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Local group notable for their inspired use of electric dulcimer and lute alongside the drums, guitar and tambourine. The Muons have been making music for years already, and it's nice to finally have a record to listen to. The tone is of warmth and yearning with an underlayer of sweetly droning psych guitar, chiming tambourine, and delicately murmured vocals. Fans of Belle and Sebastian and depressed folk troubadours of earlier eras such as The Incredible String Band will enjoy this.
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Who isn't happy to see / hear / be in the presence of this compilation? Really, it has something for everyone. The diva, the sensitive singer, the corny comic, the drumming maniac. You know who we're talkin' about! Speaking of which, whoever is responsible for Animal's playing is an absolutely kickass drummer. Seriously, check that shit out! And who doesn't get a lil' lump in the throat when they hear "Rainbow Connection"?
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Another quite nice drone/bliss release on the ever reliable Time Released Sound label, available as per their usual operating procedure in two different versions: an ultra-limited edition in super deluxe packaging, and also a cheaper, no frills edition too. We're still enjoying TRS's previous release, by The Inventors Of Aircraft, and this other new discovery of theirs is equally dreamy. A thing of shimmering beauty, from a Japanese ambient artist we'd never heard of before. This may be his first release - we'll certainly be looking out for more in the future.
Ten tracks of slowly unfolding murmer and mesmerism, sunny sleepy afternoon music for sure, with gentle melodies (on piano, we think) and rhythms surfacing amidst the glimmering drones, Murkami's music seemingly inspired by nature and the seasons, possibly ghosts as well� Murkami thanks his ancestors, and one track is entitled "Vorie's Ghost Sanitarium".
The deluxe cd version is limited to 100 copies only, and comes in a handmade (stamped, sewn, assembled) six inch square booklet, composed of antique paper ephemera from Japan including fold out tissue maps and Meiji-era apothecary ledger pages, plus a double sided insert printed on bamboo. This booklet is banded by a strip of vintage 8mm film depicting scenes from the aftermath of the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, and is nestled with the cd inside a "clouded" translucent vellum envelope decorated with cherry blossoms. A Japanophile's dream! But if you don't want the fancy packaging, you can also get the cd more cheaply, packaged in a simple hand printed sleeve. Either way, recommended.
Another quite nice drone/bliss release on the ever reliable Time Released Sound label, available as per their usual operating procedure in two different versions: an ultra-limited edition in super deluxe packaging, and also a cheaper, no frills edition too. We're still enjoying TRS's previous release, by The Inventors Of Aircraft, and this other new discovery of theirs is equally dreamy. A thing of shimmering beauty, from a Japanese ambient artist we'd never heard of before. This may be his first release - we'll certainly be looking out for more in the future.
Ten tracks of slowly unfolding murmer and mesmerism, sunny sleepy afternoon music for sure, with gentle melodies (on piano, we think) and rhythms surfacing amidst the glimmering drones, Murkami's music seemingly inspired by nature and the seasons, possibly ghosts as well� Murkami thanks his ancestors, and one track is entitled "Vorie's Ghost Sanitarium".
The deluxe cd version is limited to 100 copies only, and comes in a handmade (stamped, sewn, assembled) six inch square booklet, composed of antique paper ephemera from Japan including fold out tissue maps and Meiji-era apothecary ledger pages, plus a double sided insert printed on bamboo. This booklet is banded by a strip of vintage 8mm film depicting scenes from the aftermath of the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, and is nestled with the cd inside a "clouded" translucent vellum envelope decorated with cherry blossoms. A Japanophile's dream! But if you don't want the fancy packaging, you can also get the cd more cheaply, packaged in a simple hand printed sleeve. Either way, recommended.
Tijuana-based techno musician Fernando Corono (a.k.a. Murcof) has released an album that serves as a worthy successor to those that have so obviously influenced him -- without asking Corono, we'd point to the abstract dub-masters of the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction crew and Richie Hawtin's experimental work under his Plastikman moniker. Previous Murcof work has garnered attention for its intricacy, and led to him being considered a sort of electronic classical composer. The newest offering, Cosmos, bears witness to an increasingly pastoral sensibility that is at once both choatic and hymnal. Maybe the easiest way to describe the music is to make reference to labelmates M83. But where the aforementioned pop-electronic-shoegazers sometimes fall flat with incessant drumroll crescendos and a flood of pre-programmed "choir voice" pads, Murcof manages to shine with an intensely cerebral effort that presents itself for both active and passive listening.
The Nortec Collective have succeeded in convincing the masses (including Chris Blackwell of Island Records and all of the arts editors at NPR) that an idiosyncratic, cute fusion of traditional Mexican music (such as the tambora flares for tuba and accordion ballads) and club-friendly, big-beat rhythms would be a good idea. I have not been convinced, holding the ill-tempered opinion that they are electronica's version of The Gypsy Kings, or at least that they've allowed themselves to be marketed as such. Thus, it came as surprise that Murcof is a pseudonym for Fernando Corono, who is one of the members of the Nortec Collective. While the appropriating force is still at work in Murcof, it's handled with a considerable greater sense of gracefulness than the archetypal Nortec sound. Furthermore, it's Morton Feldman and Arvo Part that Corono is sampling, and not North Mexican folk music. Looping evocative motifs from those minimalist composers into elegant patterns, Corono adds very simple Chain Reaction heroin house grooves to create a very pleasant, very polite sound that runs through the Martes record. The result is a melancholic electronica album that complements Boards of Canada, without resorting to mimickry.
