The Quietus

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Brian Coney

There is no such thing as background noise in Divide and Dissolve’s world. Every note, every groaning chord, every keening saxophone line sits foregrounded, heavy with intent. On Insatiable, Melbourne multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed’s most emotionally unguarded and orchestrally scaled work to date, doom becomes a medium for not reckoning alone, but reckoning transfigured by love. Opener ‘Hegemonic’ isn’t so much an overture as a warning.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | David McKenna |Jennifer Lucy Allan |Bobby Barry |Luke Cartledge

The life and work of pioneering poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini casts a long shadow over this record from French artist Karen Jebane, also known as Golem Mecanique. The album’s title, which translates as “we are all in danger”, is derived from the final interview Pasolini gave before his still-unsolved murder in 1975, and a sense of threat pervades the record from start to finish. This is a dense, foreboding album, its scale and texture as unforgiving as a vast, broiling body of water.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Bobby Barry |Jeremy ALLEN

Let’s start with some heresy. As furious and phenomenal as Hawkwind’s UA Years were – with an unimpeachable run of albums that includes X In Search of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall of the Mountain Grill and the live classic Space Ritual – I find myself more frequently visiting the less fabled Cherry Red Years these days, a supernova of creativity at this latter end of a quite remarkable 55 year career (and counting).

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Daryl Worthington |Patrick Clarke

“I don’t have the words for it,” says Richard Dawson. “I almost want to cry telling you about it. What they’ve achieved, and what they do, is so important. It’s really precious.” Dawson is speaking tenderly about a place that means a lot to him. Where he has spent hours sat in darkness, in contemplative silence, as images and sounds play out on a screen over the quiet hum of the city’s metro that runs beneath it. The Tyneside cinema in Newcastle is “an absolute beacon”, he says.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Rory Gibb |Patrick Clarke

It’s impossible to disentangle Tremor Festival from the island on which it takes place, São Miguel, the largest of The Azores. Just as the programming of the festival puts an impetus on adventurousness and the dissolving of arbitrary boundaries, purposefully fostering disorientation in a number of different ways, so too does flux feel innate to the island. Historically, it’s been a place of comings and goings rather than settlings, thanks to its location in the middle of the Atlantic.