Rocket Probes – July 2021 playlist

GOAT – Queen of the Underground
(Been 3 years since we had any new GOAT music...they have not disappointed!)
GOAT

GNOD – Paint it Blacker
(New GNOD 7" on Golden Lion Records)
GNOD

Dialect – Under Between
(Lavish textures...one half of Land Trance)
Dialect

Jussi Lehtisalo – Pelkuri
(Jussi from Pharaoh Overlord takes the fuzz of '6' and takes it somewhere uncharted before) 
Jussi Lehtisalo

Sawdust Caesars – 'A Potential Social Menace Of The First Magnitude'
(A collection of unreleased material from their archives)
Sawdust Caesars 

Anadol – Uzun Havalar
(Re connecting with this incredible album from 2018)
Anadol

Mudo – The Beast Speaks
(Darkness descends)
Mudo

Microcorps – XMIT
(New album from Alex Tucker)
Microcorps

Thee Alcoholics – Tape II
(Second release of beautiful scuzz from London's best new noise band!)
Thee Alcoholics

Fulu Miziki – OK Seke Bien
(Ugandan repetitions)
Fulu Miziki

Blak Saagan – Se Ci Fosse La Luce Sarebbe Bellissimo
(Great album on the ever reliable Maple Death Records)
Blak Saagan

Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Aubergine
(Cheers to the Centrum guys for turning our antennas on to this...)
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist

Colleen – Implosion-Explosion
(...also thanks to Centrum for bringing this to our attention)
Colleen

Paul Chain – Is Dead Volume 1
(Experimental cosmic sounds from Italy)
Paul Chain

Sussan Deyhim and Shirin Neshat ‎– Soliloquy
(Great collision of sounds – listen/watch at Tate Modern right now)
Sussan Deyhim and Shirin Neshat

Sons of Viljems – Jelena
(Mournful soundscape)
Sons of Viljems

El Michels Affair – Unathi
(Skewed Turkish-style funk jam...a GOAT recommendation)
El Michels Affair

Death Angel – The Ultra Violence
(Back to our roots...10min+ of classic 80s thrash)
Death Angel

Klaus Weiss - Survivor
(Synth n' drums)
Klaus Weiss

The Transcendence Orchestra – Satsuma Felt Slow
(Immersive sounds from Anthony Child and Daniel Bean)
The Transcendence Orchestra

Vox Populi! – Myscitismes
(Industrial soundscapes from the Fourth World)
Vox Populi!

Offering – Earth
(Taken from Steve's The Holy Family album launch DJ set)
Offering

Khalab & M'berra Ensemble – Curfew
(Italy meets West African sounds)
Khalab & M'berra Ensemble

Matching Mole – Instant Kitten
("It's a Mole!")
Matching Mole

Valentino Mora – Underwater
(A tale of drifting drones and rhythms)
Valentino Mora

Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt –The Blob/Tense Cuts
(Great seagued tracks from a great album)
Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt

Oranssi Pazuzu – Live At Roadburn
(One of our fave bands around at the moment)
Oranssi Pazuzu

Hans Zimmer – Tick Tock
(Late night repetitions)
Hans Zimmer

Listen/sign-up to our 'updated monthly' Rocket Probes Spotify playlist here:

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Listen to Steve Davis on the 'Synthetic Dreams' Podcast

Listen in here: Synthetic Dreams

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Listen to Vol.1 of The Holy Family's 'Six Of The Best' playlist

The Holy Family have just launched the first of a series of Spotify playlists called 'Six Of The Best'. The title of this first volume is 'Ritual & Repetition' and features incredible music from Tim Hecker, Codona, The Stargazer's Assistant, Von Zamla, Urban Sax and Cylobe.

Listen here: Spotify

Keep your eyes and ears open for Vol.2!

The Holy Family's debut album is out now on ltd 2LP and CD.

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Introducing 'Time we left this world today' – a very special Rocket & Carnival Brewing collaboration

We have teamed up with the great Carnival Brewing to create a special beer called 'Time we left this world today' – a DDH session pale ale that comes in six different ltd edition cans.

The cans feature six Rocket album sleeves: Goat's 'World Music', Teeth of the Sea's 'Master', GNOD's 'Just Say No to the Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine', The Utopia Strong's S/T album, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs album 'Viscerals' and Pharaoh Overlord's '6'.

But most importantly, about the beer...
'Time we left this world today' is a hazy, juicy 5% pale ale brewed with loads of wheat and oats for a thick body then dry hopped with citra and mosaic to maximise the juice levels.

You can buy these ltd edition cans from here:

Carnival Brewing

The beer will also be available on draft for a ltd time at a selection of bars and venues across the UK.

Cheers!

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GNOD and JK Flesh to release collaborative EP on The state51 Conspiracy records

The four-track GNOD vs JK Flesh EP that was first made available last December via The Quietus's subscriber service is to be released on The state51 Conspiracy's new '51 editions' lathe series. It will be released via the labels site on 16 August.

You can watch a visual for GNOD's version of 'Not Listening' above.

