Norman Records review "Goetheanum"

...according to our Mike on 18 May 2011.

On this super-limited cassette release, Matthew Shaw is credited as playing "guitar, piano, singing bowl and voice". Now I really couldn't tell you what a singing bowl is until today, but I looked it up and it's a type of standing bell/gong thing, apparently. Learn something new every day. This tape consists of quite sparse, minimal drones; quite unintrusive and relaxing stuff, much more on the twinkly ethereal side than the harsh and grating one. Cosmic as fuck, basically. To be honest I'm not hearing guitar, piano or voice on here, so I'm guessing that whatever he's done with those instruments has been processed and tinkered with until it's just texture on the ethereal smudge. Phil says that it sounds celestial, "Like the music of the heavens, if there is any". I reckon heaven's got some proper skronky synthpop vibe going on, though, with really filthy 80s bass with a total flappy filter on it, and everyone's totally getting their dance party on.