Eigteenth of Oktember The night falls The king comes The hunt starts Wolfgang Voigt, Rausch (2018) GAS is Wolfgang Voigt, co-founder of the legendary electronic music label Kompakt from Cologne, and Rausch (2018) is his masterpiece. On the cover art we see and on the two discs we hear the mythical German forests, birthplace of …
Iggy Pop on Steve Reich’s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ (1978)
Suddenly I felt anger and shame This record is important to me, because in a certain way it saved me. When Music For 18 Musicians was released, I lived the rock’n’roll lifestyle with every fibre of my body and continued to incite myself. I went through every wall with my head first. I tried to …
Souvlaki (1993): When Slowdive Touched the Sky
During the exciting first years of the 90s decade, the USA were experiencing the angry and furious fever of grunge bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, an underground musical genre with a radically opposite sound had been fascinating England for some years: it was a mysterious, …
The Record That Changed My Life: Dave Gahan on Sigur Rós – Ágætis Byrjun
Albums have to be vinyl for me, not cd’s or downloads. When I am writing songs for my own albums, I always imagine at which point the listener has to turn around the record. And when I think of the artwork, I always imagine a big gatefold cover. Because that’s how I listen to music: …
Zoviet*france – Shouting at the Ground (1990)
Let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane ‘recreation’ to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries. René Guénon The dark …
Heaven on Earth: Brian Eno’s Music For Installations (2018)
15 months into the pandemic, and life feels like the ending of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale: a heavy veil is slowly lifting and awakening us from a sleep which for many was filled with endless nightmares of multiple kinds. But while the sleeping beauty’s gentle awakening was entwined with roses and initiated by a Prince’s …
Make a Blank Valuable by Putting it in an Exquisite Frame (and other Oblique Strategies)
I was born on May 15, 1948 in the small town of Melton in Suffolk, England. I studied painting at the nearby Ipswich Civic College and at the Winchester School of Art from 1966-1969. I explored abstract expressionist painting and wrote poetry. 1975. I was walking across a crowded intersection and was struck by a …
Wolfgang Voigt – Rückverzauberung Exhibition (2021)
I am part of the part that once was everything, Part of the darkness which gave birth to light. Mephistopheles, from Faust. Wolfgang Voigt is back with a most complex and powerful work, cementing his status as one of the most captivating contemporary artists, not just in the field of electronic music, but as conceptional …
2814 (aka HKE and Telepath) -新しい日の誕生/ Birth of a New Day (2015)
Just that name “Vaporwave” was enough to turn me off. The aging hipster within making it very clear that I would have nothing to do with this internet creation. “Just a shiny plastic container with nothing inside”, I said defiantly. Without depth or feeling or humanity, this music was nothing I would be interested in …
Yutaka Hirose – NOVA +4 (1986)
I have always rejected the general notion that music was merely a listening experience or throwaway entertainment. Even at its most superficial, music feeds the intellect and the soul, for the better or worse. It informs us of the world we live in, and makes us part of the community we mentally and physically inhabit. …