Jon Buckland

Ultracrepidarian

Music Criticism

The Quietus •

The Strange World Of... Room40 | The Quietus

As the 21st century roared into view, so did Room40. 

What started off as a pre-millennium zine cobbled together in Brisbane grew into a series of carefully curated shows promoting the type of artists very rarely seen in North East Australia, and has now evolved, a quarter of a century later, into a home for some of the most vital, compelling, and dream-like experimental records. Included on Room40’s discography are artists such as Kevin Richard Martin, Grouper, Tim Hecker, Alan Lamb, Celer...
The Quietus •

The Whole of the Dog: Decius Vol II – Splendour & Obedience is Our Album of the Week | The Quietus

“He watched the pale, speed-driven teenagers shiver around the dance floor. Droplets of light sprayed onto their faces and T-shirts. In alcoves, couples were frozen in the trance of foreplay. The beat was too quick to dance to, almost too deep to hear. It was like the roar of water in an underground cavern.” – The Window

Lifted from a particularly harrowing short story by the British author Joel Lane, the above paragraph depicts the initial meeting place of a burgeoning sado-masochistic sexual relationship. It could also double as a description of the notoriously selective Berlin nightclub where Decius’ Meat Divine first caught a taste of electronic music’s throbbing abandon.
The Quietus •

Deep Cabaret – Matchless | The Quietus

Certain music lends itself particularly well to specific physical media. For instance: Black Sabbath on vinyl, Autechre on CD, Aaron Dilloway’s tape manipulations on cassette. I don’t know if it’s due to the rugged, physical performances or the nagging sense that this is a fly-on-the-wall recording of a live jam session, but something rooted in Deep Cabaret’s Matchless demands the innate tangibility of analogue formats. It’s fitting then that this jazzy desert blues album, initially released on...

Top 25 Records of 2024

I swear these years are whipping by quicker and quicker. There’s a theory that a year feels shorter as you get older because 12 months are a smaller slice of your entire existence. So, in percentage terms, you’re dealing with a slimmer slither compared to those school days when the long summers seemed to stretch out way beyond the glittering horizon, almost into infinity. Endless, some might say. Christian Fennesz ought to write an album about that. Anyway, despite knowing all of that, this year flew. Here we are at the end and I’m once again writing that thing I do around this time each year… although I’m still not entirely sure why.
The Quietus •

Kemper Norton – Tall Trees (And Other Tales) | The Quietus

Recently, a friend generously shared a fairly rank video in a group chat. It featured an open manhole cover with a length of blue piping descending into an underground tunnel system. After a moment or two of faint gurgles and twitching hosing, a huge stinking brick of toilet waste sludged its way through the narrow duct like a giant faecal slug. It clogged up the entire opening, causing mud-coloured discharge to rise to the brim and threaten to spill out into the road. A series of flatulent sounds...
The Quietus •

Eros – Your Truth Is A Lie | The Quietus

Back in the winter of ’06 a piece of music crawled under my skin and has remained there ever since. It was on the Mary Anne Hobbs-hosted Breezeblock: a weekly late-night slot on Radio 1 where she blended avant-garde electronics with fresh cuts of grime and early dubstep. Around twelve minutes into the episode Hobbs introduced the Multipara Remix of ‘Removed (Vacuous Movement)’, by No Movement No Sound No Memories, as “proper white-knuckle stuff” and she was not wrong.
The Quietus •

Thurston Moore – Flow Critical Lucidity | The Quietus

The former Sonic Youth guitarist invites us into his own dreamworld of grinding guitars and dappled lightIn 1988 the artist Jamie Nares painted an image titled Samurai Walkman which featured multiple tuning forks sticking out of a helmet. That same year Sonic Youth released the double album Daydream Nation with Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze (‘Candle’) on the front cover. Thirty-six years later Samurai Walkman has been realised as a physical sculpture for the album artwork of Flow Critical Lucidity, Thurston Moore's ninth solo record.
The Quietus •

Seefeel – Everything Squared | The Quietus

Seefeel sprung up in 1993 with the release of their debut album off the back of a series of glittering EPs. With each record their style and sound shifted, confounding journalists and record labels alike. They were initially lumped in with shoegaze, post rock, and then IDM, largely due to their Warp and Rephlex associations. Yet none of that quite captures the truly engrossing blend of ambient electronics, pop-adjacent melodies, and mangled but uplifting guitar-slinging that Seefeel were creating.
Bandcamp Daily •

Bandcamp Album of the Day - The None 'Matter'

The None have history. 'Matter' might be their first release, but each member of the quartet is well-seasoned in the machinations of music making: Between them they’ve played in Bloc Party, Blue Ruth, Cassels, Youth Man, and Frauds. Based on that, you might think you have an inkling as to what they sound like. You’d be wrong. Without intending a slight on any of those earlier projects, The None are far greater than the sum of their parts.
The Quietus •

Brian Gibson – Thrasher

In the early 2000s, whilst I was inhaling silly quantities of cannabis and playing music-related video games such as Frequency and Guitar Hero, Brian Gibson was working for Harmonix as the lead artist on those exact games.

The Lightning Bolt bassist quit the computer game industry back in 2015, yet he hasn’t been able to stay away entirely. In 2016 he recorded the soundtrack for cult rhythm-violence video game THUMPER and, more recently, the spatial audio score for VR assault THRASHER.
The Quietus •

µ-Ziq – Grush

After thirty years in the game, Mike Paradinas is clearly still having a heck of a time, finds Jon Buckland

µ-Ziq aka Mike Paradinas has been in the game long enough to see styles and fashions come and go. Hell, in his career spent carving out glitchy, emotive electronics with crackling beats, the Planet Mu man has even invented the odd genre along the way. For his new record, Grush, however, he’s opted to take a trip down memory lane.

‘Metaphonk’, the penultimate cut on the record, is a case
The Quietus •

British Murder Boys – Active Agents & House Boys

A dozen years since their 'final show', the duo of Regis and Surgeon prove they can still tear it up

British Murder Boys went out with a bang in 2012. Performing their “final show” to a rapt Tokyo audience eager for industrial thumps, ear-shredding guitar feedback, and a shamanistic performance by robe clad beguilers. And, whilst the duo of Surgeon (Anthony Childs) and Regis (Karl O’Connor) only managed to stay away for three years, it’s taken until now to raise their heads above the parapets and commit their bolshy electronic belligerence to a full-length release.
The Quietus •

Kee Avil – Spine

Within Spine’s forty minute run-time, Kee Avil scampers across myriad references points from a broad array of modern musical masters. There’s the quiet exploration of Keeley Forsyth, Coil’s unsettling esotericism, and Lucrecia Dalt’s sensuality. We get creaking sounds akin to Gazelle Twin’s straining electronics, the delicate leanings of HTRK, Ronce-like ASMR, elements of Björk’s vulnerability, and, impressively, she hops between these various styles and approaches, whilst restricting herself to just four sound sources per song.
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