Two new batches of ultra clinical, vacuum sealed, glitched out minimalism from Alva Noto and Raster-Noton. The difference this time around is that these tracks are FUNKY. Well, sort of. Gorgeously packaged in oversized cardboard sleeves, printed with tripped out geometric patterns and pressed on those 3" cds embedded in 5" clear plastic, and assembled in such a perfect way, it's obvious that the Raster folk are designers first, musicians second. And that feeling comes across in the music as well. Painfully precise, perfectly constructed, and completely sterile. But in a good way. From the song titles ("Funkbugfx") to the head nodding rhythms contained within, this is obviously Alva Noto's funk record. But it's unlike any funk you've ever heard. Sine waves, and test tones and rumbling bass frequencies, white and pink noise, are all painstakingly constructed into a delicate lattice of alien funk, an extreme (and extremely rigid) dance floor music for some unimaginable outer (or inner) space dance party. Where the guests are all blocks of crystal, or swirling clouds of molecules, or pools of gelatinous ooze that sort of undulate sexily to the glith and click of this unfunky funk. These are the kind of grooves that you can picture scientists in sealed vacuum suits rocking out to in their lab on their ipods. Or maybe imagine Ryoji Ikeda and Sachiko M getting together to "jam" and running through some James Brown tunes, but in their inimitable, barely there style. Weird but pretty wonderful too.
Although I don't predict that Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto and Alva Noto) will be taking a sabbatical any time soon, the global electronica community might be better for it if he did. Not because his work's not great -- quite the opposite. It's just that the proliferation of Noto imitators might subside, and maybe artists would be more inclined to try something new. Maybe.
We love Alva Noto. His minimal rhythmic soundscapes are just so fantastic, dense and complex but at the same time impossibly simple and spare. And everything he does is so high concept. But in a way, that's not obvious just listening to the music. This may be art, high concept art, but the resulting sounds transcend art, and become music, and grooves, pleasing to the ear, not only the mind.�
Unitxt is Alva Noto's (aka Carsten Nicolai) return to 'the rhythm' after a handful of releases (in several different series) that were much more esoteric and ambient. Unitxt is still pretty ridiculously high concept, with the songs developed through various methods: one song is a portrait of Nicolai converted into sound, another is based on the golden ratio, a recitation of an endless row of numbers, another is based on a reading of the various items in Nicolai's wallet, credit cards, business cards, notes, just reading the words and numbers and converting the resulting information into sound. Endlessly amusing for sure, but it wouldn't mean shit if the music was bad. Thankfully, this is exactly the stuff we love from Nicolai, super clinical machine like soundscapes of skitter and glitch. everything sharp and clipped, the grooves far from funky, at least in the normal sense, but VERY funky in some sort of fucked up futuristic minimal robot dancefloor way. A few of the tracks feature vocals, but they're in German, and spoken quickly and rhythmically, making them less like lyrics and more like another overlaid rhythm (especially when the voice is just reciting numbers).
Imagine a huge white glass cube filled with robots, all hunkered over computers and drum machines, and synthesizers and equalizers, everything totally automated, huge gears turning, machines pulsing, the robots locked into the same motion over and over, a strange assembly line. At the end, a tiny speaker, facing a huge empty grassy field, a blue sky, nothing in the sky but a single white cloud. Perfectly ovoid. Out of the speaker comes this. That's what we imagine when we listen to Unitxt. Stripped down, cool and clinical outer space future robot anti-funk, laced with plenty of sculpted buzz and crackle, and shaped from bits of hiss and crunch.�
Tacked on to the end of the record, are a whole series of fragments and sound sources, each created from transforming an image or information into sound. These are 'Source Code Solos' to be played over the other tracks, or might assume, that with these sounds, and your own giant robot manned glass cube sound factory, you could make your very own Unitxt!
After a multitude of records filled with austere expanses of ultra minimal, cold and clinical beep and click, or warm lush dreamlike ambience, Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, finally seemed to embrace the funk a few years back - which for some of us, would not have been a good thing necessarily, if it weren't Nicolai, cuz Alva Noto funk is something utterly unto itself, a wild super dynamic robotic funk that takes all manner of glitch and whir, hum and click, beep and hiss, and weaves those minimal building blocks into something incredibly and impossibly groovy. This might be the best Alva Noto funk record yet. Weird and minimal enough for the dancefloor hating avant experimental headphone set, but holy shit, we can barely imagine what would happen if some big time DJ just unleashed one of these jams at full volume, besides everyone going apeshit, it seems like everybody's brains and eardrums would just melt, these sounds so pure, the lows so intense and rib cage rattlingly low, the highs piercing sine waves, and in-between, all manner of hum and hiss that we imagine would blow your hair back if you were standing in front of a big pile of speakers. But in headphones, this is total bliss out alien robofunk, that sounds better than anything we can imagine! But this is Alva Noto, so there's lots of other stuff going on, long stretches of glitched out super ominous buzz, over some looped skitter, or some weird swirling lush drones, or some dizzying rapidfire percussive stutter, some full on speaker shredding noise, some gorgeously serene electronic ambience, but it always eventually returns to the funk, or the groove, or whatever you call the thing that makes these weird beeps and clicks take over your body and force it to move along to the music. So goddamn great!
Like most Raster-Noton releases, the latest from Alva Noto begins with plenty of stutter and squelch,�sinewaves and dog whistle tones, subterranean rumble and digital clips, but it's actually kind of misleading, as the rest of the disc exists in a sonic landscape much closer to the Kompakt sounds of Pop Ambient, or the hissy soft focus ambience of Tim Hecker, than the lowercase world of glitch and squeak.�
The first three tracks are strange minimal sonic experiments, plenty of hiss and scrape, static and hum, but it's track four, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)", where suddenly things get downright pretty. Soft distant swells, mysterious slow motion loops, hard to say whether the sounds are synthesizers or tape loops or field recordings, although according to the liner notes all the sounds here are drawn from airports, in flight announcements and telephone hold music, but by 'xeroxing" these sounds over and over, and letting each copy degrade just a little,�Alva Noto takes those degraded sounds and shapes them into lovely blurred dronescapes, eventually wrapping them in soft prickly layers of digital hiss, which only adds to the soft focus romance and dreamlike otherworldliness.�
The tracks are named and grouped thematically. The ultra short "Astoria" tracks seem to act as brief respites, tiny sonic events separating the longer more song based tracks. The focus seems to be on those particular songs, each named "Haliod Xerrox Copy" and numbered or given an extra title in parentheses, these are gorgeous fuzzy, blown out dreamy drifts, all reminiscent of�"Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)" but each, with its own distinctive flow, seemingly drawn from the same sonic template and utilizing a similar melodic theme, but softly molded into subtly different shapes. In "Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Airfrance)" it's all warm fuzz and muted white noise, a dense buzz, that is more soothing than abrasive. Moments later, in "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy_6" the buzz becomes washed out, pulsing louder and then quieter, while off in the distant, we are able to observe gentle lilting sonic events, as if viewed through a dense fog. Later on, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 1" returns to the billowy bliss of track 4, offering long soft contrails of sound, floating weightless amidst swirls of smeared radio static and and the sound of TV channel snow.
