating to dig into deeply. There are, perhaps, two main threads to Japanese noise. There’s noise as a subset of rock – something that was begun by mysterious ‘70s outfit Les Rallizes Dénudés, whose feedback-swathed mantras sounded like the VU on heavy tranquilisers. Their story is a wild one, including associations with the hijacking attempts of the Japanese Red Army. Following in their wake was Keiji Haino, whose early shows in free jazz trio Lost Aaraaf alienated festival audiences; his noise-rock…

BAGPUSS Songs And Music We both grew up with these songs, and know them inside out. "The Weaving Song" is about being a skilled craftsperson, proud of your craft, but also that the work is tough. We really like the sparse instrumentation and storytelling; it’s just great. SPIRITUALIZED Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space The mix of samples, layers, gospel and psychedelic space rock works as a whole piece. The packaging, everything about it, felt ginormous, the intention of it, something to aim for. THE YOUNG TRADITION The Young Tradition Sampler This was one of two folk albums Ian had as a kid. Peter Bellamy doesn’t seem to get enough credit for his work and we were very fortunate to meet Heather Wood a couple of years ago.…

MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY GERONIMO’S CADILLAC MCA, 1972 A stirring debut of off-centre country, gospel and singer-songwriter reflection, beautifully played and produced. The title track was later covered by Cher, while The Monkees had already tackled the spritely “What Am I Doing Hangin’ Round?” WAYLON JENNINGS GOOD HEARTED WOMAN RCA, 1972 The first of a trilogy of uncompromising LPs that provided an early template for outlaw country. The rollicking title track is a co-write with Willie Nelson, while elsewhere Jennings sings Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat The Devil” like he’d lived every word – which he had. DOUG SAHM DOUG SAHM AND BAND ATLANTIC, 1973 Sahm and a stellar cast steer his signature blend of rock’n’roll, R&B and tejano in an overtly country direction. It’s live and loose, with western-swing fiddle meeting…

JOHNNY HALLYDAY Rock’n’roll singer and actor (1943–2017) YOUNG Jean-Philippe Smet wasn’t the first teenager to fall under the spell of Elvis Presley. But upon seeing Loving You, Presley’s 1957 movie, the 14-year-old bought a guitar and began mimicking his hero, his obsession soon turning into a vocation under the alias of Johnny Hallyday. “The first time I saw him, I was paralysed,” he explained later. “His voice, the way he moved, everything was sexy.” Hallyday began his recording career as the French equivalent of Elvis, adopting the black leather look and dishing out American rock’n’roll covers in his native language, though his cultural identity grew to transcend such limitations. At the time of his death, Hallyday had sold over 100 million albums, received the Légion d’Honneur and was…

“IDON’T know if I ever want to hear ‘Sonic Reducer’ if I’m not playing it,” admits Cheetah Chrome, founding member of the Dead Boys and co-writer of one of the great punk anthems. “I have a blast playing it, but I don’t want to hear my version and I don’t want to hear anybody else’s version. Maybe if it was on a Coca-Cola commercial. I was in London last year and I heard the Buzzcocks on a commercial. I thought that was cool – we’re finally mainstream.” The Dead Boys formed in Cleveland in 1976 from the ashes of Rocket From The Tombs, and the band recorded two LPs – Young, Loud And Snotty and We Have Come For Your Children – before they split in 1979, leaving “Sonic Reducer”…

WHILE Gary Numan’s music is defiantly industrial in construction and dystopian in theme, the man himself cuts a pleasingly down-to-earth figure. Here he is, explaining to Uncut what’s on his touring rider: “Americans aren’t very good at bread,” he says. “So I ask for some decent bread, some butter and peanut butter. I’m so easily pleased, it’s embarrassing…” It is late December and Numan is in Colorado on the closing dates of a 30-date North American tour. It is the latest leg in a global trek that has been running since September in support of Numan’s current album, Savage: Songs From A Broken World. “The energy level is good,” he reports. “But the repetitive nature is beginning to wear a little bit.” Nevertheless, Numan is still vibed up for the…

The Drink WEIRD WORLD 7/10 Vinyl outing for short-lived Edinburgh duo’s absurdist pop The Drink first surfaced at the end of 2016 as a free YouTube download, by which time the two members of Guinness (now styled with asterisks, presumably for legal reasons) had called it a day after seven months together. As Guinness, Edinburgh conceptual artists Allie Ormston and someone billed as “Ω” (possibly Keith Farquhar of Edinburgh Leisure and The Male Nurse) campaigned in their idiosyncratic way for a kind of surreal social justice, rambling about readymades, Le Corbusier, suicide and Christmas over drum-machine beats and angular riffs. As they descend into a cover of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” during “Practical Song”, it all sounds suspiciously competent. PIERS MARTIN POPPY ACKROYD Resolve ONE LITTLE INDIAN 7/10 Brighton composer complicates…

