Okkervil River, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 22 November 2008

Okkervil River’s concert at Porgy & Bess on Saturday night is a very strong contender for my show of the year. With just a few weeks to go before 2008 wraps up, its pole position is unlikely to be overtaken. This was a night of sheer blinding inspiration, with song after song ramming home extraordinary amounts of rhythmic flair and melodic inventiveness. In Will Sheff the group has a frontman like none I have ever seen: searingly honest, passionate and quite transported in his breathtaking urge to communicate through live performance.

Michael Gira, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 21 November 2008

There seems to be an occasional series of concert reviews on this blog — see Leonard Cohen, Whitehouse and Einstürzende Neubauten — that mostly consist of Epiphanies-style reminiscences of my first awareness of the artist in question. This, though, is the one I’ve been waiting to write — how I fell in love with Swans, probably the most important group of my life.

Nurse With Wound: Shipwreck Radio Vols. 1 & 2, Soundpooling

As Nurse With Wound approach their 30th year of activity, their public profile is higher than ever. A slew of new releases and reissues, a series of well received live performances and a collaboration with Faust have all served to raise awareness of Steven Stapleton’s formidably strange life’s work, once shrouded in mystery and anonymity. The famously eremitic Stapleton, who lives with his family in a remote farmhouse in Ireland, has even dipped his toe into the fetid waters of internet commerce, selling limited edition prints through his official Website.

Tanakh: Ardent Fevers

This fourth Tanakh album is, like its predecessors, largely the work of Jesse Poe. More song-oriented than previous efforts, it nods in the direction of various past luminaries while confidently asserting its own identity thanks to Poe’s particular brand of sensitive, literate songwriting.

Michael Gira: Songs for a Dog

An odd release, this – a mish-mash of previously released and unreleased material, it nevertheless provide a useful introduction to one side of Michael Gira’s post-Swans work.

Maurizio Bianchi: Elisionem

Maurizio Bianchi is an Italian noise musician who is perhaps best known for his early association with Whitehouse and their Come Org label. In 1981, Bianchi gave copies of his early noise recordings to Whitehouse’s William Bennett, who re-edited them without Bianchi’s approval and released two albums’ worth of material under the name Leibstandarte SS MB. Bianchi himself does not count these albums as part of his oeuvre, even though they are undoubtedly responsible in part for such public profile as he currently has.

Graf & Zyx: Trust No Woman Plus

Along strikingly similar lines to Cultural Amnesia’s Enormous Savages, here’s a reissue of another lost artefact of electronic pop. This time the Klanggalerie label has disinterred the very rare 1981 album Trust No Woman by the Austrian duo of Inge Graf and Walter Zyx, adding a slew of bonus tracks ranging from 1977 to 1986 for good measure.

George: A Week of Kindness

A week of kindness is the very least you should extend to anyone who introduces you to this little gem. The duo of Michael Varty and Suzy Mangian have produced an inspired fusion of icy slowcore, lo-fi instrumental textures and ethereal electronic atmospheres. At times calling to mind the achingly sad quietude of Low, at others the aerated starkness of Julee Cruise, the album progresses through its fifteen tracks like a slowly unfolding musical drama.

Dredd Foole: Daze on the Mounts

Dredd Foole is a kind of godfather to the free folk scene. Born Dan Ireton, the 57-year-old American has been an itinerant musical presence in the north-eastern USA for over 20 years. Having released two albums in the 1980s under the name Dredd Foole and the Din, and played with Boston art-punks Mission of Burma, Ireton disappeared from view in the 90s but was re-energised by the emergence of the free folk weirdos in the early 2000s.

Cultural Amnesia: Enormous Savages

The appearance of this record is a remarkable piece of musical archaeology and certainly one of the reissues of the year. Active between 1980 and 1983, Cultural Amnesia were a deeply submerged part of the British post-punk underground scene, dispensing experimental synth pop with an Industrial edge. Their milieu was the cassette culture, a many-tentacled network of like-minded souls which took full advantage of the ubiquity of the compact cassette and the affordability of multi-track recording equipment, recording their music at home and distributing it principally by mail order. Into this vibrant scene, Cultural Amnesia launched three full-length albums and numerous tracks on compilations; this new album contains a tantalisingly small, nine-song selection of these.