For some folks, it might just be enough to say that the debut release from Howling is indeed a howling, heavy slab of WEREWOLF-themed death metal. Add that the band features members of aQ faves Wooden Stake and we're ready to crank this loud (after stocking up on wolfsbane and silver bullets). The beautifully rendered, kitschy cover painting, which looks like it belongs on the front of some '70s Italian erotic-horror "fumetti" comic book, ought to give you some idea of what sort of sick slasher-thrasher outfit this is. A trio that teams up shredding guitar player Tony P. with screaming, guttural vocalist Vanessa Nocera (Wooden Stake, Skeletal Spectre, Scaremaker, etc.) and pounding drummer Electrokutioner (Wooden Stake, Encoffination, Father Befouled, Scaremaker, etc.), Howling doesn't just play straight up death metal, though there's plenty of that, old school style; there's also lots of classic '80s metal melodicism to the guitar licks and soloing, giving this a bit of a Carcass feel at times. And Howling happily delve into some doomy bongsmoked jams too, like the lumbering stoner riffage of "A Night In The Crypt", that Acid Witch fans ought to dig. Lycanthropic death at its best.
This here's an album for folks who dig swampy music that's fucked up, off its ass, played by and for folks who're sooooooo hiiigh. Actually this sounds as though Neil Michael Hagerty with electric guitar and broken drum machine in hand has finally smoked himself retarded. In fact, it's easy to imagine that the title is an indication of the limits of his counting capabilities these days. Really, these recordings seem excessively unravelled even by Hagerty's standards. For one thing, the volume levels of the vocals and instruments are all willy-nilly (too loud guitar atop barely audible vocals and vice versa). Personally we dug the You Can't Beat Tomorrow album far more than this one. It was fucked-up and weird in a good way. That album only just came out in November which makes us think that maybe Hagerty should've let this one brew (or stew?) a bit longer.
Yeah! Howling Hex is the new gig for Mr. Neil Michael Hagerty (formerly of ye old greats Pussy Galore and Royal Trux). A great band name most befitting his usual bad boy yowl, don't ya think? Heck, he thought was a perfect album title back in 2003, why not reuse it?! As per the Hagerty norm, this is a murky garage-y rawk affair, but the man's presence aside, it's the ladies (or maybe it's just a single lady... we really can't tell 'cause unfortunately the backing vocals are uncredited) who take center stage in Howling Hex... and they are awesome! The mysterious female vocals have that old sassy yet womanly quality you might associate with the likes of Nancy Sinatra or Shirley Bassey, and they're the perfect foil for Hagerty's vocals which here are boyish and wheezy. All-Night Fox? Alright!!!
(Deep radio announcer's voice) Neil... Michael... Hagerty... in what is quite possibly his most melodically straight-forward album to date! Gasp! Shock! Oh my! While his last couple of Howling Hex releases have left us with the mental image of the former Royal Truxer fumbling to press the 'record' button while being completely baked out of his mind -- those were some seriously rad, fucked-up records! -- Nightclub Version Of The Eternal comes across as almost completely sober... which actually makes it even more bizarre in the whole scheme of Hagerty's trademark off-kilter swampy bluesy cheez-tinged tunes. Keepin' us all on our toes. Recommended for fans of the poppier, sunnier side of Royal Trux!
Not one to rest on his rump, Mr. Neil Michael Hagerty (yeah, y'know him... ex of Pussy Galore and Royal Trux) delivers a second Howling Hex album in 2005! You Can't Beat Tomorrow picks up right where All-Night Fox left off back in February in its all-out freewheelin' strangeness. Aha, a pattern? One was released a month from the beginning of the year and the other one released a month from the year's end with a dvd. Are we scrutinizing trivialities? Makin' a mountain outta a molehill? 'Kay, we'll just move along to the music then, shall we? First things first, if you dug All-Night Fox, this ain't anything like that. Perhaps, it's the influence of his You Can't Beat Tomorrow backing band o' Texans, the very rootsy Theater Fire? Perhaps, it's just a result of Hagerty tryin' another 'something new' as he is wont to do. Unfortunately, he ditched the female vocals that made All-Night Fox so right-on, but if you're a Hagerty fan you'll find plenty to love in his newest rough-hewn eccentricity-laden path. Still bluesy, still rockin', but with more of a moonshine-drenched swampy hillbilly feel. Hmmm, it almost veers into quirksome Quintron or Ween (circa Pure Guava) cheezy territory with its weeny electric guitar lines, rudimentary drumming, funky basslines, woozied-up horns and murky vocals.
The dvd features The Howling Variety Show by noneother than Neil Michael Hagerty. It's a just-over-half-an-hour, haphazard and decidedly lo-fi program of music, animation and sketches (!), and is apparently a pilot episode... so there very well might be more where that came from.
Far be for us to tell you what to do, but we'd strongly suggest lightin' up a big fatty prior to hitting 'play'. With or without 'refreshments', it's an all-around entertaining hoot!