What was the thinking behind the album? We wanted to get more people involved. Also, a lot had happened, personally and in the wider world that we wanted to address. Musically we wanted to make it a bit more sonically wide ranging. We got the horns and the strings involved a bit more, we got a flautist in. We wanted to spread the palette around a bit. How could we change the ensemble up a bit for every song, so that everyone is not on everything? Anything in particular inspired you this time? They’ve been re-running Top Of The Pops from the ’80s on BBC4, and I find it fascinating what pop music was in 1982. You’d get the Ian Gillan Band on next to Ultravox. People talk…

Do you see this as a reinvention? Oh, it’s more than that. An actual real self has been killed. You have to kill yourself off now and then. We have become a different band, with a different mission – to make 21st-century-sounding music. Until now, I had been paying tribute to the old record bins filled with obscurities from 1962. It’s time to make our own culture. A lot of these songs sound incredibly soul-baring and confessional. Are they? Hmm. Does it matter if any of those things happened to me? I see this album as a collection of grand fiction. When I walk into a bookstore, I feel that the boundaries between fiction and memoir, for instance, are rather nebulous. Memoirs make a bunch of stuff up, and fiction…

“When I’m recording the album I’m thinking, ‘What would The Velvet Underground do?’” YOU failed an audition to join Roxy Music when they hired Davy O’List, but became their sound engineer and got the job later. Why did you stick around? When I went for my audition, Paul Thompson wasn’t even in the band yet, so it was just Graham Simpson, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and Andy Mackay, and I thought, ‘Oh, these guys are special.’ They were five years older than me – I’d only just left school the year before – and so grown up; they had bank accounts, they were teaching, they had proper jobs. They’d been to university, to art school; I was brought up in South America, came to England in the ’60s – I…

BON IVER For Emma, Forever Ago (reissue, 2008) JAGJAGUWAR 8/10 Gatefold sleeve, vinyl reissue for Justin Vernon’s career-defining debut When it was released a decade ago, Bon Iver’s debut came with an irresistible creation story. The record, said the myth, was the lonely testament of a man facing an emotional and artistic crisis who holed up in his father’s log cabin in Wisconsin until boredom led him to create his folk masterpiece. Like most successful myths, it’s slightly true. The musical part – the notion that Vernon was a spartan, confessional folkie – was always misleading, as subsequent albums have proved. Vernon’s breakthrough was his decision to sing falsetto, and treat his voice as another instrument, Auto-Tuned and multi-tracked. Far from being folk, For Emma is closer to an experimental…

A longside a heap of very fine albums that we’re not yet allowed to reveal, in the next issue we’ll be taking a look at Creep Show’s Mr Dynamite – the electro debut by the new project featuring John Grant and Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder – Gwenno’s Cornish-language Le Kov , and the latest from singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, Historian . In the neverland of archival releases, there’s Jimi Hendrix’s Both Sides Of The Sky , featuring a host of unreleased material, unearthed stuff from Propoganda and The NIghtcrawlers, and some welcome vinyl reissues from Julian Cope, including his masterpieces, Peggy Suicide and Jehovahkill . TOM.PINNOCK@TIMEINC.COM…

“THE number of stupid things that happened trying to get these records out is unbelievable. One of the stupidest ones was an attempted cut of Loveless. We were in the countryside and the guy who was delivering them wound up driving in the mountains behind us and got lost. He had to be rescued by a tractor, which had to be rescued by another tractor. “We did over a year’s worth of test pressings. We’d do three cuts each time, as there might be a pop on one. Then instead of doing test pressings, when you get 20 copies, we started doing white label runs. We realised there’s no point in judging the quality of the test pressing, it had to be judged by going through the system properly. So…

IT was American composer and philosopher John Cage, in his classic essay The Future Of Music , who stated, “The use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” A singular spirit whose research extended to Zen Buddhism and mycology (the study of fungi), Cage also realised, as early as the 1930s, that noise was the future. At their best, Cage’s ‘noisiest’ compositions are compelling constructions that mutate according to both players and climate: Imaginary Landscape No 1 (1939), for example, is written for two variable-speed turntables; later, he’d draw on tapes, amplified plants, conch…

