Album review: Excepter 'Black Beach'

In the wrong hands, minimalism can be dangerous. Consider New York’s Excepter, an “improvisational performance group” who last year went to Big Sur to record themselves mucking about on the beach. Flutes and percussive toys were clumsily assailed. The result is an album so tedious its deployment as a means of torture seems possible. Most of the tracks consist of random parping, rustling and rattling, rendering them evocative of The Fast Show’s inept Patagonian buskers. The exception is ‘Castle Morro’, during which trance music starts to rumble in the distance, recreating the experience of an early-hours wander across a festival site. This, depressingly, is as good as it gets.

Niall O’Keeffe

2 out of 10