Before even hearing a note, we were sold. You really can't argue with an album called Into The Cryosphere, not to mention the fact that this bears the stamp of the always amazing Profound Lore label, AND this duo features Ryan Lipinsky of doom lords Unearthly Trance and punkers Villains. The Howling Wind definitely writhe in some of the same blackened sludge as UT, but with an approach that is heavily indebted to the hateful black metal we can never get enough of, with a thrashiness that is hypnotic, relentless, and pretty much the kind of thing your mother wouldn't ever want you listening to. Their punked out approach snakes around the Cryosphere through all sorts of passages, taking you along for a super negative death trip reminiscent of Deathspell's more thugged out excursions on Kenose. The riffs are thick and burly, the drums heavy as fuck, and you will marvel over how appropriate a name like The Howling Wind is, as the whole album seems shrouded in an uncontrollable, icy wind. Not surprising then that the band would cook up song titles like "Teeth Of Frost", "Ice Cracking In The Abyss", and "A Dead Galaxy Mirrored In An Icy Mirage". Lipinsky certainly sounds like a man of conviction here, with his super tough, throatshredding vocals telling you how it's gonna be. Totally nihilistic and hateful with a sense of fuck all despair, it's also surprisingly catchy with riffs just won't let up, which will surely keep this one blasting out of our speakers for quite some time.
The Howling Wind is the duo of Tim Call and Ryan Lipynsky, whose combined black metal CV is kinda ridiculous/amazing: Aldebaran, Serpentine Path, Saturnalia Temple, Villains Mournful Congregation, Hail, Thralldom, Unearthly Trance and loads more. Needless to say, these two make a potent pairing, and this one is a cassette version of their 2012 release Of Babalon (there's a new one one since called Vortex), which sounds a bit like you might imagine from the above list, sure there's dense, buzzing furious blackness, but there's also churning, downtuned doomi-ic sludge, most of the tracks are laced with psychedelic leads, or wild metal shredding, and the sound itself, while plenty grim, offurs much in the way of ambience and atmosphere, with even the blurriest of blasts infused with plenty of haunting moodiness, and the guitars layered into epic swaths of sonic fury, soaring majestically, and becoming almost psychedelic at times. There's also a seriously proggy vibe as well, the tracks lurching from tangled chaos to looped harmonic wooziness and back again. Definitely a good balance between classic black metal and the new wave of modern avant/post USBM, and some of the tracks definitely remind us of other likeminded outfits, like Yellow Eyes or Ash Borer or Krallice (Colin Marston from Krallice did produce this record after all), one even reminds of Norwegian BM groovers Khold! But Howling Wind situate themselves somewhere closer to the classic sound of orthodox black metal, albeit, reworked for the modern age...
Latest from this post Unearthly Trance / Thralldom outfit, whose sound has shifted a bit since their last full length Into The Cryosphere, which still seemed more rooted in the blackened sludge of UT, with hints of some blacker force driving the music, a blackness that was more evident on their debut Pestilence & Peril, and a blackness that has again been fully unleashed here, the sound right from the get go, a blasting ice cold onslaught of gnarled black buzz, the opening track, "The Seal Upon The Tomb", the perfect hybrid of classic Unearthly Trance pound, and the furious blackmathbuzz of Deathspell Omega, the sound shifting effortlessly from punkish black pummel to swirling soaring blasts, the churning riffage wreathed in wild squiggles of psychedelic leads, and infused with a surprising amount of melody and mathiness, all over a bed of snake charmer synths, that add a haunting texture to the already dense proceedings. The template is thus laid out for the rest of the record, a collection of frantic, frenetic heaviness, equal parts downtuned crush and dizzying black blasts, the wild squalls of guitar, giving the sound a seriously psychedelic vibe, that transforms Howling Wind into something much more twisted and transcendent. But then, as if to demonstrate their black credentials, they finishing things off with an appropriately grim blast of black crustiness in the form of a Hellhammer cover. Fuck yeah.
Not to be confused with Howlin' Magic, Howlin' Rain or Howling Hex! This Howling, the Wind one, is appropriately enough a black metal band. Of the more primitive, thrashing variety... screaming morbid cacophony, with deathgrunts and raw pounding riffs raging amidst a murky metallic miasma.
This duo is spearheaded by Brooklyn's Ryan "Killusion" Lipynsky, a musically misanthropic gentleman whom you may know from such fine bands as Unearthly Trance, Villains, and the (un)godly Thralldom, to which this project is perhaps the sequel. Here he (and Portland, Oregon based drummer Parasitus Rex) bring the noise old school black metal style. They definitely owe allegiance to the likes of Darkthrone and Hellhammer. There's some doomic dirge on here too, and 'ambient' bits as well.
And yep, The Howling Wind ain't a bad name at all for this - a lot of this really does sound like it's been recorded in a howling wind. That's more than the case on the final track, "The Inevitable Conclusion", which sounds like a howling wind itself, being rather more of a creepily abstract, droning, power electronics track than anything "metal".
Number 9 in the 'Fading Captain' series of Bob Pollard / Guided By Voices related projects. And what more do you need to know? Well, okay, this one is actually a little weirder than your normal Pollard / GBV fare: a rickety framework of spaced out ambience, rhythmic sort-of-retarded drumming and general lo-fi randomness, all supporting some pretty cool not exactly GBV sounding pop songs.
One of those movies we weren't allowed to watch as a kid, but managed to see it anyway, I mean, c'mon WEREWOLVES! We had nightmares for weeks. The soundtrack is pretty scary too....