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Freq reviews Gnod's Easy To Build, Hard To Destroy

They say:

The nouveau mediaevalism of the first track on Easy To Build, Hard To Destroy, “Elka” is a choice gem plucked for those early hippy daze where I first mentally hitched a ride on the Gnod train from the back of a dusty Trowbridge barn. A trickle of curling consciousness, leaking naturally into the latch key languid incessants of “Inner Z”, full of sweeping Moog and dazzling silver, the free-flowing vocal caged by a chordic bite and colliding colour.

It’s hot and summery and I have this on headphones, a fly lands on the page of a book I’m reading, and it walks the words in time to that steadily metered sprawl that wheels through my head in twisting spirals. Its thin insect legs obscure the letters, then scrabble-dance as the vocals levitate languidly in a weird synchronicity that plays nicely along...

Read the rest here: Freq

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Tom Tom Rock reviews The Holy Family

They say:

The Holy Family's debut album is a surprising trip in mysterious sonic dimensions, an almost 90-minute long ritual whose master of ceremonies is David J. Smith , percussionist and multi-instrumentalist already with Guapo and The Stargazer's Assistant. The musicians who assist him have precedents with bands such as Gong, Coil, The Utopia Strong, Téléplasmite ... very respectable past that guarantee a very high technical level and that accompany us in the maze of the most creative British underground, in which this album also lives, to between avant-garde, progressive, folk wyrd, psychedelia with space and ethnic influences.

The 'plant' The Holy Family
The Holy Family is like a plant firmly anchored to mother earth, but with long branches reaching out into the universe. The roots are represented by references to an ancestral folk matrix, percussions are preferred to drums that easily evoke the image of esoteric rites consumed in dark clearings to awaken the elements of nature. As in Lovecraftian mythology, the doors of access to another reality are opened, which returns to us simultaneously from the deepest interstellar spaces and from a remote and forgotten past...

Read the rest here: Tom Tom Rock

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The Prog Aspect reviews The Holy Family

They say:

My initial thoughts were, “Can I just say… this album is fucking tremendous!” Read on further if you want the long version. 

One of my go-to “altered state” albums has long been The Isness by Amorphous Androgynous – those who know, know. When I spotted a vinyl version of the Abbey Road mix of this fine slice of English wiggoutery on Discogs, I had to snap it up. I just played it prior to giving my shiny new copy of The Holy Family a spin, and it is the perfect hors d’oeuvre for David J. Smith’s main course, I must say! Gaz Cobain’s lysergic musings meld seamlessly into I Have Seen the Lion Walking, the opening woozily wonderful song on this effervescent new album from a new-but-old band, from whom we always await fresh waxings with a puppy-like eagerness.

You see, The Holy Family is really those tremendous righteous noiseniks Guapo wearing Kosmische make-up and a lush feather in their cap. Convening in Plague Year to craft a new album, David J. Smith and his mischievous troupe, namely Kavus Torabi, Emmett Elvin, Sam Warren, and Michael J. York, found that the heavy manners of the times was guiding the Guapo muse into an entirely different and colour-negative elysian landscape, far removed from its usual altar of levitational and deeply spiritual insistently heavy and heady rhythms. Here, where the musical kaleidoscope frequently hones in on rolling vistas of odd but vaguely calming hues, before heading off through clouds of Kosmische dust, things are not what they once were or may ever be again...

Read the rest here: The Prog Aspect

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Flowers Must Die announce rare live show

Flowers Must Die are playing a rare show at Festival of the Midnight Sun in their home town of Linköping on the 28th of August. Also on the bill is Träden and Baby Grandmother.

Info: Festival of the Midnight Sun

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Freq reviews The Holy Family album

They say:

This has a weird energy, a smokey commune bonfiring prog, hippy trippiness and the more esoteric end of the musical spectrum.

A flamboyant mirage angeling the experimental itch of the Ya Ho Wha 13, King Crimson and Comus (and a hell of a lot more). The Holy Family‘s head architect David J Smith has gathered together a host of like-minded travellers, including The Utopia Strong’s Kavus Torabi, and Téléplasmiste’s Michael J York to bounce ideas between.

The Holy Family is a fusion of spacey collisions and peppered psychedelics inspired by the shimmering surrealism of Angela Carter and displaced realities of Dorothea Tanning, the narrative slips past, as snippets zero in, dreamily detonate, affix themselves like uneven tapestries alive with candied contours and half-lit rabbit holes.

That tindering ’70s Brian Eno off-cut that is “Skulls The…” coaxing the cobra to cast wavery silhouettes across the room. The acoustic dawn of “Inward Turning Suns” that merrily ribbons your head like a Woodstocked aquarius, its flowered braids kaleidoscopically kiltering into the Can-like candy of “Stones To Water” that beetles some tasty percussive recoil and gargling crocodiles. A diverse universe, satirically pinching at its influences as “Desert Night” lustfully devours a Comus-like glee, and the musicality drifts out from its moorings to Rorschach the uncharted...

Read the rest here: Freq

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