You may remember Onelinedrawing from the split he did with Rival Schools a while back, and boy did we love that record. But this is the first we've heard of OLD on his own. And the sound is much less rocking. Much more sensitive and lo-fi, recorded mostly at home directly to his lap top and featuring mostly voice and guitar with the occasional 'full band' effort. Weary and emotive male vocals that brought to mind Soul Asylum, Goo Goo Dolls and Wilco. Jangling indie-pop rock with dreamy acoustic-y Sentridoh-ish ballads and shining, driving songs like the college radio ready "Smile". Pretty cool.
Spanning the years 1970 to 1982, this is a wonderful double-disc collection of cuts taken from Plunky Branch's career as the bandleader of such acts as Oneness of Juju and Juju & the Space Rangers, also as a principal behind such personalities as Roach Om
So, Gneiss Things made a small batch of discs for this Oneohtrix Point Never album back at the end of 2008, probably not anticipating that OPN would become something of a big deal via his cyborg meditation music. A Pact Between Strangers was the second recording for OPN, predated only by the Betrayed In The Octagon album, which first came out as a cassette on Deception Island and later got released on LP through No Fun. By now, most everything that Dan Lopatin has released as Oneohtrix Point Never has gone out of print; so Gneiss Things wisely decided to make another run down to Kinkos, run off some more color copies of the artwork, and press up another batch of discs. But it will inevitably be a small window of time in which we'll be offering these discs.
That said, A Pact Between Strangers is not all that dissimilar to the long sprawling sci-fi tracks of Betrayed In The Octagon with shimmering synth patterns gliding along those day-glo lazer tones without much use of the sequenced arpeggiations that Lopatin had featured so prominently on Zones Without People or the KGB Man material.
Limited as fuck, and just as recommended.
On this 7", the title track from the most recent Oneohtrix Point Never full length gets two radically different reworkings, one from Antony (of & The Johnsons), the other by Christian Fennesz.
The original "Returnal" was a dizzying slab of robotic future funk, all pulsing synths, processed machinelike vox, a tripped out hybrid of Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and M83, all fuzzy, and swirly and psychedelic and spaced out, but these two reimaginings couldn't be further from the original. First up, Antony strips away all the synths, and reinterprets it as a torch song, played entirely on an acoustic piano (by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix, himself), the sound lush and elegiac, Antony's vocals moving and emotional, intense and so dramatic, the new version a haunting dark ballad, that even to fans of the Oneohtrix original, will most likely sound like a completely different beast.
Fennesz takes the Antony version from the A-side, and pulls it apart, blurs and softens the sounds into softly spinning clouds, taking various tones and stretching them way out, letting the piano drift in and out, the vocals slipping from gently reverbed to layered heavily effected, looped and repeated mantra like, occasionally disappearing into a squall of dubbed out effects, other times suspended in a field of pixilated piano and thick streaks of chordal clusters, eventually building to a warm lush psychedelic climax, before settling back to earth, fading out completely, leaving just shadowy traces and slowly decaying sonic contrails...
Probably quite limited, as these things most often are, features some sleek minimal Mego style cover art/design by none other than Stephen O'Malley.
Oneohtrix Point Never is the work of Brooklyn's Daniel Lopatin who also records as Infinity Window with Taylor Richardson, operating in that curious resuscitation of progressive electronics which so far hasn't strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. Yet that's exactly the time period which Lopatin seems intent on mining. Fortunately for all of us, Lopatin enjoys the benefit of being born well past the New Age nadir, and he can selective mine the past through a darkening lens of noise culture and with a skepticism that selects against dopey (even if earnestly penned) philosophies and woefully lackluster music. Nope, Oneohtrix Point Never is none of these, despite a conscious nostaglic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The label tag of No Fun Productions should also be an indication of where this may lie on the musical spectrum.
Both sides of Betrayed In The Octagon open with two sprawling pieces of densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. The other pieces bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arppegiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced). This is great stuff that won't last for long. No Fun only printed up 300 of these!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oneohtrix Point Never is back with another record, this one descending further down the path laid out by R+7, a strange yet catchy mashup of high and low brow electronics. In the same way that harsh noise outfits rummaged through piles of modernity's trash for sound sources, OPN's Daniel Lopatin mines the 21st century media garbage bins for inspiration - Muzak, trashy guitar solos, Eurotrance arpeggios, and autotuned vocals are all prominent elements on Garden Of Delete. While not as conceptually awesome as R+7, Garden of Delete is some of Lopatin's most interesting and even poppiest material to date, and of course, is sure to appear on countless top of 2015 lists, although some of us here felt Lopatin may have taken his (previously ironic?) fondness for vocoders and such a step too far, where he's not joking anymore...
Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never and one half of Infinity Window) has produced this bizarro DVD of visual esoterica culled from YouTube videos of '80s computer animation and straight-to-video clips with ghastly amounts of digital effects. Much of the imagery is familiar to anyone who grew up watching MTV and Night Flight in the early-to-mid '80s, although Lopatin's sources occasionally sport Cyrillic texts flashing across the screen, which may point to even more obtuse references from Russian television. Nonetheless, his aesthetic choices gravitate to those cathode ray / neon glows which seemed to grace the cover of every issue of Omni magazine and were also endemic to every single computer animation project freshly broadcast from the cable access station circa 1985. He takes snippets from these videos and loops them into mantras of a woman affectionately displaying the new fangled piece of technology known as as compact disc, an overlapping series of neon hexagons floating freely on blackened backdrop, spiral stairstepping patterns of glowing squares descending to oblivion, and an ultra-cheesy rainbow bridge wavering towards an gleaming city in the distance. There's one snippet which seems to be culled from a Hipgnosis video, although it's one we're not familiar with; but it's got many of the signatures of Hipgnosis -- a psychosexual reconfiguration of the human body (here a woman's hands seductively caress each other while water pours from above almost as if coming from the palms of her hands) and barren Dali-esque landscapes cobbled into modern architecture.
