Is this what it sounds like when the ghosts of your pasts become those of your present? Richie Hawtin needs little introduction in electronic music circles, but having spent much of the last few years...
Review posted on 22nd February 2016
When it comes to music, being ambiguous is a quality which some artists value but many fans find a confusing luxury. The Leaf Library are a quartet from London who write songs about rural Suffolk...
Review posted on 15th February 2016
So the cliché goes, men are visual creatures. Whilst the theory is most often used by people to explain why product A will be more attractive to a male than product B, a more hopeful...
Review posted on 1st February 2016
A couple of years ago Ummagma's Shauna McLarnon and Alexx Kratov ran away. Their flight was not from condemnation, or prejudice, or the mundanity of a civilised existence, but from war in the Ukraine, the...
Review posted on 1st February 2016
1,000 years ago in what was Northern Europe you would spend the winter covered in pelts, listening to the animals in their pen, sleeping on the ground of your thatched roof house with everyone else....
Review posted on 22nd January 2016
Best known for their collaborations, Soulsavers - production duo Rich Machin and Ian Glover - creatively peaked almost a decade ago with 2007's It's Not How Far You Fall, It's The Way You Land, a...
Review posted on 22nd January 2016
Garret Borns - he who is BØRNS - was a professional magician by the age of ten. This alone is a factoid to astonish; after all the trade relies on deceit, sleight-of-hand and good old...
Review posted on 8th January 2016
Being cynical, you could make plenty of assumptions about 2015's "Best of" charts featuring returns for the likes of The Prodigy, Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers. All worthy choices they may be (Okay OKAY except...
Review posted on 23rd December 2015
Fewer times in twentieth century history have had a more prismatic effect on the beholder than the last few years of the 1980's: now subtlely rewritten by the winners (Media corporations, the cult of celebrity,...
Review posted on 23rd December 2015
10. King Midas Sound ft. Fennesz- Edition #1 Kevin Martin (AKA The Bug), poet Roger Robinson and singer Kiki Hitomi joined forces with Viennese avant garde composer Christian Fennesz to chart almost certainly the most...
News posted in Music / Festivals on 22nd December 2015
When is a band not a band? Since when they're Soldiers of Fortune of course. Loosely assembled from members of American leftfield alumni outfits such as Oneida, Endless Boogie and Interpol, the Brooklyn sextet formed...
Review posted on 14th December 2015
Speaking to the audience at The Brudenell Social club in Leeds in the middle of last year, Chills front man Martin Phillips had more reasons to look both forward and back than most. In the...
Review posted on 16th November 2015
Shot on the front of Replicas, Gary Numan look much like the embodiment of Bron Helstrom, the former male prostitute of Samuel R. Delaney's pan-cultural science fiction novel Triton. Hair peroxide blond and clad entirely...
Review posted on 2nd November 2015
For those of you who aren't fully aware, the Shoegaze of this compilation's title refers to a splinter group of late 80's British indie that, initially inspired by the likes of Spacemen 3 and My...
Review posted on 2nd November 2015
Everything's relative, right? For instance, if we were to tell you that Italian production duo Simbiosi's debut album was a little challenging, we'd need to qualify what we meant by that. And so here goes....
Review posted on 13th October 2015
The last time we heard of Londoner Jono McCleery at Contact Towers, he was taking Maribou State's recent album 'Portraits' to a piquant level of high grain via his turn on 'Say More', the sort...
Review posted on 13th October 2015
We all know how much producers in the electronica world love a good pseudonym, so why spoil the fun? (In this case you can do that yourself with about 3 minutes of internet searching). The...
Review posted on 13th October 2015
The thing about bubblegum is, it's ace. Does bubblegum take itself too seriously? No. Can you mess it around into all kinds of different shapes, then when you get bored immediately change it again? Of...
Review posted on 2nd October 2015
Hipsters may curdle at the insinuation, but one of the most attractive qualities about the briefly prescient Chillwave movement was the thin line it trod between pastiching the superficiality of the 80s musically and on...
Review posted on 1st October 2015
Yppah (real name Joe Corrales Jr. - put an I before the PP's in his stage name and you've got the pronunciation sorted) makes records that are frequently out of time. Not in terms of...
Review posted on 30th September 2015
So much of music is in diverse ways, so instructive. It's made to be like that: the artist wants you to think a certain way when you listen to the songs, to understand either the...
Review posted on 14th September 2015
For artists who are effectively one hit wonders, there are few career choices when they reach the inevitable crossroads that follows. Take, for example, the truncated career of Gregg Alexander, the man who gave the...
Review posted on 3rd September 2015
Often forgotten, woe betide the music fan who makes the error of underestimating the influence of the cerebral, acid jazzateers of the twentieth century. Whilst the likes of Miles Davis, Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock...
Review posted on 1st September 2015
Sifting through a pile of new releases at Contact Towers is mostly fun, but occasionally can become a bit of a drag. By the time the fifth boy/girl combo of the afternoon are on the...
Review posted on 21st August 2015
Maribou State's Chris Davids and Liam Ivory both hail from the Hertfordshire village of Potten End (that's right next to Frithsden, for those of you who need a point of reference) but didn't form a...
Review posted on 7th August 2015
Talking about ethnomusicology at Contact Towers one afternoon as we do, we remembered the famous words of Meyer when he spoke about the common, cross cultural threads in different styles of composition: "...different musical languages...
Review posted on 23rd July 2015
Meg Baird has certainly paid her dues, having been lead singer of Philadelphian octet Espers, an alumni of both Sharon Van Etten and the achingly hip Kurt Vile and releasing three solo albums, of which...
Review posted on 23rd July 2015
Few artists in the electronic cannon will release a record with the gravitas of 'Leftism', Leftfield's 1995 debut. Arriving in the confused but angry wake of Castlemorton and the man's crackdown on repetitive beats, Neil...
Review posted on 23rd July 2015
Look, we remember 2006 like it was yesterday: frantically checking MySpace every day so you could be the first to have discovered yet another new thing, having the 1965 label promo CD on endless repeat...
Review posted on 13th July 2015
One of 2014's slowest burning and yet most rewarding albums blindsided many of us: London trio Happyness filled their debut albumn'Weird Little Birthday' with references to the slacker chops of Dinosaur Jr. and post-grunge, but...
Review posted on 10th July 2015
Maximo Park return with their first full length studio album in nearly four years as they release 'Nature Always Wins'.
Yes, I know, it's far too early to call out contenders for the Top Ten Albums of 2021 but, if 'In Quiet Moments' by Lost Horizons doesn't feature...
Maisie Peters first release of 2021, 'John Hughes Movie', is as an inspired, individual and thought provoking concept that showcases the singers ever...
Wolf Alice make a long awaited return ahead of the release of their third album with a new single and video, 'The Last Man On Earth'.
Tom Odell returns with new song, 'numb', his first single in nearly two years.
Way, way back in the February of 1980 one twenty year old Bryan Adams released his eponymous debut album, paving the way for the start of his...
As the second month of 2021 gets ever nearer we take a look at the new releases that are set to delight our ears over the coming weeks.
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