Hauschka – Snowflakes and Carwrecks (Fat Cat)
Well now, this is an interesting treat. Hauschka, known by his mum as Volker Bertelmann, is a Düsseldorf-based composer whose previous output has involved messing about with the innards of his piano to distort or treat its sound, doing away with your preconceptions that you’ve heard everything a piano can do. As far away from [...]
Spider Hill columns at diskant.net
The lovely folk over at independent music community diskant.net are currently republishing some old demo review columns written by us in 2002 as part of the diskant rewind series. Have a read of them here, here and here. More to follow over the coming week or so from them, and here we’ll have reviews of [...]
Japanese Gum – ‘Without You I’m Napping’ (self-released)
An Italian duo combining ghostly drum machine breakbeats, swirls of ambience and reverb-drenched Constellation-style guitar lines, Japanese Gum offer nothing much to surprise your average fan of the artier side of rock, but plenty to keep them interested. ‘Chlorine Blue’ is the best track on offer here, starting off as a somnambulant Piano Magic lilt [...]
Higamos Hogamos – ‘The Illuminoids’ (DC Recordings)
Higamos Hogamos is another one for the scrapheap of terrible band names. It almost put us off listening to them entirely, such is our level of superficial pettiness. But wait! This is a pre-album taster from the latest signings to DC Recordings, a label that the frankly phenomenal Oscillation call home, and therefore one to [...]
Filastine / Maga Bo – Sonar Calibrado (Shockout/ Tigerbeat6)
These guys certainly know how to keep themselves busy. When they’re not touring house parties and nightclubs around the world or releasing albums of their own, they’re wheeling out the portable studios to knock together collaborations under the Sonar Calibrado moniker. In short, it’s world music meets breakbeat, with the catch being that it’s generally [...]
Flip video camera review
About a month ago, I picked up a Flip video camera, as much to trial it to see if it’d have useful applications for my work as anything. Having played about with it for a while, here are a few thoughts on its performance if you’re thinking of buying one. I’ve tested it out mostly [...]
