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Elephant Micah: “Louder Than Thou”

Over the past year or two, MC Taylor of “Hiss Golden Messenger has become not just one of my favourite American contemporary songwriters, but also a great source of musical recommendations; most recently, of course, with his terrific “Wah-Wah Cowboys” mixtape.

Wild Mercury Sound 100 from 2011

100. Rene Hell – The Terminal Symphony (Type) 99. King’s Daughters And Sons – If Not Then When (Chemikal Underground) 98. Wolfgang Voigt – Kafkatrax (Profan)

Wild Mercury Sound 100 from 2011: 25 to 1

And after 100 to 76, 75 to 51 and 50 to 26, here's my rough top 25. Thanks for indulging me.

Fennesz, William Basinski

Among the multitude of underground micro-genres that have grown like bacilli these past few years, one of the most refined is ‘Modern Classical’. Ostensibly, much of the music that is sold under this pretext is a kind of evolved ambience, with compositional pretensions: a tidy hybrid of Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and Erik Satie that is almost invariably pleasant, but which often seems to affect substance without actually delivering it.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy: “Wolfroy Goes To Town”

A new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album often prompts me to visit a remarkable resource called The Royal Stable, a website dedicated to thoroughly cataloguing and cross-referencing this most fiendishly complicated of musical careers.

Club Uncut @ The Great Escape: Gang Gang Dance/ Babe, Terror/ Alexander Tucker, Pavilion Theatre, Brighton, May 12, 2011

As the first night of Club Uncut’s annual seaside trip to Brighton’s Great Escape festival comes to an end, a girl passes me yelling “My ears! My ears!”. New York’s Gang Gang Dance have just come off stage at the Pavilion Theatre, where they’ve cranked up the decibels to ear-splitting levels. Really, it was loud. Earlier this week, I’d been listening to their latest album, Eye Contact, recorded in relaxed circumstances near rural Woodstock, and been impressed by the ambient textures of tracks like “Glass Jar”. Live, they’re clearly a very different proposition: the sheer intense forcefulness of their sound physically impacts on the body. It had all been so very different three hours earlier…

The 14th Uncut Playlist Of 2011

An extra-long list this week, since we seem to have worked our way through more stuff than usual. A lot of good stuff, too, I’d say, with one or two exceptions, and a tremendous new mystery record that’s coming out in the summer and which hasn’t, I think, been announced as yet – hence the necessary evasiveness.
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