Dear John. I’m sitting here listening to the playback of this copy of Outside. I can hear the tape making noise and dropout. I can hear the old Wollensak sound. I wish it were a better copy. – Tony Conrad to his friend John Cale. Some albums are just a deep dives, the type of …
Forget Kraftwerk and Can, because here they are: DAF (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft), the most exciting and influental German band of all times, with the second of their golden run of four albums*: Alles ist Gut (1981) – a unique marriage of sex and totalitarian attitude that remains timeless and fascinating to this day. DAF is a …
Released on March 20, 2000, Broadcast’s cinematic debut The Noise Made By People is a song cycle which tiptoes on a delicate balance between the labyrinthine contours of electronic experimentation (this is Warp records, of course) and the crystalline elegance of film scores (especially the swinging basslines and jazzy percussion of the ’60s.) And, most …
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer. Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot In the middle of the 1970s, David Bowie and Iggy Pop were both struggling with the demons of their drug addictions. Iggy …
The Idiot is the most important album of my life, because it almost made me give up music forever. I have to explain this. It was 1994, I was 21 and still playing with Kyuss. Back then I almost completely refused to listen to anything else than Kyuss. I was young and stupid, and I …
When Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself, his body was discovered with Iggy Pop’sThe Idiot still spinning on his turntable. The choice made sense, as the record directly inspired the dreary post-punk that Joy Division was beloved for. It’s odd then, that The Idiot was actually a stylistic detour for Iggy, an outlier …
(The following text is the first chapter of David McGowan‘s astonishing book “Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon‘ The very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia, in which Laurel Canyon’s colorful characters – rock stars, hippies, murderers and politicos – happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.) There’s …
Reading newsstand copies of Rolling Stone magazine during my adolescent years was really my only outlet for mainstream music news back in those days. There was no Vinyl Writers, internet or MTV. Music news were rare and exciting, and I would immediately flip to the back pages for the news and reviews section. This is …
A Commentary on Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2019) Whose house? Which Jack? From the beginning it was a matter of material. After all, all creation, production, and construction must begin with matter. The material Jack uses as the instrument for his first in a series of murders was a car jack. …
The Jesus and Mary Chain play their milestone album Darklands in full length on their upcoming tour (click here to check dates and buy tickets). Our author Shawn Ciavattone reviewed the album and talked to Jim Reid about the album, touring, and the band’s influences. The Jesus and Mary Chain play Darklands – the tour …