The first we heard from British sound artist Robin The Fog (here going by the name Howlround) was the stunning and mysterious lp The Ghosts Of Bush, which was sourced entirely from audio recorded in an abandoned building in the UK. It had been the home of the BBC's world service for seventy years, now left derelict, but somehow alive with strange sounds, captured and decontextualized into a haunting world of creaks and whirs, of shifting textures and buried melodies.
For Secret Songs Of Savamala, Robin set up in an abandoned house in Belgrade, with a flooded basement, the structure itself the palette, with open beams struck, surfaces rubbed and scraped, the sounds outside the house causing walls to vibrate, doors and windows to rattle, with some deft recording, and what sounds like some sort of haunting vocalizations, the sounds are whipped up into some sort of primitive ritualism, at times barely there, at others, nearly psychedelic, small soft cacophonies, that ebb and flow, dripping water, the clang of metal on metal, but more often than not, everything blurred and smeared into dreamlike soundscapes, lush and layered, rife with miniature sound events, all woven into languorous drifts, tape hiss and warble woven into the natural sounds, giving even the most mundane moments a woozy, hazy, faded feel, with other moments transformed into almost dublike trippiness.
Heady and hypnotic, this is some fantastic, and fantastically hypnotic deep listening, that we can get enough of. But it will have to hold us over until we get the OTHER new Robin The Fog record, that one sourced entirely from a squeaky iron gate!
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One of the absolute standout tracks on the recent "Slave To The Power" double cd Iron Maiden covers collection was the version of "The Trooper" by an obscure Finnish chamber-rock combo called Hoyry-Kone. It was certainly the weirdest inclusion on the comp, as they were the only band to pay tribute to Maiden with trombone, cello and saxophone! We'd never heard of them before, but resolved to find out more. Now we've tracked down this reissue of their second album, from 1997. Hopefully their upcoming third album won't take 'em too much longer, 'cause this one is pretty great! They play an eclectic sort of progressive rock, starting the disc off with a lulling, beautiful, quasi-religious six-minute mostly-vocal piece that suggests Nordic folk influences, before erupting into a hard-hitting classical rock attack that combines Naked City-style dynamics with "Eleanor Rigby" strings. From there, we hear echoes of everything from prog greats King Crimson and Area to cabaret music and even a little metal riffing (hence their interest in Maiden I guess)... For fans of Uz Jsme Doma, Samala Mammas Manna, Borknagar, Bondage Fruit, Arcturus, and other international exemplars of complex, melodic, progressive, and (last-but-not-least) *bizarre* rock. Recommended!
Last year one of our favorite records was one of those limited edition Latitudes eps from Paradise Island. Sadly that great ep is now out of print but luckily Jenny Hoyston, who is Paradise Island, and a member of the great Erase Errata has unleashed her first full length solo recording, sonically similar, just now under her own name.
Isle Of is everything we've come to love about Jenny's music. It's eccentric, impassioned and so fully engaging. From anthemic blood rushers like "Spell D-O-G" and "Bring Back Art" to twangy numbers like "Even In This Day And Age" and "Send The Angels" to the Mary Timony/Helium like "Novelist" to late-night burners like "Ruff Ruff/Rainbow City," Isle Of is a record filled with unpredictability but with a common thread of honest delivery and colorful expression. While most people treading such wide ground would most likely trip up at some point, Jenny is able to get all those sounds and songs to make perfect sense. Her range and great taste comes shining through brightly, bringing the same kind of intensity that she's perfected in Erase Errata, yet without any of the usual band boundaries.... We love the free and loose sounding Jenny, singing any kind of song she wants, and doing so with a conviction and flare that's impossible not to fall for. Liberating, exciting and totally infectious. Isle Of is highly recommended!
As if she's not already plenty busy with Erase Errata and Paradise Island, Ms Jenny Hoyston has joined forces with William Elliot Whitmore. Not sure if this is a one-off, but we sure hope not 'cause they make such a great duo, and this six song ep ends all too soon! Their voices compliment each other wonderfully as they weave their earthy tales in true country folk tradition. Yes, we could go on and on lavishing praise, but how 'bout we just cut to the chase and give this a hearty "Recommended!"
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Ominous, heavy and despairing, Hrsta's third album really reminded us of the most recent Carla Bozulich album Evangelista on which she collaborated with many of the Godspeed You Black Emperor kindred spirits. It definitely solidifies their position as a mighty stand-out amongst the many Godspeed branches. Ghosts Will Come And Kiss Our Eyes opens with a deep wheeze of an accordion that almost imperceptibly melds with main man Mike Moya's distinct guitar work that glides like a theremin in and around heavy-lidded drones from harmonium and organ. Loosely structured despairing vocal passages vanish into absolutely beautiful glistening drone scapes out of which acoustic guitar and voice re-emerge. Wonderful.
Is your Godspeed You Black Emperor antenna tingling? Yup, this is yet another project from the fertile Montreal scene, featuring Mike Moya, a GSYBE! founding member. He's also in Set Fire To Flames and Molasses. Hrsta (say "Hursh-tah") is his solo debut,
Hrsta is the project of Godspeed You Black Emperor co-founding member Mike Moya (also of Set Fire To Flames and Molasses). he's assembled a full band for this, the follow-up to his first solo album L'Eclat Du Ciel Etait Insoutenable, and it's a beauty. The first song draws back the heavy curtain on a darkened stage with a droning chorus of shadowy faceless chanted vocals which immediately drew comparisons to the Italian ensemble Larsen's fine album Rever which was an AQ Record Of The Week a couple of years ago. In fact, we'd venture a guess that much like that mysterious group, Hrsta also draw deep inspiration from Swans and Michael Gira. Weighted by an immense emotional gravity, Moya's music is a heady, hypnotic force -- half dream, half nightmare. Recommended!
