‘Going to Oxford University from an inner-city comprehensive school was like landing on another planet, one populated by strange people in bow ties with no concept of what it’s like to live in the real world.’ Continue reading Posh Boys-how the English public schools ruin Britain (Robert Verkaik):
Ouch! Very’ very fine, ripping, fast-free-flow aggressive harsh noise from dual heavy-weights Animal Machine & Napalmed. This is straight-forward, furious & preemptive Stridor. Fast, energetic harsh, quality. It’s not as spasmodically labile as say, Sewage or Hinyouki, but it is rapid & continually surging, with a strong propellant & sense of plummeting. Continue reading Animal Machine-Napalmed (collaboration)-vegetable music for carnivorous people-split cassette
Ok! So despite considerable flaws, this is actually one of the most important documentaries in circulation concerning climate extinction, corruption & mendacity media. Continue reading Greedy Lying Bastards-DVD:
“When someone takes a beating or gets killed by police, city bureaucracies go into siege mode, reflexively stalling and delaying at every turn. The patience of complainants and their families is stretched to the limit. Embarrassing information, if it ever comes out, comes out years later, long after the streets have calmed down.” Continue reading I Can’t Breathe-the killing that started a movement (Matt Taibbi):
Sami Ben Redjeb & Analog Africa have been knocking-out some absurdly-gorgeous, vintage composites of lost/forgotten/obscure 60’’s/70’s/80’s African recordings for over a decade now, retrieving some utterly superlative gems that had long been lost to the topsoil of time. Such recordings may entail magnificent, hypaethral sessions (a lot of this stuff was recorded outdoors), of black American Funk & sometimes Rock-themed modus, dipped in local traditional forms of bush or orisha antics & raw African interpretations jumbled with homegrown mediums. Continue reading African Scream Contest 1 & 2 (Analog Africa) LP/CD’s:
These reports have been stalled behind massive sand-berms, flattened castles, toppled turrets…the Taylor one as I was waiting on a specialist to deliver a more punctilious exergete, which never showed-up, & the Muhal affair because I was so vexed at the loss of a well executed & adulatory review that had just been comprised (I failed to transfer it ‘successfully’ to a USB on a proxy computer, where the original was then deleted) >< . two pianists, one year either side (birth/death) & one premonition – Continue reading Muhal Richard Abrams – Cecil Taylor
Anda union rolled through town again tuther’ day. This is a great & pleasingly successful collective of largely young musicians from Inner Mongolia playing traditional Mongolian folk music with a few of their own tweaks & personalizations stowed in tha mode. Their success is indicative of the growing suffuse of the “World Music” epithet, but it’s also what happens when the machine gets behind a specific act. Continue reading Egschiglen – Anda Union – Chinbat Baasankhuu – Bayarbaatar Davaasuren – sounds of Mongolia
So, Eddie Harris asserted himself early (his first album surfacing in 61) as a band leader & composer, playing sax, keys & vocals. The tenure of his that are the focus of this garble comes in the very late 60’s, when Harris started to transmute from Bop to spectrums of Funk, Fusion, Soul & very importantly – Free Jazz, without discarding his bop groundings. Nothing wrong with his derivations, & the earlier epoch, but the major excitement for me comes from when he started to effuse the new found multiplicity head-on & load more & more humour, mischief & cross-curricular dynamism in his music. Continue reading Dope as fuck Eddie Harris:
So there’s this rapper in Australia right.. Sri-Lankan Australian in origin, going under the nom de guerre Pataphysics. He is a composer, accomplished trumpet player, MPC player & what are we going to call this guy? – ‘activist’? He makes some of the most politically fervent Rap you will ever hear, period. Long’ long since the current trend (very much forced by recent events), this guy has been ploughing into subjects that are deigned too sensitive or controversial for sustained debate. Continue reading Pataphysics-tip of the spear LP:
Jonathan Miller brings us the first biography on homicidal mayor turned mass murdering populist dictator Rodrigo “The Punisher” Duterte. Martial law, extra judicial killings (EJK’s), murky & nondescript rampaging death-squads & excessively-crass n’ crude expletive-lumbered vocal attacks on anything deemed challenging, annoying, non-compliant et-al. A leader in egregious authoritarian bollocks basically. As funny as this foul-tongued psycho is, the body count makes it less amusing – “On day one, he launched a Latin America-styled ‘Dirty War’, and with it introduced the darkest of Latino shadows: the death squad. By the end of year one, he was presiding over the largest loss of life in Southeast Asia since Pol Pot took Cambodia back to Year Zero”. Continue reading Duterte Harry-fire and fury in the Philippines (Jonathan Miller):