Like his Betrayed In The Octagon LP for No Fun, Lopatin constructs a soundtrack that is equal parts John Carpenter soundtrack, Richard Pinhas arppegiation, and Klaus Schulze cosmic tapestry. His glissandos of analogue synth bubble and glide with a cybernetic optimism that the world is going to be a much better place through the pursuit of technology. Lopatin does include two numbers based on samples from an '80s pop tune, sounding much like an Ariel Pink song both in its no-fi production and unsettled sentimentality.
A weird and wonderful collection! And yes, it's limited to something like 100 copies!!
An album that has been lauded as the next great hope for electronica, R Plus Seven marks another curious sonic direction for Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never. At one time, he was deftly composing geometric patterns of drones as the forgotten soundtracks to unwritten Philip K. Dick novels, all of which took 1982 as a technological jumping off point. But things have changed.
There has always been an awkwardness to Lopatin's pastiche oriented aesthetic; and it is not without its charm. On R Plus Seven, the clunky Russian sci-fi allusions dissolve into the intellectual domains of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich in the late '80s who were dabbling with digital technologies, sprinking their chunks of non-melodic synth blort with skittered vocal samples in compositions that wore their technological limitations on their sleeves. Like the recent revival of late '80s EBM, this was a style that we never expected to come back into fashion again. But here's Lopatin taking up this ivory tower aesthetic. Leave it to Lopatin to make another uncool sound seem relevant.
Copies from copies of copies upon copies to copies through copies on copies of more copies. Daniel Lopatin was but a babe in the early '80s - the global time frame which stands central to his Oneohtrix Point Never project, where Russian TV advertisements, faded slow-jam hits, and forgotten futures all get misinterpreted, rewired, and misremembered through an android dream. Much of his past work revolved around the step sequencing and ambient swoosh that filtered through the kosmische aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler with plenty of sci-fi sound design moments thrown in for good measure amidst the angular trajectories of his obtuse electronica. Where Lopatin had been instrumental in bringing this retrogarde aesthetic to a broader audience, he's dropped much of the compositional framework that went into albums like Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. Some of the swelling Vangelis synth pads reappear on Replica, but this album has much more in common with a plunderphonia aesthetic, with his 'ghost vocal' samples getting caught in an inexplicable feedback loop as a self-perpetuating syntax error within a Cray supercomputer which got hung up trying to come to terms with the audio-visual data from bad VHS transfers from old episodes of Max Headroom. Some of Lopatin's sounds originated from a series of compilations of late night TV commercials from the '80s, with the saccharine strings, flutes, and pianos cycling in elliptical patterns that scrub backwards and forwards. On "Sleep Dealer" in particular, these loops snap with a hard-disc rigidity more in common with the Oval disc-skipping mantras on Diskont 94 or the winking electronica of The Books. "Submersible" locks onto a middle-eastern rhythm, conjuring the ghost of Muslimgauze in an appropriation of an appropriation. For as much hype as this record has received, Replica is a very abstract and deliberately confusing proposition for OPN, one which we have been digging quite a bit. Killer cover art to boot!
FINALLY ALSO AVAILABLE ON CD!! Here's what we said about the vinyl version a couple weeks back:
With the opening squall of electrical noise on his latest Oneohtrix Point Never album, Daniel Lopatin must have been paying homage to Mego's history of digital cacophony, with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Florian Hecker, and Zbigniew Karkowski all abusing binary code through their releases on the label. Of course, Lopatin's signature sound is a throwback to the bygone era of education films about the wonders of chemistry and the drama of the space program with their cheesy, blooping soundtracks, so an homage to Mego is not entirely out of character from a conceptual point of view. Beyond this assaulting track, the elastic surfaces and geometric patterns which have become the hallmark of Oneohtrix Point Never work their magic on Returnal. On the title track with its staccato synthesis, Lopatin tricks his voice out through a couple of pitchshifters, rendering it very much in line with what Karin Dreijer Andersson has done in The Knife and Fever Ray. This isn't the first time he's sung on a track, as he did entertain some robotic vocals on one of those KGB Man cassettes from 2009. He follows this with a series of tracks overlapping cathode-ray drones, algorithmic shapeshifting, and pools of synthetic android tears all of which revolve into curving compositions that split the difference between pastoral new age drool puddling and progressive electronics with a nod to atonal cybernetics. Like Emeralds, who have also signed to Editions Mego, Oneohtrix Point Never has been on quite a roll, and Returnal lives up to all the hype.
The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material!
Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced).
Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors.
Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!
Russian Mind is the third piece of vinyl to be released in 2009 by Daniel Lopatin's ever-amazing Oneohtrix Point Never, following Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. All three of these LPs have recently been collected on the Rifts anthology, also released through No Fun, and this week's Record Of The Week!
The ideas of a forgotten future had been recently employed by Leyland Kirby on the driftscape trilogy Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was; but where Kirby pegged his lost future as somewhere in the early portion of the 20th century, reclaimed through downpitched and blurred 78s, Lopatin firmly pegs his lost future as the one perceived from the time period between 1975 and 1985. Given the title of this album, Lopatin's retro-garde zone-tripping looks back to the former Soviet Union. Such is also the case for some of Lopatin's appropriated video work, which features '80s Russian commercials with all sorts of a wonderfully corn-ball, lazer-clad video effects. Furthermore, he claims this album was "transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia." Nope, there is no such institute at the Russian Academy, but it makes for a good piece of fictional context.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind, and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms in the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Russian Mind tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. A marvelous record for sure.
Not only do we finally have the awesome Oneohtrix Point Never Returnal record now available on cd, we also just got in OPN's Young Beidnahga, released as part of Ruralfaune's Synth series (along with the Innercity reviewed elsewhere on this week's list too!), but it sold out so quick we never got a single copy. Thankfully, the label decided to do one more small batch, so the band would have copies to sell on their recent European tour, and we'd have copies to sell in the shop!
