After their caustic debut, "The Towers are Burning" (also on tUMULt), a record that explored an especially pummeling and punishing kind of ambience, Oakland based audio terrorists Noisegate abandoned the violent and corrosive clamor that peppered their first full length, and instead, created a dark and barren dronescape of ominous, slowly shifting deep resonance. Whirring and thunderous low end rumble underpins shimmering textures of glistening darkness and hazy tonal reverberations, grey and austere. "Suspended Animation" is a breathtaking arrangement of hum and buzz and chime. Stark and spatial, warm and mesmeric; feedback, voices, guitars, and bells are dismantled, reduced to tones and timbre, flowing like a murmering black river; bubbling up from a lost spring. A maudlin elegy, hypnotic and somber, funereal yet effulgent.
Reminiscient of the isolationist experiments and drone investigations of Lustmord, Organum, Zoviet France, Andrew Chalk, and Jonathan Coleclough.
Noisegate were a two man ambient wrecking crew, taking the crusty crush of Neurosis, and smearing it into desloate and apocalyptic stretches of pure droning malevolence. This, their first record, is easily one of the bleakest and harshest and gorgeously heavy records we have ever heard. Brutal and aggressive and furious, sometimes impossibly tranquil and serene, but even at it's most ambient, Noisegate still managed to imbue every minute of every track with some ineffable otherworldly forboding.
Four huge ominous dronescapes over the course of sixty minutes, interrupted by violent squalls of slow-motion pummel and 16 rpm grindcore. uneasy ambience and corrosive electronics nestled in a sea of suffocating drones and rib cage rattling hum. Sparse brooding nightmarish ambience punctuated by bursts of skull crushing walls of bass, guitars, tapes, samples and vocals. A monstrous and truly threatening din.
First, a short-hand point of ponder: What if the Squirrel Nut Zippers were reincarnated as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hmmm. Hot stuff? Actually, yes!
Allow us to elaborate...
Characterized by the come hither / cold shoulder / scarlet clawed vocals of singer/bass player Shingai Shoniwa, the Noisettes' tightly wound, fiery music stirs up visions of times long past of unsavory characters inhabiting dark lit speakeasys. Lots of smoke and steaminess. Really, where was this London trio when the movie makers were putting together the soundtrack for Frank Miller's Sin City? Their tempestuous noirish rock keeps the joint jumping with plenty of plot and tempo twists of its own. Can you smell the burnt rubber as the hip kids get all hot under the collar for this mighty band? Oooh, just watch the sparks fly.
So here's the deal. Nothing is heavy enough for you. Nothing is fast or furious enough. Hardcore techno, drill and bass, none of those offer up the beats you need, none of that stuff kicks your ass. And grindcore, no matter how heavy or fucked up or insane, is just not brutal enough. Sound about right?
Have you been loving the Drumcorps shit, did you go nuts for that Drum:Machinegun comp? A damaged and delirious hybrid of metal and spastic blown out beats what you're craving? Well have we got the thing for you.
Japanese duo Noism. Two dudes, a guitar and a drum machine. And all hyperbole aside, this is probably the most fucked up, furious and frenzied grindmetaltechnowhatthefuck you will ever hear. Imagine Drumcorps remixing Orthrelm, but then the results tossed in a computer, chopped up and spit out double time. Or along those same lines, take your favorite grind records and spastic drill and bass 12"s, throw those in that same computer, smash them to bits (and bytes) and then compress them all into 21 minutes of face melting tech(no) metal fury. There are no songs really, well there are, but they, super convoluted fucked up alien 'songs', no 'arrangements' (see: songs). Just lighting speed riffing, squiggly guitars all over the place, blasting 300+ bpm beats that stutter and skip and skitter, all tangled up into a blurred grinding metallic beat heavy onslaught, it sort of sounds like free jazz played by a malfunctioning drummachine and a robot guitarist set on shred. Like if you had some computer that was meant to emulate the music of any performer, and you entered Masayuki, Takayanagi and Mick Barr and Venetian Snares, and it overloaded the program and cause the mainframe to fail, but somehow it still spit out a result, it might sound a little like this, Which Is, as far as our iron ears are concerned, a very very good thing. Recommended, if you think you can handle it...
Stefan Senf, founder of Suburban Trash Industries and longtime veteran producer of many, many fucked up hardcore d'n'b/gabba/fuckstep singles on labels like Zod, Appareil, SixSixtySix, Brutal Chud, etc., has been picked up for a long overdue full length by London's king of brutal hardcore mashup DJ Scud and his Ambush imprint. Clocking in at just under a half hour, "Deferred Media" is a unrelenting onslaught of distorted beats, ripping shards of harsh noise and bass -- tons of bass! Certainly for fans of Ambush, DHR, Praxis, Brooklyn Beats, et al.
Our favorite Ukrainian black metal band releases, not a new album, but a cd containing the music from their early demo cassette, previous to their "Goat Horns" debut. Majestic grimness from the pagan forests! If you don't already have their "NeChrist" disc,
Imagine the Charlie Daniels Band jammin' with Emperor. Or rather, playing at the same time in adjoining practice rooms -- out in the forest. The ancient forests of the Ukraine, to be precise. That's where Nokturnal Mortum hail from. This is their third album. You may remember the big fuss we made over the amazing Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra disc last year? Well, Mr. Varggoth is the main guy in this band Nokturnal Mortum. With "NeChrist", he and his comrades have created a unique sound, one that combines a raw, roaring black metal attack with the pipes and fiddles and "yee-haws" of folk/country music, Ukrainian style. And, to make us AQ-ers enjoy this EVEN MORE, all of a sudden all the music will stop and the middle part of a track will be occupied by the croaking of frogs! And you know we like frogs and the noises they make. Similarily, the final song on the disc is preceded by 78 short (3 sec.) tracks of twittering birdsounds and forest ambience. Therefore, if you play the disc in "shuffle" mode, you get lots of cut-up bird calls mixed with the occasional actual fantastic Nokturnal Mortum song! The unanimous AQ black metal pick of this lunar month!! Brilliant. Yee-haw! (Recommended.)