In recent years, Keith Fullerton-Whitman has been focusing on the beautiful strains of minimalism speckled with an exceptional craftsmanship and radical rewriting of historical precedents. Fortunately, he's not forgotten about his Hrvatski moniker where he applies his Amen break (the classic drum and bass loop!) obsession to short attention span theatre. Irrevocably Overdriven Bleak Freakout Megamix is a live set from his summer 2004 jaunt to San Francisco, where he performed at the Rx Gallery through the Jiffy Scuttler series for avant-electronica performances. And yes, the set does live up to its name, mangling many of the same mathematically acrobatic drum 'n' bass rhythms found on his previous albums (Oiseaux 96-98 and Swarm & Dither) in a toxic soup of knob-twiddling noise that's as good as non-jazz Squarepusher records or the more antagonistic Aphex Twin tracks. The seamless audio program of the show is splattered with 91 tracks, the longest of which clocks in at a mere 48 seconds. We like!
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The debut album from Hrvatski (the prosaic electronica expert at Forced Exposure) is a drum & bass disc that almost all junglists will absolutely hate. 'Oiseaux 96-98' is a rumination on the Amen break (THE quintessential drum & bass break) which Hrvatski treats less as the structural placefinder and more as a hypnotic noise crashing endlessly next to looping toxic drones and field recordings of wildly screeching Hitchcockian birds. By also incorporatating the likes of detuned acoustic guitars, a 190+ bpm Pink Floyd cover, garage-sale organs, and hand held dulcimers, this near-drop out from the Berklee School of Music (and former Guitar Player magazine 'Metal Detector' columnist) unloads his vast store of musical knowledge and ideas. Hrvatski has created an unusual synthesis of Stockhausen's excess, Farmer's Manual's digital glitch worship, and of course The Winston's 'Amen, Brother' (in the liner notes, he does apologize for overabundance of the aforementioned break, because 'it just sounded so damn good...'). Recommended!!
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Not cheaply made floppy vinyl on this seven inch. No sir. Hrvatski wouldn't think of it. This has some of the fattest, heaviest vinyl we've ever seen on a seven inch. "Raume" sounds much like early / non-jazz Squarepusher, where the complexity of the drum programming meant more than being true to drum & bass tropes. In other words, mind-boggling.
Following the electronically toxic explorations of the Winston Bros' "Amen" break on the "Oiseaux 96-98" album, Keith Fullerton Whitman returns with his second album as Hrvatski. "Swarm & Dither" further expands the fusions of drum & bass with obscure '60s psyche-rock, plenty of Max / MSP patches, and an open dialogue (critical and otherwise) with academic composition. The "Amen" breaks still run rampant throughout the "Swarm & Dither" cuts, but are less of a unifying factor than on Hrvatski's preceding album. Rather, Whitman under the Hrvatski guise treats each individual track as insular structures where he's responding and reacting to all of the elements within. "Swarm & Dither" is less of a wholly conceived album, and more of a collection of completed fragments. At times, these individual tracks are celebratory eruptions of DSP gabbacore jungle (i.e. the magnificent version cover of "Paint It Black" which also appeared on the amazing tUMULt compilation "Painted Black"); at others, they display a dry sense of humor that's more of satrical witticism than another self-reflexive piss-take (i.e. the Commodore 64 8-bit melodies appearing on "Marbles" on top of a rhythmic kaleidoscope of perpetually menacing breakbeats and 909 stabs); and on others, Hrvatski displays serious expositions on grindcore and elite '60s electronic composition (esp. Stockhausen and Riley). The album ends on a particularly anti-electronic note, with Hrvastki doing a very straight cover of Trad, Gras, och Steiner's "Waltz of Tegenborg" -- a Swedish psych / prog tune perfect for happy-go-lucky dancing trolls. It's a perfectly odd ending to a wonderfully odd album.
HSDOM is the sporadically active project of Jochen Hartmann, who runs the equally sporadic Phaserprone label with Jonas Asher, releasing grim, obscurant electronica with plenty of blank, macabre overtures. His own work doesn't fall too far from this axis with his grids of moody step-sequencing that modulate above skeletal rhythms and alien dronescapes. The tape begins almost innocently reclaiming a pleasant synth sequence that could have come by way of Suzanne Ciani, but things take a dive down the rabbit hole from there with some aggressive synth percolations dotting a plodding rhythm, ending with a very creepy horror-film swarm of tinkling bells and disembodied voices. It's akin to the early '80s Skinny Puppy demos and the early manglings of Severed Heads from around the same time. Great stuff, in other words! The B side begins with an eerie, ghost broadcast tone that gasps with haunted melodies slowly augmented by cybernetic skitterings caught in a dub-echo miasma. As the tone collapses into a tesla-coil oscillation, HSDOM slowly pours over a boiling concoction of caustic distortion and white-hot static. The tape concludes with a darkening obfuscation of Oneohtrix Point Never's sci-fi angularity through disjointed rhythms and tone clusters. Recommended. C40. Limited to 100 copies.