Three tracks, 26 minutes, long form blissed out spacedrones, but somehow a bit more twisted and gnarled than other OPN releases, beginning with some sprawling wavery tones that sound almost Native American, the synths soon go wild, emitting wild tangles of melody, laced with what sounds like fluttering flutes, a wild trancelike swirling soft psychedelic squall that goes on and on and on, until eventually morphing into what sounds like several minutes of lazer battle! The second track continues in much the same vein with spidery melodies branching out and intertwining, trills and arpeggiated runs, all laid over hazy whirs and a fuzzed out, blurred background soundscape, those flute like flutters return, everything sun dappled and reflective, this track two morphs part way through and becomes a woozy sprawl of spare lo-fi analog synth squiggle. The last track is definitely a surprise, a strange stripped down coda, all acoustic guitars, strange effected vocals, some sort of druggy psychedelic dronefolk, lo-fi and a bit twisted, but also weirdly lovely.
Strange for sure, even by already strange OPN standards, far out and space-y and psychedelic, this should appeal to all you kraut-drone space-synth fanatics...
Be warned, we got a little less than 40 copies, and we won't be able to get more, so this is it, and it's a doozy, so if you're already a fan, you're FOR SURE gonna want one, and if you've always wanted to check out OPN, this is as good a place to start as any....
It makes perfect sense that Daniel Lopatin is a fan of J.G. Ballard, the late author of dystopian environments plagued and / or graced with the dilemmas of the relationship between man and machine. Lopatin's previous entry as Oneohtrix Point Never was the Memory Vague dvd on Root Strata, recycling '80s computer animation from YouTube to serve as the visual data for his sci-fi soundtracks of analog synthesis; and there was no doubt about the peculiar Ballardian aura to that dvd which enjoyed a bittersweet optimism for the future of technology with its sensual grasp upon the 'new.' For this album - Zones Without People - Lopatin continues to delight us with his perfectly anachronistic use of synthesizers to capture the early '80s memories of early afterschool science specials, cheap sci-fi soundtracks, and the never-ending fascination with space. Lopatin is keenly aware that we don't have teleportation devices, jetpacks, or holidays on the moon; and an undercurrent of sadness does seem to bubble from below all of his compositions. In fact, Lopatin describes the strategies he employs for his poly-synths as "grid tears," imbuing a sense of melancholy through his rigid network of percolating tones and bleeps.
Above an solar-powered electric hum, the album opens with a series of interwoven synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arppegiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lapotin gets to the title track, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the flip side is a dud. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters as the second side's opening cut. Cosmic arpeggiations and star-gazing drones settle in the rest of this amazing record. Don't expect this to be around for long. We're not the only one's freaking out about Oneohtrix Point Never, and Zones Without People is 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.
These two tapes, housed in a soft-plastic case a la RRRecords, offer documentation of four live, and very nice electronic sets from one evening at the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn, featuring the 2009 darling of outro-electronics Oneohtrix Point Never, the ever impressive Keith Fullerton Whitman, No Fun Acid (aka Carlos Giffoni in his 'acid' guise), and Prehistoric Blackout (aka Taylor Richardson of Infinity Window).
Oneohtrix Point Never begins his set with a lugubrious plodding synth melody before nestling into those stratospheric arcs of Juno-synth tones found on his recent Russian Mind LP. Keith Fullerton Whitman kicks out squiggles and step-patterned melodic phrases via a C64 emulator on his iPhone (no shit!) which gradually explode into a kaleidoscopic supernova after lifting out of a thick set of modulated tones 'n' drones. Giffoni has been talking up his love of acid techno with No Fun Acid being the project to act upon that infatuation. He sets down a simple breakbeat and begins a set that would make Phuture proud, in a pretty straight forward, but wholly effective techno workout. Prehistoric Blackout offers a four-note synth melody that drifts with counterpointed arpeggiations, tremolo lazer beams of sound, and tripped out, looping electronics. It should be noted that this is a room recording, and not a board mix. But as a result, there is some very amusing banter that Whitman provides at the end of his set with two enthusiastic women describing his set as a being akin to achieving multiple orgasms. Ahem. Throughout most of the sets, the audience politely stays quiet with the exception for the beginning of the Prehistoric Blackout set. Super limited, we've got less than a dozen of these.
Issue #4 of this Seattle zine has arrived! You simply seldom see this sort of lovingly handmade, cut'n'paste publication these days! Features include stories about Grouper and Blue Cheer, animal facts, assorted other writings, comics, collage, drawings, and reviews of gigs and... beer! The 52-page zine comes in a plastic sleeve which also corrals a handful of odds'n'ends -- some screenprinted stickers and a cd-r of educational, spoken word and children's LP obscurities. Limited to 450 copies!
Ong Ong! The third issue of this Seattle-based zine comes packaged as a goodie bag of sorts. Not only do you get the zine which has interviews with Grey Daturas and Slim Moon, but there's also a crafty chaotic mish mash of stories, stickers, comics, flyers, pictures and a compilation cd with music by The Vonneguts, Western Graves, Na, Ghost Family and Ear Venom! Limited to 250 hand-screened, hand-cut, and hand-assembled copies! We only have a handful, so snooze not!
Boasting members of Beulah and Guided By Voices (obviously not *the* members), Yuji Oniki's debut album is a... well, if you like Bread, East River Pipe and The High Llamas then this is for you.
Japan's Otomo Yoshihide is a noisy, sampling-mad composer and performer, yes, perhaps best known for turntablist chaos in his notorious Naked City-ish outfit Ground Zero, and also for his "onkyo" experiments in groups like ISO and Filament, where he's been known to "play" the turntable without records. But, he's also a jazz guitarist. Of course, noisy and experimental in that mode too, a lot of the time. But with a definite love of the standards. Some years ago, Otomo's New Jazz Orchestra did a whole disc dedicated to Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch album. And there was Ground Zero's Plays Standards, before that. And Otomo has also covered Mingus, Ellington, Coleman, and others. Now with the stripped down ONJT+ unit, he's got two new discs tackling two more of his favorite jazz touchstones: "Lonely Woman" (from Ornette Coleman's 1959's The Shape Of Jazz To Come) and "Bells" by Albert Ayler (originally released as a single-sided 12" by ESP-Disk in 1965).
Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Trio consists of the man himself on guitar, with Mizutani Hiroaki on bass, and Yoshigaki Yasuhiro on drums and percussion. The "plus" part of the name is due to the presence of two special guests as well: Sachiko M with her sine waves, and Jim O'Rourke on EMS synth!
The Lonely Woman disc consists of 6 individually tracked interpretations of that composition, the two lengthiest tracks that bookend the disc featuring the full quintet, two more with just the core trio, and two that are solos from Otomo alone, one for electric guitar, the other one for "broken acoustic guitar". So it's sort of a "Lonely Woman" suite, varied throughout, but also like one extended rendition of the tune, a worshipful (but adventurous) "Lonely Woman" tour de force, achingly gorgeous and moody and often noisy too, both outright and subtly, with much electronic crackle, hiss, and whine especially when Sachiko M and O'Rourke are involved.
It's clear from Otomo's personal, quite interesting liner notes in the cd booklet, that this disc is really more of a tribute to his free jazz guitar hero, the late, legendary Masayuki Takayanagi, than to Ornette. After all, Takayanagi did his own Lonely Woman album. And exerted a huge influence on his would be "apprentice" Otomo. So this is definitely recommended as much to fans of Takayanagi as to those of Coleman or Otomo...
On the other disc, there's two takes of "Bells", one by the quintet, one by the trio. Albert Ayler has always been a horn player beloved by avant-guitarists (Marc Ribot especially, but also Keiji Haino and Sonny Sharrock come to mind) and "Bells" makes a good launchpad for Otomo and Co. to get LOUD and go way out. Particularly since Aylers' wonderful folky melodies have already been proven to withstand (and compliment) any such abuse, by the composer himself. This disc is an intense freakout all right, but with a high degree of listenability due to its loveliness at heart. That Otomo wrote liner notes for this about a served head (Mishima's) he saw a picture of in a newspaper as a kid, and makes some kind of a connection to Ayler, is also interesting...
Both discs, quite recommended, come in beautiful digipacks, with similar art, abstract pink jellyfish / balloon / breast images.
Japan's Otomo Yoshihide is a noisy, sampling-mad composer and performer, yes, perhaps best known for turntablist chaos in his notorious Naked City-ish outfit Ground Zero, and also for his "onkyo" experiments in groups like ISO and Filament, where he's been known to "play" the turntable without records. But, he's also a jazz guitarist. Of course, noisy and experimental in that mode too, a lot of the time. But with a definite love of the standards. Some years ago, Otomo's New Jazz Orchestra did a whole disc dedicated to Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch album. And there was Ground Zero's Plays Standards, before that. And Otomo has also covered Mingus, Ellington, Coleman, and others. Now with the stripped down ONJT+ unit, he's got two new discs tackling two more of his favorite jazz touchstones: "Lonely Woman" (from Ornette Coleman's 1959's The Shape Of Jazz To Come) and "Bells" by Albert Ayler (originally released as a single-sided 12" by ESP-Disk in 1965).
Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Trio consists of the man himself on guitar, with Mizutani Hiroaki on bass, and Yoshigaki Yasuhiro on drums and percussion. The "plus" part of the name is due to the presence of two special guests as well: Sachiko M with her sine waves, and Jim O'Rourke on EMS synth!
The Lonely Woman disc consists of 6 individually tracked interpretations of that composition, the two lengthiest tracks that bookend the disc featuring the full quintet, two more with just the core trio, and two that are solos from Otomo alone, one for electric guitar, the other one for "broken acoustic guitar". So it's sort of a "Lonely Woman" suite, varied throughout, but also like one extended rendition of the tune, a worshipful (but adventurous) "Lonely Woman" tour de force, achingly gorgeous and moody and often noisy too, both outright and subtly, with much electronic crackle, hiss, and whine especially when Sachiko M and O'Rourke are involved.
It's clear from Otomo's personal, quite interesting liner notes in the cd booklet, that this disc is really more of a tribute to his free jazz guitar hero, the late, legendary Masayuki Takayanagi, than to Ornette. After all, Takayanagi did his own Lonely Woman album. And exerted a huge influence on his would be "apprentice" Otomo. So this is definitely recommended as much to fans of Takayanagi as to those of Coleman or Otomo...
On the other disc, there's two takes of "Bells", one by the quintet, one by the trio. Albert Ayler has always been a horn player beloved by avant-guitarists (Marc Ribot especially, but also Keiji Haino and Sonny Sharrock come to mind) and "Bells" makes a good launchpad for Otomo and Co. to get LOUD and go way out. Particularly since Aylers' wonderful folky melodies have already been proven to withstand (and compliment) any such abuse, by the composer himself. This disc is an intense freakout all right, but with a high degree of listenability due to its loveliness at heart. That Otomo wrote liner notes for this about a served head (Mishima's) he saw a picture of in a newspaper as a kid, and makes some kind of a connection to Ayler, is also interesting...
Both discs, quite recommended, come in beautiful digipacks, with similar art, abstract pink jellyfish / balloon / breast images.
The latest release on Echochord comes from the oddly monickered Onmutu Mechanicks, aka the Scottish techno producer Arne Weinberg. Where Weinberg's regular gig is more melodic, traditional techno, Onmutu Mechanicks exists for his more dubbed out ambient explorations, which of course sounds right up our alley, and it is.
Fans of other stuff on Echochord (Quantec, Rod Modell) as well as stuff like Pole, Echospace, Deepchord, Kompakt's more minimal less housey sounds and well as the more Pop Ambient stuff, will definitely dig this, skeletal skitters careen back and forth over deep billows of dubbed out synth, low slung bass throbs pulse beneath strange bits of industrial crunch, while barely there melodies wrap themselves around the slow drifting murk, many of the tracks take that house music throb as their core, but bury it under layers of whir and shimmer, sending extra peripheral beats bouncing around from speaker to speaker before letting them sink back into the swirling sonic miasma, other tracks ditch the beats entirely, their looped synths and processed effects creating their own rhythms, while still others take chilled out late night techno and strip it way down, the soundtrack to some futuristic after hours nightclub, or a wander through some post apocalyptic future world. Another fantastic chunk of sonic bliss to add to the recent spate of killer minimal techno and abstract rhythmic electronica releases from Actress, Glitterbug, Pantha Du Prince, Clubroot, Vex'd, Klimek...