The disc finishes with the lengthy "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy 9", the most dramatic of the bunch. The melody is again similar, there is still plenty of hiss and fuzz and white noise, but the low end is more intense, giving the track more weight and emotion, the peaks and valleys too are more pronounced, a much more dynamic musical journey, a much heavier drone element. This is intense, brooding, beautiful too, but haunting and ominous, a gorgeous minimal sonic smear of M83 fuzz, Tim Hecker-ish sepia toned blur, and Basinski-esque looped dreaminess, all wrapped in Noto's thick fuzzy ambient buzz.�
The cd comes packaged in another striking and strange oversized Raster-Noton package, a multiple panel fold out sleeve, with die cuts holding the disc in place.
Part two of Alva Noto's Xerrox series takes up right where the last one left off, continuing on in a much more buzzy, blissy, droney vein, way more textural and melodic than many of the AN records that have come before. In the review of volume one we mentioned Pop Ambient, and if anything volume 2 is even more washed out and shimmery, right out of the gate, AN offers up a warm wash of muted buzz, and thick gristly whir, softly pulsating, layered and warm, seemingly gone are the harsh tones and glitchy clicks and pops found on most Raster-Noton releases. Could be that Xerrox is just a concept record, but we have to say, as much as we loved the clipped minimalism of other Alva Noto records, the sounds here are quite divine. But this is an Alva Noto record, so even these warm whirls of drifting ambience, are laced with bits of static and hiss, super high end sine waves, but they're woven deftly into the sound, and serve to simply add more texture. There's a brief bit of super minimal beep and rumble, but then it's right back into that gorgeous drifty haze, that could just as soon be a Tim Hecker record.
"Xerrox Meta Phaser" follows suit, at least in the beginning, a soft whirring soundscape, that quickly escalates into an almost Sunn like dirge before exploding into a squall of blown out white noise. And then we're back to the dreamy dronemusic, this time, stretched out strings, smeared into soft summery swells, laced with a patina of gritty hiss, and so it goes, the whole record is a dark swirling expanse of muted minimal melodies, warm textures, mysterious drones, and delicate hazy drifts, the usual glitch and buzz, relegated to accents and filigree, rarely interfering in the rest of the record's blissy sprawl. Any one of these tracks would be right at home on the newest, more Kranky-fied Pop Ambient comp, and thus, this might be the first Raster-Noton record that might just appeal to all the drone and dirge folks as much as the glitch and pop people.
Like all R-N stuff, gorgeously designed and packaged, an oversized diecut, 8 panel sleeve, the cd nestled within the diecuts, the art spare and minimal and striking.
Insen is the exquisite follow-up to Vrioon, which was the first collaborative outing for seminal electronic musicians Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) and Ryuichi Sakamoto that came out in 2003. As on their first album, Insen centers upon the balance between the impressionist piano passages of Sakamoto and the cold yet graceful production of Nicolai. While the differences between the two records are subtle, they are certainly noteworthy as Nicolai slices up Sakamoto's piano into fine slivers of time-stretched fragments, terse rhythms, and blurred ambience. In turn, Nicolai realigns these sounds with Sakamoto's untreated notes, providing a complex interplay between the piano and its fractured electronic mimesis. In structuring all of the pieces on Insen, Nicolai occasionally situates his electronics along a parallel path to Sakamoto's piano, and slowly moves the two paths toward different directions, with Nicolai's rhythms achieving velocity and tension whereas Sakamoto's pointillist notes remain weighless and transient. Yet, Nicolai always teases with losing control over the composition, as he often snaps back into a somber atmosphere of minimalist smears, resorting to a similiar strategy as heard on Eno's epic Thursday Afternoon. Stunning.
When the dollars-to-minutes ratio eeks close to 1:1, we tend to get a little uncomfortable. Really, what's the big deal about David "Organum" Jackman doubling or even tripling up the sounds on his $15.00 singles that clock in at a couple of minutes? There's also been talk of this marketing psychology from this mathematical ratio due to a pending Boris LP, which is not going to be cheap (not surprising), but also isn't one of their monstrously long drone-doom pieces either... well it's just sorta long. So the question always comes down to the quality of the merchandise, is Boris worth the price of admission? The same question should be asked of the third collaboration between Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryuichi Sakamoto, which clocks in a little under 20 minutes. Again, the division of labor puts Sakamoto at the piano and Nicolai at the laptop, with Sakamoto providing a series of impressionist clusters of piano notes and elegant repetitions, and Nicolai smudging those sounds through his pixel crunching software. Harmonically crisp and deftly performed, the three pieces on Revep offer a nice variation on the theme set by the first two collaborations Vrioon and Insen. Sakamoto fans will delight that he's offered a new arrangement for his classic piece "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," which Nicolai aerosolizes into a fine mist of digital ephemera and pin-pricked ambience. Certainly as lovely as the first two!
Let me just mention the crucial facts up front. It has been said that "Vrioon" is all out of print and Raster-Noton is not going to be repressing this record any time soon. Thus we will not be able to get any more than what limited stock we have at the moment. Don't say we didn't warn you.
"Vrioon" is a collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto (of Yellow Magic Orchestra) in which Sakamoto provided source material of impressionistic piano pieces to Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), who blurred many of the edges into a beautiful ambience and added clusters of slow-moving rhythms. It's very simple and very effective and very beautiful... and soon, very out of print. If we could have got more, this would have likely been a 'record of the week' pick -- it's the kind of thing we instantly sell whenever it's playing on the store stereo.
