Hades Forum

While past releases saw the band's avant folk dosed somewhat conservatively with the blues, free jazz, heavy psych, and metal, Gipsy Freedom brings these other, non-folk elements to the fore and generally turns the volume up. It's the band's most confounding and rewarding release. You may hear the faint echoes of "Island Harvest"-era Albert Ayler on one track, Iommi-derived riffage on the next, torch songs that sound torn straight from the Gershwin songbook on the next, and Can-style epic grooves on the next. Radically different, yet sustaining the group's high level of musical and thematic consistency, Gipsy Freedom is the sound of a band breaking out of the box and using the discarded shapes to construct strange new universes.

Wonderfully wacky and always weird is the unique Pop Culture/New Wave band, Flying Lizards. Taking their cues from the works of the Dada/Fluxus movement of the beginning of the 20th century, their main objective was to take the popular, classic songs of rock and roll's rich musical history, strip them of all of their insturmentation until they were left with a bare bone minimalist beat and pair them with a robotic drones of voice and synthesizer. Often compared to The Residents, their sound was wackier, more minimalist and without question deviant to the sound of the original songs. What is so amazing about this band is when they have applied their own brand of styling to the songs, it gives you a completely different perspective to what the original artists intended.

Matinee Orchestra is sound artist Andrew Hodson's first commercially available album and has been recorded in Spain, Twain, Scotland and England. With layers of beautiful instrumentation punctuated by haunting vocals this is a dense record, employing the wall-of-sound pop production we so lovingly reminisce about. Matinee Orchestra is described by Hodson as a laptop album, but this is without a doubt no 'folk-tronica' cash-in. To group this album in with others in the genre would not be doing it the justice it clearly deserves. An epic journey, more in line with the soundtracks to lonely American films such as "The Straight Story" or "The Hired Hand", Hodson has created a beautiful introspective but warming journey. Finally we are presented with a record which can sound childlike and innocent without ever becoming twee, and for that we should be thankful.

Shogun Kunitoki is a quartet based in Helsinki, Finland. They work at a music of a past future that draws from the myriad synthetic sounds of the 20th century. Elements borrowed from 50s electronic pioneers, 60s psychedelia and minimalism, 70s experimentalism and 90s revivalism come together in concise instrumental compositions built on rhythmic interplay between simple repetitive motifs and between the players. Rejecting the cold bleakness of the digital domain, Shogun Kunitoki choose to craft their sounds using worn analog equipment in order to give electronic music human warmth, a soul.

The French duo return with a juddering Hip-Hop breaks meets folk meets Warp melange of bleeps, squeals and samples. From the left-field just above Tunng and one field along from Boom Bip, Depth Affect build strange melodies from a junkyard collection of keyboards, industrial noise, and the conversations between R2D2 and C3P0. Over this, they layer soulful hip-hop, like on the CYNE collaboration One Day or So. Their interior world is like another universe that seeps out of them through the weirdness of their music. It's no wonder that Anticon's Alias is a fan, coming on board for Wyoming Highway.

Full on Night is the fifth release by Rachel's on Quarterstick Records, and it pairs them with longtime friends M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel of Matmos. The song Full on Night originally appeared on Handwriting, Rachel's debut album, but in 1997, after the inevitable mutations that result from nightly improvisation, along with the addition of strings, organ and samples to the arrangement, the band decided an updated recording was in order. Due to the song's stubborn refusal to fit on an album side with other material, Rachel's approached Matmos about a collaborative project. Matmos, in their inimitable manner, combined the new studio masters and live recordings of the song to create The Precise Temperature of Darkness, in which the original elements are taken radically out of context, processed, sliced apart and then fashioned into an intriguingly alien shape which still mimics the overall narrative flow of Full on Night.

Anthony Burr and Sk??li Sverrisson have a collective CV which would have the average leftfield musician choking with envy and getting jiggy with the hyperbole as they tried to plump it out and challenge a list which includes Jim O'Rouke, John Zorn, David Sylvian, La Monte Young and Ryuichi Sakomoto to name but a scant few. Having first come together a little over ten years ago, Burr (bass clarinet) and Sverrisson (bass player) took to each other immediately and have plumbed an increasingly minimal electronic well for inspiration ever since. Yet whilst the digital obsession produced some friable results (notably 1997's circuit-feedback release), Burr and Sverrisson seem to have rediscovered their roots with A Thousand Incidents Arise featuring just as much deeply wrought instrumentation as it does static tickled excursions. All extended pieces, the likes of We Shall Be Sure of Not Going Astray and Except in Memory have overt song structures in their shrouded elegance, whilst elsewhere Change Is Far More Radical Than We Are First Inclined to Suppose reveals a love of drone amongst the stirring bass creased bedrock. Anything but incidental.

The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast is the new record by San Francisco duo Matmos. It is a series of "sound portraits" of a pantheon of people that they admire. A musical attempt at biography, it's loose in some places and very literal in others; taken as a suite of stylistically disparate songs, you get a kind of fractured family album, a historical pageant. It's at once Matmos' most melodic and most conceptual record.