THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Brand new lp by East Bay's Mono Pause. Taking cues from the early days of Thinking Fellers and Sun City Girls then building on it, Mono Pause's compositions range from off kilter ethno-prankster-rock, to seemingly semi-German classic psych, to improv skronk. The multitude of such musical tangents are at times discreet and others brilliantly blended. Quite good.
Split between east-bay ethno-rockers Mono Pause and Icelandic organ power-trio Aavikko, with each band covering the other's work. Mono Pause takes a mighty fine stab at "El Cebo", slowing down the tempo and filling out the arrangement with guitar, ud (mandolin? other ethnic-lute-thingy?), whacked synths, drums, bass, trumpet and more. After a Kraftwerk style vocoder intro, Aavikko, for their part, do almost the opposite with their arrangement of their chosen Mono Pause tune: stripping it down to fit their organ, organ and drum format and speeding up the tempo to a lively jaunt. Very purdy cover art on this Seeland release, makes it worth the slightly steep 7" price. We wonder if Seeland has designs on possibly reissuing some of that out of print Aavikko stuff.
Years and years and years ago (2001!), we reviewed a record by a Canadian seventies worshipping hard rock combo with the bizarre name of Sir Hedgehog, and it was one of those classic records pretty much all the aQ heavy rockers here were obsessed with, we sold a ton too, and always sort of wondered what happened to those guys. Well, apparently at least some of them now play in another goofily monikered outfit, this one called Monobrow, and while they may not worship the seventies as much as they once did, they're still heavy and hard rocking and psychedelic, the new band is all instrumental though, with a more stoner metal vibe, big riffs, killer leads, bombastic drumming, the songs mathy and a little bit proggy, we even hear a little Fucking Champs, if the Champs were on MeteorCity. And actually, the deeper we get into the record, maybe these guys haven't ditched that seventies love as much as we thought, plenty of proto-metal sounding grooving, wild wah wah guitar freakouts, thick meandering melodic basslines, and songs that are pretty goddamn catchy considering they're instrumental, as well as pretty dense and proggy, but hell, we can't imagine anyone into heavy psych, stoner metal, riff rock or just classic heaviness, not flipping out over these guys.
Most definitely recommended, and another one of those records we can't seem to stop listening to.
The awesomely titled Love Zombies was record number two from UK post punk combo the Monochrome Set, released a handful of months later then their debut in 1980, and while the band professed that Love Zombies was meant to be more accessible than their Strange Boutique debut, it's hard to get that from the album opening title track, which sounds like it could have come right off Strange Boutique (then again, the records were recorded just months apart), but weirdly enough reminds us of a band that would come way later The Cardiacs, proggy and bombastic and cabaret-like, the music intricate and lush, the vocals crooned and dreamily dramatic, with strange bits of pop bombast and weird production, a buzzing main melody (a synth maybe), some spidery guitar leads, the word 'zombie' chanted ominously, it's hard to believe this was their idea of more accessible. And while the wild tribal drumming that was all over the debut is notably absent, and the vibe is definitely slightly less dark, everything else is still present, the songwriting, the strange arrangements, the fey vox, if anything, Love Zombies reminds us a little bit of another seminal post punk pop reissue, the Cleaners From Venus, we'd imagine most folks who dug those Cleaners reissues would like this as well, although Monochrome Set, especially on Love Zombies, are a whole lot more precious, a bit jazzier for sure, in fact, in the review of Strange Boutique we mention Murray Head and "One Night In Bangkok", which again, much of this reminds us of, but there are plenty of subtle surprises and bits of weirdness here and there, like the garbled freak out opening of "In Love, Cancer?", which sounds like it came straight off a Teenage Filmstars records, but for the most part this is just a classic slab of eighties (post punk) jangle pop.
We missed the Monochrome Set the first time around, then again we were only ten or eleven when this record, their debut full length, came out in 1980. But then a few years back, someone turned us on to these guys and we became sort of obsessed, total seminal post punk radness from the UK, catchy and weird and a little bit fey, jangly and hooky, with wild tribal drumming, Morricone-ish guitars, dramatic crooned vox. Apparently, the Monochrome Set was born from a band called the B-Sides, a group that also featured the future Adam Ant, and at least on MC's debut, it's easy to hear that both Adam Ant and the Monochrome guys shared similar influences, especially in the drumming, just give a listen to the "The Monochrome Set (I Presume)", the opening could be an Adam Ant song, big tribal drumming, pounding toms, surrounded by all sorts of jungle sounds, but where Adam Ant would take that song in a more rock direction, the 'Set add some spidery minor key melodies, and the result is almost like a sped up Tom Waits jam, the guitar very Marc Ribot-ish, it's not hard to imagine Waits' raspy growl, but instead, more guitars enter and add a little woozy groove, and then the vocals a sort of sung spoken croon that reminds us a bit of Murray Head ("One Night In Bangkok"!), then the chorus, with it's weird sing songy vocals, it's such a weird, killer song. Our favorite for sure. But the rest of the record is nearly as good. "The Lighter Side Of Dating" unfurls a string of low slung bass pulses underneath some effected guitar strum, and then the drums come in, a dizzying spray of fills, which lead right into an almost Smiths-like chorus, very twee and again dramatic. And so it goes, the record rife with coulda/shoulda been classics, some dark and churning and groovy, others lighter and poppier, with a cabaret streak a mile wide running throughout. So good!