There's very few comparisons to listening to Nokturnal Mortum. The Charlie Daniels Band jammin' with Emperor? Bizarre black metal hoedown? Some sort of line dancing campfire jamboree gone horribly horribly wrong? The unholy spawn of the grimmest black metal and a hauntingly festive medieval gypsy folk? Okay, so maybe there are more than a few comparisons, but they all tend to center around NM's unlikely country-gypsy-folk / black metal hybrid. Precisely what makes them so completely and bizarrely brilliant. This Ukranian horde unleash the ghost hounds and the battle commences with the sounds of galloping horses, strange battle horns, the strangled cries of wounded beasts, the clatter of steel on chain mail, sounds that continue throughout the entire record. It's almost like a field recording of some epic medieval battle, a mad dash through corpse strewn villages, with occasional bursts of black metal buzz from some random corpsepainted ghouls playing in the smoking rubble of a burnt and blackened tavern, or from within a copse of twisted trees, the metal soon drifts into the background as you head deeper into the forest, are farther out upon the battlefield. Nokturnal Mortum's particular take on black metal tends toward the buzzing midtempo gallop and lope, thick and gnarled and fuzzed out, a la Burzum, Graveland, Woodtemple, etc. But more often than not, these black bursts twist into unlikely shapes, blackened metallic jigs, strangely festive and rollicking but still razor sharp and dense with guitar buzz and ripping riffs, jubilant (yet still slightly ominous) gypsy stomps, but laced with spiky guitars and blasting drums. Most noticeable this time around are the extensive ambient interludes, swooshy, starlit night twinkle and shimmer, lush wooshes over tinkly melodies, almost new age-y at moments, but it's not long before you are felled once again by a sharp slab of utter blackness, or a rollicking jubilant mace to the temple, all part of the curious journey through Nokturnal Mortum's bizarrely blackened world.
While they last we have the super deluxe oversized hardcover book version (limited to 1000 copies), once we run out of those you'll get the regular jewel case version (which also happens to be cheaper!).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Elsewhere on this list you'll find our two favorite Nomeansno records, Wrong and The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed, both Records Of The Week, as they were destined to be, considering lots of us here consider those to be ALL time favorites, which makes it even weirder that some of those very same people had never even HEARD of Mama, also newly reissued.
Mama turns out to be the very first recordings from the brothers Wright, before they added a guitar player, total proggy mathy poppy rhythm section genius, even back then, in 1982! If you think Nomeansno sound weird by early nineties punk rock standards, imagine a band like that in Canada in the early eighties, playing local clubs or bars, people must have been very very confused. Cuz even in these early recordings, the band is pretty much fully formed, pulsing sinewy basslines, mathy complex drumming, and the same sort of strange sung spoken vocals, the same snarky vocals, but back then there was also a bunch of keyboards, which added another strange vibe to their sound. And the funk element was way more in play, a few tracks are definitely flat out funky, but even then, the band twist it all up into something unique, although nothing here is really punk rock exactly. It's a cool glimpse into the sounds and songs that would eventually get transformed into the post punk math prog juggernaut that NMN would eventually become.
We weren't sure what to think at first, but the more we listen to this, the more we're digging it. Tripped out, stripped down, sort of new wave. At least one of the tracks does get pretty fierce, and sounds like it could maybe be a demo for a track from the first record, "No Rest For The Wicked", fast and furious, buzzy, a little bit heavy, the bass already a force to be reckoned with, but then the track after sounds like some twisted cruise ship lounge band whatthefuck. Definitely confusing, but that's part of their charm.
The four bonus tracks are from a 7" that preceded the release of Mama, and feature guitar finally, as well as sax on one song, and an early version of "Forget Your Life" which would later show up in a different version on The Day Everything Became Nothing, but this is the raw, original lo-fi version, and again, it sounds surprisingly true to the final version, except for some wonky keyboards, that we almost wish they had included in the new version.
Cool stuff for sure, but definitely only for fans, mere dabblers should first pick up Wrong and The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed, but trust us, you shan't remain dabblers for long.
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Definitely the days of 'Wrong' or 'The Day Everything Became Nothing' are long past, but the Brothers Wright and co. can still pummel any of today's sorry excuses for punk into submission and admiration. Still maintaining the awesomely thunderous bass presence and sharp wit they're known and respected for. All hail the raging greatness of NoMeansNo. This is album #12. Still going strong and showing no signs of stopping. Includes covers of songs by the Ramones (heavy and sludge-y) and Miles Davis (long and strange).
When reviewing a record you've had and treasured and loved for years, or decades, the pressure to do it justice is immense, so much so, that it seems almost impossible. But once in a while you gotta try. So here we go. Two of the MOST essential punk rock / post punk records ever, recently remastered and reissued, which gives us the opportunity to not only gush about records that have been on constant rotation since we were in our early twenties, records that totally changed the way we listened to music, but to also hopefully turn on the few folks who may have missed out, or who may not have even been alive when these records came out.
