The first Largo Winch film was lauded as being a breath of fresh air amongst the typical Hollywood, all-out action movies. In this respect then, The Burma Conspiracy was a disappointment. The film demonstrates more clichés than the family portrait of a particular Man City footballer. We have the solemnly sexy, suited antagonist (Sharon Stone), the eastern European billionaire (Dmitri Nazarov), and the bumbling sidekick providing the comic relief (Nicolas Vaude), though in this instance, he looks like he’d be better suited living in The Shire. The plot itself is also very worn: After announcing his intention to sell his business to fund a charity, Largo Winch (Tomer Sisley) is accused of crimes against humanity. It sounds like more sabotage, backstabbing, and conspiracy than Bond, Hunt, and Bourne, combined.
The most distracting aspect of this film was the multitude of languages that were used throughout. There were enough quick changes between English, French, and Burmese to make an award show host jealous. And the incessant use of subtitles provided a multi-sensory experience that I’d really rather avoid.
The movie itself is chronologically baffling, jumping from ‘three years earlier’ to ‘three years later’ with nothing more than a fleeting subtitle to explain. More popular titles have dealt with this issue in much better ways: J. Edgar uses different camera filters to indicate the date, and in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the presence of Gary Oldman’s glasses let us know what was going on. These useful tricks are apparently rather useful to stop the simple-minded (i.e. me) from getting confused.
On the plus side, the movie contains some refreshing direction from Jérôme Salle, and whilst the script may appear a little laboured in places, the action sequences serve as a saving grace. There are definitely some innovative camera shots during the fight scenes, and the car chase near the beginning is certainly spectacular. My highlight however has to be the most ridiculous skydiving scene since The A-Team. Credit where credit is due though: this scene was actually shot in free fall!
Whilst this film may be a enjoyable little watch on a Saturday night if there’s nothing on TV, when it comes to European comic book adaptations, leave it to Tintin.
Do a quick internet search of James Landale and most of the results will be about his former facial hair. For a political journalist with a couple of decades’ experience in the industry, you’d think he might be disappointed that it’s his dear departed moustache and not his hard-hitting scoops that are attracting the most attention. But Landale is proud of the fact: having reached the £7,000 mark in his Movember fundraising campaign, it’s clear the experience has humbled him, even if it comes with the dubious cachet of making headlines in the Metro.
“I’ve learnt two things as part of this Movember campaign,” he tells me. “One thing I’ve learnt is just how generous people can be in a time of austerity. I think it’s a real lesson for charities, that actually, even though money is tight for many, many people, there’s still a sense of a need to give. That surprised me quite a lot.
“The second thing I learnt is just how much women hate facial hair. They really, really do not like it. Women who were very polite about the campaign while I had the moustache were less diplomatic once I’d got rid of it and let their true feelings be known.”
There’s no doubt that his upper lip was attracting attention: one Twitter user described Landale’s appearance as “an extra from Blackadder goes over the top”. But despite creating such a buzz recently, it’s evident Landale’s real interest is in finding the stories, not making them. Unlike his colleague, BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson, who was notorious in his Oxford days for his political hackery, leading to a position as President of OUCA, Landale has never fostered political aspirations.
Instead, while studying Politics at Bristol, he set up what continues to be the university’s premier student paper, Epigram. He freely admits that while he enjoyed the theory side of his degree, the “nuts and bolts” side of politics held little appeal.
“I loved the Hobbes, the Locke, that’s what fascinated me, rather than you know the nitty gritty comparative politics between how the British system compares to the American system. So at no point when I was studying politics was I thinking one day I want to become a Member of Parliament. It was the theory that sparked my interest.”
I ask whether he thinks that his student journo background prepared him better for being a political journalist than hands-on political experience. He pauses, compliments me on the question, clearly trying to formulate an impartial response.
“I think journalists who have had some kind of political background have the advantage of knowing what it’s like to be political, to think politically, how a party operates. They understand the limitations of politics. They feel it a little bit more in their blood. But equally, those who have started early in journalism by working in student journalism have an earlier understanding of the way the media operates, how to operate. So both are good experience.
“But, to answer the question, how to become a political journalist, the answer should be become a journalist, not become an expert in politics. Because journalism is about finding stories, telling stories, discovering what’s going on, making mischief. And politics just happens to be the subject that I’m interested in and obviously many other people are as well. But not all people who are interested in politics are necessarily good at journalism.”