"Opto Files" is the surprising combination of the Pole-esque neo-dub work of Denmark's Opiate and the clinically clicked rhythms of Noto (here calling himself Alva Noto, although there hasn't been any discernable difference between the Noto and Alva Noto projects). While Noto has supplied his trademarked glitchs, it is Opiate who offers a wide spectrum of color to Noto's typically
Latest offering from long time collaborators Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Their work together really exemplifies the pinnacle and potential of true collaboration, each party bringing in a different aspect and aesthetic while simultaneously balancing each other and creating something neither would be able to achieve on their own.
While Sakamoto's work can be drenched in warmth and heavy emotion, Alva Noto is known for his ice cold precision and together they really are able to strike an awesome balance of sound that takes from each of their very different approaches to create a unique chilling warmth. With Sakamoto's impeccable piano playing, and Alva Noto's skilled hands processing and chopping us that playing, Summvs might just be their finest work together yet. The most sublime moment coming in their cover of Brian Eno's "By This River", which we really wouldn't want anyone else to touch, but these two are able to bring out its melancholy in such a breathtaking manner.
This is the rare album you want to play from start to finish, ideally in a clean and silent room where you can just drift and dream in its presence. So beautiful!
This limited edition cd ep was released by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times". Carsten Nicolai (Noto) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) did a three-hour set as part of the opening of the
Both the digipak design and the sounds on the cd lean towards the Raster-Noton aesthetic -- minimal clicks and cuts style, starting with a pleasant insectoid buzz and gradually adding layers of crackle and drone (and what sounds like crickets chirping or frogs croaking!). As the piece progresses, these "synthetic late summer night" sounds are augmented by high, wavering electronic tones. Really a gorgeous listen! This disc is apparently only available at the SFMOMA store, as well as locations in Berlin, London and Tokyo -- and here at Aquarius, which was nice of the SFMOMA people. Get it while you can...
This is basically the Raster-Noton allstars: Alva Noto, Byetone, Komet, and Signal (which is a collaboration of the aforementioned three artists) recording for Staalplaat's acclaimed "Mort Aux Vaches" series. Alva Noto's piece is a live documentation of the material found on his debut, with its terse electron pinpricks evolving amidst very slowly developing pure-tone, post-techno structures. Nicolai's performance of "Prototypes" clearly incorporates the same sounds found on his studio album, but the arrangement is one very long track and is completely different than the original. Byetone (aka Olaf Bender) is the least prolific of the Raster-Noton founders, with only a couple of releases. His 30 minutes for the Raster "Mort Aux Vaches" is a solid replication of Mika Vainio's crystalline "Metri" album for Sahko, as a surgical presentation of acid house bleeping grooves. Komet, who has recently simply been recording under his given name Frank Bretschneider, is the most effects-happy amongst the Raster-Noton family, warbling his pure tones through ring modulation and ample delay patterns to give the whispered clickery and alarm call bleeps a Frippertronic feel. The Signal recordings may be the weakest amongst the group, Pan Sonic / Goem throwaway tracks with electronic loops are set up and left unchanged, as if nobody amongst the group wanted to change anybody else's sounds. It is the slippages between melody and rhythm that make the Raster-Noton sound so appealing. While the rest of this double set is well worth checking out, Raster-Noton's collaborative efforts prove they are perhaps better as solo artists.
Here's the much anticipated cd reissue of this way-too limited Alvarius B album which came and went on vinyl in a matter of days early in 2011. Alvarius B is the solo project of Alan Bishop, better known as one of the Sun City Girls - a project which dissolved after over twenty years following the death of drummer and fellow provocateur Charles Goucher. The Girls (a trio rounded out by Bishop's brother Richard) were specialists in frustratingly brilliant psychedelic-punk, damaged with free jazz, Southeast Asian pop, and fucked-up beat poetry. They were notorious for their designed lack of editorial constraints in situating brilliantly over-charged weirdo-pop melodic crescendos often hybridizing the likes of Ennio Morricone and Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son next to an uncomfortably misogynistic rant from Alan Bishop's slimy Bukowski parody as Uncle Jim. Even the most die-hard Sun City Girls fans who could stomach and perhaps grow to love their confrontational affronts will undeniably say that it's Torch Of The Mystics or 303,003 Crossdressers From The Rig Veda that are the masterpieces of borderless songwriting.
So with the Girls no more, where would Alan Bishop take his own work? The Sir Richard Bishop records have been uniformly brilliant in their fiery elliptical fingerpicking, exploding the Takoma handbook; and Alan has often given off the appearance of being a trickster figure, presenting himself as a minstrel with an immense emotional range only to pull back the mask to reveal a devilish, blackened heart intent on causing misery upon all who hear. With all of this as a preamble, we can say that Alan has followed where the Sun City Girls ended their career on Funeral Mariachi, with this gorgeous record in the form of Baroque Primitiva.
The album is rich with covers, although an Alan Bishop cover would certainly amount to a delirious transfiguration. The man has long been obsessed by Ennio Morricone, and this expertise has been applied to some of the best compendiums of Morricone's best work during the '60s and '70s. And 6 of the albums 12 songs are attributed to Morricone, or "Maestro Padre Supremo" as Bishop describes him in the liner notes. These songs enjoy the lilting yet complex melodies that Morricone had been so known for, with Bishop crooning all of the wordless oohs and ahhs that Morricone had originally penned for a female vocalist. Bishop has long been known for his ability to hit sharp falsettos in the Girls. Even though he does bend many of the notes towards atonality, he is quite reverential towards the Morricone text. In fact, the contrast between Morricone's ecstatic songs and the many cracks in Bishop's deliberately lo-fi production (think Sebadoh's four-track recordings with just multi-tracked voice, guitar and chord organ) serves to heighten the drama of these recordings. There are a couple of Bishop originals, "Humor Police" is very much a manic carnavalesque number and "Well Known Stranger" is a classic downer jam of strum and vocal mope that sounds like it could be a lost Neil Young tune, but done way better. The two other covers on the album are also quite noteworthy: the only song to emerge from his aborted album of John Barry covers in the form of "You Only Live Twice" and one hell of jubilant romp through the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is very nicely packaged in the form of a 30 page hardback book, featuring various close-ups of the nude mandala artwork photographed by Kristen Anderson, to sweeten the deal. Already proving to be one of the best albums of 2011. So don't let the cd pass you by, if you didn't have the good fortune of getting hold of the vinyl already.