This is the 2nd full length by Tijuana-born electronic composer Fernando Corona aka Murcof. Loosely connected to the Nortec Collective and a major player in the creative art scene in Tijuana over the last several years, Murcof makes music rich with tension and melody. With a strong sense of the elements of both classical and electronic music and composition, he creates an inciting blend of contemporary composition and minimalist Mexican techno. In lesser hands that could be a cringy combination, but Murcof blends the two elements so naturally and with such rich skill that there is no doubt he is one of the great electronic composers of the 21st century. Highly recommended!
Mexican electronic artist Fernando Corona has previously worked alongside the much-ballyhooed Nortec Collective, although you'd be hard pressed to hear any of Nortec's fusions between traditional Mexican music and big-beat electronica in Corona's Murcof project. Where Nortec is brash and tumultous, Murcof is cool and detached; but Corona doesn't entirely leave the ideals of Nortec behind as he develops a chimerical space where disparate styles are forced to cohabitate, dialogue, and ultimately work together. Here, it's a hybridization of 20th Century orchestral composition and the clinical precision of clicks 'n' cuts techno. In sampling the likes of Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki, Corona grafts a hallowed, filmic atmosphere of lilting strings and sustained chorales onto the studied techno formalism as heard in the microhouse facets of Kompakt. Utopia is a remix album dotted with a few original tracks from Murcof alongside the reworkings from Deathprod, Sutekh, Jan Jelinek, Colleen, GeoffWhite, Icarus, and Fax. Unlike a lot of remix albums, Utopia is relatively seamless with most of the artists constructing sympathetic moods and surfaces to Murcof's signature sound.
Last record from these Seattle garage goths. This e.p. was released right before they broke up a few weeks ago. Too bad too cause 'Thelema' is probably the best thing they've done. Dark and damaged garage punk filtered through Siouxsie and the Misfits. In fact, it sounds exactly like the Misfits at moments, mostly because of the singer's Danzig like howl. Tight black jeans, lots of
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Brutal, catchy as fuck gangsta rap from these Def Jam/Ruff Ryder/ Murder Inc./Roc-A-Fella allstars. Sounds a lot like the last DMX record which is a good thing. With Jay-Z, Ja Rule, Vita, Black Child, and of course DMX.
First full length from this female Australian doom duo, three looooong tracks, and then 5 tracks from their demo tacked on to the end, good stuff too, and not the 'normal' doom we usually get around here either. Not sludgey crusty funeral ultra doom, or plodding lumbering blackened doom, no this is somewhere more along the lines of classic old school doom, but mixed with some more modern miserablism a la Skepticism, Esoteric (Murkrat labelmates), all mournful and melancholy, the guitars fuzzy and washed out, the drums plodding and skeletal, the riffs sometimes super Sabbathy, other times much more abstract, and then the vocals, dark and dramatic and a bit gothic, perfectly complimenting the sound in a way growls or screeches never really can. And then there's the organs, thick swells of keyboard that give the tracks a seriously ancient ominous vibe. The production is strange, almost like a Trollmann record, especially with the guitars and the keys, muddied and muted, heavy, but a sort of dreary windswept heaviness. The vocals sometimes shift into witchy rasps, but still spend most of their time hovering hypnotically above the churning riffs and doomic drumming.
The demo tracks are sonically not that far removed from the new tracks, if anything the vocals are a bit louder and more present, in fact it sounds like maybe both are singing more on the demo, the riffs are still murky, the drums buried in the mix, the riffs lugubrious and fuzz drenched, a sort of seventies British folk mixed with classic doom, which we shouldn't have to tell you is a wicked combination.
Fans of classic doom will definitely dig, as well as anyone who has been digging stuff like Jex Thoth, Blood Ceremony and various other female fronted modern doom combos. And check their Metal-Archives page, frontwoman Mandy V.K.S. Cattleprod just might be our latest metal girl crush!
Murmer is the work of the lowercase / microsound newcomer Patrick McGinley, who has coaxed an impressive orchestration out of the transient, yet distinctly urban sounds of his native London. McGinley specifically cites the air vent on a 73 bus, the esclator at the Pimlico tube station, and the air vent of a Austin Mini, as well as datastreams, feedback, a malfunctioning gas heater, and other elements of any city's general din. Through a number of digital filterings, he polishes the rough source material into looped samples of lustrous tones. While not exactly a generative system of sound construction, Murmer strives to set up situations in which a number of slightly misaligned loops of complementary sounds, then step back to let those loops weave and phase amongst themselves.
While the tones that Murmer uses seem very much informed by the work of Richard Chartier, this album, with all of its complex interweavings, is much more conducive to metaphor, and to these ears has the feel of the 'classic' futurism of Jules Verne with guilded machines whiring in near synchronicity to achieve time travel. All in all, this makes for an excellent debut, if only a CD-R pressing. Fortunately, it's been very nicely packaged!
Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) is a sound artist whose primary tools are field recordings and found objects activated within acoustically interesting spaces. While most of his impressive back catalogue of recordings finds him manipulating and treating those sounds into expressive drones and subtly dynamic collages, this double disc set is far more spacious and open-ended, given a slight shift in methodology. He explains in the liner notes that "the framework compositions are a series of experiments with untreated field recordings, exploring notions of musicality within the structures of found sound. The compositions were created with differing sets of self-imposed rules." Two of the four compositions deal specifically with voice, with "Framework 3" settling into a rather lovely passage of wordless vocal harmonics improvised in an open terrace by noted Estonian folk singers Mari Kalkun and Piibe Kolka. This track begins with a reprise of some of the sounds that McGinley used on his 2012 album What Are The Roots That Clutch, as heard in the dense burbling of water insects, building up through brightly resonant objects that shimmer with the minimalist fervor of an Angus MacLise composition. "Framework 2" is the other piece dealing with voice, with the grunts and wheezes of somebody snoring very loudly at the end of this 30 minute piece, which is mostly comprised of frigid wind-blown recordings and scabrous snippets of activity more on par with G*Park's ice-born recordings. "Framework 4" alternates between interior and exterior sounds emphasizing the psychological impacts of the incessant buzz of late-summer cicadas and the flourescent-tube hum of institutional space. Beautiful wanderings of sound that always have the potential to surprise, frighten, and delight.