Landale has not always been a broadcast journalist. Before joining the BBC in 2003 as Chief Political Correspondent for the News24 channel, he spent ten years with The Times, culminating in a stint as Assistant Foreign Editor. I wonder whether his move to television was a tactical one, shifting away from the newspaper market before it suffered abject decline, and before News International became synonymous with phone-hacking and other misdemeanours.
“I’m afraid I can’t claim any prescience about the state of the newspaper market,” he confesses. “I had been at the Times for ten years, I’d had a great time there and it’s a fantastic newspaper. But an opportunity came up and I felt that after ten years it was a good opportunity to do something new and different, to operate and do journalism in a different medium. But I can’t claim that I thought ‘ah newspapers are declining therefore I must move somewhere else’.”
When pressed on the future of the industry, in light of recent scandals and the Leveson Inquiry, Landale is circumspect.
“We simply don’t know what conclusions the Leveson inquiry will reach, it’s got a long way to go. I think, though, that the whole hacking affair has had an impact already in terms of greater caution, in terms of a change in attitudes. The interesting question is how long that lasts, because I think that the crucial driver will not just be new regulatory structures established, but how are attitudes changing in the media as a whole. In the same way with the expenses crisis, the response from Westminster was not just the new regulatory system set up for MPs but also the attitude towards money and expenses within Westminster.”
It’s a curious system at Westminster, with the MPs rubbing shoulders with journalists on an informal level, but all the while the former are acutely aware of their public image and the latter that the next day they may write something utterly derisive on the person they just had lunch with. It seems a constant effort to maintain a sense of balance.
“There are lots of MPs and politicians who I know and I’ve known for a long time; I’ve worked at Westminster for a long time,” Landale explains. “And I’ve had lunch with them, and know them quite well. But still, when they’re standing up at a press conference saying something and I’m standing up at a press conference asking them something, then that’s a professional context and you’re asking hopefully professional questions in a professional way.
“I think the relationship between political journalists and politicians is exactly the same as any relationship between any journalist and the people they’re writing or broadcasting about. You have to get to know them, so that you can report what they’re thinking and saying accurately for the audience, because that’s our job, to tell the audience what’s going on, what are people thinking about, why they are thinking about it, what they are deciding. But equally you have to maintain an element of distance and separation so that you can report without fear or favour. And there’s constantly a line, and you have to make sure you maintain it.”
Nonetheless, it seems even when you scrupulously maintain such relationships, the best stories can come seemingly from nowhere. I ask him what he considers to be the biggest scoop of his career, and his response is something of a surprise. He tells me about an occasion when he discovered that a distinguished New Zealand born poet, Fleur Adcock, had written a sonnet about her sexual fantasies about John Prescott.
“The first line from memory was ‘Last night I dreamt I was kissing John Prescott’. And I wrote this story and I rang up the poet and she was in New Zealand. And she told me how she liked John Prescott because she considered him to be gritty and genuine and Northern compared to Tony Blair who she considered to be soft and Southern.”
His article made the front page of The Times. It was the mid-nineties, before New Labour had seen the heady days of power, and the story ran and ran. Michael Heseltine read the poem aloud in the House of Commons. Another Labour MP appeared from the woodwork claiming to have had a “long passionate, unforgettable embrace” with Adcock decades earlier. Responses flooded into the letters page.
But although there are the highs, scoops like that don’t land on your desk as often as journalists might like. Landale admits that “every day” he sees a story he wishes he’d been the one to break. “The whole point of being a journalist is that you want to be first, you want to get stories first, and if you don’t have that hunger then you probably shouldn’t be in the business.”
We do realise that it’s been close to a month since we’ve entered 2012, but somehow some of us at Cherwell Music keep looking wistfully back at 2011. To kick off Cherwell Mixer for 2012, and provide you with some listening material before the slew of upcoming releases, we take one final glance back at some of the best (and most interesting) singles of last year.
We begin with the opening single of New York noise rockers’ 2011 release for Slumberbland, In Love With Oblivion. The perfect mix of jangly discord and irrepressible, earworm-riffs.
‘Ice Cream’ – Battles ft. Matias Aguayo
Having lost their vocalist Tyondai Braxton, Battles was liberated to make the sugary delight that is Gloss Drop. ‘Ice Cream’ is the pièce de resistance, an ecstatic romp expertly accompanied by Chilean guest vocalist Matias Aguayo.
