Kill the Giants - Drones, Clones and Bio Machines (Nub Music)

The clues to who was behind Kill the Giants were always there, had I bothered to consider them rather than simply rolling around in the wonders of this extraordinary release, which instantly became one of my favourite half dozen releases of what has already been a great year for great music.

It's on the Nub Music label for a start and, as this is the label of Pocket God Mark Lee, it made sense that Mark would be behind it all, especially given the playful brilliance of the release.   The excellent 'Beautiful Day' (which samples quotes from Shakespeare and not only gets away with it, but absorbs it magnificently) opens my Dandelion Radio show this month but consider this only an entry point to the fascinating, diverse and compelling world of sound within this album.

It's Mark Lee at his best - and it should be enough simply to say that.   It's also one of many fascinating releases Nub have put out recently - find out more here.

Nac/Hut Report - Transmisja Z Przesilenia (Chrunchy Human Children)

Sometimes, massive changes of direction can be a good thing.  However, I'm always glad to hear a new Nac/Hut Report album and find that they've resisted it.  Frankly this duo, based in Poland, create such astonishing things together it's always refreshing to find that a new collection of their stuff consists of hammering out a new set of jarring, challenging noises from pretty much the same template.

As usual, the release comes via the Warsaw cooperative Crunchy Human Children and, as you might have guessed from my preliminary comments, it doesn't disappoint.  I played a track from the album in my Dandelion Radio show last month and this month I'm playing 'Plytki Lek'. 

The album is available to buy on cassette or as NYP download here.

Mood Taeg - Exophoria (Happy Robots)

Another excellent release from the Happy Robots label becomes available next week in the form of this Dusseldorf/Shanghai collaboration that stems from a wider collective comprising DJs, graffiti artists and photographers, among others.

Exophonia's five tracks exhibit their krautrock influences prominently but there's something highly distinctive about what emerges, all emanating from their own Lowell's Garden studio where digital recording techniques meet with analogue synths to produce results that are at once experimental and bewitchingly accessible.

I'm playing opening track '2MR' in my Dandelion Radio show this month and you can pre-order the release as a download or on vinyl here.

V/A - You Don't Have To Be Fashionable Vol. 8 (With A Messy Head)

The annual You Don't Have To Be Fashionable compilation from French label With A Messy Head is always keenly anticipated.    The release invariably offers great opportunities to hear some great new bands or artists from around the world, reacquaint yourself with a few already established favourites and just generally listen to some fantastic tunes. 

Volume 8 is up there with the best yet.  I've made it a featured compilation in my Dandelion Radio show this month, playing tunes from three bands I don't think I've played on the show before - Germany's Big Hit, The Victor Pope Band from Scotland and Barcelonas Ella Ella along with tracks from the wonderful Carton Sonore (France) and Woog Riots (Germany), both of whom I've featured multiple times before and will no doubt continue to do so.   Incidentally, the new Woog Riots single is great and I'll be playing that in my show next month.

Get the album for free here.

V/A - 'Mark Barton's "The Sunday Experience"' (Bearsuit)

I have to confess I hadn't been aware of Mark Barton's  work prior to his untimely death earlier this year.    Having got hold of a copy of this excellent tribute album, it's clear how much I was missing out.   So many terrific bands and artists have contributed to this tribute compilation, it's hard to know where to begin.  The Lovely Eggs, JD Meatyard and Moon Duo all feature here among many other staples of my musical diet over the last few years.

I'm featuring selections from the compilation in my April Dandelion Radio show, concentrating on artists I've either not played in the show before or not played enough.   That both helps to narrow it down and also enter into the spirit of this tribute to a great lover of new music and someone who clearly dedicated a lot of his life to bringing it to the attention of others.

In my show, which streams at various times until the end of the month, you'll hear tracks from Schizo Fun Addict, Xqui, FortDax and Eat Lights, Become Lights but please do yourself a favour and don't leave it there.  There are 42 tracks on this mammoth release, lovingly assembled by the wonderful Bearsuit Records, and all proceeds go to McMillan Cancer.  Get it on CD or download here.

Staraya Derevnya - Kadita Sessions

There was really only one way to end my traditional summer blogging hiatus and that was with a review of an album that's done so much to get me through a couple of months of hotel rooms, train journeys and improbable work deadlines.

Kadita Sessions came out in April so it's frustrating that I've not been able to write anything about it before now.  It is, frankly, one of the most magical and bewitching albums I've heard for a long, long time.  From the guttural howl that is the starting point for opener of 'Hram' to the frantic close of 'Kadita', the listener is taken on a journey that's perhaps best described as one third aural Alice Through the Looking Class, one third experimental psych jamboree and one third impossible to describe.

One listen of the aforementioned album opener was enough to tell me that this was a collection that was likely to keep me occupied for a damn good portion of my life, working on the assumption that at some point in the hopefully far-off future I'll lose my faculties at roughly the same time as my bladder control.  An inability to appreciate something as wonderful as this is what makes me dread such a day (the loss of faculties, I mean; the loss of bladder control will be regrettable, but probably something I can learn to live with).

From there we're taken on seven extraordinary journeys, from the understated 'Chastity' to the majestically freakish 'Het', one of the album's shorter excursions but already a contender for my favourite track of 2016.

If that's not enough to whet your appetite you should know that you can download the whole thing here for NYOP, although there's also a CD version available and you can get your hands on a cassette via Weakie Discs.