Originally released on vinyl in 2005 on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label, Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset was at the time the first Alvarius B release in 7 years, a project of Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, accompanied by long time SCG accomplice Eyvind Kang as well as Randall Dunn, Tim Young and Andrew McGinnis.
Alvarius B is some sort of weirdo psychedelic cabaret folk music, somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and show tunes (?). The opener is a swampy bit of country folk, all slithery acoustic guitars, junk yard percussion, weird voices, Bishop's snarly vox, lots of buzz and tense atmospheric shimmer, and the lyrics, an over the top tale of miserable miscreants, while the second track is even more Tom Waits-ish, a piano ballad, haunting and melancholy, distorted and creepy, over a chorus of nighttime crickets, as if Bishop was set up on the porch of some old house on the edge of a black swamp. From there on, the sound slips into a strange lilting doom folk, Kang's viola, moaning over some atonal strum, and Bishop ranting like a madman. Deep chanted vocals draped over jagged acoustic guitar, a distant choir competes with some strange grunting, jaw harp, moody hushed vocals drift over a latticework of spidery steel string buzz, super dramatic and over the top, helps that that one is actually a cover, a piece by Italian horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi, lyrics of course courtesy of Bishop. Which is what turns it into something much sicker and more hauntingly demented than even Frizzi could have ever imagined.
They also tackle a Morricone track, and a traditional, but it hardly matters, Bishop and company make the songs their own, transforming them into oozing, misanthropic swamp folk dirges, creepy, and funny, and fucked up, exactly what you'd expect from one of the Sun City Girls, an aural roadtrip through the hellish mind of a madman, a lost world of run down houses, bleak swampland, of destitution and despondency, but viewed through a serious cracked lens, that makes even the most dismal and brutal and miserable situations and characters seem endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Awesome stuff, essential for Sun City Girls obsessives of course, but maybe a bit TOO out there for the general population, which is precisely what makes this so awesome.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
No need to go into much detail about this one, as the latest Alvarius B album is already sold out at the source, with no future for a repressing. We have less than a half-dozen left, going going going...
Alvarius B is the nom de plume for Alan Bishop, the former Sun City Girl. Where his brother Richard strives for the technical mastery of his pastiche of middle eastern ragas, Takoma pluckery, and flamenco swagger, Alan prefers a roughhewn, dissonant approach to the guitar instrumental. Nope, no singing found here; but he does show off his songwriting chops with plenty of angular riffs that still express the sneer of a scoundrel. Limited to just 400 copies.
It goes without saying that the Sun City Girls often exhibit splashes of hallucinatory brilliance throughout their pseudo-eastern psychedelia mashed with cinematic grandeur and way-fucking-far-out esoterica, but at the same time, the Girls have a bad habit of releasing way too much meanderingly psychotic material that definitely tries the patience of even the most die-hard SCG fan. Curiously enough, the smattering of solo recordings from the Bishop brothers, Sir Richard Bishop and Alvarius B (aka Alan Bishop), have managed to avoid the failings of some of the SCG recordings. The reissue of the first Alvarius B record clearly demonstrates this (as well as the 2005 vinyl-only record Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset). Recorded between 1981-1989, many of Alan's severely mangled folk-songs are curiously prescient of the current flourishing of acid folk fingerpicking. At the same time, these fucked-up lo-fi indie-spluttering instrumentals sound like an excessively complex Sebadoh tune played by one guy with a tuneless guitar. Either way you look at it, here's one of the great recordings from one of the Bishop brothers. It went out of print quickly the first time it was released on vinyl back in 1994. We hope it won't happen again.
Fucked up minstrel-tunes, misogynistic murder ballads, and world-weary blues played by a man who's too smart and too talented to play everything straight. Yup, it's Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls in his singer-songwriter guise of Alvarius B. Alan's poetics of cruelty and black humor are highlighted most egregiously on this eponymous album (not to be confused with another self-titled record from 1994), and if anyone is expecting the puckish tunes from Bishop's acclaimed 2011 album Baroque Primitiva with its Morricone, John Barry, and Beach Boys covers will be shocked by all of the dead whores and vulgar epithets that come a mile a minute from Bishop's venomous mouth. Bishop's arrangements typically find the man scraping and rapping his bloody knuckles across his steel-strung acoustic guitar with a violent aggression that splutters out of stolen blues progressions, always punctuating his deranged lyrics. As was the case with the Sun City Girls, Bishop's solo work teases with moments of musical ecstasy thanks to some downright brilliant songwriting that get all twisted and fucked up with those gnashed acoustic chords or subverted by a peyote visions (e.g. "he sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia") or downright mean spirited lyrics (e.g. "Fucking maggot, you're in the way!")
Originally released as a double lp 1997 on Abduction, the album went out of print quickly only to fetch small ransoms on eBay. The double cd sports six bonus tracks including the Sun City Girls classic "CCC" from 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. It's pretty fucking recommended, but only if you don't mind getting sonically slapped in the face every other song.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
People had been really excited for this collaboration, and on first listen it was a little difficult to see why. The first handful of tracks come courtesy of Alvarius B, otherwise known as Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, and sad to say, sound really tossed off and pointless. Sounding alternately like a guitar lesson with two people arguing in the background, someone blowing through a crazy straw, and a guitar with squirrels climbing on it, those tracks had us pretty much ready to give up. Thankfully, we stuck it out until Dylan Nyoukis' 12 minute closing track on side one, a relentless barrage of muted thumb pianos and rubber band/kleenex box guitars that overlap and intersect and eventually become a loping, skipping, Philip Jeck-ian soundscape, warm and sepia toned. Side two fares just as well with Nyoukis and Bishop teaming up for a super abstract half hour of song snippets, transient noise bursts, bizarre sonic disturbances, eastern ragas, rumbling drones, spastic freakouts and subtle melodies. Sounds like the Sun City Girls' recent Sublime Frequencies series of world music recordings, only from some other world entirely.