Drone Records never fails to deliver great material on an unlikely medium: the manipulated drone housed on a 7" single. Here, the curatorial nod goes to Murmer -- the Murmer who recently released the impeccable We Share A Shadow album, and not the differently spelled Murmur. One of the two sides features drones extracted from pipe resonance amassing into a polyphonous chorus of timbre and frequency. the density of this drone doesn't become apparent until Murmer cuts the power on the drone, introduces a series of hissing crackle of tumbling sand, and then flips the switch for the drone to re-emerge. The flip opens with an ominous gasping sound that snaps into a deep-throated drone of distended wind-swept sounds. Tactile objects like leaves and forest debris begin to be tossed around with the tones lightening from those haunted frames of The Hafler Trio to the gilded timbres of Andrew Chalk or Aidan Baker. Limited to 300 copies!
Proprietor of the Framework radio show on Resonance FM for many years now, Patrick McGinley has implored his listeners to "open your ears and listen" to the world at large, presenting an impeccable series dedicated to field recordings and its use in composition. So, it goes with out saying that the field recording and the found object are commonplace within McGinley's own sound art constructions which he records under the moniker Murmer (and not Murmur, mind you!). Given his predilection for wandering throughout the European countryside for all that it has to offer (not just limited to environmental sound), his recorded output has been somewhat limited. We Share A Shadow is his first proper solo album in almost three years, although his collaboration with Jonathan Coleclough did stand out as one of the dronemusik highlights of 2006. Consisting of two very long pieces, We Share A Shadow is a notably restrained album whose dark beauty reveals itself with a slow and deliberate pace. The first untitled piece opens with sheets of cold rain scuffing the smooth arcs of bowed metals, whose Feldman-like swell and collapse recalls the late period work of Bernhard Gunter. As the rain gently fades, a composite drone emerges out of those rasps and vibrations from the bowed metals and intensifies through dissonant timbres subtly agitating the shimmer and filigree of the gilted drone. Throughout, windswept debris ricochets across the stereo field casting an ominous cloud onto the sustained tones. The second piece is an even darker affair with a motor grinding against a piece of metal in the distance while a somber, almost doomscape piano plods in the foreground. With plenty of low frequency rumbles and spectral activity lingering in the background, this piece is almost like KTL remixing Xenakis at 16 RPM. Needless to say, this is an incredible album.
Gorgeously packaged in hand water-colored / letterpressed sleeves, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
In looking at his discography alone, Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) might not seem to be such a prolific artist; although he's certainly dedicated his entire existence to the pursuit of the field recording, its use in composition, and avant-garde sound practices in general. Each week, McGinley produces the ever enlightening Framework radio series dedicated to those very topics, starting out of Resonance FM in London with syndication now reaching several dozen adventurous radio stations across the globe. He's also active in curating a quarterly series of small cd-r editions of sound ecology, phonography, and field recording based sound art; and he also is an active participant in the Estonian avant-garde, as he's currently planted himself in the university city of Tartu. What Are The Roots That Clutch is his first full album in nearly seven years. Has it really been that long? That said, McGinley did work on a brilliant collaborative project with John Grzinich and Yannick Dauby, and he released a 3"cd-r for Taalem, both of which came out earlier this year in 2012. McGinley quips that he put the recordings aside to this record for well over a year, which may account in part for the delay; but ultimately, all of the recordings from Murmer are timeless. What Are The Roots That Clutch is no exception.
The field recordings that McGinley collects hedge towards disturbances in any given sound ecology, as found in the abrasive textures from a busted exhaust vent comingling with the Aeolian harmonics from the sustained gusts streaming down from the North Sea. McGinley does include two relatively unaltered field recordings (probably some minor filtering, but that's all) within the thoroughly abstracted and droned out compositions. One of these features a very eerie fundamental harmonic drone, obviously being activated by the wind and coupled with a glistening rattle and an unfurled flapping. The three elements here make for a surprisingly musical, if totally alien sounding piece that's akin to the Alan Lamb wire recordings. The album's 17 minute centerpiece is a slow building blur of industrial resonance and densely layered aquatic filigree that melts into chunks of clattering ice (it could be wood or glass... but ice is just so much more poetic to consider given the context); but the album's finale is where McGinley really gives us something to sink our teeth into. A comparatively harsh stutter of electrical abrasion builds up to a crescendo through water-tank rumblings and fire and / or water textures. At the peak, McGinley snaps to a downright psychedelic raga of back-masked belltones, harmonium drones, and percussive clatter that all comes together in a minimalist chorale on par with anything that Angus Maclise mustered in his dervishes and mantras.
As great as McGinley's last record was, What Are The Roots That Clutch might be even better. Handsomely packaged in letterpress artwork whose ochre-yellow hue matches the color of an Estonian farm house he's quite fond of. Limited to 400 copies.
