Third mysterious sonic missive from this Northwestern lo-fi synthscaper, and like the two tapes that came before, it's another wild and wooly mad scientist concoction of stuttery beats, creepy soundtracky synths, woozy loops, and all manner of warped effects. At first we dug this stuff just cuz it was kinda far out and fun, but with every record the sounds get better, the arrangements more fully fleshed out, and with Octagonal Wax, we're really beginning to wonder how this guys has remained such a secret. Just check out the opener, "50 Times Higher Than Any Normal Man", with its weird little blurts of synth squelch, woozy haunted house ambience, bloopy bleepy 8-bit video game melodies, all wrapped on a creepy cinematic Goblin-y gauze, playful but also infused with a strange sinister streak, which is precisely what makes this stuff so good. The last Oxykitten played out more like a summer party record, but this one is ominous and a little bit wintery, the opener a herald of strange dark times to come, leading directly into "Drowning Inside", which weds a thick buzzing synth to swoonsome melancholic strings, some weird wah wah melodies and a lumbering staticky beat. But it too has a strangely melancholy cast, with some almost choral like sounds that give this the vibe of some heartbreaking montage, and weirdly enough, sort of sounds like a WAY better produced Fastest.
From there on out, the sounds continues on in much the same fashion, definitely slipping into much more sun dappled sonic climes, but almost always drifting back toward something more woozy and moody, with a lot of the tracks touching on Carpenter / Goblin retro-synth soundtrack territory, making Oxykitten definitely ripe for discovery by fans of Umberto, Zombi, Majeure and all that stuff. That said, this is much definitely way more home brewed and DIY, which also in many ways makes it more appealing, strangely idiosyncratic, a dizzying melange of retro soundtracks, modern beatscaping, and outsider synth oddities. Another weirdo winner from Oxykitten!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Includes digital download coupon!
Full length number two from this mysterious cinematic lo-fi synthscaper from the Pacific Northwest, whose first record was a surprise hit around these parts. A surprise in part because of the strange band name, that didn't and doesn't even begin to hint at the creepy synthy bliss that lurks inside. And if anything, this new one takes everything we loved about the first tape, and shapes it into something less lo-fi summer-synth party jam, and more haunting John Carpenter style cinematic 8 bit mood music. And holy shit is this stuff good. All the bands out there peddling their particular brand of retro futuristic synthesized sound, would do well to keep an eye on this guy, cuz if this stuff gets the attention it truly deserves, the rest of the synth wranglers out there are really gonna have to up their game.
Needless to say, if you're a fan of folks like Gatekeeper, Bitchin Bajas, Xander Harris, Nightsatan, Stellar Om Source, Umberto, Majeure, Roll The Dice, Solar Bears and all the rest, then odds are you're gonna love this. But Oxykitten definitely has his own take on that sound, adding flurries of old school 8 bit bleepage and bloopage, or some darkly propulsive krautrock groove, often in the same song. Robotic space funk turns into alien eighties soundtrack turns into droned out analog kosmische drift and back again, "Nar Nar Dargarstar" might be our favorite, a buzzy creep, with dense swaths of thick low end buzz, warped minor key melodies, and cool little high end trills, like the soundtrack for the NES version of Deep Red Or Suspiria. AWESOME.
Includes a download code as well.
Everything about this cool little tape that showed up in the mail one day hit the spot, the bright red tape, with silver metallic lettering, the eye popping crocheted cover art... Everything that is except the band name, not sure why, but the name Oxykitten just had us imagining the music would be way too twee, to cutesy, too fey, a sort of Hello Kitty vibe, but in the interest of not judging a book by its cover, or a tape by its band name, we threw it on, and BAM. Or POW. Or KABLOW. Or whatever sound would indicate you that you just stumbled on the bad ass, old school electro synth lo-fi party jam of the summer. Or whenever. The opening track is a killer, with super buzzy synths, some simulated 'meow's, retro drum machines, thick deep ominous synth basslines, the melodies weirdly haunting, a weird combo of mysterious and groovy, creepy and funky, with some rad squiggly synth freakouts, very soundtracky, or like the music to the best video game you've never played. The closest reference might be Black Moth Super Rainbow or Tobacco, that sort of lo-fi 8-bit bastardized hip hop, but the sound here is way more retro, and weird. That aforementioned opener throws in some creepy John Carpenterisms too, as if Carpenter had scored Castlevania for the Sega Saturn.