Local label Time Released Sound unearths yet another dark and dreamy sonic gem, this one fitting perfectly into the label's washed out and wistful modern chamber music aesthetic, but like all the TRS releases, manages to exist in its own mysterious soundworld. Colors In The Dark, by Monochromie, aka French pianist/composer/soundscaper Wilson Trouve, is all lush, layered landscapes of plaintive piano, fans of Lubomyr Melnyk and Anton Batagov will feel right at home, drifts of hushed melodic shimmer, swoonsome swaths of chordal thrum, all swirling softly beneath Trouve's gorgeous piano, the vibe achingly heartfelt, the arrangements sweeping and cinematic. We're definitely reminded of Eluvium, the music on Colors similarly sounding like it could be the perfect score for some low budget indie art film, dramatic and intense, melancholic and emotional, the sound alternately brooding and moody, before slowly morphing into something more warm and washed out. The melodies so lyrical and lilting, the whole thing wreathed in a hazy patina of gauzey soft focus shimmer, some tracks drifting dreamily, others slow building, smoldering and intense. Gorgeous stuff. We're tempted with every TRS release to say it's our favorite, and generally it is, at least until the next one. As always, WAY recommended.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, Colors In The Dark comes in two version, the standard, limited to 200 copies and housed in a full color digipak, and the deluxe, which as always, is totally stunning, this time around, the cd is housed in a printed envelope, affixed to an 8.5" x 8.5" square folder with aluminum screws. The front of the envelope features a diecut cardstock print affixed to the front, printed with silver metallic concentric circles, inside are 4 square prints made from spray stenciled and collaged pieces of vintage wallpaper, all sewn and folded together, everything, held shut with more aluminum screws, which have to be unscrewed to access. So cool. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Local label Time Released Sound unearths yet another dark and dreamy sonic gem, this one fitting perfectly into the label's washed out and wistful modern chamber music aesthetic, but like all the TRS releases, manages to exist in its own mysterious soundworld. Colors In The Dark, by Monochromie, aka French pianist/composer/soundscaper Wilson Trouve, is all lush, layered landscapes of plaintive piano, fans of Lubomyr Melnyk and Anton Batagov will feel right at home, drifts of hushed melodic shimmer, swoonsome swaths of chordal thrum, all swirling softly beneath Trouve's gorgeous piano, the vibe achingly heartfelt, the arrangements sweeping and cinematic. We're definitely reminded of Eluvium, the music on Colors similarly sounding like it could be the perfect score for some low budget indie art film, dramatic and intense, melancholic and emotional, the sound alternately brooding and moody, before slowly morphing into something more warm and washed out. The melodies so lyrical and lilting, the whole thing wreathed in a hazy patina of gauzey soft focus shimmer, some tracks drifting dreamily, others slow building, smoldering and intense. Gorgeous stuff. We're tempted with every TRS release to say it's our favorite, and generally it is, at least until the next one. As always, WAY recommended.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, Colors In The Dark comes in two version, the standard, limited to 200 copies and housed in a full color digipak, and the deluxe, which as always, is totally stunning, this time around, the cd is housed in a printed envelope, affixed to an 8.5" x 8.5" square folder with aluminum screws. The front of the envelope features a diecut cardstock print affixed to the front, printed with silver metallic concentric circles, inside are 4 square prints made from spray stenciled and collaged pieces of vintage wallpaper, all sewn and folded together, everything, held shut with more aluminum screws, which have to be unscrewed to access. So cool. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Former Chain Reaction mainstays (Chain Reaction is the label that is home to the murky dubbed out minimalist 'heroin house', the only house music anyone here at AQ can stand) Monolake left their former label behind, but you'd never know it, that Chain
Latest from this long running minimal techno outfit, aka sonic alchemist Robert Henke, and another fantastic excursion into a murky world of mysterious sound, minimal skeletal beats and crunchy, staticky ambience, dubby and this time around, surprisingly big-beat heavy. Long gone are the days of Monolake's 'heroin house' murk, the later releases by Henke displaying a lush sound palette, even at their darkest and moodiest, the sounds themselves are still glistening and prismatic, but Henke never shies away from employing sonic detritus as well, whether that means bursts of static, or sheets of crumbling distortion or clouds of white noise hiss. The title track gives us a glimpse of Monolake's new sound, which is seriously propulsive and downright funky, almost a little jungly, with a distinctive techstep vibe, but wreathed in crackle and crunch, making it sound a little Digital Hardcore as well, but Henke keeps things tight and controlled, so it never veers totally into any of those other realms, it remains mostly tightly coiled and minimal, but Henke also adds some creepy whispered vocodered vocals which add a whole other element.