Nomeansno, from Canada, most folks know the name, but not everyone has actually heard these guys, but almost every single person we know who has, was never the same. The sound is super rhythmic and mathy, punk rock, but totally proggy as well, the focal point is on the bass and drums, manned by two brothers, Rob and John Wright, one of, if not THEE, tightest rhythm sections ever, the bass lines thick and throbbing and distorted, the drums chaotic but so tight and precise, the guitar, handled by a member who always remained unnamed - "Someone (but we're not sure who)" credited with "other things" on one record, or "none of your fucking business" on another - which is ironic cuz the guitar playing besides being BAD ASS was also so integral to the sound, they were a punk rock band after all. And the vocals, super high in the mix, dramatic, howled, crooned and yelped, melodic but raw and rough, sometimes sort of spoken, but always sharp tongued, spewing some of the best and funniest and intense lyrics. And as always, none of that would mean shit if the songs weren't great, and these songs are GREAT, so hooky and heavy and weird, a testament to these guys is that even the most obtuse tangled whatthefuck jam will stay lodged in your head forever.
Then there's the funky aspect, which we had planned to discuss at length, but listening to this again, the funkiness is implied, subtle, based entirely on the fact that almost all the songs are bass driven, and some are weirdly stripped down to just bass and drums and vocals, but this is not bullshit funky, this is elements of funk used the way they were meant to be, mixed into a churning, super complex, angular, jagged set of songs that manage to be both heavy and crushing and confusionally complex while still being poppy and hook filled and so goddamn catchy.
We tried to pick just one of these reissues to focus on, but eventually could only get it down to two, so both seemed like ideal candidates for Record Of The Week, especially considering that at least half of the folks here freaked the fuck out when we got these back in. We'll talk about each separately, but we have to suggest just buying both, you won't regret it, they're equally classic and timeless and heavy and catchy and far out and freaking awesome!
The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed is a compilation of sorts, collecting the album Small Parts Isolated And Destroyed from 1988 and The Day Everything Became Nothing 12" from that same year, but for most of us, these two have always been bundled together so The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed plays like one long, surprisingly cohesive record. And right out of the gate it's a killer, with the manic bass heavy groove of "The Day Everything Became Nothing", with crunchy guitar and over the top vocals, and a dense super tangled arrangement, and seconds after hearing it for the first time, we knew these guys were gonna be our new favorite band, and other punk rock bands were gonna have to step it up a notch. We could seriously go track by track, it's been long enough now that every single track here is seared into our brains, the kind of record where even the spaces between songs are part of the flow of the album, but we can definitely pick out a few highlights.
"Dark Ages" might just be one of our favorite songs ever, from its super mathy freaked out intro, to the loping hooky bass groove, the minimal guitar flourishes, the killer chorus, the super weird drum part, it's like some insane progged out punk rock opera crammed down into 5 minutes, just listen to the sound sample, if you're not smitten after this one, we might just have to give up on you! "And That's Sad" is a looping super complex rhythmic workout, with some cool, moody minor key breaks, that all gradually build right back up to the frenetic freakout that opened the track. If you slowed down "Small Parts Isolated And Destroyed", it would probably sound like Harvey Milk, a super spare, sludge-y stop start work out, that sounds like no other band at the time, or hell even now. "Victory" is a brooding drift of low slung bass, and muted tribal drumming, but as with all NMN, these long passages are separated by unbearably catchy choruses and here too, some tangled mathiness, that never seems showy or flashy or unreasonably complex, it's how these songs needed to sound, every part, no matter how weird or superfluous seeming, is perfectly places, and a few listens in no one could disagree. "Teresa, Give Me That Knife" is about as punk as these guys get, furious, frenetic, blasting drums, frantic guitars, with an insanely technical chorus, and a haunting creeped out prechorus, that is just as catchy as any other part of the track. And then there's "Real Love", most folks' favorite, a weird sort of heavy punk rock doom ballad, big crunchy guitars, long sprawling breakdowns, some crushing drumming, the chorus a lumbering almost waltz, with dramatic howled vox, which switch to a spoken croon in the 'verses', finishing off with a massive blown out super heavy sprawling outro, and again, the song, as unlikely as it maybe sounds on the surface, or with a glancing listen, is impossibly catchy, and somehow having heard it maybe hundreds of times, we're still not anywhere close to being sick of it.
Easily an all time, lifetime, desert island top 10 favorite for sure. And thus, just about as recommended as a record can be!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
When reviewing a record you've had and treasured and loved for years, or decades, the pressure to do it justice is immense, so much so, that it seems almost impossible. But once in a while you gotta try. So here we go. Two of the MOST essential punk rock / post punk records ever, recently remastered and reissued, which gives us the opportunity to not only gush about records that have been on constant rotation since we were in our early twenties, records that totally changed the way we listened to music, but to also hopefully turn on the few folks who may have missed out, or who may not have even been alive when these records came out.
Nomeansno, from Canada, most folks know the name, but not everyone has actually heard these guys, but almost every single person we know who has, was never the same. The sound is super rhythmic and mathy, punk rock, but totally proggy as well, the focal point is on the bass and drums, manned by two brothers, Rob and John Wright, one of, if not THEE, tightest rhythm sections ever, the bass lines thick and throbbing and distorted, the drums chaotic but so tight and precise, the guitar, handled by a member who always remained unnamed - "Someone (but we're not sure who)" credited with "other things" on one record, or "none of your fucking business" on another - which is ironic cuz the guitar playing besides being BAD ASS was also so integral to the sound, they were a punk rock band after all. And the vocals, super high in the mix, dramatic, howled, crooned and yelped, melodic but raw and rough, sometimes sort of spoken, but always sharp tongued, spewing some of the best and funniest and intense lyrics. And as always, none of that would mean shit if the songs weren't great, and these songs are GREAT, so hooky and heavy and weird, a testament to these guys is that even the most obtuse tangled whatthefuck jam will stay lodged in your head forever.