It's been raining Murmurs lately. Or Murmers. Or both. The last little while has given us the dark dronemusic of UK based Murmer aka sound sculptor Patrick McGinley. Then there's the dubstep pop ambient of the group Murmur with a 'u' that just came out (to be reviewed here soon). And there's definitely at least one other Murmer... and now we have -this- Murmur, also with a 'u', and we actually got an email from these guys about all the Murmurs and Murmers and they were talking about actually trying to do a three way collaboration! Cool.
This Murmur, is a loose collective of sound makers who gathered in an old decrepit brewery in New Orleans, where one of the players worked, and helped the others gain after hours access. The quintet dragged their instruments up into an old metal fermentation tank, dark and dank, with SO much natural reverb, that they couldn't even talk amongst themselves as the sounds would echo and overlap and turn into blurry smears of sound that would drown out the conversation. And so it was with any sound, the group had to barely play, barely breath, as every movement, every shuffle of the foot, would result in another layer of strange echoing sound. The building that housed the tank was subsequently damaged in Hurricane Katrina, then looted, and still stands abandoned and crumbling to this day.
Thankfully the resulting sounds are as fascinating as the story behind their creation. Using just acoustic guitars, harmonium, a tamboura-zither box, dobro, cymbal, Tibetan bells and vocals, the group, coaxed hushed sounds from their instruments, letting them interact with the alien acoustics of the tank around them. The various stringed instruments, their metallic buzz, billow into thick swells of reverberating low end, that occasionally transform into buzzing rhythmic pulses, always fading back into tranquil shimmers.
The organs wheeze, the vocals hum, the cymbals spread out like ripples in a pond, the percussion clatters and tinkles, the background rife with thumps and rattles, moans and creaks, but it's not just wispy drones and barely there rumbles, the band occasionally locks into some NNCK style shambolic freefolk, the guitars unfurling lazily, a constantly expanding smear of stumbling atonal riffage, drifting through a cloud of jangle and reverb, almost like a super lo-fi disembodied krautrock, the whole thing laced through with a nearly constant dronelike buzz, a sitar sounding shimmer that holds all the drifting sonic slabs together.
Believe it or not, it's been a while since we've been this excited about a black metal band, but this French horde sound like they could have been cooked up in a lab just for aQ. Heavy and fuzzed out, psychedelic and weird as fuck, melodic and sorrowful, abstract and all over the map, within the first minute you'll know exactly what we mean, starting out with this strange little snippet of exotica, that sounds a bit like that cursed idol theme from the Brady Bunch Hawaii movie, the intro becomes this warped soundtrack, all fluttery flutes and strange glitches, we would have been perfectly happy to have a whole record of that, but instead, Murmuure launch into some sort of twisted abstract avant black metal, that is pretty difficult to describe. The sound is echoey and blown out, the riffs aren't traditionally buzzy and black, they're more gnarled and warped and woozy, layered into heaving swells of blackened sound, and shot through with streaks of twisted melody, the drums totally chaotic, slipping from totally free, to stumbling dirge, the vocals are buried and barely there, there also seems to be all sorts of synth stuff happening, wheezing swatch of washed out chordal whir, as well as crunchy buzzing low end thrum. After a brief melodic interlude, the tape seems to crumble into a woozy circusy dronescape, all stuttering looped sounds, melancholy melodies, lots of hiss and crackle, and then those drums come in again, super loud, and weirdly produced, adding some structure to the whirling black cloud of twisted sound. Like some demented synth driven lo-fi black metal take on Godspeed but run through a whole bank of malfunctioning effects, not to mention the twisted mind(s) that conjured up these alien sounds.
Some of the tracks get downright shoegazey, all washed out and shimmery, the delicate melodies drifting through clouds of muted crunch, laced with an M83 style retro electronic haze, the drums driving this weird black pop into even further reaches of the know black metal universe, one moment it sounds like blackened Cocteau Twins, the next like some post rock band covering Abruptum as covered by Alcest, there are field recordings, long stretches of spaced out collaged soundscapes, but everything is woven together into a single multi movement gloriously blissed out, post black metal psychedelic drone drenched drift, and is just about the weirdest and coolest black metal record we've heard in FOREVER.
Here's one possible reason that this record sounds nothing like most black metal, according to the band:
"All the Murmuure material is based on a one hour guitar improvisation from November 2006. The selected parts were then further edited to fit a rhythmic structure, and merged with additional layers of sound. The percussions are a mixture of the original programmed drums, and some (extremely re-edited) additional live drumming. Vocals were recorded during a cathartic trance at a sacred place in the forest, with a mini-disc recorder. Being almost inaudible in the music, they're strictly conceived as a vocal sigil technique, a vehicle for intent."
Awesome. The sound is dizzying and confusional and so original, hell, if this were not a cassette, and not already out of print, this would be some serious Record Of The Week material for sure. But it is just a tape, and these are the LAST COPIES, saved just for us, and you, but fear not, we got a whole bunch, but considering how awesome, and awesomely fucked up this is, you still oughtta grab one of these quick, cuz without a doubt, this is our black metal record of the year!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. WE HAVE THE VERY LAST OF THESE TAPES!!!
A lot of our favorite krautrock, like this, is really nothing more than what you might call super duper "heavy progressive" rock that happens to be from Germany. Not really eccentric or electronic or "kosmiche" like some of the more famous, innovative krautrock acts, but still darn good if you're into psych, prog and proto-metal and just want to hear some kickass longhaired jams -- often with flute! Though, sadly, there's no flute in this particular case.