One of the remnants from Record Store Day 2014. Each of the Bishop brothers from the Sun City Girls gets a side of vinyl to bloody their knuckles on the guitar. While the cover sports a sunken portrait of Alan Bishop (aka Alvarius B) at the microphone with cigarette in hand, he doesn't turn up in his Uncle Jim guise. In fact, he doesn't even sing at all. His spluttering acoustic guitar instrumentals are full of piss and vinegar, taking up the violent folk-punk strum that was one of many focal points for the Sun City Girls as well as much of his Alvarius B output. Richard Bishop offers a set of his cocksure flamenco-meets-Egyptian acoustic guitar solos of effortless esotericism and beguiling mastery of his instrument. Just a few left.
Cerberus Shoal wrote a song. Alvarius B wrote a couple songs. All in all, three songs were written. between 1996 and 2002, Alvarius B, who is Alvin Bishop from the Sun City Girls, recorded his two songs and the Cerberus Shoal song and Cerberus Shoal, who do their droney folky collective thing with lots of instruments from all over the world way out there in Maine, recorded their song and the two Alvarius B songs. Ok, so that's the story of how this second installment in North East Indie's series of splits came to be (first was " The Whys and Hows of Herman Dune and Cerberus Shoal," upcoming splits in the series will include Magic Carpathians and Guapo). This pairing seems natural; past AQ reviews have compared Cerberus Shoal with Sun City Girls, and each person / group's style suits the songwriting of the other one very nicely. Alvarius B brings warm lo-fi acoustic guitar and vocals; Cerberus Shoal's musical universe, not so overtly "ethnic" here as on some of their other recordings, is populated by banjos, clattering typewriter percussiveness, and a uniquely droll vocal delivery.
Both Cerberus Shoal and Alvarius B contribute darkly surreal lyrical imagery, alternately plaintive and fucked-up, contributing to a psych-folk sound that manages to be simultaneously blackly comic and genuinely moving.
MPEG Download: CERBERUS SHOAL "The Real Ding" [/audio/cerberusshoalrealding.mp3]
MPEG Stream: CERBERUS SHOAL "The Real Ding" [/audio/cerberusshoalrealding.m3u]
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A semi-legendary fixture of the late eighties cassette underground, Alvars Orkester was a noise/drone duo obsessed with "the mysteries of psychic sickness, mental institutions, the industrial music culture and the power of sound". They took their influence from the likely industrial candidates, Test Dept. SPK, Throbbing Gristle and the like, but their sound soon developed into a more minimalist approach to sound, focusing more on the drone. The band split in the nineties only to reunite last year to record this 4 track exploration of paranoia and discord, fear and mortality, sickness and death.
The first track is a ten minute near static drone, dense and layered a high end sine wave hovering above a low end buzz, the two slowly shifting and subtly interacting. Sublime and in its own way quite gorgeous. Track two is much more harsh, an assemblage of digital feed back, harsh slabs of noise, chopped and sequenced into ear piercing rhythmic blocks of sound. Track three "Reality Distortion Field" is a shimmering soundfield of chimes and sinewaves, pulsing instrument hum and far away feedback, a murky backdrop for disembodied voices and strange tape manipulation. Truly creepy stuff. the final near 20 minute "Field Grey" is a super minimal expanse of barely there dark ambience. Low warm tones, ebb and flow, their shifts barely noticeable until near the end of the record when processed percussion swells up beneath the drones, and ultra subtle melodies drift ghost like from the murk. So haunting and lovely. Definitely for the dark drone obsessed, Organum, Lustmord, Chalk, Coleclough and the like.
And as with most releases on Ash International, gorgeously understated and quite striking packaging.
Not sure how we managed to not review/list this amazing record, we just stumbled onto a little cache of these beauties, each disc housed in a gorgeous wood box, with a slide out top panel revealing the disc inside, and the name of the band burnt/embossed into the wood of the box. So nice! In fact, so nice, you might want to buy one regardless of the music inside, lucky for us (and you), the sounds of Alvars Orkester are most definitely worthy of the over the top packaging.
The AO duo were a staple of the late eighties cassette underground, and it wasn't until much later, that one half of the Orkester would re-emerge as half of another duo we dig, The Skull Defekts. And similar to how the Defekts sculpt rhythms, Alvars Orkester sculpted textures and atmospheres, creating gorgeously lush abstract soft noise dronescapes and slow shifting heavily textured ambience.
The bulk of the record is drawn from long out of print cassettes, and is made up of long sprawling, smoldering, slow developing drones, layered and looped, the sounds are tangled into long streaks of pulsing sound, that often blur into gorgeously indistinct crystalline shimmers, but just as often blossom into corrosive squalls of distorted crunch. The tracks drift from abrasive electronic squelch, to hazy sun dappled drift, keening FX-warped skree to stumbling blown out krauty chaos, finally culminating in the 3 part final suite of short form electronic workouts, all squiggly and glitchy and spacey, sounding like some Radiophonic Workshop psych jam, lots of buzz and distortion wrapped around the swooping bloops and bleeps.
LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES, long out of print we'd imagine, we have just 3 copies, so act fast if you want one.
Depending on your tastes this is either the most insane and enjoyable record you're gonna hear all year or the record that will drive you utterly and completely crazy. Sounds like a perfect record for AQ no doubt. Always is an a cappella outfit from Australia who loop their vocals to create some super strange and mesmerizingly repetitive sounds. Somehow the human voices become blurred and it begins to sound like you're being swarmed by wild buzzing flies. If each of those flies was whispering the same thing in your ear. Hmmm... In some ways we hear the influence of Steve Reich's early tape pieces but here they end up broken down into shorter tracks that still test the limits of endurance and your tolerance for maddening repetition. Whenever we play this in the store at least a few people end up driven away, yet just as many freak out and need to know what's playing so they can buy it. Listen to the sound samples and figure out which camp you belong in. Just a matter of time before folks like Irwin Chusid and the Incredibly Strange Music brigade freak out to the totally insane sounds of Always.
