5 Oct 2019
Concrete Islands and NARC reviews Julie's Haircut's 'In The Silence Electric'
They say:
Julie’s Haircut harness avant-rock experimentation and channel intoxicating psychedelic grooves fuelled by a kosmische engine on In the Silence Electric
There’s a particular kind of thrill about hearing new material from a band who are unknown to you but have an already storied career. Such was my experience encountering Julie’s Haircut. Hailing from northern Italy, the band have been putting out material since the late nineties, but it took Andrew Weatherall playing two of the tracks from In the Silence Electric on his NTS Radio show in 2019 to open the door for me. The polyrhythmic dream-into-nightmare of the African-steeped “Pharaoh’s Dream” hit me like a psychedelic depth charge when Weatherall dropped it. Something like a sonic appropriation of The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles or The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni, with the primacy of another culture subsuming the not-wary-enough interloper. Weatherall ended the show on “Sorceror”, an intoxicating man-machine howl and propulsive groove somewhere along the lines of Roy Orbison making the dirtiest kosmische musik possible. In other words, two tracks in and I was hooked.
Read the rest: Concrete Islands
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Italian metaphysical electric noise band Julie’s Haircut have produced a real gem of controlled power and strange beauty. Spiritualized-esque, it’s a driven mix of staccato drones, sax wails, psyched out guitar and whispered reverb menace.
The V(elvet) U(nderground) dials are full on at key points in the music, even extending to the avant-garde artist’s sleeve work by Annegret Soltau, which the band state as their inspiration, claiming “…a liberation from the shackles of oppression and of the everyday”. Opening track Anticipation Of The Night is an elevating buzz of hypnotic intensity which clearly indicates the path taken through the rest of the album, drifting purposefully from tenebrous mysterious hearts of darkness to screaming noise-flooded fields.
See the piece here: NARC
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