Berlin's Murphy Blend (named after a pipe tobacco, and featuring future members of similar acts Blackwater Park and Hanuman) made just one album, back in that magical year of 1971. Now reissued on cd, their album is a solid one, rocking bombastically. There's plenty of powerful guitar riffing, and even more in the way of Hammond organ jamming from their classically trained keyboardist, capably pumping out both rock n' roll grooves and neo-classical flourishes (as on "Praludium/Use Your Feet", before the track gets into breakbeat mining territory). Meanwhile, the sometimes goofy lyrics are delivered in heavily accented English, but the album's strength isn't the vocal melodies, but in the compelling, propulsive instrumental passages. Definitely a "heavy progressive" gem. Oh, and it's kinda cool that, despite all the prog excesses earlier, the final track ("Happiness") is less than three seconds long!
Rian Murphy (Drag City) and Will Oldham (Palace, Bonnie Prince Billy) team up with all their friends (Jim O'Rourke, Bill 'Smog' Callahan, Laetitia 'Stereolab' Sadier, Archer 'Sea & Cake-Coctails' Prewitt, Edith Frost and David Grubbs) and play music. A project supposedly over 3 years in the making, it's a little spotty. Recommended only if you *really* need everything that has anything to do with Will Oldham.
We've ballyhooed Brendan Murray's exceptional, yet perennially overlooked drone & din work in the past; but nothing could have prepared us for Commonwealth. Damn, this guy is good. No, wait; he's fucking great! After a handful of cd-r productions, a Twonicorn cassette, and a fine cd release on Intransitive of processed shimmer, shifting frequencies, and some low-end girth rumblings for our obligatory SUNNO))) reference, Brendan Murray has produced his best work to date with Commonwealth. Compositionally, it's incredibly simple: a drone goes up, and it goes down. It lasts a little under 50 minutes. But buried with this single minded composition, there are thick spun rumbles, reflective vibrations, sympathetic sub-harmonics, and rich tonal frequencies. Out of the constant tectonic whir that introduces Commonwealth, shimmering clusters sound like a battery of reed organs or hurdy-gurdies, slowly modulating into heavier, deeper drones. We've been told that the source material for these sounds is guitar, although you'd be hard pressed to hear anything guitar-shaped anywhere on the disc. It's far more like the hallowed minimalist sound of Charlemangne Palestine and LaMonte Young. Dare we say, it's better? Yes, Murray's drone hums like a perfectly tuned machine, with multiple pistons purring in a steady progress along Commonwealth's compositional arc. When Murray shifts the focus of the album downward, which begins not even halfway through the piece, the descent is noticeable; but it actually becomes Murray's most fertile work within Commonwealth. Here, low rhythmic thrumbs crawl beneath the surface of the slowly collapsing drone, precluding its inevitable terminus. Perfect trance-enducing dronemuzik. Fans of Aidan Baker, Andrew Chalk, and Phill Niblock should definitely take note!
This one is for the drone obsesses among you. Not the soft shimmery dronesters, although you softies might take a shine to this, no, this is a deeeeeeeeeeep dark doooomy drone, a massive 40+ minute single stretch of undulating organic rumble. Broken old Casio keyboards, found sounds, field recordings all woven into a huge rafter rattling, bass bin blowing, bone shaking, cranium cracking lowercase minimal dirge. Pulses and whirs, rumbles and growls, all rendered indistinct, painted black and folded in on themselves, a black hole, a thousand helicopters hovering in place, a hundred meters below the sea, two planets colliding, the shockwave traveling through the universe setting up sympathetic vibrations in every inanimate object in existence, until the whole galaxy is bombinating like a struck tuning fork. So awesome.
LIMITED TO 110 COPIES. We managed to get the last 20 so once these are gone they are gone for good!
Brendan Murray, we salute you! You get the reason why there should be a cassette resurrgence - the 90 minute tape! So many noise / drone / floorcore tapes have been released in recent years as 8, 12, 15, 20 minute running times, and it's totally baffling. If you're gonna put out a cassette, let's have the full 90-minute experience as was the norm for any self-respecting mixtape in the '80s and '90s.
So, yes the Boston-based minimalist has cranked out a stunning, slow-crawl tape of suspended tone, that was originally commisioned as some sort of installation thing at Weird Records. The A-side is a brain-drain smear of brass instruments turned into a brash atonal undulation that sounds more like a symphony of junkyard car-horns rather than french horns or trumpets (the more likely culprits). As a result, Murray's piece becomes this glacial recapitulation of a Hermann Nitsch style sonic violence, whose speed is crushingly slow but impossible to avoid. There are also similarities to Murray's highly acclaimed Commonwealth album and its long-stare contest of inevitable decline. If you sit and listen for anything to change there's nothing noticable in the perpetual shimmer and consummate drone; but get up leave the room for a couple of minutes and something will be different - a slight variation in timbre, a repeating form either added or subtracted, a lumbering rhythm oozing from the depths, etc. The B side is not an exact replica of the first, promoting more compositional leaps and starts. In reality these shifts are quite subtle, but given the anesthetizing affect of the A side, any transition is gonna appear like a huge mountain range on a flat surface. Put this up there with LaMonte Young and Charlemange Palestine. Limited to 150 copies of professionally dupped cassettes.
Oooohhh! Live Free Or Die is a re-configuration of Brendan Murray's acclaimed Commonwealth cd, also released by San Francisco's premier sound arts organization 23five. This limited edition redux was conceived as a "tour disc" in support of Murray's 2009 performance at the San Francisco Art Institute, opening for Tony Conrad. The title happens to be the motto for New Hampshire, and has more to do with his personal history in living in New England than anything else. As a teenager, Murray was living in New Hampshire when he and a friend ventured to Boston for a Table Of The Elements showcase that featured a performance from Mr. Conrad. In so many words, the concert blew his mind, and lead him to begin tinkering with sound, a process which lead him to become a mighty finer minimalist and phonographer in his own right.