‘The Look’ – Metronomy
Metronomy surpassed already lofty expectations with the sleek, synthy, and unquestionably catchy release of The English Riviera, of which ‘The Look’ is the prime example: pure pop genius.
‘Lion’s Share’ – Wild Beasts
Wild Beasts are now three for three, after hotly-anticipated third album Smotherwas released to near universal acclaim. The Kendal quartet has always explored the dark yearnings of male desire, and ‘Lion’s Share’ takes it to predatory excess: “I take you in my mouth, like a lion takes his game.”
‘Misery’ – Veronica Falls
To label London C86-throwback quartet Veronica Falls mere mimicry would be unfair: theirs is a luscious, nostalgic sound, but wholly their own. ‘Misery’ is fairly self-explanatory: melancholy encapsulated, amidst plenty of heart-tugging guitar jangles.
‘Cruel’ – St. Vincent
‘Cruel’, to be a little hyperbolic, is rapturous: distorted hooks, thudding bass, and Annie Clark’s gorgeous layered vocals, racing along in shambolic glee. Did we mention there’s a guitar solo too? There’s a guitar solo too.
‘French Exit’ – The Antlers
For those needing respite post-St. Vincent, worry not. The Antlers‘ Burst Apart, 2011 follow-up to the widely adored Hospice, is rather less forlorn, but nevertheless retains a unique beauty, of which ‘French Exit’ is a excellent example.
‘The Noose of Jah City’ – King Krule
Nobody has quite worked out who exactly King Krule is yet. He appears to be a 17-year-old British producer/singer, who looks even younger on his press photos. But does it really matter? ‘The Noose of Jah City’ is too good to ignore: a spacious, syncopated jam topped with Krule’s preternaturally mature vocals.
‘Space Is Only Noise You Can See’ – Nicolas Jaar
An anomaly within the mostly tranquil, ambient works of Space Is Only Noise You Can See, Nicolas Jaar’s title track features one of the most thumping bass lines of the year. An impossible listen without at least some head bobbing – just try it.
‘The Words That Maketh Murder – PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, deserving winner of this year’s Mercury Prize, is a beautifully crafted thing – a mournful ode to England and the ravages of war. ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’ stands out even amid Harvey’s majestic suite: rippling guitars, lamenting vocals, cut with bitter lyrical irony.
‘Better Off Without You’ – Summer Camp
Summer Camp’s ‘Better off Without You’ was undoubtedly one of the summer’s most pitch-perfect singles. It’s got it all: the sound, the hook, and the teenage drama of a John Hughes flick. Elizabeth Warmley’s voice is oh-so-satisfyingly derisory as she tells an imaginary jilted ex-lover that “if you said you’re never calling back, I’d be so happy.”
‘I Can’t Compete’ – Balkans
Criminally overlooked this year, Balkan’s self-titled debut was the perfect amalgam of bouncing, jangling, punk-influenced pop. Breakneck single ‘I Can’t Compete’ has it all: gutsy, teenage longing in the vocals, and guitar hooks to die for.
‘Ritual Union’ – Little Dragon
One of the year’s most overtly sensual releases was Swedish synthpop quartet Little Dragon’s Ritual Union, whose title track is an exercise in warm electronics and soulful longing, courtesy of Yukimi Nagano’s stunning voice.
‘Stop’ – Twin Sister
Those who detected funky undertones in the sleepy dream pop of Twin Sister’s debut EP were vindicated in 2011’s full-length Bad Street. ‘Stop’ certainly doesn’t drop the band’s dreamy heritage, but its delightful girl-boy call-and-response and syrupy strings are lovingly inflected with shuffling, irresistible syncopation.
‘Mer’ – Chelsea Wolfe
Eager categorisers have been busy throwing labels at Chelsea Wolfe – ‘goth rock’, ‘doom folk’ – but, truth be told, none can adequately describe her appeal. Dripping with menace, Wolfe’s voice combines with the growling guitar and bass of ‘Mer’ for a resonant, booming catharsis.
‘Raconte-Moi Une Histoire’ – M83
Of M83’s effusive, sonically overflowing double album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, Jayson Greene wrote that “If a sound has ever made you break out into a foolish, cheesed-out grin you couldn’t suppress, it’s probably here.” ‘Raconte-Moi Une Histoire’ is an obvious case in point.