Then there's the funky aspect, which we had planned to discuss at length, but listening to this again, the funkiness is implied, subtle, based entirely on the fact that almost all the songs are bass driven, and some are weirdly stripped down to just bass and drums and vocals, but this is not bullshit funky, this is elements of funk used the way they were meant to be, mixed into a churning, super complex, angular, jagged set of songs that manage to be both heavy and crushing and confusionally complex while still being poppy and hook filled and so goddamn catchy.
We tried to pick just one of these reissues to focus on, but eventually could only get it down to two, so both seemed like ideal candidates for Record Of The Week, especially considering that at least half of the folks here freaked the fuck out when we got these back in. We'll talk about each separately, but we have to suggest just buying both, you won't regret it, they're equally classic and timeless and heavy and catchy and far out and freaking awesome!
Wrong, from 1989, was the follow up to the life changing Small Parts album and The Day Everything 12" from the year before, and guess what, it too was life changing, managing to take the sounds and songs from the records before and make them heavier, more complex, more intense. The opener "It's Catching Up" is just so heavy and intense and brutal, the bass about as thick and distorted as it can get and still nail the flurry of rapid fire notes, the drums are devastating, not sure why this guy wasn't a drum god to all the aspiring drummers out there (although he was to Andee, who did get his autograph way back in the day), the guitars sharp and jagged, all wrapped around an insanely catchy hook, and somehow they manage to make it sound punk as fuck at the same time. "The Tower" might be our favorite here (amongst a record full of favorites), with its dirgey Black Flag vibe, more impossibly thick and distorted bass, and a weird staccato chorus, with one of the strangest and most anguished vocal parts ever, but so hooky, which leads right into a killer tangle of head spinning mathiness. Another favorite (like we said, they ALL rule), is "Rags And Bones", with easily one of the best bass lines ever, and some tangled complex drumming to go with it, some bizarre lyrics and a total pure pop chorus, of course doused in distortion and punked up a bit. "Brainless Wonder" is impossibly dense and heavy, like a skipping Black Flag record, before it slips into something a bit more groovy. "Two Lips, Two Lungs And One Tongue" is a short sharp blast of weird vocal / instrumental tangle, with the band locked into the repeated titular phrase. And then there's "All Lies" which is sort of the "Real Love" of Wrong, an epic punk rock prog rock sort-of-ballad, long sprawling moody breakdowns set between dense tribal math rock workouts, moving and emotional and dramatic, all building slowly to a killer super catchy stop start chorus.
Phew, we're just about gushed out. If you can't tell, we love this record A LOT, and The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed, both are easily all time favorites, desert island discs for you list making nerds, essential listening for anyone into punk rock, post punk, pop punk, heaviness, hookiness, great music... as we were listening to this again, Allan asked me why bands weren't good anymore, and I couldn't really think of an answer. Absolutely and totally and utterly recommended.
This remastered reissued has two bonus tracks from a 7" released by Mr Wrong, aka NMN bassist Rob Wright, which sound a whole lot like the record proper!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Operatic, plastic, geometric. Absolutely astounding. The pinnacle of the wonderfully strange. Klaus Nomi (1944-1983) was all this and so much more. Prior to his solo career, he performed with David Bowie on Saturday Night Live. Watching his striking performance on the 'Urgh! A Music War' video (which is very recommended), you get the sense that he's at once both fearless and terrified. Although this compilation features some eyebrow-raising cover choices --- "Ding Dong" (yes, from the 'Wizard of Oz"), "You Don't Own Me" and "Just One Look". the highlights ("Total Eclipse" and "Simple Man" to name but two) far out shine these very odd numbers. Simply amazing.
Our Ms Cup has long been a Klaus Nomi devotee, but -- save for his one song appearance in the Urgh! A Music War film and the now out-of-print Eclipsed: Best Of Klaus Nomi compilation -- there's never been enough documentation from back in the day to satiate any craving for this ultra stylized, provocative and enigmatic figure. So she was thrilled and a bit trepidatious to hear that a documentary was being made. After many failed attempts to go see the film in the theater, she was then delighted to hear that it was coming out on dvd. Her verdict? Superlatives galore. This fantastic documentary was made with absolute loving care and imaginative attention to detail. One of the most obvious (and unique) examples of this comes in the segments featuring the voice of Nomi's aunt. "Why just her voice?" you might ask. Well, apparently she's really camera shy, and the filmmakers came up with a novel way to present her likeness in the film. They crafted accurately detailed miniature dioramas of various locations (such as her living room with a mini slide projector and backyard with shrubbery and garden hose) in which they sat a paper doll with a picture of her face. The interview clips (each filmed in front of a very thought out, appropriate backdrop), audio and video footage sheds much light on his life and music career (including more background info about the abovementioned Urgh! appearance), totally capturing the vitality, tragedy and defiance of Nomi the individual as well as of the underground New York New Wave scene as a whole during those years. He cut such a striking, unmistakable, indelible silhouette. Unforgettable.
The dvd includes a bunch of exclusive remixes by Scissor Sisters' Ana Matronic, Richard Barone, The Moog Cookbook and Man Parrish (formerly of The Fast, Man2Man and more!)