Man, it took a while - a REALLY long while - but we finally got enough of these suckers to list. By now, many of you are familiar with Japan's amazing Onna, whose self-titled anthology on Holy Mountain turned many a head not all that long ago (we made it Record Of The Week). Though they first emerged in the early 1980s, the band was clearly carrying on a psychedelic tradition in the vein of many of their countrymen from the previous decade. But even calling Onna a "Japanese psych" band doesn't describe just how strange and awesome this band is. Katawa was released in 2007, and though the sound is drastically different from the band's catchy first single, this is still clearly Onna, which always operated under the leadership of guitarist/singer Keizo Miyanishi. The same unsettling themes still seem to be present - the cover here being quite similar to the anthology but not so grotesque this time around - with the hallucinatory lyrics printed in both Japanese and English... so if you were wondering what Onna might be singing about, wonder no more. The lyrics work perfectly for these songs, pained and sexually deviant laments performed with just acoustic guitars, voice, and lots of feedback. The results are creepy, poetic, and just plain weird at times, tending to focus on lost love, nightmarish delusions, and a general sense of hopelessness.
Opener "Salamadra Salamander (The Three Sisters)", which you might remember from the comp, is 13 minutes of rhythmically strummed acoustic guitar and wandering vocals with a dose of electric feedback shrieking above in the atmosphere. Mournful as hell and spacious sounding, it is also murky and ultra depressive, droning on in a sort of Jandek way with lyrics focusing on, um, the narrator's three penises... Damn. The total weirdness here could have come from any time within the last 45 years or so, but it also stands as a definite legacy of Les Rallizes Denudes, especially in the vocal department, as Miyanishi shifts from low moans to high pitched wails. "The Prophet (After Pushkin)", which sounds like it may have been recorded in a live setting, features a discordant acoustic guitar strummed with a heavy hand and bursts of controlled feedback that surface and recede like an earsplitting sonic wave. The song is sort of sour sounding, but also kind of pretty in its own miserable way, with lines like, "Tormented, I stumbled through a gloomy waste". With a super atonal and out of tune guitar adding a sparse, strangely piano-like sound, "Estelle's Making Herself Up" comes off like a Japanese version of the blues that gives a nice glimpse into someone's sad, demented soul. You almost feel like you're spying on Miyanishi as the sounds of a chair shifting gives things a strangely intimate feel. The mood so far is shaken up a bit on the next number, "Silver Dove", with upbeat, folky strumming and lyrics that seem a little more hopeful, but still reeeally fucking weird. "Morning Blues (Moaning Song)", sounds a bit like '60s proto-punks Godz on a bummer before the album closes with "Bamboo Otoko," where a scarlet beast comes around and crushes Miyanishi's balls. So, by now you should probably know whether or not this one's for you. Hardly the easiest stuff to digest, but patience yields some amazing results for the adventurous listener. Nice gatefold mini-lp style sleeve.
Certainly one of the best things about working at a record store is coming across new bands that give you that undefinable, but very real feeling in your stomach where you can't imagine having ever gone on without THIS band. Even better is discovering something from the distant past (not too distant in this case), something whose existence could have eluded you forever had good fortune not smiled down in the form of a reissue.
Onna were the Japanese duo of Keizou Miyanishi and Mafuyu Hiroki, whose 1983 7" has thankfully been rescued from obscurity by the mighty Holy Mountain label, and has been blowing minds left and right here at aQ. One of the coolest things about this record is just how surprising and unexpected it all was, the whole "1983" part in particular. With a nod to the past but no doubt out of place in the early 80s, Onna were without question inhabiting a world of their own. The most obvious point of reference soundwise would be legendary psych/noise enigma Les Rallizes Denudes, especially in the vocal department. This is a very good thing for anyone who loves those somewhat lazy, partially detached, Japanese sung vocals of groups like LRD and LSD-March.
The use of a drum machine keeps these two songs pulsing like a mechanical heartbeat, which when combined with the fairly free form guitars, definitely gives this record its own vibe. Side 1 begins with a meditative two chord lament before noisy, white hot guitar squalls begin creeping about in the distance as simple and repetitive bass lines keep the foundation strong and focused. The second track introduces catchy psych guitar chords with a machine modified quasi-girl group drumbeat, the bass again holding things down nice and steady. The heavily reverberated strummed guitars bubble about as fake cymbal explosions recede and return over and over again, until a prolonged fadeout is replaced by a locked groove note that keeps this record spinning endlessly, just as it should.
The lack of information on Onna only adds to the mystery (and just a note, they are not affiliated with those other Japanese psych monsters Christine 23 Onna). PSF has issued an album by the group called Katawa, which we will definitely be paying close attention to after this 7". Until then, the only things we have to judge the duo by are the perplexing ugly/beautiful cover featuring an androgynous female figure lying naked on a bed (is she sick and decaying? is she just hanging out in bed? waiting for a lover?), and more importantly, their music, which we cannot recommend highly enough. Seriously, how many 7" singles would receive this much of a write up? You know this one is a winner.
PS for the non-turntable-havin' folks, apparently these tracks are also to appear on an upcoming cd collection Holy Mountain's putting out with other Onna stuff...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Japanese female dream-rock trio, of violin and bass and voice, as last heard on the Tokyo Flashback Vol. 4 and Land of the Rising Noise Vol. 2 compilations. Ethereal atmosphere from a group who, as Jim puts it: "drifts in and out of aural existence with a haunting array of delicate tonalities."
Well, Yoko Ono's always generated love-her or hate-her responses, and this new disc sure is no letdown in that department! For the Yoko Ono lovers at AQ (Allan, for instance), it offers some prime '70s style Yoko screech, proving that even at 68 years old she's
Love her or hate her, Yoko Ono is the rare kind of artist that is hard to be indifferent about. There are those of us who love nearly everything she does, and there are at least one of us here who can't stand her at all (though perplexingly, that said person is a HUGE fan of Harry Pussy whose singer's vocal style is wholly copped from Yoko's, so go figure.). While this is not a new reissue, we recently found out it was still available, and if you were ever going to buy only one Yoko Ono release, this is definitely the one!