‘Lay Myself Down’ – Mazzy Star
Few anticipated the abrupt return of 90’s alt rockers Mazzy Star in 2011, but their welcome was warm following the quiet release of the ‘Lay Myself Down’, a tender ballad featuring the peerless, husky tones of Hope Sandoval. Expected a full-length in the year.
‘The Daily Mail’ – Radiohead
Although the long-awaited Radiohead album of 2011, The King of Limbs, fell somewhat short of wild expectations, the steady stream of remixes, singles, and basement tape released by the band in the following months have abated the disappointment. ‘The Daily Mail’, in particular, is a gorgeous, haunting return to form.
Mixer: Farwell to 2011 is also available on Spotify – click here to load the playlist.
Spring is on the horizon and the wardrobe is looking a little stale. After being wrapped up in your snood and faux fur coat for the past months, the idea of less clothes and more colour can be daunting, especially on a student budget. However a few simple adjustments can make your look seem revitalised without having to make too much effort.
1. PRINTS- of any kind. Animal, tribal, floral, geometric. Anything goes as long as it isn’t plain so be bright, bold, and brave. A good range of tie-dye leggings can be found in Topshop, and they have some nice floral pieces as well, in playsuits, skirts and billowy blouses (a good way to combine two trends). Printed jeans are another way to follow this trend- but be careful not to overdo it and keep the rest of your outfit quite muted. You can even bring prints in via your accessories- Gap has some nice butterfly print scarves and you can’t go wrong with anything that is on offer in Accessorize.
2. BRIGHT LEGS- Jeans in any shade other than blue. If you don’t want to go down the printed jean route buying a pair in teal, raspberry or frankly any other colour, will help to update your wardrobe. Apply this rule to other denim products and invest in a pair of mustard shorts from Topshop to really stand out from the crowd.
3. SHEER BLOUSES- A la FCUK and their ‘I am your Blouse’, be ultra-feminine and invest in a translucent blouse in cream or black. Miss Selfridge have a wide variety of shades in black, off-white, white and even mustard, and something similar can be picked up in Zara. The sheer blouse can go from day to night and can be as daring as you want.
4. FEATHERS- still on trend. Feathers are great accessories, in earrings and necklaces and just placed in the hair.
5. NAUTICAL- the nautical look has returned once again so dig out your stripes, rope-handled bags and channel the fisherman look. This year the look is quite crisp- see Gap for some good striped jumpers.
Most of us would agree that the world is unfinished, but Graham Sutherland with his ‘working and reworking of familiar landscapes’ seems to have brought the finishing as near as possible in his lifetime. For all curator George Shaw’s optimism that ‘Sutherland is an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him, a world forever unfinished’, his world, when before us, seems to have totally finished, marching off as it did along with the soldiers towards the Second World War. Sutherland seems to be ‘one for the experts’, rooted in a specific time and place. This could well be just a quirk of unfinished history, but there is something about the look of the paintings that consign him to the England that stretches back to Boudecia and didn’t survive the 50’s.
Sutherland possesses a Larkin-like sense of earthly propriety, evoked in his dark-tinted, non-brilliant shades. All his works (especially the pre-war Welsh landscapes) have that slight ‘30s’ hint of brown, no matter the prevailing colour. He wears his age on his sleeve. Curator Shaw seems to have drawn most heavily on Sutherland’s strongest, more abstract work. Sutherland is a painter of line, not colour. Shape and contour are his tools, and it is from these tools, that his subjects take figuration. From close up Sutherland’s paintings suffer from perspectival flaws; his best paintings are the ones that can withstand the inevitable “flattening out” of the gouache upon the viewer’s approach.
Consequently, the pictures in which he allows himself freer rein with the relations of colour and shape on canvas are his best work, when he allows the sun (or anything movable for that matter) to act as counterpoint, as in Sun Between Two Hills. He never quite dispenses with figuration, but his strength is in taking the landscape in front of him and letting imagination take hold, laying on the Welsh hills in that signature sloping arc of the brush.