The overt rebellion of industrial culture icon Boyd Rice (aka Non) against mainstream American culture through occultish symbolism and a rhetoric of hate parallels the punk movement's call for social upheaval. Yet, Rice has polarized himself between the extremes of American culture, espousing on one hand the Church of Satan, rightwing totalitarianist warmongering, and general amorality; and on the other, the sickly sweetness of Barbie, the Partridge Family, and '60s girl groups! Rice has never claimed to change the world, but instead revels in social detritus as the means to accumulate personal power and strengthen his own claim of self-determination against any authority structure.
To those familiar with the unholy noise, apocalyptic prophesies, and machine-gun spray misanthropy that have riddled Rice's recordings for the past quarter century, his "Children Of The Black Sun" album is a surprisingly calm composition, but one that doesn't detour from Rice's manifestations of free-will. For this album, Rice has drawn from the ancient apocryphal texts of the Greek Gnostics, who believed that the knowledge of God (and thus the ability to be God) was possible to attain through the rigorous study and existential self-discovery. Lucifer, Cain, the Nephilim, and the Archons have all been the central figures for Gnostic studies, as all have willfully separated themselves from the authority of God in favor of their own pursuits. Rice's "Children Of The Black Sun" traces some of the mythologies of Cain after he had been banished from God's Kingdom for murdering his brother. Yet, just as many of those myths are shrouded in a poetic mystery, Rice has constructed a mostly instrumental affair of blearily sustained drones: hunting trumpets, violins, harp, and dissonant guitar noise, not unlike the massive orchestrations of Hermann Nitsch. Like all manifestations of Gnosticism, Rice hides the true content (perhaps because it's a lie?) but creates a spellbinding atmosphere.
"Children Of The Black Sun" has been released as a double disc with one disc housing the audio in stereo, and the other disc being a DVD with audio only for the surroundsound, 5.1 platform. Nope, no visuals on the DVD.
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Paranoid, def underground NYC hiphop from this crew newly signed to noted rap label Matador. Trax from their upcoming full-length debut "The Future Is Now". Totally aiming at the X-Files market with the black helicopters theme and the rad computer artwork, lettering and logo courtesy of Voivod's Away!
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Seems like Non Phixion have been around forever, but 'The Future Is Now' is actually their debut full length, after a handful of 12"s and a brief stint on Matador. Another posse of white boys who have managed to sidestep the Vanilla Ice/Eminem/3rd Bass
Non Toxique Lost began in the early '80s as a German industrial band that had stuck true to the avant-garde / difficult listening propositions to also come through Throbbing Gristle and Dome. While plenty of other industrialists such as Psychic TV and Einsturzende Neubauten honed their craft for occluded electronics with sinister motives into downright catchy tunes, Non Toxique Lost chose a murky collage strategy for metal bashing, undulating electronic arppegiations, and megaphone vocal barking. Wanton was the first album for Non Toxique Lost, recorded between 1982 and 1984 and released a year later on vinyl. There's an aggressive deconstruction of sound within the primitive synth-punk arrangements which get splattered into amassed distortion from guitar freakouts blowing out of way too small amplifiers on top of lumbering electronic loops, all of which get cut up and mangled on tape. One of the early members of Non Toxique Lost was Achim Wollscheid, who had also begun his solo project of DIY musique concrete called S.B.O.T.H.I. before developing his highly conceptual sound art projects throughout the late '90s. It seems that Non Toxique Lost is still around, although Wollscheid left many years ago. Either way, Wanton is a fascinating document of art-damaged noise from this little known German industrial project.
Limited to 300 copies.
The Last Hydronaut is the inaugural release on the Controlled Burn label, a collective of bands and artists, spearheaded by our pals in the Austerity Program, and including, obviously, these guys, who hail from Chicago, and totally sound like it. Although they actually sound like they could be from Chicago circa 1995. Total post punk / noise rock / math rock, thick fuzzed out bass, big Albini drums, crunchy guitars, yelped / howled emo vocals, all woven into dense driving heaviness and intricate arrangements, the kind of shit we always lament, like old rock men, that they 'just don't make anymore', but these guys DO, and man, do the do it well, and while for lots of people they might seem like a band out of time, we never get tired of that math/noise/post rock sound, think Jesus Lizard and Drive Like Jehu and Naked Raygun, catchy, heavy, noisy... Pretty much everything we like. This has been getting serious nonstop play around these parts, and Nonagon are one of those bands, that sound like they probably KILL live. Here's hoping we get to find out!
Includes a download code, features eye popping shark attack / wooden raft / sensible sweater woodcut style cover art, and LIMITED TO JUST 300 COPIES.
This record sucks. But goddamn it's SO good. Released on the truly cult Flemish Masters label, this has to be one of the most fucked cds ever. So much so that Andee really wanted to make it record of the week. But when you listen to the sound sample you'll
Nonhorse is the work of one Gabriel Lucas Crane who spends his day job rocking in the group Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice, but when he's on his own, it's a whole 'nother sonic ball of wax. Ot maybe ball of old busted cassettes would be more like it.