This double album, Fly, released in 1971 after the concurrently released Plastic Ono Band solo debut lps with husband John Lennon is a widely varied but creatively inspired affair with an amazing back-up band (featuring Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman) that covers both straight-ahead rock numbers as well as mind-melting experimental realms. The sixteen minute proto-krautrock groover "Mind Train" is a definite highlight, sounding like Yoko fronting Can or Faust, but this disc also covers tender acoustic pieces, outsider blues, femme folk, fluxus noise experiments, as well as her trademark howling scream jams, some full throttle noise, others more restrained inner turmoil. But for all its variation, it flows together like a complete piece that grossly engages and vulnerably assaults in equal measure. Probably not for everyone, but highly recommended nonetheless!
What's this? Another collection of remixes from Yoko Ono already?! You're darn tootin' right! But whereas Yes I Am A Witch (released February 2007) enlisted the very varied and very 'now' cool cats (i.e, Peaches, Antony and the Johnsons, Flaming Lips, Le Tigre, Polyphonic Spree, and Cat Power) to do new remixes and reworkings of Ono's music, Open Your Box (released April 2007) compiles her previously released dancefloor smash remix 12"s. In case you're unacquainted, these remixes are far more NYC house, techno and disco scene oriented (a scene that has celebrated and embraced Ono and her music over the years), and feature the likes of Orange Factory, Basement Jaxx, Danny Tenaglia, Felix Da Housecat, DJ Dan and Pet Shop Boys. Sure some of them are pretty dated, but it's terrific to have and hear all of these tracks together. Throughout the two releases, much love and reverence and fun flow freely, and in the case of Open Your Box also much giddy clubland nostalgia. Yes.
We can't help but love Yoko Ono. I mean c'mon, who else at her age could rock those face-blocking shades and look so incomparably awesome? Plus, apart from some really schmaltzy songs (i.e. "Children Power") she has recorded, arguably more often then not, some pretty damn amazing music (Plastic Ono Band, Fly, Feeling the Space, Season of Glass). Here, she enlists the help of a wide array of indie-music collaborators including Peaches, Antony and the Johnsons, Flaming Lips, Le Tigre, Polyphonic Spree, and Cat Power, who each chose a song from her back catalog and were given access to the multi-track masters to rework them how they wished. Most of the songs come from Ono's more songwriter-ly albums (Double Fantasy, Season of Glass, It's Alright, and Approximately Infinite Universe), with most of the artists keeping Ono's vocal tracks intact. Only Flaming Lips ventured further back and used vocals from "Cambridge 1969" one of John and Yoko's first performative collaborations of screeching shrieks and distorted feedback. Personally, we wished there were more songs selected from that period, better yet being done by artists of our choosing (c'mon, Circle re-doing "Mind Train"? You know you want to hear that!!). At first scan, this seemed like the type of hip remix compilation we dread, the kind which inevitably takes both artist and re-mixer down a notch by needlessly updating old songs through dated trip-hop, trance, or house idioms (she's done it before, more than once, even -- hence our wariness). Thankfully that isn't the case here. Most of the artists breathe new life into the songs through restraint rather than bombast, coming to a halfway point that is neither entirely Ono's nor her collaborators. Cat Power creates a duet with piano on "Revelations". Porcupine Tree deemphasizes the slow burn of "Death of Samantha" with acoustic guitar and atmospheric washes. Jason Pierce from Spiritualized takes the disco out of "Walking On Thin Ice" and gives it something more majestic and much colder. Even the electro and dance-ier tracks submitted by Peaches, Le Tigre, Shitake Monkey and Blow-up don't disappoint as you would expect but contribute a nice flow to the more subdued moments. All in all a surprising listen, and according to the Astralwerks website, this is not the end of it. Another Ono remix album is on the way later this year! Now, if they'd only reissue Fly (hint, hint).
Remixers make each song sound like themselves: Cibo Matto, the ABA Allstars (Adam Yauch aka MCA, Mario Caldato Jr, Cibo Matto and Sean Ono Lennon), Ween, Tricky, and Thurston Moore, who features in his remix Masonna, Incapacitants, CCCC, Hanatarash, Aube, Monde Bruits, Gerogerigegege, Keiji Haino. There are also some cd-rom-able additional trax.
Depending on where you stand with Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth's avant explorations, this is either a dream come true or a nightmare collaboration. It sounds exactly like what you would imagine. Extended vocal freakouts, chiming detuned arpeggiations, blithe detached whispered murmurs, ritualistic vocalized koans, distorted feedback squalls and even some right wing slamming poetry in the round. But besides that last part, it rarely comes off as indulgent as we feared, and the fact that it was recorded in a day, gives the pieces an urgency and vitality that would have been lost had it been more composed. Yokokimthurston definitely would have made a great installment in the group's SYR experimental series, and as a part of that series might have felt more substantial, and been granted more of a musical gravitas. As it stands in most music press this record is being treated more as Yoko acting as some therapeutic arbitration for Kim and Thurston to work out their post-marriage musical relationship. Please! As if the three of them didn't have anything better to do. Disregard the hype (or lack of) and check it out, it's definitely pretty great!
Oh Yoko! After all these years and all you've gone through, you still manage to have such dynamic energy and such a magnetic spirit. Who else at 76 years of age could make a record that pretty much blows away all the stuff made by folks in the supposed 'prime' of their lives.
With Between My Head And The Sky, Ono has done just that, this is maybe one of the most rewarding, immediate and satisfying albums in her expansive back catalog. Sounding so totally modern yet so totally Yoko at the same time. With an awesome band behind her featuring Cornelius (!) and the amazing drummer from his band Yuko Araki, as well as cellist Erik Friedlander, saxophonist Daniel Carter, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, Yoko's son Sean Lennon, and a few other great musical minds.