The rest of the record is not nearly so block rocking (although a few tracks do come close), definitely hewing closer to Henke's more minimal roots, but within that sound, Henke definitely mixes it up, creating some serious headphone ear candy, a lush minimal liquid skitter one second, the beats seemingly made from the sound of marbles or various items rolling on a hard surface, some severe ultra pristine Raster Noton style click and crunch the next, although in both cases Henke definitely adds his own unique twist. There's one track where things get downright housey, complete with buried female vocals and weirdly reverbed handclaps, while elsewhere the sound does occasionally shift into strange buzz drenched metal percussed skitter grooves, or blisses out into gauzey, hazy almost Caretaker sounding ambience, or blossoms into warm whirling almost proggy synthscapes, or oozes into a hushed almost static black ambient rumble. Pretty fantastic stuff, but then, we've sort of come to expect that from Henke's Monolake.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This German electronica duo (of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles) stumbled a bit on their first post-Chain Reaction release, but their second is a return to form with this extended 35 minute track of granular synthesis, dubbed EQ, and slow ambient passages of soft pulsations and bubbling analogue sounds. If you liked Pole or the minimalist ambient of Kit Clayton, you'll be quite pleased by this one!
Robert Henke took his Monolake project away from the Chain Reaction label a few years ago, but his recordings still sound as if they would be right at home within the rigid structures of Chain Reaction's techno minimalism. "Gravity" is a sedate album of quick tempo techno beats and deep ambience that Henke unsettles with thunderous digital dub reverberations. Definitely reminiscent of Vladislav Delay and Pole. This album (which collects a handful of singles onto disc) is a solid if not entirely innovative entry into the realm of armchair techno.
In the wake of Wolfgang Voigt's recent Gas reissue, it would be easy to overlook something as simple - yet essential - as Monolake's Hong Kong. It was originally released on Basic Channel's Chain Reaction label, and has long since been unavailable. The album was composed and recorded back when Monolake was a duo, after the two took a trip to, yes, Hong Kong. Incorporated within, between, and around the opiate propulsion you'd expect from a Chain Reaction release, various field recordings illustrate the specific "atmosphere and mood of this experience." While potentially sounding like a college homework assignment, this collection surprisingly manages to create a sense of purpose and cohesion greater than what one might expect. Fans of minimal techno, field recordings, or even drone, listen up! Recommended.
Graduating from the Chain Reaction school of minimal electronica, Monolake have started their own label and transformed their bleak electronic pulses into a more driving propulsive techno.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Whoa, Monolake does drum and bass? "Polaroid" is just that, with skitterish but mid-tempo Speed Garage breakbeats and hoovering basslines built out of Monolake's signature metallic synthesis. A bit uncharacteristic for a former Chain Reaction artist, but certainly not bad.
We've always been way into Monolake, with their murky hazy "heroin house" sound, all muted four on the floor beats, but as if you were hearing them through the wall from next door. For the last few years though, the haze seems to have been clearing gradually revealing a whole new Monolake, each release a little more polished, a little more uptempo, a little more, well Kompakt. This definitely sounds like it belongs on Kompakt, which is in no way a bad thing. Well, it is maybe if you were still looking specifically for that murky Chain Reaction drugged out techno sound, but hell, we love Kompakt, and that slick thumping skittering Kompakt minimalism. So now we have Polygon_Cities, which is just that, a minimal pulsing slab of modern electronica, clipped beats, and shuffling IDM-ish rhythms, stark and spare, but with warm synth swells and brief flurries of crumbly distortion and bits of that dubbed out Pole sound we used to love so much. Super laid back and smooth, kinda like what we imagine you'd hear in some Eurotrash opium den resting up for your next undercover spy misssion, or maybe the music that plays in a sci-fi movie while you're having your retinas scanned by some beautiful cyborg.