The last we heard from mysterious post industrial deadtech alchemist HSDOM was on a split cd-r from way back in 2009, which he shared with likeminded noisemaker SYNB aka Mat Brinkman of Load Records infamy, but on that split, with each artist reworking the sounds of the other, it was difficult to tell whose sounds were who, and to be honest at the time, it didn't matter, as both batches of reworked sound were incredible. So this limited cassette is actually our first true glimpse of what this Brooklyn by way of Berlin soundscaper is capable of, and much like that out of print split, it's a creepy, industrial, soundworld, of disembodied reverbed voices, churning, chugging, whirling rhythms, twisted swirling fractured effects, loads of hiss and static, rumble and crunch, the sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, slipping from rhythmic pulse to white noise blast, a barrage of looped lysergic mesmer, the garbled voices transformed into rhythms of their own, while the various electronics offer up their own confusional counter rhythms, blurred sea of blackened squiggles, hazy ambient sound turned into minimal thrumscapes, bleary streaks of gristly shimmer, peppered with common every day sonic detritus, all transformed via old microphones, mouldering magnetic tape, and damaged effects into some sort of crumbling futuristic transmission, sent from the cold grey past.
The second site starts out with some pulsing cold wave synths, slightly off, occasionally seeming to falter, or stumble, a haunting hypnotic malfunctioning machine groove, still underpinned with strange whispered voices, bits of distorted electronics, the synth tones gradually changing tone and timbre, clipped and brittle one second, warm and fluid the next, everything gauzy and hazy and washed out, the vibe growing more tense and claustrophobic, a minimal cinematic loopscape that evokes dread and darkness, gradually fading out to something much more shadowy and abstract, a looped bit of synthy soundtracky murk, that locks into a motorik groove, while all around, more strange voices, brittle sine wave tones, creaking glitched out electronics, mysterious low end croaks, all seems to float and shimmer like some dying sonic particle field. Haunting, otherworldly, dreamily disturbing, quite abjectly fantastic.
And of course, SUPER LIMITED!! Very likely the last copies we'll be able to get. Beautifully packaged in deluxe letterpressed, hand stamped J-cards, pro duplicated...
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When was the last time anyone made a Sisters Of Mercy reference and meant it as a wholehearted compliment? Well, that's definitely the case for HTRK (pronounced Haterock, FYI) as this Melbourne trio adopts a bleaker than black stance through their psychosexual dirges. With slinky Goth basslines, ghostly coldwave electronics, and skeletal slow-mo drum machine pulses, HTRK's arrangements mirror those that the Sisters Of Mercy produced for The Reptile House EP (which found them at their slowest, creepiest, and most anti-pop). But instead of Andrew Eldritch and his affected baritone, the singer for HTRK is Jonnine Clementine Standish whose comatose droning is seductive and compelling in its own right. She adopts the roles as the co-dependent, the broken-hearted, the addicted, the master, the servant, and the lonely, all delivered in Lydia Lunch's "I Fell In Love With A Ghost" dispassionate, zombified mantra. On the track "Rent Boy", Standish breaks out of that montone delivery, bellowing this dark ballad that comes across more like PJ Harvey than before. We have to wonder if the title is a reference to the These Immortal Souls track "Marry Me," penned by the former Birthday Party guitarist Roland S. Howard who happens to have produced this record and has sprinkled his narcotized swamp rock guitar throughout. No matter if it is or if it isn't, Howard's voodoo production for HTRK certainly gives them that Birthday Party feel. Great, very dark stuff for sure!
Once known as the Hate Rock Trio, this Australian-born / London-based ensemble shortened their name down to HTRK (which the band still insists on pronouncing Hate Rock). Unfortunately, in the spring of 2010, the bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide. The remaining members - Jonnine Standish and Nigel Lee-Yang - look to continue making music, although that may seem a difficult proposition given that Stewart's low-slung basslines really drove HTRK's doom and dirge songwriting approach. The Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy, and PJ Harvey came together within HTRK's very impressive 2009 album Marry Me Tonight, produced by Roland S. Howard who really emphasized the skeletal, haunted aspect of HTRK's sound. That's quite different from what you'll hear on their 2007 debut Nostalgia, which still had a very strong Birthday Party sound especially with Stewart's recapitulation of Tracy Pew basslines, but the band has buried Standish's exhausted / exasperated vocals, Lee-Yang's swampy guitars, and the minimalist electronic programming in a huge bath of reverb. The spectral morass of all of the reverb really casts as a abjectly narcotic to the feel of these songs. Where on Marry Me Tonight which pushed Standish's vocals to the foreground to dramatic effect, she's lurking around the corners of these songs, howling and yelping deep into the night. It should be noted that a couple of songs from Nostalgia do reappear on Marry Me Tonight, although the difference in production really does change the the outcome. "Look What's Been Done" has become "Ha". "Look At That Girl" reappeared as "Rent Boy" and "I'm All Broke Up" turned into "Disco." Really fantastic.