While they all help to create beautiful layers of sound and incredible grooves to each of these songs, it's Yoko's compositions and of course idiosyncratic delivery that pushes these songs into another realm. This is a record that perfectly blends Ono's more "out" and cosmic tendencies with her astute awareness of presence and nature and our surroundings, ranging from the charged and manic to the sweet and organic.
We know that folks tend to have quite strong opinions of Ono, with some of us at the store falling decidedly and staunchly on both sides of that divide, but a true testament to how great this record is, was when we were playing it in the store the other day, a customer asked what it was, when we told him he looked so surprised and told us he always assumed he didn't like her music, but that this was in fact a disc he would end up listening to over and over. For those of us here who are way way in the pro/in-love-with Yoko side of the equation, this is simply an amazing reconfirmation of why she is one of the most striking, sincere and creative forces of nature to live in our lifetime. Along with folks like Ornette Coleman and Asha Bhosle she is a constant reminder that growing old has nothing to do with losing spirit or soul, quite the opposite. So what will you be doing when you're 76??!!
Plenty of artists we love have mustered beautiful, droney compositions through the act of decay. Look no further than the AQ favorites from William Basinski's sublime Disintegration Loops, the crumbling digitalia of Tim Hecker, and even our own Jim Haynes has his special rusting techniques with sound and image. So when it comes to an album called Entropy which comes from the Japanese drone 'n' field recordist Yui Onodera, we have to wonder how it measures up.
We gotta say this is a beautiful piece of grey-smeared ambience, but we're scratching our head over how this sounds like the world falling apart. This would be a perfect rainy day, contemplative soundtrack, but not exactly a meditation on entropy. Well, maybe except for the Loren Chasse-like crumbling of soil, pebbles, and leaves on the untitled second track which quietly tumbles into a series of evolving loops that blur into a sleep-inducing drone of oceanic waves and shimmering tones. The way this track progresses is how the entire record is situated -- a very calm, sedate, yet hypnotizing collection of drones and tones that float out of stacked guitars and processed field recordings. The fourth track is pure drone bliss straight out of the Chalk / Coleclough axis of smeared dronemaking precision; and the sixth has more of a Popul Vuh two-note melody oozing out of Onodera's shoegazing guitar chords, which have been filtered, layered, re-recorded, layered again, echoed, reverbed, and back again. Onodera has produced some great recordings for Mystery Sea and And/OAR, but this one was actually something he released back in 2005 through his Critical Path imprint. Even if this doesn't inspire the idea of entropy for us, Onodera has still made a fantastic and beautiful drone record here. Check it out!
Not much information to present about who Yui Onodera is. Nor is there anything in the way of a conceptual framework to guide one through this album beyond its sources from "environmental sound and pump organ." Not that it really matters anyway, as Suisei is a gorgeous album of darkly textured drones with parallels to Thomas Koner's isolationist compositions or Keith Berry's precious deconstructions. Wind, rain, and water all make themselves known in the collection of field recordings, as does the pump organ, which reveals itself in harmonic sustained tones with a spectral timbre (e.g. Niblock, Radigue, Chalk, etc.). During a particular enigmatic episode, wooden creaks and sodden groans duet with a motorized persistant soft-grind, giving the impression that some unscrupulous machine is quietly compacting sinews, meat, and bone. Strangely, it never sounds macabre or unsettlingly grotesque; rather, these crunching textures situate humbly next to a hypnotic wash of compressed static and melancholic shadowy drone, which sublimely shift into a slippery crescendo of grey massed sound. Very, very well done!
Like a lot of you, we flipped for Chinoiseries, a killer collection of sample heavy jams from French-Vietnamese producer Onra, the sources for which were all culled from old records scored while crate digging in Asia, the result was a dizzying barrage of beat driven almost Bollywood craziness, folk music, opera, classical, pop, chopped and looped and wrapped around funky beats, transformed into crazy catchy crackly grooves. We were psyched to discover there was more Onra out there, although this is not so much an album proper as it is a sort of beats and breaks record, and it's not new material, it's archival (check the date as title), but even so, all the breaks here KILL! The song titles are pretty self explanatory: "Porn", "Hit The Bong", "Dirty Loop", "Disco", and as you might imagine, those tracks do in fact sound like the title suggest, but not exactly. Onra definitely has a knack for twisting up sounds and making them weird and warped. Vocals are clipped and layered, collaged and recontextualized, lots of wah guitar, breathy exhalations, plenty of sci-fi synths, bloopy bleepy electro-funk, electronic squelch wrapped around passionate porno moans, bubbling bong sounds over woozy grooves, blasts of disco skitter, much of the record definitely falling into a sort of psychedelic / fuzzed out, almost Blaxploitation sort of vibe/sound, with a bunch of the tracks getting all RZA like, one in particular with fuzzy flutes, squiggly effects and a gaggle of giggling girls. So cool!
Every crate digger worth their salt has come upon the Asian record dilemma. Records (often Chinese) that look so awesome and full of promise with their mysterious photography, strange graphics and humorous English misspellings, only to be underwhelmed by the most boring, pedestrian and oft-times sickly sweet music contained within. But what's a cratedigger to do when they are actually IN Asia and have to wade through stacks upon stacks of such records knowing they can only bring home a tiny batch? That's the dilemma the French-Vietnamese producer Onra found himself in on a trip to Vietnam where scouring through various flea markets, he picked up a stack of promising but highly worn records. Like the best of recent instrumental hip-hop records by J Dilla, Madlib (especially his Beat Konducta Indian series), and Oh No processed through the radio collage filters of Sublime Frequencies, Onra was able to mine pure gold from the scratchy sounds he collected abroad. Bits of operatic theater, odd sixties easy-listening covers, traditional flute and string ensembles, love songs and obscure soundtracks chopped into loops and grooves with all the rough crackle and sheen kept in tact. Soooo Awesome!!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The fifth release in David Byrne's World Psychedelic Classic series for Luaka Bop (the previous ones being from Os Mutantes, Tim Maia, Shuggie Otis, and the West African funk comp, Love's A Real Thing) is a killer survey of Nigerian Afro-electro-funk by the elusive William Onyeabor who self-released records between 1978 and 1985, before apparently converting to Christianity and refusing to discuss himself and his music ever since. Long in the making after years of trying to negotiate licensing with the difficult Onyeabor, this compilation is a revelation of outsider analog synth and politically-tinged Afrobeat caught right in between Parliament/Funkadelic and Fela Kuti.