It wouldn't be that far off to lump Robert Henke alongside Brian Eno as a pioneering force of electronic music. Eno's legacy through his impeccable glam-pop records of the '70s and into his ambient period is well documented; and there's plenty of ripples felt throughout the world from Henke's work both through his minimal techno variations and through his ongoing development of the Abelton Live software. Similarly, in discussing Henke (as with Eno) comes the topic of the superior quality of Henke's recordings. While his compositions are good, the sound those compositions achieve is always exquisite. His tones, textures, and rhythms are rich, silky, precise, and, like any self-respecting techno, coldly detached. As many of you know, these are not necessarily the values we seek here at aQuarius. If some kid in his bedroom can unleash a horrific fury of black metal that's ungodly expressive, we're gonna get really excited about that, especially if all of that rage, hate, and sorrow really translate through the murk, grime, and hiss. So, when it comes to a record like Monolake's Silence which sounds so good, we'll admit that we're less impressed by production skills on display and more by the impressive slippages between dubbed-n-chilled downer techno, dubstep bass rattling, gestures of arctic ambience, and well spatiallized use of clanging metallics, digital textures, and disembodied voices. Fantastic.
The second solo album from label founder Rune Kristoffersen is centered around a series of improvisations using a very basic electronic setup often resulting in strange, freefloating and rhythmic abstractions that occasionally take off in unexpected
Brand new band from our own backyard brings us 9 impeccable pop songs. Their debut album, "Here Comes The Monolith" sounds more like the work of a seasoned rock mainstay than a rookie's first time at bat. The Monolith successfully harken the sounds of Cheap Trick, Beatles, E.L.O., Big Star and more recently, The New Pornographers. The latter probably most noticably distinguished by the silky vocal harmonies present in every song. Superbly crafted pop arrangements with heart-snagging hooks, bridges & choruses filled with horn sections and strings are merely the icing on the cake. The cherry on the top is the gorgeous production that is so often sadly lacking from debut releases. Highly recommended!
Oh the yummy pop power of The Monolith! They continue to dish it out in heaping spoonfuls on this their second album. This terrific Bay Area foursome take the standard pop band instrumentation of vocals, guitar, bass and drums, and plush it up so nicely with horns, keyboards and strings. The Monolith sound is alternately reminiscent of Quasi, Apples In Stereo, Big Star, Beatles, Beach Boys, maybe even a bit of Bread too -- y'know, all the best popsters! Bright, bouncy, harmony filled sweetness. Meet you there? You bet!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Hey, an awesome uber-heavy band from Sweden, what a surprise! Last list we had Salem's Pot, also now on the same label comes this album from psychedelic stoner sludge outfit Monolord. (As in, Lord of the Monolithic riffage!) What they do, and do well, are massive mesmeric doom jams, derived from the devolved DNA of old grandads Black Sabbath. While that's nothing we haven't heard before from the likes of OM and Electric Wizard, Nibiru and UFOmammut, Gonga and Sleep, we're still suckers for it - the blown out speaker-rumbling amplifier worship, the repetitive riffs, extended song structures, the mantric vocal chants (utilizing an echoing underwater-y sort of effect, much more stoned sounding that way). There's five long songs here, one of 'em an instrumental, the others featuring fantastical, occult lyrics fixated on death and ritual. It's OM/Sleep, perhaps, that these ceremonial riff/chant tracks remind us of most, not a bad thing at all. Recommended to all who like to be able to throw on a disc, crank the volume, and be helplessly, hypnotically buried beneath a slow moving, oozing mound of HEAVY.
This fantastically frosty bit of glacial electronic ambient drift comes from the strangely named Monolyth & Cobalt, a French sound artist who finds himself right at home on local label Time Released Sound, his guitar flecked chordal swells, and hushed ambient atmospheres a perfect fit alongside the other ambient alchemists in TRS's stable.
Fans of the 'Time Released SOUND', will be in heaven, as M&C effortlessly conjures up softly heaving swells of gristly thrum, pocked with subtle bits of glitch, and laced with flickering fields of crystalline guitar, all wreathed in clouds of softly swirling shimmer, the sound in constant flux - lush and billowy one second, a barely there whisper the next, some tracks are darkly cinematic, fields of moaning low end beneath weightless melodies and abstract anti-rhythms, others are more ethereal and electronic, sun dappled sprawls of pastoral electronic flecked drone/drift mesmer. Some tracks seem to blossom into Sunroof! like psychedelic ragas, all prismatic and kaleidoscopic, while still others erupt into grinding, lurching rhythms, but even then, those rhythms are pulled apart and recontextualized into something much more tripped out and free form, subtle and minimal, everything eventually blurring and smearing into strangely lovely electro-psych-folk ambience and neo-classical chamber-drone polar drift. All quite lovely, haunting and hypnotic.