WITH their interest in mass psychology and control techniques, it’s no surprise Throbbing Gristle encouraged, directly or indirectly, an entire genre to magic(k) itself almost out of thin air. They released some of the earliest industrial singles on their own Industrial imprint, including “Meat Processing Section” by Australian ex-pats SPK (Surgical Penis Klinik or Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv). Subsequent albums like Information Overload Unit (1981) and Leichenschrei (1982) had SPK as one of the most fluent of the first wave of industrial. Outfits like Throbbing Gristle and SPK inspired countless DIY operatives up and down the UK, and overseas, to put pen to paper and torment to tape, using primitive electronics and FX to sculpt monolithic screeds of noise, while networking via fanzines…

THE thing is, Nicola Kearey says, she doesn’t really like folk music. She ended up singing it, with Stick In The Wheel, if not quite by mistake, then with a certain amount of happenstance. “It took me a long time to realise I could do singing,” she says, sipping a soft drink alongside Ian Carter, the guitarist and other founder of the London five-piece, in a quiet pub on a cold Sunday night in Walthamstow. “But in order to make sense of it I had to sing the way I talk. Then there was no turning back. But no, I don’t like folk music.” Stick In The Wheel, then, are not your average folk group. Even in a world whose leading artists are constantly aware of the need to overcome…

VARIOUS ARTISTS La Bamba (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 1987 This piqued my interest in rock’n’roll at an early age. “La Bamba” was always on the radio when the film came out – I was a toddler, but it was my favourite song. It sounds kinda ’80s, but it still stands up. Some of the performances – Los Lobos, Marshall Crenshaw, Brian Setzer – are spectacular. I watched the movie a lot as a kid, and the story of Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper stayed with me. I actually made a pilgrimage out to the ballroom in Clear Lake, Idaho, the last place they all played. ROY ORBISON Mystery Girl 1989 My grandmother gave this to me on cassette – she was a fan. I only knew “Oh,…

Where are you living? Have you resolved your feelings about the restrictiveness of Ireland? I’m living about 10 minutes outside of Galway city. I wouldn’t say I have fully resolved the feeling, but these last few months I have not felt as restricted as I used to. I delved a lot into my ancestry, the history and culture of the island. I also have heard lots of stories of people who are only now feeling able to speak up about what it’s been like to grow up here. Having an understanding of why it’s felt restricted for many has expanded my view. What are the ‘Two Worlds’ of the title? It started with a feeling of how to balance your day-today life with honouring who you are and what you…

Had you been planning to go more electronic for some time? We needed to move on and do something different. So we tried to boil it down, existentially, to ‘What can we do and still be Hookworms?’ A lot of it came from MB’s XAM Duo project, which has been quite influential, incorporating more of the electronics he was doing. We wanted to make a more danceable record. How did the process of starting afresh, after the studio flood, play into Microshift ? We had a few sessions where MB and JN would come round to my flat and we’d play with synths. We couldn’t really use any loud amps, so I think that helped with the songwriting process. It was just a different way of working than before,…

Roxy Music (reissue, 1972) UNIVERSAL REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10 UNSIGNED and – at that stage – unsignable, their original drummer Dexter Lloyd about to jump ship to join the pit band for Aladdin at the Oxford Playhouse, Roxy Music did not lack a certain chutzpah when they spoke to Melody Maker’s Richard Williams in July 1971. “The average age of this band is about 27, and we’re not interested in scuffling,” said frontman Bryan Ferry, adamant that ‘Roxy’ felt no need to pay any musical dues. “If someone will invest some time and money in us, we’ll be very good indeed.” Snooty and ambitious from the off, Ferry’s claim on their day-glo debut single “Virginia Plain” that Roxy had “been around a long time, just try try try tryin’…

Ringo 1. I’m The Greatest (John Lennon) 2. Have You Seen My Baby (Randy Newman) 3. Photograph (Richard Starkey, George Harrison) 4. Sunshine Life For Me (Sail Away Raymond) (George Harrison) 5. You’re Sixteen (You’re Beautiful And You’re Mine) (Bob Sherman, Dick Sherman) 6. Oh My My (Richard Starkey, Vini Poncia) 7. Step Lightly (Richard Starkey) 8. Six O’Clock (Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney) 9. Devil Woman (Richard Starkey, Vini Poncia) 10. You And Me (Babe) (George Harrison, Mal Evans) Goodnight Vienna 1. (It’s All Down To) Goodnight Vienna (John Lennon) 2. Occapella (Allen Toussaint) 3. Oo-Wee (Richard Starkey, Vini Poncia) 4. Husbands And Wives (Roger Miller) 5. Snookeroo (Elton John, Bernie Taupin) 6. All By Myself…