Each track, always clocking in at either 3:12, 3:13. or 3:14, is a dense assemblage of random sonic detritus, fuzzy indistinct song fragments, manipulated tape drop outs, ringing phones, sound effects, huge swaths of buzzing distortion, looped bits of detuned guitar, slabs of damaged percussion, the sounds of tapes rewinding and fast forwarding, abstract guitar shimmer looped and slowed down, snippets of classical music, crackle and static, everything murky and indistinct, blurry and smeared into strange cross-eyed soundscapes. It's a bit like John Oswald for the ADD set, but when the mania subsides just a little, and sounds are allowed to shimmer and fade, the sound becomes remarkably beautiful, like Dialing In, all blown out and gorgeously crumbling to bits before our ears, or like a more corrosive lo-fi version of our favorite soundscapers, Jasper TX, Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Philip Jeck, the same sort of milk eyed warble and disembodied drift, but assembled from a pile of junkyard tapes. A seriously drug addled mashup of light and dark, pretty and ugly, noisy and serene, and somehow it works. In a big way. Completely dizzying and confusional, warped and warbly, but in it's own ugly duckling manner quite pretty. If all that blissed out fuzzscape crap is a little too mellow for you, but you still want to be dragged off to some other world, Nonhorse might be the little red pill you've been waiting for.
Mastered by the Yellow Swans' Pete Swanson.
G. Lucas Crane is the man behind the dead-eyed tape excursions he broadcasts as Nonhorse; and he's the same G. Lucas Crane who can also be found in the equally as psychedelic, but far less grim projects Woods and Vanishing Voice. It's all about the cassette for Nonhorse, how the hiss accumulates over multiple dubbings, how crappy tape heads can fuck up the sound, how the machines start, stop, rewind, and fast-forward against the tape itself. The door creaking loop that begins Shadow World is a very low-tech translation of Philip Jeck's equally low-tech turntable rhythms; and the crawling synth rhythm takes this somewhere way more phantasmagoric than anything Jeck has produced. Floating monastic vocals spiral against the agitated delivery of shortwave radio transmissions from a Christian evangelist. These kaleidoscopic revolutions haphazardly tumble in and out of the simple overlapping structures, eventually mutating into a thumbing mess of pre-recorded tinklings from synthetic bells while clarinets tumble about some drill 'n' bass breaks appropriated from Hrvatski's missing-in-action Oiseaux 96-98 album, all of which is augmented through start-and-stop strategies on the tape decks, through a chain-linked fence of delay and reverb. As a willfully confused collage of warped hiss, toxic noise, and corroded found sound, Shadow World is a throw-back to the tape-trading heyday of cassette culture permeated by the likes of Solid Eye, Blackhumour, AMK, and Premature Ejaculation. You don't see this type of stuff kicking around much these days, that's for sure!
Released in several tiny editions through Upstairs, which has already sold out of all of their copies, meaning these few copies are all we will ever get!
With the title nostalgically referencing the landscapes of a utopian future, there is an element of despair within Luigi Nono's composition, as the eccentric experimental composer prefers to look at the future through the "classical" lens of Jules Verne or even Terry Gilliam. Technology is a system of magnetic gears and whirring electrical devices which affect the environment around them to actualize the dreams of the alchemists searching not only for the catalyst which turns lead into gold but also the rifts leading toward instantaneous time / space travel. Composed in 1988 when information and cyberspace were becoming the technological tools of the neo-alchemist, Nono saw his vision collapsing and composed this piece as a document to a "future nostalgic landscape."
After many hours of recording violinist Gidon Kremer, Nono composed an 8 channel backing tape in which original violin tones were filtered and treated to create an arsenal of frequency shifted, dense harmonics. The piece had been composed as an interaction between a solo violin and the pre-recorded backing tape -- to the point where both the violinist and the backing tape can control each section of the work. For this recording, Irvine Arditti and Andre Richard leave plenty of room beteen all of the tones to exist as rich singularities much like Morton Feldman's application of tonal color.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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New project from Simon Dine of Adventures in Stereo. With swingin', throaty female vocals and a nonstop rollicking tone to it, this is like sixties psychedelic rock with a very millenial "shagadelic" flavor to it. Breakbeats accompanied with farfisa organ, twangy Duane Eddy guitar with shimmering cymbals, Association-style vocals with unison handclaps... Not very thrilling, but the combination isn't terrible either -- it just sounds like something that would be playing in the London branch of Urban Outiftters. Pick up the first two Os Mutantes records instead (it's obvious Dine's been listening to them.)
It seems like recently, the world has finally begun to openly embrace the joys of sludge-doom-death-drone or whatever you want to call it. Boris, Corrupted, SUNNO))), Earth, Marzuraan, Bunkur, Moss, Khanate, Nadja, nobody can seem to get enough downtuned sludginess, or glacial metallic pummel. And we couldn't be more thrilled. But if you were around the Bay Area way back in the late nineties, you might remember a band who were prime traffickers in such gloriously low end brutality, but who have seemed to have been completely forgotten.
That band would be Noothgrush, who back in the day, released records and toured with Corrupted, released tons of killer splits, and who were known to lay waste to tiny clubs all over SF.
Having broken up way back in 2001, and with almost their entire catalog out of print, Noothgrush seemed to be about a decade too early. If they were around now, we can guarantee people would be losing their shit (and tons of money on eBay) over this low slung, sludge rock power trio. And way before sludge nerds all over the world were smitten by the diminutive Wata wielding her mighty axe in Boris, Noothgrush were being driven by a young woman by the name of Chiyo, an equally diminutive rocker bashing the living shit out of her drums!
Sonically, there's a definite resemblance to early Corrupted. Huge plodding doom, massive downtuned guitars, riffs stretched out into near-drones, glass gargling vocals, a slow motion glacial black hole of crumbling doom destruction.
This cd collects the band's final studio recordings, all of their splits as well as a handful of unreleased material. The first half of their 'discography' was released on Slap-A-Ham and is now unfortunately out of print. But this 2nd part has most of our favorite Noothgrush material. The band really shone on their splits, and this disc collects all of their material from long out of print splits with Corrupted, Suppression, Gasp, Wellington and Carol Ann. Plus a handful of unreleased tracks. Hell yeah!