Like all TRS releases, there are two version, the standard, which is limited to 150 copies, and is housed in a nice full color digipak, and the deluxe, which is limited to just 70 COPIES, and in this case finds the disc housed in an antique metal 16mm film canister, each one hand labeled, collaged and stamped, inside the canister are 10 round, hi-res photos of the polar ice caps, two attached to the inside of the canister, the others hand sewn into an accordion like booklet. Each one hand made and totally unique. Fantastic!
This fantastically frosty bit of glacial electronic ambient drift comes from the strangely named Monolyth & Cobalt, a French sound artist who finds himself right at home on local label Time Released Sound, his guitar flecked chordal swells, and hushed ambient atmospheres a perfect fit alongside the other ambient alchemists in TRS's stable.
Fans of the 'Time Released SOUND', will be in heaven, as M&C effortlessly conjures up softly heaving swells of gristly thrum, pocked with subtle bits of glitch, and laced with flickering fields of crystalline guitar, all wreathed in clouds of softly swirling shimmer, the sound in constant flux - lush and billowy one second, a barely there whisper the next, some tracks are darkly cinematic, fields of moaning low end beneath weightless melodies and abstract anti-rhythms, others are more ethereal and electronic, sun dappled sprawls of pastoral electronic flecked drone/drift mesmer. Some tracks seem to blossom into Sunroof! like psychedelic ragas, all prismatic and kaleidoscopic, while still others erupt into grinding, lurching rhythms, but even then, those rhythms are pulled apart and recontextualized into something much more tripped out and free form, subtle and minimal, everything eventually blurring and smearing into strangely lovely electro-psych-folk ambience and neo-classical chamber-drone polar drift. All quite lovely, haunting and hypnotic.
Like all TRS releases, there are two version, the standard, which is limited to 150 copies, and is housed in a nice full color digipak, and the deluxe, which is limited to just 70 COPIES, and in this case finds the disc housed in an antique metal 16mm film canister, each one hand labeled, collaged and stamped, inside the canister are 10 round, hi-res photos of the polar ice caps, two attached to the inside of the canister, the others hand sewn into an accordion like booklet. Each one hand made and totally unique. Fantastic!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The sleeve must be seen to be believed -- full on glitter in rich brights (by Thingmaker of course).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We sometimes think lysergic free noise floorcore duo the Skaters might as well have never broken up. Sure both James Ferraro and Spencer Clark (aka Monopoly Child Star Searchers) have carved their own sonic path, but they seem perpetually linked. On the same label, releasing records at the same time, often playing on each other's records (which makes it the Skaters sort of anyway, right?), sounds that while different, definitely share many similarities, and most notably, both possess a visual aesthetic so appalling and seemingly purposefully eye gouging, it's almost as if they're trying to get people not to listen to their records. Which is a shame, cuz another thing these guys have in common, is almost without exception, their records are fantastic. Tripped out and woozy and warped and psychedelic, each in his own twisted way.
Bamboo For Two is apparently some sort of poetic loveletter to Clark's beloved parrot, unless it's all a put on, but the cover, does feature Clark in a button down shirt, with a parrot perched on his shoulder, with lots of cheesy fonts and palm trees, and yeah, we know it's that weird eighties retro tropical look the kids are digging so much, but ugh. And yeah, the music inside is a little tropical, but it's also a little alien, a little looped and twisted and tangled and freaky and fucked up and weird as fuck. Ferraro joins his former partner in sound, as does Lieven Martens of Dolphins Into The Future and Eva Van Deuren of Orphan Fairytale, the four of them crafting a sound that evokes a visit of the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, while tripping balls. Warbly retro Casio-scapes, peppered with strange percussion, squiggly melodies, bizarre vocalizations, wheezing organs, fluttery flutes, often sounding like a new age Avarus record, all clatter and shuffle and skitter and looped lysergic mesmer.
As always fantastically far out, a murky mesmerizing chunk of retro-looped lo-fi tropical psychpop, as long as you can get past the garish cover, but do, cuz it's definitely worth it...
The name Monopoly Child Star Searchers might not be all that familiar to you, but the man behind the music probably is, it's Spencer from long time AQ faves the Skaters, with a brand new solo tape, under yet another new and obtuse monicker.
But as weird as the band name is, it probably won't prepare you for what lurks inside. Sonically, it's definitely reminiscent of the Skaters, but where the Skaters dabbled in murky tribal jams, and stumbling free folk rituals, the sound here is much more chaotic and playful, almost circusy at times, sounding like some cracked pop record rolled in tape his, and played back at the wrong speed, all bass and no treble, so even the high end sounds like a buzzy blur. Super hypnotic, a looped landscape of hiccupping stuttering melodies, dizzying and dense, while in the background, long drawn out tones drift in the background, synths or vocals, hard to tell, but they sound angelic and haunting. The tape is all variations on this strange looped alchemy, sometimes stripped down to just percussion, but even then it's a mumbled barrage of thumps and skitters, all jumbled up into a chaotic little tangle of rhythms.