Qualchan - All My Friends Are Going Visceral

I'm generally OK at pub quizzes but one thing I'm really bad at is identifying tunes from brief extracts or intros.  That's probably why I struggle to identify anything that finds its way into Qualchan's All My Friends Are Going Visceral release.  Or maybe it's because he draws the whole thing together so brilliantly that you stop playing any guessing games within seconds and just let the magnificence of it wash over you.  Which is how it should be.

All My Friends Are Going Visceral is almost nineteen minutes of chopped up extracts and loops of all kinds of material: it feels like it shouldn't hang together at all well and that, in doing so, it defies some kind of musical logic.  That's a hugely liberating experience.  I've no idea whether Qualchan just piled it all up instinctively or whether he took weeks painstakingly stitching this veritable sonic patchwork quilt together.  If the first, then he possesses an astonishing level of artistic instinct; if the second, he is a brilliant musical craftsman.

It's probably a bit of both.  All My Friends Are Going Visceral is split over two 'sides', both around nine and a half minutes in length and the whole release is available as NYOP here.  You can hear 'Side A' in my February show on Dandelion Radio, streaming at various times during this month and discussions are underway hopefully for Qualchan to do something for the show in the near future.  Give this release a try, but leave your preconceptions somewhere else, because this is unlikely to be like anything you've heard anywhere else.

Music For The Muted - Zeit

This is exactly the kind of thing you want to find in your inbox when you get home on a Friday evening - a slab of uncompromising experimental noise that blows all the shit of the day out of your head and leaves you with the unusual feeling that everything's as it should be on planet Earth.  

Music For The Muted are, their Soundcloud page tells me, a duo consisting of Maximus and Daedalus from Germany.  I'm guessing those aren't their real names, but the music they make is the kind that gives you the right to call yourselves whatever the hell you want.
 
Their EP consists of five heavy drones that slug away at your brains until your mind gives in to their intoxicating atonal moans.  If that sounds unappetising, you either have the wrong musical diet - in which case you're probably not worthy of them anyway - or else you're wrongly imagining that such stuff has no room in it for subtlety, variety or intricacy.

As it is, Zeit has all three and plenty more besides.  This is not noise as a blunt instrument as wielded by, say, those wonderful Finns Whitewater Orgasm, but rather a woozy cocktail that mixes a whole pile of ingredients together so that what on the surface might look like an unappealing brown mush contains a brilliantly devised mix of stimulants and flavours that, while clearing all that crap out of your head, give your synapses a massage and manicure all your other bits while they're at it.  The EP as a whole comes across like some creative demiurge found his way into God's toolbox and hammered together a world that, while imperfect, is a whole lot more interesting than the real thing.

The five tracks all have numbers as titles, which is fitting because these are tunes (?) that words can have little part in describing with any success, as you've probably guessed by my exasperated attempts above.  Among their interests Music For The Muted number heavy drilling machinery, secluded drinking spots, hairdress lounges and the nightsky, along with sign language and the tactile alphabet.  That probably gives you a glimpse into what to expect better than anything else, but this is something I'd seriously advise you find out about yourself.  Get along to that Soundcloud page now and feast your ears.

In session this month: Long Hat Pins

Long Hat Pins is the work of Tim Kelly, an Everton supporter who until recently lived in Salford.  I mention this not merely as biographical information but because throughout the work of this fascinating artist it's a recurring feature: not Salford or Everton, but a certain dissonance, a finding of the unexpected within the familiar and the familiar within the unexpected.  More importantly, his work is utterly unique.

I first discovered the music of Long Hat Pins when I arrived home from a New Year's break on 2 January 2012 to find a message in my inbox from Tim.  He'd introduced himself, without any bluster or promotional blurb - which is always a good sign - and included an mp3 of a track called 'That's Not The World'.  In another artist's hands the refrain of 'That's Not The World' would have been overdone and overcooked, its magic rendered obsolete by a song's over-dependence on this single pleasing feature.

Tim Kelly is not such an artist and Long Hat Pins is not such a project.  Instead the track was embellished with a cut-up interview from Tim Buckley, whatever conventional instrumentation that lay beneath transformed and bent into all manner of pleasing musical shapes and what resulted was nothing less than a brilliantly listenable sound treatise on appearance and reality that would've made Bertrand Russell realise he needed to get out more.

Now he's recorded his first session for my Dandelion Radio show (Long Hat Pins, that is, not Bertrand Russell) and it's unsurprisingly wonderful.  The four tracks do as much as four tracks can do in representing his remarkable musical range.  'Excess Baggage' and 'Handful of Heart' are from the guitar-based end of his broad spectrum, a place where you suspect a folk singer might hang his hat but where what actually resides is something between the aforementioned Buckley, the spirit of Beefheart and Bryan MacLean if he'd been more like Arthur Lee had really wanted him to be.  'Marsha's Long Blond Beauty' heavily samples Richard Brautigan reading his own poem, something which, in the very able hands of Long Hat Pins, is just the starting point for another magical musical journey,

But, as musical journeys go, they don't come any more magical than in the remaining track, 'The Grip', a deceptively lightly touched sonic extravaganza which finds Long Hat Pins in a realm within which the experimental and the melodic cohabit in a union of conflicting elements which, let's face it, is something that all truly great music has somewhere at its heart.  See a Youtube video of the track at
http://youtu.be/nZ3oEEJfOrM

And this is truly great music.  Find more of it at the Long Hat Pins Bandcamp site, where you can grab his first two EPs for free.   The session will also be getting a release on the site soon after it finishes its run in my Dandelion Radio show during April, at which point I hope you'll have joined me in absorbing every note of this collection into your brain, soul and whatever else you've got for it to find its way inside.