In making Live Free Or Die, Murray drove Commonwealth (a stately single minded composition of subtly shifting harmonics and drones) through a handful of distortion pedals and effects boxes, changing the overall color of that golden recording with an ashen grit. Using these sounds as the source material, Murray presents two slowly building crescendos whose dynamic range of near silent valleys and speaker rattling peaks as the crux to Live Free Or Die. More Francisco Lopez than Eliane Radigue, Live Free Or Die makes for a very nice companion to his near perfect Commonwealth. There were only 50 copies of these things produced, and the bulk have already disappeared! Ack!
We reviewed Murray's last cd-r release not too long ago (and we actually have a handful of those left, re-listed elsewhere on this list) and we started that review with the words: "This one is for the drone obsesses among you. Not the soft shimmery dronesters, although you softies might take a shine to this, no, this is a deeeeeeeeeeep dark doooomy drone, a massive 40+ minute single stretch of undulating organic rumble." And heck, had we not already use those very words to describe another record, we could very well have used them to describe this one too. 39 minutes of barely shifting bottomless pit drone. Dreamy and pretty, sure, but this is not soft and shimmery, or wispy and gauzy, no, this is dark, and thick, and throbbing and pulsing, lots of layers and tonal color, melodies maybe, but if they are in there, they're stretched and smeared and almost completely lost in the slow crawl fabric of "Ocean Of Dirt, Mountain Of Steam." Close listening reveals plenty of microscopic sonic events, as well as some crystalline loveliness, and over the course of the disc's 40 minutes, the drone does twist and subtly transform, but for the most part this is a near static droneworld, ultra meditative, densely minimal, and surprisingly gorgeous.
Another new one from tape label Twonicorn, a label specializing in "basement new age crawl", finally new music from the highly underrated Brendan Murray, who as we mentioned before we would most definitely rank up there with Coleclough and Chalk as one of our favorite masters of the drone. Former missives from Murray have been of the harsher and heavier variety, gritty and buzz bottomless dronescapes, still ultra minimal but with some heft, bordering occasionally on the heaviness of SUNNO))) or other like minded sonic explorers. But on Scared In My Heart, Murray softens his sound, and offers up two utterly mesmerizing chunks of slow moving soft shimmer. The first, is all hushed ambience, tones that pulse and flutter, but are ultimately smeared into endless drones, allowed to shift and drift, seemingly simple and nearly static, but rife with strange tonal color, subtle dissonance, and all sorts of tangled melody. The second, is like a louder, more active version of the first, the tones sounding more like bells and organs, stretched out and smeared, wavering and warbling, notes beating against one another, all manner of implied motion and abstract melody, minimal but strangely active, intense and emotional, slow burning and quite beautiful.
As with all Twonicorn, gorgeously packaged, pro printed tapes, textured paper sleeves, and of course super limited, ONLY 100 COPIES!! Each tape hand numbered.
This is the first release we've had from dronelord Brendan Murray that wasn't either a cd-r or incredibly limited. And it's about time, cuz if you ask us, Murray is just as good as any of our other drone favorites, Coleclough, Chalk and the like. But Murray has his own thing going on. His is not so dark and minimal. Instead, his world of drones is an active one, alive with strange sounds that shimmer and shimmy, that buzz and blur, plenty of melody or at least a melodic sensibility that Murray seems to imbue all his work with. He often delves into near-noise, letting sounds grind and hiss, building industrial clatterscapes, jagged and harsh, and allowing them to settle into a not so obvious drone-like state. And his latest, Wonders Never Cease, manage to touch on all those various sounds and approaches and then some. From soft fluttering barely there drifts, to fuzzy stretches of muted minimal white noise, to dense and aggressive soundscapes of hiss and crunch, to the album's centerpiece, the 20 minute long "Seas", probably the most melodic track we've heard by Murray, strange disembodied melodies play out and then the various notes separate themselves from the melody and drift into the ether, floating weightless in a swirl of minimal low end pulses and distant keening high end shimmer. A twenty minute track that could last for 20 hours as long as we're concerned. The record finishes off with a 4 minute reprise of the opening track, turning its fuzzy bliss into a grinding crumbling slab of bob ambient splendor. Fucking awesome!
It's always exciting to get a new disc of droning mystery from soundmaker Brendan Murray. We went pretty nuts for past releases, which is saying something as it takes a lot these days for a drone record to really get to us. And for a drone artist to consistantly hold our attention record after record. Of course we love drones, so as a sound, we're as likely to be entranced by a huge humming piece of machinery as a meticulously crafted chunk of ultra minimalist dronemusic (hmmm, what exactly does that say about us?), but we're of course partial to the artists who can deftly fashion drones into new and fascinating shapes, or who create music using drones as just one of many elements.
Which is precisely what makes Murray's music so special, just that, it's incredibly musical. He's perfctly capable of kicking up a Sunn 0)))-like wall of downtuned dirge, or fashion a skeletal bit of hushed murmur, but even then he infuses those all to common sounds with strange melodies, and abstract textures, transforms simple tones and chords into strange sprawling beasts, sounds become actual songs, with melodies and parts, distinct beginnings and ends, each song is a journey, through thick fields of warm hissy blur, caustic crumbling crunch, chiming crystalline shimmer, deep machine-like industrial whir, clangy and clattery abstract angular guitar flecked noise rock, very Dead C here and there, gorgeously murky and lo-fi, and weirdly looped sounding, intense wall of pink noise whir and billowing clouds of near static organ hum. Dark and dense and mysterious and intense, but always so so gorgeous.