It's a bleak world for HTRK, as tragedy and death has surrounded this outfit which has only been around for a couple of years. In 2010, the band's bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide and the producer of their haunted album Marry Me Tonight, Rowland S. Howard died of cancer a year earlier. All of these elements make a connection to The Birthday Party almost inevitable, especially given their historical mirroring in relocation from Melbourne to Berlin and the manifestation of the id through a very raw sound. But where The Birthday Party was an expression of violence, HTRK are in constant search of desire, occasionally finding it only to have it frustratingly fizzle out before anything ecstatic can be achieved. As a result, HTRK's sensual bleariness is in an emotional feedback loop that never can spiral beyond the longing for sex, love, a relationship, etc, without anything ever attained. HTRK's existential portraits of being trapped by one's own desires are in direct opposition to the hedonism found in most electronica. Here on Work (Work, Work), the band parallels some of the horror-affected reverberation of the flash-in-the-pan Witch House crowd; but instead of drawing on unremembered memories of the forgotten '80s, HTRK has profound pain to draw upon... and they want their audience to feel that too.
The band had been shifting their sound even before Stewart's death, with a greater reliance on electronics and subharmonic tones girding the spindly guitar work from Nigel Yang and the self-composed breathiness of Jonnine Standish. They were moving away from the rock trio and towards a miasma of voice, guitar, bass, and electronics with boundaries between these sounds far more permeable. The closest references to HTRK's sound would be Ike Yard and Dome, although HTRK are much more interested in building tension with their teasing melodicism through their droning electronics. The first track on the album features a weird collage that Stewart had made of late nite TV sex ads in Berlin amidst slow-motion sighs caught in a half-melodic drone and crawling drum machine pulse. "Eat Yr Heart" ramps a quarter-speed Giorgio Moroder sequence above heroin paced rhythm with Jonnine crooning a sultry melody counterpointed by breathy exhalations. Sexually charged yes, but more of a downward spiral into dejection rather than release. "Poison" is more in keeping with the bass and guitar structures found on Marry Me Tonight, with Sean Stewart's bass clearly present next to the twilight flickering drone-riffs from Yang. "Body Double" overhauls Suicide's classic sound of metallic synth / drum interplay with undulating melodies that stretch into a magnificent coda of cascading melancholy for what amounts to a masterful album. Highly recommended.
Been meaning to review this for a while now, the debut full length from Hubble, aka Ben Greenberg (Z's, Pygmy Shrews), who over these three longform pieces conjures up his own tranced out modern minimalism, which according to the label is "equal parts shred-fi, cyber-dread and fired psychedelia", which really is a fair description.
The first track here "Nude Ghost", begins as a swirling tangle of guitar melodies, a warped take on Reich / Riley minimalist mesmer, and very quickly, the layered melodies grow more and more dense, the tangles more, well, tangled, the runs of notes faster, until it's a flurry of swirling notes, almost like a guitar version of Lubomyr Melnyk, the same sort of dizzying shimmer, and while we'd be perfectly happy to listen to this head spinning swirl for ten minutes, Greenberg, adds a bit of subtle percussion, and lets the loops shift and slow down, growing more melodic, and strangely more melancholy as well, and as the buried rhythm becomes more prominent, other elements begin to surface, swirls of high end shimmer, more abstract bits of percussion, all manner of drones, but instead of being a huge mess, those other sounds are employed subtly and judiciously, and the track remains utterly mesmerizing, even with the addition of what sounds like synth squelches, the whole thing manages to grow busier, and more dense, but continues to pulse hypnotically.
The second track, the 20+ minute "Glass Napkin", begins with a stretch of droned out shimmer, as some riffing begins to surface, soon the shimmer is gone completely, and we're left with this distorted looped riffage, which sort of reminds us of a more academic abstract Blackwolfgoat, the sound growing more metallic and a bit more shreddy, the sound shifting between muted riffage, and wild tangled boogie and back again, sounding a bit like a modern minimal classical piece composed for Mick Barr and Tetuzi Akiyama. And finally, the record finishes off with the sort of title track "Hubble's Hubble" which drapes looped guitar noodle over a hissy staticky drone, the sound darkening as the track progresses, the static in the background becoming a moaning low end, before nearing the record's end, the notes start to fly fast and furious again, coalescing into a celestial swirl that sounds like some sort of manic looped kosmische bliss out. So good!
We can always count on local reissue label Companion Records to foster the kind of rare hidden musical gem that perhaps won't appeal to everyone, but will get a select group of enthusiasts very excited over the discovery of someone's sincerely unique, but oftentimes misguided musical vision. Companion's specialty has always been cd reissues of vintage private press vanity releases, such as the Luie Luie, Charlie Tweddle, Marc Mundy, and New Creation records, and for their first foray into vinyl, have given us two quite amazing but very different musical visionaries: the spirited orchestral lounge stylings of Michael Farneti (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and the latent stoner mope-psych of Stan Hubbs.
Released in collaboration with Gloriette Records (Nite Jewel, Ariel Pink, and Puro Instinct), Stan Hubbs' 1982 recording Crystal is more out of its time than ahead of it. Recorded in his rural Sonoma County living room, it seems like the band almost can't decide if they're latent hippie stoner boogie-folk, eighties shred-guitar rock or progressively disaffected mope wave, which makes for an unusually intriguing sound that is hard to pin down. Hubb's vocals sometimes sung in a near monotone with female singer Kriss O'Neil can sound as much like a downer Fleetwood Mac as it can resemble some of today's gloomy pop found in Beach Fossils or Crystal Ships. But it's Larry Doyle's kitchen sink electric guitar approach that makes it really out of sync in an amazing way. Using lots of psychedelic effects and sounding like he's eager to show off his shredding licks to anyone who comes along, Doyle shows just barely enough restraint not to overstep the hazy vibe the singers and keyboards are laying down. Imagine if Simply Saucer did a cover of America's "Tin Man", and you'll sort of get the idea. But this is regionalism at its best, taking lots of big musical ideas from different popular styles and making something completely home-brewed, a bit oft-kilter and super genuine. Limited to 500 copies, comes with a full reproduction of the 16 page booklet of lyrics and drawings that came with the original release. Hot Damn!