It used to be, not a New Arrivals list would go by without some wonderful, weird new music from aQ pal Antony Milton, but lately, those release have been fewer and further between, so we've begun to treasure each one just a little bit more, not knowing how long it'll be 'til the next. We've long been fans of Milton's mercurial soundmaking, whether it be abstract ambience under his own name, or in any number of outfits making dark, psychedelic heaviness. So we weren't sure what to expect this time around, but Dragonfly ends up being a good fit for the Trensmat label, and their shift toward electronic music, albeit, of the noisier and more abstract/avant variety. Much like countryman Campbell Kneale (Our Love Will Destroy The World, Birchville Cat Motel), Milton has added beats to his sonic palette, creating a strange hybrid of NZ noise, and twisted techno, or warped house music? It doesn't mater what you call it really, and it's much different than Kneale's more electronic noise, the sound here still seems to be rooted in guitar, and has a distinctly krautrock feel, while the opener is all gristly high end, and loping rhythm, a sort of noisy kosmische space noise, it's on the title track where things seem to coalesce, the sound like some weird Sublime Frequencies style desert blues, that sort of looped buzzy riffage, wreathed in billowing clouds of FX heavy electric noise, soaring gouts of raga-like skree, and psych shred tangles, we're hearing hints of Gunter Schickert for sure, and as we say all the time, we would have been perfectly happy if the 5 minute title track was stretched out to full up the whole record. Total kraut-noise space-raga bliss out.
But fear not, there's plenty more where that came from. "Glassworld" is all dubby and abstract, a buried rhythm pulses beneath looped layers, and soft focus shimmers, muted sonic squalls, blurred into gauzy chordal washes, heady and hypnotic. "Helioscope" ditches the beats almost entirely, transforming the sound into something closer to Pop Ambience, hazy swells, over distant pulsations, dreamy, drifty and druggily drowsy. The final proper track is a grinding field of low end buzz and crunchy sci-fi lazer-pulses, all wrapped in fields of Geiger counter crackle, briefly ditching all the skree and leaving just muted minimal bass thrum, only to have the sound erupt again in a flurry of swirled FX and blurred buzzy noise. The final track is live, and stretches out over 13 minutes, and returns to the kraut-psych sound of the title track, the synths gristly and granular, peppered with swirls of smoother shimmer, all draped over a heartbeat like pulse, dreamily cosmic, before a mid song/set shift transforms the sound into something much darker, and noisier, a gritty minimal noise-techno that explodes into one final burst of white noise howl.
Includes a download code!!!
This is Antony Milton's first completely computer based recording, using the sounds of Tibetan instruments that just happened to be laying about. Things start off with what sounds like someone taking a powersaw to a bell, UGLY, but with gorgeous shimmering overtones. As the record progresses we hear lots of wild tribal percussion over a thudding pulse and some low end rumble, banjos chopped up into a digital soup that sounds a bit like a more uneven, more jagged Oval, and syrupy bass melodies and fluttery static over a dreamy, hypnotic dirge with rich swells and seasick melodies. This is a really nice mix of organic and non-organic sounds, computer manipulated into a collection of rich soundscapes, gorgeous ambience and some downright melodic, almost-pop-songs.
We'll just have to assume that AM stands for Antony Milton, head of Pseudo Arcana. This disc starts off with a three part piece, the sounds of passing traffic, buzzing insects, whirring fans, and sort of lowercase drones with the occasional percussive intrusion of a bumped microphone, or distant clatter. Eventually, strange otherworldly notes are introduced, sounding a bit like horns without reeds, more sound than actual notes, but they manage to add miniscule amounts of soothing melody. Part two sounds like a version of part one, only far away, and with the sound of crickets, that slowly evolves into a buzzing swarm. Part three sounds like a version of part two, but with the addition of doleful lonely melodies played on a bamboo flute. Sounds like some overheard, ancient ceremony being performed fireside. Track 2 is all casio bleeps and blips, that demarcate a warbly uneven synth drone, all dreamy and effevescent. Sounds a bit like a more lo-fi Boards Of Canada. The final track is a noisy assemblage of dissonant clatter and barely discernable melody, tape hiss, and a wild spray of notes and tones, like a Total or Gate record falling apart, slowly deconstructing before your ears. Nice.
One of three new discs in the latest series of lovingly hand made 3" cd-r's from the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis... Don't! label (the other two being Bonecloud and Nigel Wright, reviewed elsewhere on this list). Poerua Acid features two looooong tracks from beloved NZ noisemaker and PseudoArcana label head honcho Antony Milton, and is the perfect mix of his two sides of his sonic personality, one side lilting dreamy and melodic, the other, dense, muted and noisy.
The opening track begins with just guitar, all warbly and slightly out of tune, the tape speed shifting and changing speed, making it sound like the sound on one of those grade school film strips, warm and wreathed in reverb, underneath, strange little swells and swirls drift and shimmer. Over the course of the track, the delicate finger picked melodies sink deeper and deeper into the background, until all that's left is a blown out muddy dronescape of overlapping rumbles and haunting flute like melodies.
The second track is much less restrained, opening up with a thick wall of guitars, dense and tangled, thick with distortion, roiling and overblown, garbled vocals and all manner of mysterious melodies lurk ghostlike beneath an epic expanse of layered guitar grind, like a more blissed out and melodic Sunroof! or Hototogisu.
Packaged in thick textured maroon paper mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
And as always, these are SUPER LIMITED, and odds are we won't be able to get more. So don't dawdle...
Never heard of the oddly monikered Ama-Dots? Neither had we. But apparently this experimental post punk outfit from Milwaukee, having formed in the seventies, releasing their only proper single in 1980, were poised for greatness, having opened for Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Gang Of Four, even the Talking Heads, but somehow these guys were WAY weirder, just check out "Luxury With Her" the first track on this lp reissue of everything the group ever recorded. It's a filthy, grimy, loping bass driven creep, all low slung bass, woozy riffage, a lurching stop/start arrangements, some angular guitar scrape, some sample baby cries (?!) and some of the coolest, creepiest female vocals EVER, a raspy sort of growly croon, it's dark and weirdly groovy, sinister and seriously tense/intense. But Ama-Dots weren't all doom and gloom, their 'hit' "Hit Girls" is all angular and frantic, with super dramatic vox, over spidery guitar melodies, and a frenetic rhythm, a super distinctive call and response chorus, the sort of female fronted punk that was in short supply, and definitely struck a chord with the girl punks.
Frontwoman Boolah Hayes has the craziest voice, the music is pretty cool and weird, but when coupled with her deep raspy vocals, sometimes swopping into something super dramatic, putting on all manner of made up accents, but just as often slipping into a demonic growl or a feral bellow, transforming some of the sounds here into near metal, like some crazy female death metal vocalist found her way into an eighties post punk combo, making for some seriously kick ass, and super unique post punk, weird that this stuff has taken this long to get a proper reissue, but holy shit is this stuff great. And did we mention weird?