While they last, we have the limited version, that comes with a bonus cd-r, featuring a 30 minute live performance recorded last year, a super intense, ultra heavy exploration of some seriously woofer destroying bassiness. Deep rumbling whirs, sprawling into massive reverbeating slabs of black hole low end. Wow.
Here's the second pressing cd-r of a tour ep that these two New England noise+drone artists self-produced during their 2008 East Coast into Midwest tour. Nope, we never got any of that first edition; and perhaps if you didn't catch them tearing it up in Columbus, Ohio, this one might be new to you as well. We've been longtime fans of Brendan Murray's work, which has steadily developed into a very confident brand of minimalism thanks to such work as Wonders Never Cease and Commonwealth. Shiflet's numerous contributions to the American noise community have been splattered on cd-rs from every nook and cranny you could imagine, including his own imprint Gameboy.
For Sentimental Gentlemen, the two weld together each others aesthetics with remarkable panache. The first track is pretty much what you might expect, as Murray's arching compositional strategies couple with Shiflet's seering tactility, which is somewhat softened from such couplings with 16 Bitch Pile-Up and Carlos Giffoni that nonetheless is graced with an electrocutionist's touch. Shortwave radio static and cracked ether highly charged with electricity hang amidst harmonically unsettled sustained tones that slowly build over 15 minutes with phase pattern flutter. The second piece glibby entitled "How's Your Late 90's?" snaps into an abraded electro-acoustic chunk of clipped signals above a bed of low end sawtooth waves and motorized oscillations, that's much more on par with some of the hand built circuits that Joe Colley has managed to abuse over the years. Great stuff all around, and limited edition to 150 copies to boot.
Here's the first piece of vinyl from one of our favorite drone artists - Brendan Murray. Here, he's working with his Boston neighbors Perispirit, whose earlier recordings seem to lean much more toward the power-noise end of the soundscraping underworld, but actually ends up being a worthy compliment.
Brendan Murray offers an interesting twist upon his electrical orchestrations of uneasy minimalism for his contribution to this split. Here, Murray is working with the voice of Noell Dorsey as the only source material. Not all that sure of the background of Ms. Dorsey, aside from a few avant-improv performances in various spots in Boston; and Murray repurposes her voice within a churning insectoid drone which elegantly descends into a soft hum whose calm is disrupted through signal ruptures of Dorsey's cackling. These witchy vocalizations have all of the bloodcurdling empathy of Diamanda Galas, but Murray is more interested in dissembling that voice into a swarm of disquieting drone.
The Perispirit half of the record begins with a lurching splatter of air-compressed noise, broken up with tiny jittery silences and heavily gated signal processing, only to snap into a shadowy, lonesome ambient passage of lilting guitar tones, which gradually acquire a leaden sheen of heavy, downtuned distortion before cutting back to a rupture of those aerated noises from the first moments of the record. Another razor edit back to silence, and Perispirit makes another ramp of guitar-sourced dronescaping through atonal loops and layers of sound, whose density has the rapturous quality of those Chatham / Branca guitar armies, but coupled with some low-impact noisemongering below. Limited to 250 copies, pressed on off-white vinyl, and certainly recommended!
Long out of print cassette from 2006, available again, but now on vinyl, by Heather Leigh Murray, who is probably better known as the woman behind Scorces, and as one of the folks who runs the great Volcanic Tongue mailorder.
On Jailhouse Rock, Murray offers up two gorgeous sidelong slowburns, all processed slide guitar and murky disembodied vox, washed out and smeared, blurred beyond recognition into slow motion avalanches of sound, swirling streaks of feedback, heaving swells of crumbling rumble and muted buzz, a gorgeously sprawling ebb and flow, slipping from murky muddy meander, to coruscating psychedelic meltdown, on the B-side the vocals are almost recognizable, a warped woozy moan, all tangled up with the strangely lysergic sounding distorted guitar melt, the whole of the second side sounding like someone has their finger held down on the record as it spins, a Japanese psych guitar style freakout chopped and screwed, the various bits of guitar and voice, constantly mutating and shifting, heaving and roiling, but always under a patina of shimmery drugged out buzz, a totally mesmerizing ur-drone jam, that manages to be dense and dark, but also mesmerizing and meditative. Free guitar soft noise oozes into floorcore dreamdrone expanding into blown out in-the-red spacedrift warp and warble, all dizzyingly psychedelic.
So goddamn good. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another Italian reissue of the great BYG/Actuel back catalogue. Sunny Murray, legendary drummer for free jazz giants Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, is joined here by most of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Recorded in Paris in 1969 (like much of the output on this label), "Sunshine" is a propulsive, adrenaline-fueled monster that'll leave you breathless. Features top-notch performances
1966 recording from the legendary free jazz drummer, originally released on the seminal ESP label. The quintet featured here includes the brilliant Alan Silva, Jack Graham, Jacques Coursil and Byard Lancaster.
Def Jux can seemingly do no wrong. And this latest Murs joint proves that point again and again. On first listen, 3:16 seems a lot more 'normal' than a lot of Def Jux stuff (Cannibal Ox, El-P, etc.) but on closer listening, this record is really fucked up, sonically -and- lyrically. The loops are very old school, simple and bumping, but with lots of strange arrangements, Wu-Tang style sped up diva vocals, stuttery classic soul snippets and hiccupping stop/start beats. And then there's Murs' laconic delivery, lazy but animated and boisterous (sounding quite a bit like Del at times actually), spitting some wickedly clever, and occasionally downright hilarious lyrics.