Having previously only heard the tracks featured on the Love is A Real Thing and Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970s Funky Lagos comps, it's amazing to hear a whole collection of Onyeabor's music, with songs that sprawl well over the ten minute mark, and like Fela Kuti's music, filled with call and response female backing vocals and pointed lyrics over an infectious funk groove. "Something You Will Never Forget" repeats that line between Onyeabor and the female backing group before revealing, "One day you'll be lying dead". Other songs denounce war and the atomic bomb. But what separates Onyeabor from Kuti is his astonishing analog synth skills that propel the music into much stranger psychedelic territory. Like that Francis Bebey collection we raved about a while back ago, this release is bumping and of course comes highly recommended.
Only here on cd at the moment, but we'll get the triple vinyl version back in hopefully real soon!
Oh, OOIOO! No one makes spazzed out splashes of sonic color with more energy and spirit than you. While Yoshimi will always be best known for being a member of The Boredoms and the inspiration for a Flaming Lips album (Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots) we think her output with her band OOIOO over the years definitely stands on its own. Able to meld psychedelia into an infectious and dizzying pulsation of sound, OOIOO give us more of what we love with Armonico Hewa, which sonically falls somewhere between the circular and lysergic sounds of our favorite OOIOO record Gold & Green and the more tribal and repetitive groove of their last outing, Taiga.
So many folks have taken ingredients from OOIOO and gotten lots of mileage and attention out of it, for instance, we can't help but think that Gang Gang Dance owe much of their sound and visual aesthetic to OOIOO. Herky, jerky and no-wave, rich with the spirit and energy of vintage Plastic Ono Band. Folks who love OOIOO and Yoshimi will of course love this to death, but we also think this will totally hit the spot for Boredoms fans who miss the varied sound of records like Super AE. Also, be sure to see OOIOO live if they come anywhere close to you as they are for sure one of our favorite live bands around.
We have always loved Yoshimi, whether she's bashing the skins in the Boredoms, hanging out with Kim Gordon in Free Kitten or kicking up a serious ruckus in OOIOO, her main love these days. Hot of the heels of their latest outing Taiga comes this scorching remix e.p. courtesy of Yoshimi's Boredoms cohort Eye Yamatsuka. He takes the Roberto De Simone inspired standout tracks Uma and Umo and turns them into hot flashes of an African influenced late night rave that we wish we could be at. The other two tracks are the original versions from Taiga.
This is the second album from Osaka's OOIOO (say it with us: "oh-oh-eye-oh-oh"), an all female quartet led by Yoshimi (of the Boredoms, UFO or Die, Free Kitten, etc.) More melodic than their first outing, while heavier than last year's Green and Gold,
Oh, oh, eye oh oh! Drummer/trumpeter/vocalist/Flaming Lips mascot Yoshimi P-We's other main gig besides the Boredoms is back with their first album since 2009's Armonico Hewa. Over the years, OOIOO has honed both the playfully melodic aspects of their sound, and their sheer rhythmic prowess, into something simply magical. Gamel is something even more extra-special though, probably our favorite from the groop since their early outings Feather Float and Gold & Green near the turn of the millennium. As the name suggests, this album takes a lot of inspiration from Javanese gamelan music, in fact adding two actual gamelan players to the core group, OOIOO herein melding the tinkling, metallic (actual metal, not heavy metal) percussive sound of the gamelan with the band's usual tight grooves, vocal chant and electronic textures. They were somewhat "tribal" before, now OOIOO verges on exotica! It's gorgeous, dense, detailed, funky in a funky way, bright and colorful, absolutely captivating right from 10 minute opener "Don Ah" through all eleven kaleidoscopic tracks. Super recommended!!
Both the compact disc and limited double vinyl versions come in gatefold sleeves, the vinyl with a free download card.
This came out about five years ago as an expensive Japanese import -- now at last it's been released domestically at a much more affordable price. Thanks Thrill Jockey! Here's what we said about it before:
This is the third album from OOIOO (say "oh oh eye oh oh"), the Osaka based, all-female quartet masterminded by Yoshimi P-We (drummer/trumpeter/vocalist for the Boredoms, et al.) At times playful and childlike, Gold and Green abandons the grating, no-wave dissonance of earlier albums for a more textural, atmospheric and melodic experience. "Mountain Book" (which seems to be the musical accompaniment to the lovely artwork for this record) is the beautiful standout track on which they are joined by many guests including Seiichi Yamamoto (Boredoms), Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto) and even Sean Lennon: epic, hypnotic, dreamy psychedelia with piano, dulcimer, and tabla.
This Thrill Jockey version lovingly re-creates the original release's stunning packaging, a gatefold complete with a booklet of children's psychedelic fantasy artwork by Yoshimi herself!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is the third album from OOIOO (say "oh oh eye oh oh"), the Osaka based, all-female quartet masterminded by Yoshimi P-We (drummer/trumpeter/vocalist for the Boredoms, et al.) At times playful and childlike, "Gold and Green" abandons the grating, no-wave dissonance of earlier albums for a more textural, atmospheric and melodic experience. "Mountain Book" (which seems to be the musical accompaniment to the lovely artwork for this record) is the beautiful standout track on which they are joined by many guests including Seiichi Yamamoto (Boredoms), Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto) and even Sean Lennon: epic, hypnotic, dreamy psychedelia with piano, dulcimer, and tabla. As expected with any Shock City release, this comes in a stunning package, a gatefold complete with a booklet of children's psychedelic fantasy artwork by Yoshimi herself! You can expect a domestic release of this (sans the amazing packaging) someday in 2001 or 2002, perhaps...
