Some time around the start of November, I decided that I just had to make the ATP Festival - aka The Nightmare Before Christmas - curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. By then the whole thing was sold out and I didn’t have anyone to go with.
SY - Patrons of the arts
Rather than […]
At last! I have received no letters at all requesting my favourite CDs of 2006, so I have managed to find the time to collate the zero votes that came in and here is how the list looks. It includes all CDs that I had not heard before 2006 and that I liked best.
Today is […]
At the end of August, the call came to attend Camp Branca once again, this time in mellow Belgium…
This time there were to be 3 performances of Glenn Branca’s massive 13th Symphony, played by a hardcore of a dozen musicians who had played the piece before along plus a squadron of local guitarists. Where 80-something […]
This here Guardian piece from the release of her second album Lookaftering has a picture of her the way she looks: attractive and shy. She giggled with embarrassment at the huge applause that followed the end of each song.
Her voice is almost too breathy, too sincere - but how could it be?
She has a […]
This was the first time I had seen Marissa Nadler, whose first album Ballads of Living and Dying saw me through this year’s slow climb out of winter.
I cannot recommend that album highly enough: its romantic-gothic, tripped out love and death songs have resonated powerfully with me. And Ralph likes it too.
This was the […]
This Lightning Bolt gig, featuring the amazing An Albatross, well it was a banquet of blistering hardcore rock…
I wanted to write about the Magik Markers set that I saw here a couple of weeks ago, but it just wasn’t worth talking about. I know these bands have heavy tour schedules and inevitably have off nights, […]
Here’s a few more articles about the Branca LA gig.
Chris Morris (no, not that one) wrote this in LA City Beat.
Paul Bailey (no, definitely not the guy that duetted with Phil Collins on the immortal Easy Lover - actually hold on…) has an account of his experience of the concert on his blog - […]
Upset The Rhythm put on an exciting bill of noise bands at Kilburn venue The Luminaire last Tuesday. Final score: England 2 - USA 0.
Headlining were the admired California act Burning Star Core, with support from the States by infamous NY act Prurient. Warming up for the visitors were the extremely British Consumer Electronics […]
I went out to LA last week to play in Glenn Branca’s most recent work for massed guitars, Symphony 13 “Hallucination City”, which premiered at the World Trade Center in July 2001.
85 guitarists and a drummer rehearsed for 2 days and then performed the work at the Walt Disney Concert Hall - one of […]
My quest for decent new music led me to an enjoyable gig at The Luminaire in Kilburn.
I was accompanied by a guitar player called Antony and Camilla’s brother Jacob from Copenhagen who had surprised me earlier in the day by telling me he was in London. Like me, he had this terrible flu thing which […]