This collects the group's only 7" release, a lost EP, as well as unreleased demos and some live material, the studio stuff recorded by the legendary Ian Burgess (Big Black, Ministry, Effigies, etc.), pressed on swirled gold vinyl, housed in a super striking jacket, and includes a full color printed insert, with rare photos, liner notes and accounts of the group from friends, fans and writers.
A spectacular release from Tzadik's Composer series! Maryanne Amacher is a reclusive sound sculptor who constructs the aural equivalent of rust to be heard in the reverberant spaces of cathedrals. The sonorities constructed out of mutilated recordings of bells, tape noise, and lots of highly amplified alien noises that would normally be on the quiet side of inaudible.
A beautifully cromulant release.
While we've always liked what we've heard from this famous musical couple from Mali, it wasn't until this outing of theirs that we fell hard for their lively approach. They craft songs that come from their West African heritage while bringing some modern influences into the mix. Welcome To Mali has an immediacy and urgency in its grooves that swept us away on our first listen. While so many others who try to inject bits of electronics into traditional 'world' music usually fail miserably, creating a sound watered down and glossy beyond recognition, somehow Amadou & Mariam understand how to do so successfully while still staying so true to the roots of their music. This is an electrifying record that makes us move a bit bolder and brighter when we have it on. Highly recommended dance music for those into the hypnotic grooves of the likes of Tinariwen, too.
On local / Santa Cruz-based label Galaxia comes this supergroup of sorts. Amalgamated Sons of Rest is Will Oldham of PALACE, Jason Molina of SONGS:OHIA, and Alasdair Roberts of APPENDIX OUT. These guys have basically written the book on broken-voiced, broken-hearted, hollow-eyed, lovely back porch indie twang. A one of a kind 5-song session. Nice. Vinyl is one sided with a marine-life themed etching. CD available Sept 10, 2002.
The lo-fi, garagey, psychedelic "Zam Rock" scene that flourished in the southern African nation of Zambia during the mid '70s is now getting some long overdue exposure and appreciation over here, thanks to a bunch of recent reissues: Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Ngozi Family, Witch (highlighted last list) and now, also the lesser known but no less amazing Amanaz! Like Witch its reissue was facilitated by Egon of Stones Throw, who also wrote the liner notes, which make us realize how lucky we are to have these reissues, 'cause the original Zambian LPs are super rare and, Egon says, usually in about the same poor condition as an experienced frisbee. He also helps explain the genesis of the Zam Rock movement, suggesting that Zambia's Socialist government required a preponderance of "Zambian" content on the radio. Apparently the gov't also mandated a high fuzz content as well!
The Amanaz album, from 1975, certainly fulfills that quota, though at first listen we thought that maybe this one was mellower than some of the others like Witch, and parts if it are, in a stoned sorta way, and it's also somewhat more "African" sounding as befits its title, in its rhythms and vocal stylings, with some of the singing doing in the Bembe tongue, though most songs are in English. But still there's quite a supply of heavy fuzz here, with the likes of "History Of Man" being plenty brutal in that dep't. for sure!
And man is it beautiful, full of lovely, lovely grooves in a warm bath of lo-fi hiss and hum, maybe not as gritty as Witch and Ngozi but still gritty enough, and maybe even more memorably groov'd. There's fully a dozen songs here and it's hard to pick highlights, we dig 'em all, somehow so fuzzy yet so gentle, well, not always gentle, like how the otherwise laidback "Nsunka Lwendo" includes a phenomenally LOUD and PIERCING guitar solo, that wanders back and forth from left channel to the right channel, looking for a way to crack into your skull. Meanwhile the sizzling, syncopated "Green Apple" throbs with what almost sounds like a buried Geezer Butler bass line, and the exuberant "Making The Scene" features a part that we swear appears on a Witchcraft album, or close to anyway! Wow. More proof Zam Rock RULES. Recommended!
Leave Out The Sad Parts is the new cdep from this Swedish foursome who briefly went by the less fitting moniker Wichita Linemen. This U.S.-only release includes one song ("Firefly") from their fine debut album, 2005's This is Where Our Hearts Collide and two tunes previously only available on a UK 7". Amandine's sound is perhaps most characterized by the vocals of Olof Gidlof. He has one of those voices of which it's difficult to discern the gender. We believed it to be a female singer until we checked the band lineup. It sounds as though the weight of the world is preventing him from raising his voice beyond a low, muted register. Some of us thought this was quite reminiscent of '70s heavy hearts such as Bread. It's a disarmingly warm, melancholic assembly of piano, guitar, bass and drums accompanied by accordion, theremin, banjo and trumpet. The final song "Between What He's Saying And What He Regrets" is graced with some suitably sleepy fiddle... a definite highlight!
After their terrific Leave Out The Sad Parts cdep came out (now quite some time ago), we were left oh so eagerly anticipating the domestic release of this Swedish band's debut full length (which came out overseas in 2005). We waited and waited and waited. The sun came up the sun went down, seasons changed... but no Amandine album surfaced... until now! So if you dug the ep, dig into more of their beautiful, dark country rock characterized by prominent strings and piano and the charmingly caramelized voice of Olof Gidlof. Wonderful!
One of five new tapes from the awesome Austin based experimental tape label, Holodeck. Largely documenting the growing and diverse Texas underground scene of synth conjurers, drone lords psych meditators, and classical folk devotionists, each tape conceived as a unique listening experience with beautifully designed minimalist packaging. We listed tapes by Lumens, Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw awhile back, and this time around we have another tape from Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as tapes by Survive, M. Geddes Gengra, Silent Land Time Machine, and this one from the mysteriously monikered Amasa Gana.
Like Lumens, Amasa Gana features members from other groups from this fervent scene though we're not really sure which ones. Using a mixture of electronic and acoustic folk instruments, Amasa Gana make cosmic vibrational sky ragas in slow motion dramatic arcs that evoke the feel of aerial flight or freefalling. Spiraling drones like circular breathing with bowed textures, bird calls, and a cinematically intense pastoral quality that comes close to meditative industrial music. Reminding us of Brian Eno's Apollo record yet with harder deeper edges. Limited to 100 copies!