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John Hudak remains one of the underappreciated dronologists/lowercase composers, despite a number of really great albums notably "Brooklyn Bridge" and this album. "Don't Worry About Anything, I'll Talk To You Tomorrow" uses as its source material a phone conversation that took place between Hudak and his mother a year before she died. But the voices have been stripped of syllabic content to a bare sonorous abstraction with only the hints at conversational rhythms. Hudak uses these sounds to create a poetic miasma of timestretched insect-like shimmers and delicate tonalities that vibrate above a solemn quietness. A beautiful record that makes the impersonal and sterile Raster-label clickery seem, somehow, lacking.
When experimental composer John Hudak began working on his minimalist piece "Don't Worry About Anything; I'll Talk To You Tomorrow," he originally thought it would be released on vinyl, and so constructed two distinct movements (for the record's two
Hudak's work maintains a tenuous relationship with language, in particular the parallel between minimalism and haiku's communication of complex imagery through self-imposed restrictions. "Don't Worry About Anything" is one of Hudak's most evocative pieces, as he has stretched out the syllabic utterances of his mother's reassuring message into a delicate latticework of slow moving crystalline frequencies that exude a restrained sadness. That said, the unreleased movement doesn't really offer much more than the previously available version (which is ok if you don't have that), and neither do the remixes / reinterpretations on disc one by Jason Lescalleet, M. Behrens, Sukora, and Peter Duimelinks. However, disc two is far more interesting, with remixes / reinterpretations by Francisco Lopez, Eric Lanzillotta, Frans De Waard, and Leif Elggren. These four have all pulverized the original source material into granular rumblings and dense textural drones that offer uneasy responses to the delicacy of the original.
John Hudak's minimalist sound experiments have often utilized single source materials. But unlike the elemental singularity of Aube where water, flourescent bulbs, and oscilators are transmogrified into almost interchangeable, dense noise fields, Hudak's choices are based upon the metaphoric content of the subject matter as in "Don't Worry About Anything..." which broke apart an
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While the origins for Hudak's sounds are purposefully ambiguous, the high-end shimmering drones appear with a clear organic textural density to them, that could easily be digitally timestretched chirps of crickets, locusts, or other twilight insects. Hudak pushes the envelope of these crystaline sounds close to the pain threshold, but restrains from going into Whitehouse territory for a more trancendental listening experience.
Pieces of Winter was born of two compositions that the sound artists John Hudak and Stephan Mathieu recorded as holiday gifts for their friends during the 2002 Christmas season. Hudak is reknowned for his stone-faced minimalism of deconstructed acoustic phenomenon; and for -his- seasonal recording buried a contact microphone in the snow and captured the sound of the snow turning to ice. Mathieu had composed a piece with Eva-Lucy Mathieu for pump organ and ocarina, which in turn he transformed into calm and exquisitely warm piece of delicate drones. Commissioned by the Portugese label Sirr, the two married their previous recordings into a gentle exercise for minimalist grace, in which the two have removed all recognizable traces of the source material's distinctive qualities and extracted digital fragments that allude to the poetry of winter, snow, and the cold without overtly stating it. Steady cracklings form a steady stream of hushed gray textures, accentuated by crystalline pinpricks of pristine feedback whistlings. Later on, Pieces of Winter glistens with the delicate glitch collages that have become a signature for Mathieu on his celebrated Full Swing album. A word of warning, this album is very quiet, and you really have crank the volume to perceive the amount of detail found within!
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"Figure 2" is the second collaboration for sound artists John Hudak and Jason Lescalleet. Hudak's sound work is an extension of his work with delicate amplifications of emotive sounds which normally exist below the threshold of audibility, sounding like a
On an undisclosed winter night when the first blizzard of the season hit the Boston area, Hudak and Lescalleet were perfoming inside the warm confines of the Lindsay Chapel of the First Church Congregational in Cambridge. The first snow is always a mixed blessing as it offers on one hand the dramatic shift in the landscape from the drab grey of autumn to the blinding whites of early winter, yet on the other the snow obviously signifies the inevitability of cold weather. "Figure 2" subconsciously speaks of these dual emotions conjured by the encroaching winter. Using manipulations of recycled sounds from the dark old chapel itself, Hudak and Lescalleet present a series of slow sub-bass drones punctuated by eerie creakings of the wooden architecture and whistling tones from the wind rushing through cracks in the windows.
For fans of Dam-Funk , Flying Lotus and James Pants. Neo-Electro funk with lots of cheesy eighties synth patches and wobbly beats!
