Broadcast/Oliver Coates & Anna Meredith/Andrea Parker, Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 22/04/2010

themilkman on Apr 22nd 2010 12:39 am

Broadcast/Oliver Coates & Anna Meredith/Andrea Parker, Ether Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 22/04/2010

The South Bank’s Ether Festival, now in its ninth edition, has already seen a host of memorable performances this year, with a weekend of events around the work of Edgar Varèse, the premiere of a new piece by Philip Glass and an evening with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio. Invited to take over the Queen Elizabeth Hall on this Wednesday evening were Birmingham’s finest, retro future pop stalwarts Broadcast, who in just a handful of records in well over ten years of existence have time and time again proved to be the most essential band the UK has produced in years.

Laptop and cello were the backbone of cellist Oliver Coates’s opening set, first in extremely minimal form with cello played over an arid and dissonant drone and clusters of distant field recordings (one could spot in turn the ebb and flow of the sea or the threatening pull of gusts of wind, amongst other things). Continue Reading »

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10 YEARS IN 20 RECORDS

themilkman on Jan 4th 2010 12:17 am

10 years in 20 records

The noughties have seen probably the most radical changes in the music industries since the advent of the record. Consumption habits have dramatically moved from traditional to digital formats, music has been increasingly seen as something to steal rather than to buy, and listening habits means that nowadays, the album is becoming increasingly redundant. Or is it? Whereas it had, at least in some circles, become totally acceptable to fill records with substandard music, it is now essential for artists to create consistent pieces of work if they want to retain the attention of their audience. The last ten years have delivered their fair share of hits and misses, and this list doesn’t pretend to be in any way shape or form exhaustive. This is just, in no particular order, the definitive list of the 20 albums that have defined the noughties at themilkfactory.

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THE 2009 REVIEW

themilkman on Dec 13th 2009 07:52 pm

The 2009 Review

Twelve months compiled into just twenty albums. From the thousands of records released each year, it is difficult to get even a handful on the site, and even more difficult to decide which ones were the best of the lot. This is however the twenty albums that have marked 2009 for themilkfactory.

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BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP: Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp Records)

themilkman on Oct 15th 2009 01:01 am

Broadcast & The Focus Group: Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age

BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP
Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age
WARP189
Warp Records 2009
24 Tracks. 48mins36secs

Icon: arrow Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD Amazon US: CD | LP | DLD Boomkat: CD | LP iTunes: DLD

There are few collaborations seeming more fitting than that of retro-futurist popsters Broadcast and library music collagist The Focus Group. Julian House, who heads the latter, and instigator of the Ghost Box imprint, is a graphic designer by trade, and has been responsible for every Broadcast record cover to date. His work is so much part of Broadcast that they described him as ‘like another member of the band’ when we interviewed them six years ago.

While Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age is officially labelled as a mini-album, its twenty-three tracks and near-fifty minutes allow for a fully extended narrative Continue Reading »

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VARIOUS ARTISTS: Warp20 (Box Set) / Warp20 (Recreated) / Warp20 (Chosen) (Warp Records)

themilkman on Sep 17th 2009 07:20 pm

Various Artists: Warp20 (Box Set) Various Artists: Warp20 (Recreated) Various Artists: Warp20 (Chosen)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Warp20 (Box Set) / Warp20 (Recreated) / Warp20 (Chosen)
WARP20.0 / WARP201 / WARP 202
Warp Records 2009
– / 21 Tracks / 24 Tracks. – / 99mins13secs / 127mins18secs

Warp20 (Box Set)
Icon: arrow Boomkat: BX

Warp20 (Recreated)
Icon: arrow Amazon UK: CD Amazon US: CD Boomkat: CD iTunes: DLD

Warp20 (Chosen)
Icon: arrow Amazon UK: CD Amazon US: CD Boomkat: CD iTunes: DLD

LFO. Three metallic blue letters, straddled by a ghostly shape, set on a black background. Three letters that changed things forever. The year was 1991, I was browsing through the new arrivals in my local records store, and the Designers Republic artwork of LFO’s Frequencies was standing out from the blur, calling out for my attention. An hour or so later, I was left baffled by a record which I was struggling to understand. On one side, the lush flow and shattering bass of LFO or Simon From Sydney irresistibly titillated my appetite for crisp evocative electronics, on the other, I had never experienced anything quite as bare as Mentok 1 or We Are Back. This album bore its influences on its sleeve, literally, and it took a few listens to ‘get it’. But ‘get it’ I did. More than I could have ever wished for. I was hooked. Not only on LFO, but also on Warp.

The brainchild of Steve Beckett and the late Rob Mitchell, who founded the label twenty years ago in the former metallurgic city of Sheffield, Warp found itself at a crossroad between the dying acid scene and the nascent UK techno/electronica movements Continue Reading »

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BROADCAST: The Future Crayon (Warp Records)

themilkman on Aug 19th 2006 01:13 pm

Broadcast: The Future Crayon

BROADCAST
The Future Crayon
WARPCD146
Warp Records 2006
18 Tracks. 69mins31secs

Transmitting from Birmingham, Broadcast have, in the ten years they have been around, progressively crafted a very unique place for themsleves on the British music scene. While their first EPs, originally released on Wurlitzer Jukebox and Duophonic and later collected on Work And Non Work for Warp, showed similar inspirations to those of long-term friends Stereolab, from the DIY avant-garde of the seminal BBC Radiophonic Workshop to the psychedelic of The United States Of America or the Silver Apples and the sweeping cinematic beauty of Ennio Morricone, Broadcast have progressively developed and refined their very own blend of experimental pop, which they have deployed over three albums and countless EPs.
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