Canadian zine printed in an edition of 1000 numbered copies. Interviews with Jim O'Rourke, Fly Pan Am, Loren Mazzacane Connors, '60s furntiture designer Verner Panton. Comes with a 7" featuring Loren Mazzacane Connors and Ci Dy.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
More than ten years old now, this cool collaboration finally gets released on vinyl!!
When this was originally recorded, the Powerbook improv ensemble was a relatively new music performance hybridization that was having trouble finding any sort of tangible success in attempting to bring the fluidity of free-jazz improvisation to the digital clickery of live hard disc editing. Recorded results we'd heard had been mostly boring, self-important collages of inconsequential noodling from musicians who seemed more interested in being loud or noisy or simply upstaging their companions rather than in pure creative collaboration. While the cavalier Christian Fennesz and the studious Peter Rehberg have been involved in a few of the more egregious failures of this genre, this, their collaboration with Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, and Paul "Pimmon" Gough perhaps still ranks as one of the best powerbook ensemble recordings. The keys to the success for "Afternoon Tea" are the high degree of restraint from each individual collaborator and the indecipherability betwixt the guitars of Ambarchi & Rowe and the computer trickery of the rest. Slow rhythmic creaks, subtle drones, and hacked musique concrete elements form and dissolve various structures, with a lot of room for each of the sounds to breathe. While this clocks in at almost 50 minutes, you really want it to go on for much longer. Nice.
Latest in Table Of The Elements new one sided etched 12" series of modern guitar music, and certainly a collection of modern guitar music would not be complete with long time aQ fave Oren Ambarchi. Whose mastery of the guitar seems to know no bounds, teaming up with the Southern Lord stable for various exercises in extreme heaviness, but just as often crafting delicate dreamscapes of hushed strum and blurred riffing. His solo records tend toward the latter, but this piece is something else all together.
Still essentially a dronescape, A Final Kiss is rife with sonic activity, so much so that in lesser hands it would be more of a mess, a sort of pretty-ish noise record, but Ambarchi, takes all manner of buzz and glitch, of scrape and hum, and weaves it into a strangely lyrical arrangement. The core of the piece is a thick, undulating low end drone, a muted Niblockian shimmer, that seems not to change so much as shift, reflecting different colors and sounds depending on the angle. Over this nearly constant thrum, exist a veritable universe of strange sounds, streaks of feedback, cricket like electronic chitter, moaning throbbing swells of guitar rumble, brief blurs of warm soft focus fuzz, layers of crumbling distortion, all of the various elements constantly shifting and blossoming, collapsing and then blooming again, creating a super organic flow, another instance of leaving the instruments on the stage, guitars against amps. amps cranked, although here it seems the instruments have come to life, and we are glimpsing their secret lives, as the communicate musically, telling some sort of story, exchanging mysterious messages, which while indecipherable to human ears, still manage to sound magical.
Guitardrone freaks will, well, freak! Subtly heavy, darkly drone-y, slightly noisy, rich and dense and textural. Really gorgeous. And totally recommended.
Pressed on swirled turquoise vinyl. One sided, the other side with a super bad ass etching, housed in a thick vinyl sleeve, and of course, as always LIMITED!
While UK weirdo tape label The Tapeworm mostly specializes in outsider, oddball sonic wonders, mostly created by groups we've never heard of, or by sideprojects of groups we have, every once in a while a bigger name pops up, which in this case is aQ beloved guitarist/soundscaper Oren Ambarchi, whose Amulet is a great fit for The Tapeworm, without deviating too much from the sound of some of our favorite Ambarchi records proper. All recorded on an iPhone, and edited into one sprawling soundscape/sonic suite, Amulet is indeed a dark gem, all tinkling chimes, whirring thrum, keening distant tones, groaning, heaving swells of distorted buzz, everything smeared and blurred into a gauzy soft-noise drift, that slips from hushed shimmer to roiling psychedelic squall and back again, a black ambience that's gorgeously dreamlike and sonically spacious, a lushly layered sonic event that infuses what would otherwise be a dreamy bit of blissfulness, into something much more shadowy and ominous, with low tones rumbling in the background, fields of clatter and clink, gamelan like crystalline percussion, set amidst thick swells of minor key chordal thrum, haunting and it its own way, heavy as well. The various bits of percussion, also have the feel of a field recording (which they technically are), but it evokes the sense that this is some strange ritual, or some mysterious world, captured surreptitiously, viewed from the shadows, a glimpse of something strange and blackly wondrous.
Cover art by Savage Pencil. And as always, super limited!!
Along with Oren Ambarchi's new Nazoranai trio with Keiji Haino and Stephen O'Malley (in which Ambarchi plays percussion), we thought we'd also list the Aussie experimentalist's recent 'solo' effort on Touch, which features a lot of help from his various talented friends. We were thrown off a bit by the opening track, "Salt", a sad slice of ambient-indie pop, featuring heartfelt singing from someone we at first assumed was Ambarchi (but is in fact Paul Duncan from the band Warm Ghosts) set amidst gentle, atmospheric backing crackle and melodic strings. Quite nice, really, readily reminding us of Ambarchi's Sun duo with Chris Townsend who made a couple records few years back. So we assumed the rest of the disc would play out in a similar song-oriented fashion, Ambarchi as indie troubadour, rather than experimental deep drone axeman, but nope, not exactly - the next cut, "Knots", at over 33 minutes, could be a whole different record all by itself, an abstract expanse with telegraphic tick tick tick percussion and smoothly buzzing electronic drones. Ambarchi contributes several guitar parts, in an (international, edited-together) ensemble that includes Eyvind Kang on viola and igil, along with others on sawing cello and foggy French horn, etc. This is for those into the more extreme end of Ambarchi's oeuvre, as it gets rather frightening before it's over, like the nightmarish, grinding psych rock equivalent of an electro-acoustic ECM improv, though other, milder parts resemble the glitchdrone work of NZ's Dean Roberts.
Following that intense opus, there's two further, somewhat shorter tracks remaining on the disc: the quiet and careful "Passage", with tremulous, wordless vocals from Jessika Kenney; and then, the disc's fourth and final track "Fractured Mirror", which gets into lovely, dual acoustic guitar mode� although somewhat shockingly it's a cover of a song written by Ace Frehley from KISS!!! Hmm, Ambarchi is even cooler than we thought.
A lovely, lovely disc, that touches upon several aspects of Ambarchi's career thus far while opening up other intriguing avenues of exploration (more KISS covers!).