The husband and wife duo Jeff & Jane Hudson started out in art-punk outfit The Rentals (not to be a confused with the Weezer side-project of the same name from the '90s). There were a couple of Rentals singles, one of which landed on Beggars Banquet in 1979, before the band broke-up. The Hudsons relocated to New York from Boston, and shifted towards synths, drum machines, and electronics in their collaborative project. Their first ep - World Trade - was released in 1981 through the seminal No Wave Lust/Unlust label alongside Mars, Dark Day, Martin Rev, Lydia Lunch, Z'ev, etc., and the Hudsons had made the rounds of all the punk spaces at the time, opening for Suicide on at least one occasion. Flesh was their second album, one that they recorded at home and released themselves in 1982. There is an insularity to this album that asks something of a chicken and an egg question. Was their self-financing the result of an expressive solipsism, or vice versa?
Regardless, Flesh is a record that didn't have many contemporaries in New York, although if they hailed from San Francisco, the Residents, Snakefinger, and the Psyclones would have all been kindred spirits. Jane and Jeff wrote darkly carnivalesque, post-punk numbers through early Roland synths and drum machines, accompanying bass, guitar, vocals, and a lot of warbling effects. Their flanging, weird sound grafted onto the chicken scratch guitars certainly looks forward to what Blank Dogs would do some 30 years later. So it's no surprise that Blank Dogs' label Captured Tracks would be one of the two two labels releasing this reissue, which comes with a ton of bonus material, including the aforementioned World Trade ep, the "No Club" single, and the punchy art-punk dance number "Special World," originally released as a single in 1983 before the Hudsons transitions from music to video art. Great stuff!
This long sought after collector's item holy grail finally gets reissued. And while we don't exactly have the same Pavlovian response when slapping this album on the deck as the collecting world at large does, it's an interesting document nonetheless. Primarily it is Hudson's fragile, practically off key, trembling voice baring himself wide open for the whole world that makes this record almost creepy. The production here is standard fare, not as out there as his later Wackies collaboration "Playing It Cool & Playing It Right" which we listed before, and possibly a little too dependent on synthy-sounding keyboards for an early seventies Jamaican release. But still pretty cool.
Lotsa folks we know seemed real excited about the prospect of this reissue. Apparently this 1981 album, a collaboration between Hudson and fellow Jamaican turned Yank Lloyd Barnes (Wackies), was reknowned as an especially far-out dub treatment, way gone on the studio fuckery as these things go. Having now heard it, we agree that the production IS a big part of this record's appeal. But it's not THAT experimental, really. We think it's just as great that it's such a sunny n' soulful slice of Jamaican vocal/groove reggae. Sure it's super dubbed out at a times, with sped up/slowed down tapes, massive echo fx, filters, distortion, all that good stuff, but these songs are also really soulful and smooth, funky even. Actually, we're really reminded of the loose, swampy sound of Funkadelic's early efforts. Productionwise, this is druggy, sure -- not as wasted as the LSD-fried production of Funkadelic's "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow", but close at times. Anyway we're talking about dub reggae here, laid back and head noddin'. Dub fans take note, this is a good 'un. It's over a half-hour long but seems kinda short just 'cause it's so good and groovy that you just want it to keep on keeping on...but that's what the repeat button is for. So, excellent call on the part of Basic Channel's new Jamaican reissue imprint Basic Replay for making this album available again!
There's been so much amazing, dark minimal techno lately we can barely keep up, and so much good stuff, that even the techno haters here have come around. Recently we've been inundated with killer records from Shed, Terrence Dixon, Chasing Voices, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Kowton, Miles, Function, Silent Servant, and even techno influenced outliers like Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, etc.
You can add Huerco S. to the list. And while we know, a quick Google search, and we could tell you all about Huerco S., his real name, where he's from, what other group's he's played in, all that jazz, but sometimes not knowing anything is way better, especially when it comes to music like this. Colonial Patterns sounds so mysterious, it's murky, and moody, washed out, minimal and abstract, the sounds are crumbly and faded, the beats are barely there, more like buried pulsations, hushed rhythmic swells, a rumbling throb, wreathed in all manner of sonic detritus, so much so, that we're loathe to even really qualify this as techno. It has techno elements for sure, but to these ears it has much more in common with folks like Tim Hecker or the Caretaker, atmospheric ambience, everything wasted and decayed, even the melodies sound half formed, and ancient, as if over the course of the record, they've gradually been eroded, existing now more as sonic shadows, as audio imprints of sounds lost and faded away, some tracks are formed from fragmented vocals, looped into maddeningly tranced out soft focus stutters, which gradually blur into pure sound, the 'vocals' absorbed into something greater, like a way more arcane, abstract version of the Field, the beats are barely ever actually beats, more like skeletal arrangements of rhythmic elements, on some tracks, the beats consist of nothing more than fractured fields of static, possibly the result of gunked up tape heads, yet somehow, the results are magical, and yeah, mysterious. The tracks that do exist closer to proper techno, even those display all manner of warped sonic anomalies, swirling and psychedelic, on the verge of collapse, held together by the most skeletal of rhythmic support, while others are purely abstract arrangements of sound and rhythm, rhythm and sound, dubby, droney, drowsy, dirgey, strange samples surfacing throughout, only to be re-engineered into something wholly other, stumbling, skittering, stuttering, lurching, lumbering, woozy, meditative, hypnotic and mesmerizing, totally alien, yet strangely warm and soothing, tranquil and totally and utterly entrancing. Definitely a contender for year end lists, electronic / techno or otherwise, and a new unanimous aQ fave!!!