Fog Hag is a brilliant slab of psychedelic pop music from Bronze frontman Rob Spector. Anyone who has seen Bronze's live performances over the last few years knows that they are one of the most hypnotic and engaging live acts in the Bay Area. They combine mastery of minimal instrumentation and dance beats with a little bit of costuming and a sense of humor. Their debut full length comes out this August on RVNG. Except for maybe the costumes, these elements are all present on Muscle Drum's Fog Hag, which sometimes sounds like the Beach Boys via Thee Oh Sees and sometimes uncannily conjures Crispin Glover via Barnes and Barnes. The album opens with a few tracks that feature tons of jangly guitar and muted synths riding around minimal or no percussion, vocal harmonies and reverb washes weaving the songs together deftly. Spector's vocal delivery is consistent in its open earnestness, and is never pretentious or showy. Halfway through the first side, just as "St. Christopher" shows off the record's synthier elements and "Sashay" introduces a drum machine, you might notice that there's something a bit weird about these songs, something OFF. Once you get to "Public Transportation", your suspicions are confirmed: never has the failed quest for a burrito been so hilariously combined with the phrase "tight-wads". This is not a "novelty" record or a "comedy" record, and never tries to be funny. That's why it succeeds. The B side contains more well-crafted psychedelic jangle-pop, a track that starts off sounding almost like death metal, and lots of gratuitous echoplex usage. The songs are sequenced well, however, so that the weirder ones flow out of and into the rest of the record without the overall mood being sacrificed or sounding unbalanced. Much like Type records has been doing lately, this first LP on the San Francisco based Break Up label comes with a CD of a completely different record ("The Early Drum Gets the Snare" also by Muscle Drum, though Fog Hag is the stronger of the two). Limited to 500 copies, do not miss out on this record. Be sure to play it at 45 and not 33 1/3 or you might have a completely different experience!
More music coming to us from China, a bunch of new records and bands on this week's list. One of our favorites being the oddly monikered Muscle Snog, who masterfully mix avant experimentalism with classic jangle pop, shoegaze noisiness with angular post punk crunch. After a trippy ambient opener, the band launch into what at first sounds like some straight up noise pop, all thick fuzzy bass, chiming guitars, laid back vox, but then BAM, the song explodes into some fierce noise rock crunch, a la Sonic Youth, grinding freaked out psychedelic heaviness, swirling guitar weirdness over wild pounding drumming, and then they slip right back into it. And this is where we usually say something like "and the rest of the record plays out similarly", but this time it really doesn't, the band flitting from tripped out sound to tripped out sound. "Fuzz Rabbit" sounds like OOIOO via AmRep, with a bit of Lightning Bolt in the mix, melding playful twee pop, with buzzing, grinding heaviness, while "Happy Dreamer On A Sad Bad" sounds like a trippier Blonde Redhead, all spacey and prettily post rocky, and "Call It A Pop Song" is actually a killer pop song, sounding like the Swirlies mixed with Smashing Pumpkins, albeit a bit noisier. A few tracks get a little Melt-Banana-y, others get sort of Boredoms-ish, shades of another Chinese favorite White+ arise here and there, but really, Muscle Snog are fucking nuts, and not in sonically scatterbrained way, there's definitely a method to their madness, and it IS mad. The record is peppered with short experimental interludes, that somehow work perfectly with the proper songs, and that's probably cuz the songs are full of weird experimental bits. And as much as Beatles covers are played out, MS's version of "A Day In The Life" transforms the original into a noise drenched buzz-sludge creep, and it totally works.
Fans of all the other Chinese stuff we've listed (White+, Carsick Cars, Dear Eloise, Boyz & Girl, etc.), this is fast becoming our new fave, and it's probably the weirdest of the bunch!
Muse are probably best know for sounding EXACTLY like Radiohead, which is most definitely a shame, cuz they really are awesome. Unfortunately, the fact is they really DO sound exactly like Radiohead. What can you do though? The vocalist has a voice like Thom Yorke's and they have a thing for epic indieprog bombast, you do the math. BUT, and this is a very big but, where Radiohead have veered into mopey introspective misunderstood inward looking stadium rock, tortured geniuses who are exhausted by fame and who now find making music as painful as having teeth pulled or birthing a baby, Muse just fucking love to rock. The have big guitars, HUGE choruses, incredible harmonies and they write killer songs. Imagine the most rocking Radiohead tunes of old, maybe off of OK Computer or Pablo Honey, but even more supercharged and rocked up, then give the vocals a serious Queen-ing, and mix in a little new wave electronica, and you'll end up with something almost as badass as Muse. This new record finds them incorporating all sorts of various elements, Depeche Mode-ish new wave, Silver Sun / Supergrass style power pop, some proggy metal (check out the track "Assassin", WOAH!) all seamlessly blended into their kick ass, head banging, fist in the air superrock. They do have their sensitive side, they can craft some seriously moody mellowness (and in the process manage to sound even MORE like Queen) but their hearts are solid ROCK. Not sure why there guys aren't huge here, they sure are in the UK. Might be the Radiohead thing, could be the fact that they actually are pretty weird, maybe too weird for a lot of folks, like Radiohead's geeky new wave little brother, the one with spikey hair and a punk rock band. Either way, don't let any of that discourage you. If you're in the mood for some epic rocking electronic tinged super dramatic stadium rock majesty, check this out!
While supplies last, there's a bonus DVD, featuring their whole set at Glastonbury, playing in front off what looks like 100,000 freaking out fans! As well as a bunch of extra live and backstage footage including some pretty funny getting to the stage Spinal Tap silliness.