Sutherland then manages to get these small-scale works to open up, to unclog themselves, and defy the restrictions of their own scale to throw us open to the vast landscape. His best pictures open out for us, giving a sense of space that is not to do with perspective but is all to do with an abstract form of expression. Something not wholly organic but slightly and carefully found. The landscape must be in harmony and compromise with the artifice, just like Welsh Standing Stones. The joy is in almost seeing something that you recognise
. These Standing Stones are a poetic summoning of the Celtic, instinctive people-land relationship, but as we move into Sutherland’s paintings executed during his period as War Artist, the sloping arc, the smooth earthiness of the Standing Stone, is pushed aside for ruler-straight line. Never such innocence again. Bombed buildings are not made of ruler-straight lines, but the association of the mechanical, un-feeling line with the destruction the machines of war have caused is a dramatic poetic gesture. Such gestures can be noted in a glance and as such are moving haikus as much as they are paintings.
In the finishing comes the assertion that all is unfinished. Sutherland’s late work doesn’t maintain its earlier promise of Romantic harmony. His wartime work is all past participles: ‘twisted’; ‘fallen’; ‘blasted’. For Sutherland, what lives on is certainly an unfinished world, but it is damaged and leaking oil.
Luke Wright is dangerously close to becoming the poetic voice of a generation. His poignant, sardonic, and satire-drenched lyrics have led him to become one of the biggest names in contemporary performance poetry. And after his witty, caustic performance at Corpus Christi this week, I’m inclined to agree.
Wright’s poetic epiphany came when watching Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke aged 16. ‘All I wanted to do was put words together and rhyme’, said Wright. He later went on to form the poetry club Aisle16 in 2000 and toured a show with the group called ‘Poetry Boyband’. Like all boy bands, the magic had to come to an end, and Wright left to pursue a solo career. In the style of an X-Factor contestant or Dick Whittington, Wright says he moved to London and ‘decided to give myself a few years at it. It took me 15 months till I’d become a poet – until it was my day-to-day job.’
Nowadays Wright has written poetry for films (watch the charming and a slightly weepy Seven Ages of Love on 4od), organises the poetry line up for Latitude festival, and performs at Edinburgh every year. His obvious involvement with the more public side of poetic life led me to ask if he felt himself carefully surveying the divide between performance or ‘proper’ poetry. But Wright calls himself a ‘performance poet’ despite its reputation – ‘there is some lazy stuff on the scene because you don’t have to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i’s – because poetry is a sonorous experience. There are two types of poetry: the stuff that’s self-referential with posh language and the stuff that’s trying to tell stories, and I’m definitely in that second bracket.’ Nevertheless, Wright quotes Andrew Motion, saying that ‘poetry shouldn’t have to make people like it. Poems should hit you in the gut the first time you read it. I like to have an emotional connection with a poem but, more than anything, I love a great line.’
Wright was also employed as the poet in residence for Radio 4’s Saturday Live where he has recently written on Christopher Hitchens’ death, the race for the American presidency, and his dad’s crush on Twiggy. Does Wright find it easy working on commission or is it the cross the modern artist must bear? Wright admits that he doesn’t ‘have a real love for these [commissioned] poems. I never hand in something I’m not happy with but there’s no truth or heart in those poems – there’s something genuine that you lose from it.’
From his latest work in progress – an epic called Revolt! that twins narratives of the peasants revolt in 1381 and the recent riots – to his new show, entitled Jeremy, Who Drew Penises On Everything (and other poems), it’s clear that Wright, undoubtedly, is a poet of the people.
Japanese prints aren’t an art form that many are familiar with. I was correspondingly in the dark when I dropped in to have a look at the Ashmolean’s exhibition of twenty woodblock prints of Kubuki actors armed only with a passable knowledge of the artist Hokusai, a guide book, and the rather reassuring admission of a staff member that even she ‘hadn’t a clue how to pronounce any of the names’.
The prints belong to a Japanese tradition of stylized representations of much-beloved Kabuki actors, whose dramatic theatrical style has been wildly fashionable, entertaining and notorious in Japan ever since the 17th century when a former prostitute and Shinto shrine dancer performed with her troupe to great acclaim in 1603. Woodblock prints of the actors were a hot commodity amongst the large fan base and depict the actors in costume and in character.
The older prints are dynamic and colourful: the actors faces contorted into grotesque caricature for the ‘villains’ and heroic bravado for the ‘heroes’. ‘The Catfish Priest’, a print depicting one play’s evil denizen, almost makes the exhibition worth seeing singlehandedly: his long sideburns and amusingly sinister characterisation are brilliantly evocative.