Not sure if you can tell from the above, but this just might be our the best thing we've heard from the Skaters camp EVER!
- MPEG stream: 1
- MPEG stream: 2
- MPEG stream: 3
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With most noise bands you can usually figure out how the sounds are made, where they come from. Even if the source is run through a bank of effects, totally processed and distorted, it's usually pretty easy to tell if it's a synthesizer, or a guitar or just a voice.
But with Monopoly Child Star Searchers, we are just confounded, gloriously and utterly so. MCSS is a side project of the uber prolific Skaters, and as we mentioned in the last MCSS review, we might dig Monopoly even more than the mother ship. Precisely because their sounds are so totally tweaked. So completely alien. It sounds impossible that these sounds could just be conjured up. They are so rich and textured but the sound is so completely lo fidelity.
Besides all that, the sounds themselves are really hard to describe. It sounds like some dusty old African 78s, being played at 156rpm, broadcast through a spinning Leslie speaker. Everything warbly and murky, lots of high end percussive melody, almost like sped up marimbas or thumb pianos, speaking of which it also sort of sounds like a way sped up shortwave broadcast of some lost Konono live jam.
The whole disc is swirly and tripped out, dense and dizzy, relentless and tribal, druggy and dreamy, so totally hypnotic and mesmerizing. And still after repeated listens, we have no idea what the instrumentation is, how it was recorded, if it's live or sampled, all we know is it's super cracked and weirdly beautiful and we love it!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A few years back, Darren Tate dissolved his Ora project (which centered around Tate's collaborations with Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter, and MNortham), and considered quitting making music altogether. Fortunately, the draw back to the droning manipulations of field recordings grew to strong for Tate to remain inactive; thus, he began the Monos recordings, which
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Darren Tate, founder (along with Andrew Chalk) of the now defunct drone collective Ora, has released his second solo album as Monos. The album starts with a lengthy track of acoustic drones gathered from long wires and gongs, and later processed with tremolo and dense reverb. While this track definitely encapsulates the sound that fellow Ora members (Colin Potter and Jonathan Coleclough, to name a few) have continued to work with, Tate's following pieces depart from this dreamy aesthetic. The second track is quieter, with field recordings of a burbling brook. However these placid sounds are then interrupted by bursts of noisy activity, as if someone was trying to move a 300 pound filing cabinet next to the brook! The final track features a calm layering of keyboard synths. While there are moments of this album that certainly warrant a number of listens, "A Natural Discordance" is perhaps one of the slighter efforts to come from this increasingly prolific school of experimentalists.
Over the past few years, Darren Tate has been wandering into some wildly weird electronics, broadening the scope of his aesthetic beyond the seminal recordings he made with Andrew Chalk (amongst others) as Ora, and more recently through Monos. For the most part, Monos has been a collaborative project between Tate and Nurse With Wound engineer extrordinaire Colin Potter, but at other times, we're pretty sure that Tate is the only one behind the wheel. For Above The Sky, the Monos line-up includes Tate, Potter, and fellow British dronescraper Paul Bradley; and this record is a top notch, vintage sounding Monos disc for sure.
The extended pieces found on this album were culled from the one and only live Monos gig in 2006, the handful of recordings from that gig were processed, recreated, forgotten about, rediscovered, and processed again throughout various starts and stops over the next four years. The resulting album is surprisingly coherent, presenting itself as a sinewy mass of undulating drones dappled with various textures, shadowy events, field recordings, subtle instrumentation, and then some. The ghostly ambience that introduces this album is sublimely beautiful, like the druggy drones of Nurse With Wound (e.g. Soliloquy For Lilith) or the permafrost laden expanses of Thomas Koner or even a darker version of Leyland Kirby's much-lauded hauntological ambience. Distant sound elements of scraped metal echo to the foreground, as the latent sounds from some occluded ritual in some forgotten place. Shimmering acoustic clouds of resonance peel away into field recordings of numerous birds flitting about. Later on, semi-melodic phrases hover near the event horizon dominated by ominous electrical vibrations and dilated drone fields. Seriously, this is fantastic stuff!
The first 135 copies of Above The Sky feature a full extra disc worth of material that easily complements that found on the album proper. Needless to say, these won't last long!