So completely and absolutely essential. Fans of SUNNO))), Boris, Corrupted and other plodding drone doom behemoths who somehow missed out on the glorious brutality that was Noothgrush can now see what they've been missing.
Includes a big booklet with liner notes, photos and lyrics.
Available again, this killer compilation of early material from legendary Bay area slo-mo sludge/doom crushers Noothgrush, who recently reformed and are about to play a show with the also together-again East Coast doomlords Winter.
Back in the nineties, Noothgrush were a ubiquitous presence, playing all the time, and releasing records at a crazy clip, splits to be precise, Noothgrush were the master of the split 7", sharing records with Corrupted, Gasp, Agents Of Satan, Deadbodieseverywhere, Black Army Jacket, Carol Ann, Wellington and more. And the interesting thing is the band never actually recorded a proper full length. In fact, the two 'albums' they released were both compilations, collecting all the comp tracks and singles. We reviewed Erode The Person, which is sadly now out of print again, which gathered up the later recordings of the band, and in the review we lamented the fact that this one was sadly out of print. Well it's available again, and is here to again remind the world, that there was some serious downtuned pummel and tarpit doomsludge creep happening LONG before Boris / SUNNO))) / Whitehorse and all the rest threw their dirge-doom hat into the ring. And like we mentioned before, Noothgrush were just about a decade too early.
So Failing Early, Failing Often, originally released on Bay Area powerviolence/fastcore label Slap A Ham, is brimming with Sabbath-at-16rpm dirgery and creeping blackened crawls, loads of feedback, the drums a glacial stumble, provided by the cute and diminutive Chiyo (she most definitely a nineties SF metalhead crush), the vocals a howled raspy bellow, lots of samples too, from movies, and politicians, the sound crusty and blackened, with many of the tracks here from the WAY early days, old demos and cassettes, which means the sound on those is even more filhty and lo-fi and raw. Punishing and heavy as fuck, droned out and dreary and druggy and so good, even all these years later.
Fans of the current crop of doomlords and dirge merchants, who somehow missed out on these guys (and gal) would do well to check this out. And if you loved Erode The Person, well this is the second part to what with EtP is essentially one massive compilation/career retrospective.
Hot on the heels of the recent reissue of early material from Bay Area doom/sludge combo Noothgrush, comes this killer live record, collecting two live-on-the-radio performances, one from 1996 on KZSU Stanford, the other from 1999 on KFJC in Los Altos Hills, and both are just what you'd expect, heaving, downtuned heaviness, churning riffage, cavewoman drum pound, glass gargling vokills, all wound into a lurching lumbering doom juggernaut, the older stuff much more beholden to classic doom, featuring the band as a foursome with Matt Harvey (Exhumed) on second guitar, winding some mournful melodies into the groups dirgey plod. The sound is great, dense and crushing, the guitars massive and heavy, they even take on a Celtic Frost song and totally make it their own.
The KFJC recording (introduced by aQ pal and longtime KFJC DJ Number 6), finds the band stripped back down to a trio, but the sound is just as epic, and in fact, it's a super strange recording, echoey and reverby, the drums SUPER loud, which makes everything, especially the drums, sound super dubbed out, with some of the slo-mo snare rolls sounding purposefully dubby, but all it does really is add a psychedelic vibe to the proceedings, the band unfurling another sick set of sonic tarpit misery, gloriously miserable and darkly depressive, the sort of stuff that should be heaven (or hell?) for fans of Corrupted, Whitehorse, Monarch, Eyehategod, Monument Of Urns, Khanate, Fleshpress, Bongzilla and the rest the slow and low doomlords...
This is easily one of the best new metal-core bands we've heard. We had a split cd of theirs a while back, but three songs wasn't nearly enough to realise what these guys were truly capable of. Certainly worthy heirs to the Coalesce/Converge/Deadguy throne. Super heavy and well produced. They actually kind of sound like a heavy metal Jesus Lizard. Distorted bass with lots of
Nord began in 1979 as a minimal electronics / drone-on industrial project for Hiroshi Oikawa and Katayama Satoshi. They only recorded one album together -- their eponymous 1981 release on the Pinakotheca imprint - before they parted ways, but each of them used the moniker Nord for their own projects. Satoshi's Nord involved a handful of Japanese noise musicians including Hiroshi Hasegawa from Astro and C.C.C.C., with a smattering of recordings being released over the decades; but it's Oikawa's Nord that has become a holy grail to those seeking one of the most obscure releases of the Japanese noise underground from the '80s. He released two LPs on his imprint L.S.D. Records, as well as a couple of cassette releases. NG Tapes was one of those cassette releases, only made available as a bonus tape with a select number of copies of Nord's LSD album, itself an edition of just 200 copies. For all of its mystery and mythology, LSD was a dodgy record, in part due to the Surrealistic Pillow citation at the beginning on one side of the record; but the follow-up Ego Trip with its mind-erasing irradiation of post-Schnitzler / post-Monoton / pre-Thought Broadcast minimalist arpeggiation and dour electronics is a watershed album no matter how you slice it. NG Tapes may in fact be even better than Ego Trip, making this reissue all the more necessary.
