Various – ‘This Can’t Be Today – A Trip Through the US Psychedelic Underground’ – Cherry Red There’s a particular kind of compilation that arrives already carrying its own mythology, and ‘This Can’t Be Today’ is absolutely one of them. A 3CD sprawl promising to chart the American psychedelic underground from 1977 to 1988, it […]
Various – ‘Electric Dead Speak – Music for Electric Voice Phenomenon’ – Eighth Tower Records When I was little, I remember very clearly that my sister, Tracy, had a flexi-disc featuring not hits of the moment but the voices of dead people. How could she have possibly come upon such an item? She wasn’t much […]
Mark Hjorthoy – ‘Future That Never Existed’ – ZeroK Mark Hjorthoy’s The Future That Never Existed arrives steeped in the ideas of Mark Fisher, the British writer who spent his career diagnosing the strange temporal condition of late capitalism. It wasn’t an immediate draw to me either, but bear with me. Fisher argued that we […]
Runes Order – No Future (Eighth Tower Records, 2026 Reissue) Some records don’t return so much as seep out of the firmament like a will-o’-the-wisp, never quite burned out, finally drifting back into view. ‘No Future,’ first released in 1993 in a run of just thirty hand‑numbered cassettes, is one of those artefacts: a tape […]
Various – CBGB – A New York City Soundtrack CBGB mythology tends to calcify around the same five names – Television, Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads – the pantheon that debuted within fifteen months of each other between 1974 and 1975. Some I love (Ramones, Suicide, The Cramps), and some I’d happily never hear […]
Various – Steppin’ Out: The Roots of Garage Rock 1963–1965 Rock ’n’ roll was still a toddler when the kids on ‘Steppin’ Out: The Roots of Garage Rock 1963–1965’ started treating it like a battlefield. That’s the image that kept coming back to me while listening to this sprawling, 94‑track set: one of those World […]
Various – ‘Analog 2025’ – Unexplained Sounds Group ‘Analog 2025’ arrives with tape flutter, slow pitch wobble, spring reverb that sounds like a corridor, and the soft, humanised clipping that turns a tone into an animated corpse. It’s not nostalgic in the cosy sense; it’s in the same world as hauntology, a catalogue of misremembered […]
Various – So High I’ve Been: A European Rock Anthology 1967–1973 3CD Set – Cherry Red For decades, the story of rock music has been told as if it were a transatlantic conversation between Britain and America. The mythology is familiar: London and Liverpool, San Francisco and Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. Yet while […]
The R.I.P Man – Dir. Jamie Langlands The Terrifier franchise, three films which range from surprisingly good to not surprising, has reminded filmmakers that there is always room for a new horror icon. Just now, I have come up with Seagull Man, a deranged psychopath who ‘pecks’ out the eyes of holidaymakers to compensate for […]
Martina Testen / Simon Šerc – ‘Nokturno’ – Pharmafabrik Recordings Some field‑recording projects try to soothe you- those old hat/New Age faffing about that convinced those who lived on the muesli belt that a groaning whale was good for your aura. Others are more fun, though often feel unconvincing – cannibal tribes supposedly mid-ritual, but […]