While we've stocked much of the Monos / Darren Tate / Ora back catalogue over the years, this was one that slipped through the cracks, only to be re-released some six years after the fact by Infraction. Age & Transformation was originally self-released as solo Darren Tate album in 2006 through his Fungal imprint in two small editions of about 100 copies each. Now, in this weighty 2cd set, Tate has again adopted his Monos moniker (which sometimes gets applied to solo work, sometimes get applied to work with Colin Potter and Paul Bradley), with the second disc dedicated to a drone-on redux by Mr. Potter. The first track on the original album is one of those bonkers / outsider excursions that Tate has unfurled over the past four or five years, with plenty of ring modulation augmenting his atonal guitar scrapes and muffled electrical drones. The spluttering guitar has the rasping characteristics of Bill Orcutt's damaged anti-blues, although Tate's guitar sounds like he's broadcasting from the bottom of well and playing really slow, with just one hand. The second track is grounded by an industrial din, with a cheap organ sporadically oozing slow melodic phrases.
The first of the two Colin Potter remixes condenses everything from Tate's original into an unhurried collage, just 9 minutes long emphasizing those peculiar melodies and lurchingly hypnotic patterns that Potter found hidden within Tate's recordings. The second redux drones-out for well over 40 minutes revolving around the acoustic reverberations deep inside the bowels of a water tower, with the electro-harmonic chorus from Tate's ring-modulated guitar echoing throughout. Ghostly, through and through.
Way back when, we actually had copies of the original cd-r of Monos' Everyday Soundtracks which was originally released in 2001 in an edition of 100 copies. The artwork was pretty dumb but also highly memorable, as Darren Tate simply affixed a sticker of a car or a truck or bulldozer to a black piece of paper. Dumb, maybe, but we definitely remembered that one coming in the shop. The music however was far more subtle than the cover implied, a collection of dense fog and rumbling overtones emanating from these manipulated field recordings. Monos is the ongoing collaborative project between Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound, etc.) and Darren Tate (Ora, etc.); and their work typically begins with the cryptic recordings from Tate (field recordings? actionist events? slumped synth drone? spectral guitar voids? all of the above?) and ends in Potter's studio where he amplifies and manipulates vibrant sonorities and eerie drones from the source material. Such is the case for the three lengthy pieces on Everyday Soundtracks. Tate and Potter allow glimpses into the source materials by allowing for intrusions of the muffled hum of cars passing by or the cooing of a dove or the burbling of water dripping through pipes; and out of these sounds, Monos builds a deep, somnambulant drone that swallows those natural sounds into a lulling stasis. Like the original pressing all those years ago, this one is limited to 100 copies.
For many years now, Colin Potter and Darren Tate have produced some fine droneworks with Potter becoming a regular contributer to Nurse With Wound, and with both Potter and Tate working together first as Ora and more recently as Monos. Over the past few Monos releases, Potter and Tate have been steadily reducing their electronic tones, gestural events, and field recordings toward a bleak, monolithic minimalism. Generators, a sprawling double cd set, continues in this trend with four extended pieces, suitably titled "Sleep," "The Black Sea," "Slowly Fading," and "Generators." These stately electronic meditations parallel the narcoleptic time-shifting of Coil's Time Machines album from many moons ago in their gradual ascension and descension of compelling hums into subtle diversions from a uniform stillness. There's honestly not much to the frozen space of Generator, but it has to be said that few artists have the skills to pull something like this off with this much success.
Colin Potter and Darren Tate have been working together for well over a decade, as Tate and fellow minimalist Andrew Chalk (under the moniker Ora) began bringing field recordings, bells, gongs, and long stringed instruments down to Colin's IC Studios back in the mid '80s. Along with his uncannily sympathetic ear in engineering their ephemeral dronescapes, Potter also began to supply his own sodden ambient passages and obtuse sounds to Ora's sustained timbres. About six years ago, Chalk fully engulfed himself in the exceptional Mirror collaboration with Christoph Heemann; and Tate renamed his and Potter's collaboration Monos. Where Ora focused on the reconstitution of natural sounds, Monos hedges itself toward the electronic end of the dronology spectrum occasionally harboring a sci-fi paranoiac aesthetic (e.g. Nightfall Sunshine). Landscapes finds Tate and Potter working with Paul Bradley who has developed into an exceptional composer under Potter's tutelege, and it's easily the darkest, most all-consuming record that Monos has released to date. While the source material is thoroughly obscured through Potter's production work, it has a very similar feel to the continuous tidal currents of Troum's twin guitar hypnosis. The trio manifests a constant magnetic pulse from their devices (to be safe if they are not using guitars) whose billowing intensity fortunately does not completely cover all of the subtle, quite textures which exist just below the surface. Desolate, magnificent, and recommended.