Along with the older, largely nineteenth-century prints, there are several prints by a contemporary Japanese artist, Tsuruya Kokei, whose work continues the Kabuki tradition. These are unmistakeably modern with simple but effective colour schemes, spare and static composition, and a quality of stillness which is completely different from the wild movement of the older prints.
Kokei’s work has been very popular both in Japan and abroad for several decades. Although he has since retired from his artistic career, these prints are well worth seeing as an example of a contemporary artist who combines specialization and popularity to make him an alternative ‘favourite’ to ‘discover’.
This is an exhibition for the non-pedant. With only twenty prints in the exhibition, and filling a space equivalent to half a seminar room, it is the perfect go-to place for students with a tight schedule. But be warned: there is very little explanation of an art that for many is quite alien, although the little that is explained is enough to make you eager for more.
Visit the bookshop and pick up a copy of The Art of Edo Japan which has enlightening references to the art you will have encountered, expanding into a general discussion of Japanese art over the few hundred years that Kabuki prints were most popular. This is a useful surrogate to the inadequate contextual detail provided by the exhibition itself. For the true enthusiasts, the Ashmolean’s Curator of Japanese Art, Dr Clare Pollard, is offering a tour of the exhibition in second and sixth week.
How do your academic and your creative pursuits cross over?
In some ways I see them as very separate. I certainly have to work on them completely separately. It’s like having an easel and a set of paints in one room and an easel and a set of paints in another room. But I’ve always seen my creative work as itself post-colonial. It asks tough questions about authority and power, which are post-colonial questions. So my creative work, to a certain extent, brought me to the whole area of world literary studies.
Did you ever feel that you might go down a solely creative career path? Absolutely! At the time I took my first permanent academic job it was a little as though I was, speaking from an Irish point of view, taking the Queen’s shilling. I think there was a particularly grim moment when the new head of department at my job called me into his office and said, ‘All these junkets are all very well but you have got to understand that you are now a serious professional literary critic and teacher. You have to knuckle down and start churning out academic stuff.’ It was a bit of a crisis actually because there are only so many hours in the day and the week and so you have to do the one thing rather than the other.
Could you tell us about your recent short-story collection, Sharmilla, and Other Portraits? Almost as a bona fide finger exercise, the writing of short stories has always been enormously interesting to me. I’m particularly a fan of Katherine Mansfield who only ever, because of her circumstances, wrote short stories. So I’ve written them and published them as I’ve gone along for actually, about twenty years. The first short story in Sharmilla I probably wrote in about 1984, but it sat around for a while before I published it.
Is there any advice that you would give to aspiring novelists? Point one: keep on. And point two: keep on keeping on. Every day is very solitary because you have to go back; you’ve got to thrash it out again. The right word in the right place is a very difficult thing to achieve, but it is achievable, as long as you put in the work.
Could you tell us about the creative project you are currently working on? I have been writing a fictionalised version of my father’s early life. He was fifty-three when I was born and therefore, to my young eyes, a very old man. He was something of a colonial officer; if you know your Conrad, a sort of a Lord Jim or even a Marlow figure. He had been in the Far East before the Second World War. And very helpfully for me, he left literary but still quite useful sketches of his times in the 1930s and the 1940s. And I’ve been using these as a kind of cord for the fictionalisation of his life. So I’ve been writing that up but inevitably the story of one’s father, remote a figure as he was, is a story of oneself.
Like, who? It’s rooted in early electronic music from the 60s by the likes of Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler.
So it’s that ambient stuff? Pretty much, except not quite as uplifting.
Sounds boring. Sell it to me. Well that’s kind of the point. Most of the genre is built around long tracks of a single note.
A single note? Often, but sometimes there are too many layers to count. It’s not static. The sound is constantly morphing, just enough to hold your interest.
Errgh. Yes. But, it’s perfect chill out music, except for the extreme noise stuff. You probably want to avoid people like Prurient, Russell Haswell and SUNN o))) unless you like whole albums of screaming and guitar feedback.
Check out our selection of five bona fide bangers:
‘Hatred of Music I’ – Tim Hecker
‘Relocation.Reconstruction’ – Yann Novak
‘Sovereign’ – Yellow Swans
‘City Nightlights’ – relapxych.0
‘Mass Transit Railway’ – Monolake
Hear all these tracks, and more, on the accompanying Spotify playlist.