NG Tapes centers upon three long-form tracks of ominous, synth pulsations that capture radio-tunings, blankstare guitar drone/noise, and some disembodied vocal monotone within a psychic black-hole vortex of emotional emptiness. Oikawa girds these longer tracks with some short numbers of noise-junk tactility, scuzzed-out distortion, low impact power-electronics, and primitive rhythm-box programming. Presumably these shorter numbers reflect the aesthetic of the aforementioned Pinakotheca album though that one doesn't seem to be in the cards ever for a reissue. Hypnotic. Narcotic. Desolate. There's the sound of NG Tapes in a nutshell. A one-time only reissue, nicely repackaged in a tip-on sleeve and an obi to replicate the original tape's design.
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More lovely breathy, sighing vocals from Swedish chanteuse Ms Nordenstam. This time she's transformed a number of songs originally performed by such artists as Tim Hardin, The Doors (see the title of this collection), Prince ('Purple Rain'!), Leonard Cohen (a particularly pretty, moody rendition of 'Bird On A Wire') as well as some traditional folk songs. Recorded in what seems to be a when-the-impulse hits-kind of spirit -- performance locales include the Sweet Silence studios, an attic, her apartment and a variety of other venues. Dark, haunting and at times yes, quite strange. Recommended. While this is not new (it came out in 1998), her records have been so difficult to get that we figured we ought to list it, since it's basically new to us, and probably you.
The elusive Swedish songstress Stina Nordenstam is back with a new album. Fans will rejoice to hear that The World Is Saved has been released on the readily available V2 label, as opposed to most of her past recordings which have been next to impossible to get! For those of you as yet unacquainted with the loveliness of Ms Nordenstam, now's as good a time as any to indulge yourself a lingering gaze at her sweet wispy childlike vocals as they perch gracefully atop hazy, frosty evening peaks. Enchanting!
Originally released in 1974, these examples of Norwegian electroacoustic composer Nordheim's music are both beautiful and scary.
Whenever you may be reading this, it is inevitable that Merzbow will have released another recording of thoroughly destructive noise, being promoted with the claim that said recording is 'better' or 'more listenable' than the last three or four dozen records. It may be more lost analog recordings or another headcleaning splatter of digital noise; and I'm quite sure that Merzbow will be quite good at what he does on those records. At the same time, there are so many other noise artists in the world who may never get their fair shake because there's got to be over 200 Merzbow records by now, not including the ridiculous 50 CD Merzbox. That's a fucking shame, because when it comes to noise, The Nordic Miracle deliver when they say "We Shall Provide." Refering to themselves as a "crooner noise duo - not at all inventive or groundbreaking," The Nordic Miracle are the quintessence of what a great noise act is all about: hellish, incendiary, destructive, fucked, nihilistic, cantankerous, aggressive, torturous noise. This duo comprises of Tore Honore Boe and Lasse Marhaug, both of whom had been in Origami Republica and also the latter hails from Jazzkammer. Unlike Merzbow's very public transition to digital, the Nordic Miracle revels in the old school methods of noise making with overloaded effect boxes, amplifier damage, turntables, and a neverending cascade of shattered glass which really makes for an amazingly unsetting addition to the hornet's nest of raw noise. There were rumors that the Nordic Miracle employed samples of Francisco Lopez' Untitled 92 (the blustery collage of record surface noise which came out several years ago). It's impossible to be sure, but let's throw caution to the wind and propagate that rumor about this crushingly good noise record.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Everyone's favorite metal magazine. Dodheimsgard on the cover, with Darkthrone, Immolation, Godflesh, and more. Ridiculously brutal reviews and bizarre nonsensical writing to the point of being surreal. Plus their newest and silliest feature; a 'sexy death goddess' will pose for readers per their suggestions (hopefully they'll heed my suggestion in a future issue and she'll dress up like a Hot Dog On a Stick girl!!).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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More "entertainment for maniacs" from this seminal Norwegian black metal magazine. Cover stars: Gorgoroth ("What an astonishing and Devilish album 'Incipit Satan' really is. That's what we think, and therefore Infernus and Tormentor had some questions to answer"), plus Notre Dame, Necromantia, Impaled Nazarene, Necrophagia, Carpathian Forest, and more. The Gorgoroth interview is demented, as they somehow answer all the questions in even more bizarre a manner than they were asked. And, as usual, there's a ton of reviews written in the now-infamous fucked up Nordic Vision vocabulary, as well as their dumb "Sex & Satan" pictorial feature, and the "Soundcheck" department where black metal celebs like Fenriz, Shagrath, Samoth, Maniac, and Frost rate current releases. Another eccentric, silly, fascinating issue of our favorite Norwegian metal magazine. Sample editorial comment: "We have dived into the Necro World of bands like Necrophagia, Necrodeath, and Necromantia."
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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"Entertainment for Maniacs". Indeed. Here's the latest issue of Norway's slickest black-metal scene-zine. A must for all fans of the genre, also for fans of the totally ridiculous prose in their by now notorious review section (due not only to the English-as-a-second-language problem, but also to general weirdness on the part of the writers. A sample: "They went to Romania to record this record, when in reality they should have travelled to Mongoland. Extremely non-action music without highlights, just again and again showing us how little creativity the band have in each of two many songs." And that's one that actually makes a lot of sense...) This issue features interviews with Darkthrone, Satyricon, Angelcorpse, Dark Funeral, and more. The interviews with Norwegian bands like Darkthrone are always great 'cause the Nordic Vision guys are buddies with them and thus have some other-than-usual questions to ask. A final warning: the cheesecake "Sex & Satan" photo section is too dumb for words. Readers are invited to write in with suggestions about how the model should pose...Andee already emailed a request for her to dress up like a "Hot Dog On A Stick" girl. So if anyone wants to pre-order issue #16, let us know.