In the aftermath of the drone/ambient sound project Ora's breakup a couple of years back, all of the principle voices from that loose British collective have been producing an amazing array of translations of the drone through a variety of improvisations, field recordings, and electronic synthesis. Monos is the project of Darren Tate and Colin Potter, both of whom worked extensively in Ora as Tate collected field recordings for the group and Potter provided his engineering prowess which has also been employed by Nurse With Wound and Current 93. While the two have produced about a half dozen or so super limited CD-Rs as Monos and Dada Lives, "Nighfall Sunshine" is only the second proper CD release for the duo; and is the furthest the two have ventured into pure electronic synthesis. If the field recording is the source material for this album, Tate and Potter have almost completely eradicated the references to natural sounds with only a few instances of bird songs, night-time crickets, and rustling leaves emerging on the album. It's more likely that "Nightfall Sunshine" is the work of Tate and Potter tinkering with the huge arsenal of electronic gear that Potter has been storing up in his York studio for years. The resultant fluttering mirages of electronic warbling, sweeping parametric filtering, tremolo percolations, and atonal clusters make for a cold album of paranoid, sci-fi references not unlike the bleakest computer music from the '60s.
Outside of his 'proper' cd productions (one on Anomalous, and one pending on Die Stadt), the congenial yet humble Darren Tate has released a handful of CD-Rs of his amazing drone / field recording constructions that follow in the traditions of the numerous Ora CD-Rs he published through his former Gnome imprint. In spite of the most paltry amount of information (just the name of the project, and not even the title!), it is quite clear that Tate is working again with long time collaborator Colin Potter, as his exceptional ear and studio crammed with gear help extract the vibrant sonorities from Tate's field recordings. Each of the three tracks on "Places" open with field recordings of crackled branches, bird calls, the burbling brooks, and the muffled activity of a heavy log getting pulled through. Out of these, Tate and Potter develop a thick droning mass, stretching samples into wheezing hiss, synthetic ebbings, and deep droning. In conjunction with the recordings of more natural activities , Monos' drone work doesn't lend for an easy listening experience. This is actually the second pressing of this album, and again as a miniscule edition of 50.
Darren Tate has quietly been producing drone-based compositions out of smeared field recordings and electronics for almost two decades now, but the bulk of his productions have been tiny self-released editions. In the early '90s, he and Andrew Chalk released a handful of cassettes under the moniker Ora, often with help from Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough, Michael Northam, and Daisuke Suzuki. Around the turn of the millennium, Tate and Chalk parted ways under amicable circumstances from what we can ascertain, with Chalk focusing on the equally impressive Mirror with Christoph Heemann, and Tate beginning to record as Monos with continuing production support from Colin Potter. Promotion was the first Monos album. While many of the ensuing Monos records had the same dappled deep ambience and impressionist use of field recordings as Ora, Promotion was an entirely different beast. Here, Tate works with a comparatively caustic recording of him dragging a heavy metal object across a concrete surface with all of the abraded textures and rusted growls that one might expect from such an action. Against this, Tate interweaves several long-form electronic drones with off-set oscillation sweeps, recalling more of the bunker electronics of early '60s computer music. Originally, Promotion was released in three tiny editions of 50 copies each back in 2000. Of course, those are long gone; but Paul Bradley has rescued this gem from the dustbin, although this current edition numbers only 200 copies. And, no these won't be long for this world either!
Over the past couple of years, Darren Tate has been releasing an impressive catalogue of tiny edition CD-Rs for his project Monos, which began as a solo project although more recently has doubled in size with the addition of Colin Potter (who had worked with Tate in the organic drone ensemble Ora). While those CD-Rs go out of print almost as soon as they're pressed, Tate has fortunately allowed other labels access to his recordings for much larger pressings, including the "360 Degrees" and "Nightfall Sunshine" albums for Anomalous and Die Stadt respectively. Edition... (yes, the ellipsis is a part of the label's name) has commissioned Monos for "Sunny Day In Saginomiya," an album as good as any within Monos' catalogue of processed field recordings. Working in Potter's ICR studios (which has not only produced likeminded work from Organum, Jonathan Coleclough, and Andrew Chalk, but also the Dadaist collages of Nurse With Wound), Monos applied thick patinas of reverb and electric synthesis to a set of field recordings provided by another occasional Ora contributor Daisuke Suzuki. The first half of the album couples the reverb saturated field recordings of birds with some eerie spectral guitar drone work from Darren Tate, recalling some of the early Main albums. The second half is far more spartan as Monos works their magic on a Daisuke Suzuki recording of bells, gongs, and rattles occasionally marked by ascending delay patterns and gradually overcome by the analogue electronics found on "Nightfall Sunshine." Quite lovely.