1 JOHN COLTRANE Ascension (IMPULSE!, 1966) Not so much a record as a storm with periods of reflective calm, this is a work that might be claimed equally by jazzer, punk, noise freak or rock’n’roller. A 40-minute recording (there is also a second take) made on June 28, 1965, here Coltrane and his additional 10 players met on a tacit mission to shred the envelope. From their original gutsy opening statement, the album opens out into free, and mighty swinging, solo sections, returning occasionally to regroup in something like the opening statement. It’s a joyous noise: composed of an equitable coming together, a true unison of voices. JR 2 THE VELVET UNDERGROUND White Light/White Heat (VERVE, 1968) With its shootings, orgies and hauntings – not to mention the box-cutter through…

THINK of experimental German music of the ’70s, and many will imagine metronomic drum machines as crisp as Bavarian snow, and arpeggiated synth lines as clean as the course of the Autobahn. Looking beyond the clichés, however, Deutschland has always had a noisy side, with many of its finest kosmische artists starting out as devotees of the abstract. Tangerine Dream’s debut album, for example, 1970’s Electronic Meditation , was freeform, apocalyptic mood music created with a conventional rock lineup; Popol Vuh used a giant Moog and percussion to explore strange new worlds of sound on their first two records; and Cluster – then spelling their name with a K – offered up three early LPs of doomy jams complete with austere passages of spoken word. Manuel Göttsching,…

BEFORE the invention of drum machines and synths, electronic music was de facto noise. Delia Derbyshire’s 1963 recording of the Doctor Who theme tune, cooked up in the bowels of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was built using nothing but cut-up analogue tape and the eerie hum of a test-tone oscillator. Even in more advanced times, noise has remained part of the palette. Alec Empire’s Digital Hardcore imprint spawned artists like Atari Teenage Riot and Bomb 20, whose frenetic productions fused anarchist punk, jungle and noise into Molotov cocktails of sound. Former shoegazers Seefeel signed to Warp in the mid-‘90s and released Succour , a sidestep into industrial drones and mechanical rhythms. Peter Rehberg’s Mego label (later Editions Mego) – which launched in…

DESPITE being newcomers to the folk scene, Stick In The Wheel staked a claim to be upholding the tradition in March 2017, when they released From Here: English Folk Field Recordings . Capturing their subjects in the raw, outside the studio, Stick In The Wheel recorded singers – some well known, such as Martin Carthy, Jon Boden and Sam Lee; others, including Peta Webb and Ken Hall, less so – singing songs from their home regions. “A lot of folk music, in my opinion, is overproduced,” Ian Carter says. “I wanted to do that thing where you put mics in front of cracking musicians and they’d recreate the conditions of a singaround. And being a metre away from them watching them sing, or laying it down on…

THROUGHOUT their 40-year relationship, producing hits for Madness, Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Dexys and many more luminaries, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley have maintained a simple working ethos. “I never touch the desk, and Alan touches the desk – a lot,” explains Langer. “I came in through the engineering route,” adds Winstanley drily. “Clive came into it being a failed musician…” Hardly. An ebullient north Londoner, Langer’s art-rock band, Deaf School, were a formative influence on the late-’70s Liverpool scene, while his co-writing credits include Costello’s “Shipbuilding” and Morrissey’s “November Spawned A Monster”. He met his more taciturn partner in 1978, when Deaf School recorded at TW, the west London studio where the Fulham-born Winstanley cut his teeth as an engineer. The pair’s individual talents proved immediately complementary. Becoming one of…

DOWNSIZING OPENS JANUARY 24 Alexander Payne’s latest finds Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig shrunk for satirical effect. DEN OF THIEVES OPENS FEBRUARY 2 Gerard Butler – there is none tougher – heads up an elite unit of the LA County Sheriff’s Department. LIES WE TELL OPENS FEBRUARY 2 British thriller set in Bradford, starring Gabriel Byrne and Harvey Keitel. MAKALA OPENS FEBRUARY 2 Brilliant doc about life in the Congo. Reviewed in Take 249. 50 SHADES FREED OPENS FEBRUARY 9 More implausible BDSM goings on, just in time for Valentine’s Day. BLACK PANTHER OPENS FEBRUARY 13 Marvel’s latest, with Chadwick Boseman as the titular superhero saving the world. JOURNEYMAN OPENS FEBRUARY 16 Paddy Considine plays a boxer in his second film as writer, director and star. New Doctor Who Jodie…