This Is Not TV

Due to a slight case of crapness and busyness on the part of the TINTV group, our site has suffered from the old chestnut of ‘too much stuff not enough time’.

Here at TINTV Towers we have decided that what this situation requires is a swift boot in the arse, a dressing down and a sorting out.

In short, we’re having a reboot. WELL IT WORKED FOR STAR TREK!

Watch this space for further developments, about faces, outright denials and honest reportage on TINTV staff expense claims.

Umm, that’ll be £0.00 then.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Summer is nearly here, which means one thing – it’s the festival season, once again we will be heading out to Leeds Festival to bring you the latest rumours, news, interviews and photos from Yorkshire’s biggest music festival. Fingers crossed we’ll be having a sunny bank holiday weekend!

Check out the latest lineup at: http://www.leedsfestival.com/lineup/index.aspx

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tom and Gavin, lovers of dEUS, Dels and delay, have been working on a long play for a while and here it is. ‘Arrivals’ has arrived. It has come at a time of transition and re-transition (possibly) for these two young men, so its title is tellingly fitting, though may not be exactly what you would expect… or maybe exactly what you expect. Which is a problem.

As an ambient album, it is a worthy piece. Staccato beats bubble and pop as synths swirl up and samples echo down dark alleys, creating a air of the sinister and the mellowing. Beats emerge slowly and rise and fall, great dance leviathans in an electronic sea of sound. Tracks like ‘Evil Man’ invoke images of subterranean cathedrals, while ‘Pissing About’ and ‘You’re In My Thoughts’ sound skeletal and telegraphic, an SOS to the darkness for sanctuary from the light. But it is all implied and uncertain, this lurking in the darkness – the electronic counter measures to this gloom remains on top of things – it’s dark like FSOL but dancy like The Egg.

There’s a good deal of messing about with things too – samples of Siegfried Sassoon poems (‘Evil Man’), stretched and distorted to sound like a service announcement; Gavin breaks out his bowed guitar at the drop of a hat (‘All Things But You Are Silent’ and ‘You’re In My Thoughts’), each part of the album is puntuated literally (interlude tracks ‘.’, ‘..’ and ‘…’), new age and trance get a good seeing to (‘Im A Crooked Man’)… it’s not exactly ground breaking stuff, more like the less visted parts of a well known theme park – like the Dancing Fountains at Alton Towers. Or, less abstractly, think Orb circa ‘UFOrb’ or ChrisT.

The problem I have with it is that ‘Arrivals’ is missing something. The music is pure ambient, so there is no real climax or peak to the thing – it’s all anticipation, which is a bit of a disappointment because… that’s not what they’re about, or at least what they should be about. worriedaboutsatan used to crown their ambience with penetrative guitar, creating an almost sexual juxtaposition in their music. All that confrontation is gone, and I am sadder for its absence.

‘Arrivals’ is about as apt as it gets – you’re waiting either to arrive or more likely waiting for something to arrive. The joke is on us as something interstellar arrives just at the end of the album on the titular ‘Arrivals’, but we are yet to see what this transport of delight holds. In the meantime we are left kicking our heels and chilling in the name of.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Please note: for those who like their music snappy, familiar and immediate, move on; there’s nothing here for you. Mmmm, less here than I thought. Oh well, this one’s for you good good people who like their music in >3 minute chunks. Think 40 minute chunks.

No… come back…

By the time you read this, AMT and THPU will have already released another three records, but I’ve been looking after a small child so getting around to listening to an album with a naked woman on the front and that has absolutely nothing to do with Iggle Piggle is… an excuse, a lame excuse. But let’s face it, two tracks weighing in at 18 and 40 minutes? That requires dedication.

It is… fairly rewarding though. At least one of them is. I must confess to not being completely au fait with Kawabata Makota’s previous oeuvre (it comprising of a dozen or so ‘incarnations’, each with their own style and discography… you can see how it would be hard to keep up), but when he talks about influences like Stockhausen (that most stolen of artists) and Krautrock, it is pretty clear that a musical challenge is ahead. And there’s me with nothing to toke, drop, snort or shoot. Not that I advocate that sort of thing. Oh no.

Ahem, well… ‘Astral Projection from Holy Shangrila’. The ‘pop’ number of the record (a mere 18 mins), ‘AP’ begins with a single looped and delayed voice chanting a meditative incantation; an acoustic repeats the same passage over and over; synths appear; a siren sounds; guitars rev and shatter the surface of this musical web that is entrancing you. This is pure indulgence, but you can feel levels of hearing levered open as you attempt to hear everything, You’re on the bridge of the starship freakout and don’t know how to drive. It’s scary, exhilirating; the music ebbs and flows, pushing deeper into the recesses of bad drug experience. Suns collapse, planets rend themself and you are left on the floor of a monastry full of opium addled monks all fightign over a sitar. It is a trip, a bad trip if you will, but a good modern tone poem, full of noise and intention. That it never goes anywhere for so long a time is more of an inconvenience than a deal breaker.

‘Interstellar Guru and Zero’ is a little more advanced while being simpler. Based around a constant droning A (I believe), musical shapes shift about in the background uncertainly. A drum beat marches backtrack and forth on trance patrol as tiny meteoroids spang off an invisble sonic forcefield. Things become brighter but essentially the same and an identity of sort manifests itself. It grows, but never goes. If you see what I mean.

It’s not for everyone (surprisingly! What a stupid statement) but for the patient appreciator of drone or psychedelia there definitely something here for you; for the person who’s into racy covers, there’s the nudey lady. For the classicist, it’s proof that tone poetry is a live and well and living in the head of Kawabata Makota. A curious album from a curious man.

Popularity: 13% [?]