New music
Peter Culshaw
The tourist bumf talks a lot about Bucharest being “Little Paris”. If you squint while walking down the grand boulevards, you see what they mean. The crumbling Byzantine churches, the Belle Époque restaurants, the odd palatial Beaux-Arts town houses among the brutalist blocks all evoke Paris. They even have their own Arc de Triomphe and Odéon Theatre here, built on Parisian models. But don’t make a habit of squinting your eyes, as you are liable to fall down one of the myriad holes in the pavement.What Paris can’t boast, though, is the absurdly pompous Casa Popurului (the House of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lemmy Kilmister (b 1945) was born Ian Fraser Kilmister in Burslem, near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, but spent his formative years in Anglesey. His father, ex-RAF padre, left when he was an infant and he was raised by his mother, who worked as a librarian, and his grandmother. He was interested in rock and pop from an early age and formed various local bands, most successful of which were The Rockin’ Vicars who had a CBS recording contract. Moving to London in 1967 he quickly became involved again in the music scene and blooming counterculture, acting for a while as roadie for Jimi Hendrix. Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's understandable that people get put off leftfield dance music, given how much micro-genre delineation and dog-in-a-manger protectionism there can be in underground scenes. It can seem a shame sometimes, but then again, these are part and parcel of the fertile creativity and passion that exists around the music, so it's swings and roundabouts. However, there are some areas you're guaranteed not to find frowning chin-strokers, and one of those is inhabited by Brighton label Tru Thoughts, which consistently produces music that's friendly, welcoming and veritably insists you forget nitpicky Read more ...
mark.kidel
Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), composed in 1956, is, in many ways, the mother of all electronic music. I can remember discovering it in the 1960s, before I had acquired my first pair of Koss headphones, lying on the floor, strategically placed between two speakers, my ears opened by the copious ingestion of some red Lebanese. The combination of electronically treated live voices with purely synthetic sounds, so much a commonplace today, was then strikingly new. Along with his later pieces Kontakte and Mikrophonie, the German pioneer blazed a trail which is till Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although they're beginning to get cold, the winds blowing in from Scandinavia have recently brought enough music to keep anyone warm through long, dark nights. Finnish intensity, pop and introspection from Denmark, Swedish luxuriousness, Icelandic keyboard quirk, Norwegians that enfold - all are here. Along with Estonian haziness.Finland hits hardest with a new EP from K-X-P. theartsdesk has met them before, live and on album. Previously with Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, Easy is their first outing for Manchester’s Melodic. It’s an extraordinary thing, coalescing a vision marrying a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This weekend’s three-day Minimalism festival at Kings Place comes to an end tonight looking at the cross-over between rock and new music in New York in the Seventies. It seems to me that the collision between popular and high-art music produced some of the most dynamic movements of the 20th century, not only in New York.In the 1920s, Paris had wildly original performances like Parade, with jazzy music by Erik Satie, design by Jean Cocteau and costumes (including dressing people up as skyscrapers) by Pablo Picasso, commissioned by the great ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev. Then there was Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is probably just wishful thinking from the haters that The X Factor is going into meltdown. Pop might be the sound of a bubble bursting, but the Class of Cowell is still having hits. Olly Murs is currently in a chart battle with Rihanna for the top spot with his single “Dance With me Tonight”, so don’t go sobbing for Louis Walsh just yet. In Case You Didn't Know is the second album from oily-haired Olly. I was hoping for something with the intrigue of Will Young. I got something with decent melodies and the lyrical complexity of Jedward.Proceedings kick off enjoyably with the Number One Read more ...
david.cheal
The Hertfordshire market town of St Albans has not hitherto been renowned for its buzzing music scene: its hall of fame contains but a handful of names from the pop pantheon, most notably Enter Shikari and Lowgold (unless you count the fact that David Essex lives there). It’s not exactly Chicago in the 1950s or Liverpool in the 1960s. But now the citizens of this former Roman stronghold can hold their heads high, thanks to the emergence of Friendly Fires. The band’s three core members met at St Albans School in their early teens, and whatever they were playing and listening to in their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 9 September, 1985 The Jesus and Mary Chain played Camden's Electric Ballroom to a ceaseless hail of plastic pint pots. After 20 minutes, the songs gave way to formless feedback and they sloped off the stage. Although Yuck weren’t born then, the significance of playing the same stage can’t have been lost on them. Carrying a torch for the pre-grunge fuzz-rock that was shoegazing’s ugly sister, Yuck know a thing or two about what they’re drawing from.Yuck’s set ended in formless feedback and there was no encore. The house lights were quickly switched on and that was it. Singer/guitarist Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It sounds Vietnamese. A wordless vocal floats above bowed strings. Chiming strings drift in, shimmering. Piano notes twinkle. Musical fog, it rolls in and is then suddenly gone. “In the Valley” opens Music for Confluence. It’s a perfect evocation of geography and environment.The sense of his music being informed by the spatial is reflected by Broderick’s path. Born in Maine, he’s spent time in Oregon and then, in 2007, joined Danish moodists Efterklang, whom he worked with live and in the studio until last year. He settled in Denmark and also recorded solo on labels based in Sweden, Denmark, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“My first album was a personal love letter to God,” Josh T Pearson tells me, looking like a cross between Johnny Cash and Moses. No wonder, then, that it took him 10 years to record another. On this year's release, Pearson had moved on, talking failed love like a punk Leonard Cohen stranded in the wilderness. Face to face, Pearson is, however, quite the Southern gent: the Last of the Country Gentlemen, as he calls himself in the title of the new album. In a west-London café, he recounted how he got here, and why he is nervous about this Saturday’s big gig at the Barbican.Pearson grew up in Read more ...
howard.male
With an expensive-looking camera in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Spanish singer Buika’s sepia-tinted CD cover photo is making eyes at me, making it hard for me to think of a bad word to say about this career-so-far summation. I don’t know about the camera, but that cigarette may well be a valuable tool in Buika’s trade, helping her voice to achieve that sandpaper surface texture. It’s a voice which perfectly contrasts with the occasionally overly tasteful piano-led arrangements which grace material which embraces flamenco and jazz as well as R&B and Latin dance rhythms.From a Read more ...