The rest of the record definitely mixed it up, from super stripped down electro grooves, to goofy vocoder driven electropop, to fuzzed out Ed Banger style synth blowouts, to full on 8-bit videogame music, to wild and seriously damaged eighties party jams, to awesome, creepy soundtracky creepscapes, and on and on and on. Definite contender for party jam tape of the year, odds are a bunch of these songs will end up on summer fun mix tapes, or get blasted at full volume from car stereos, or at the very least, get pumped through those headphones, rollerskates, parachute pants and satin jackets optional.
Bright red cassette, full color eye popping covers, and a download code for those of you who no longer sport that walkman clipped to your belt...
Hey kids it's Karaoke Oye! Erland's remixing and singing atop seventeen of his fave songs to house-y backing tracks including ones by The Rapture, Cornelius, Royskopp, Phoenix, Justus Kohncke and many by the man himself. He sounds more than a little bit like Jamiroquai bustin' a groove. This is very much in the same dance-y vein as his solo album from last year. Now, for those familiar with us here at AQ, you know very well our feelings about 'dance music.' Hey, don't be mistaken... sure, we like to shake our booties every now and then, just not to such faceless formulaic fodder. This cd just makes us wish he'd take a breather from the dancefloor and get back to his dreamy folk-pop bliss band Kings Of Convenience.
Greet the solo album from Kings Of Convenience's singer Erlend Oye. We've had folks asking about this one for months! What was anticipated by many was the incredibly mellow lushness of KOC's Quiet Is The New Loud and/or the follow-up remix collection called Versus. Instead, this comes across somewhat disappointingly as Oye singing over fluffy 80s-ish electronic dance tracks. Imagine a quiet, sweet, folky lad singing for Erasure. Written collaboratively and recorded over a one year period in ten different cities around the globe with the likes of Prefuse 73, Schneider TM, Mr. Velcro Fastener, Metro Area's Morgan Geist, Soviet, Kompis, Minizza, Kilogram, Bjorn Torske. With that in mind, it's surprising how little distinction there is from track to track. Everything is super smooth. I have to admit though that halfway through Unrest, I was struck with the urge to revisit Quiet Is The New Loud rather than continue listening to this. It's just seems to be a more engaging setting for his voice. Nonetheless, fans of the laidback electronic danciness of groups like Aluminum Group or Kruder And Dorfmeister (or their offshoots Peace Orchestra and Tosca) might take a shine to Oye and co. Note: this domestic pressing has a bonus 'hidden' track not available on the import.
B-Music's "Anatolian Invasion" continues. We reviewed the Selda album a few weeks ago, now it's time for the one with the monkey on the cover, the incredibly groovy 1973 instrumental album from this super-obscure Turkish artist Mustafa Ozkent and his "orkestrasi". We're told (and we believe it) that this is one REALLY obscure album, definitely a find for any digger and a welcome reissue from the discerning heads at Finders Keepers/B-music. It's simply jazzy, sazzy, dancefloor fodder here folks, nothing but a party y'all. Fuzz guitar and Turkish trad. folk grooves like we like, but done all badass as if the JBs, "funky drummer" included, were ushered into the studio with a bunch of Turkish musicians, each teaching the other some new tricks. '70s funk, Istanbul-style! Totally full of beats and breaks that pioneering hip hop DJs woulda been all over, had hip hop originated in the on the banks of the Bosphorus rather than in the Bronx... The acid organ spasms and rhythmic workouts found here are still fresh and fun today. We know a lot of you dig the Turkish psych reissues we've been freaking on, this one should definitely appeal to those who liked the '70s cop show car chase sounding numbers found on the Edip Akbayram reish. Ten tracks, 30 minutes, and your body WILL be moving long before you need to hit "play" again to start it over.
We've been raving about krautdronedrifters Expo 70 quite a bit around these parts, and you all have been equally smitten it seems. Their blissful spaced out meditations, looped guitars and thick washes of outerspace shimmer pushing all our krautrock and doomdrone buttons.
But imagine Expo 70 with a bit more muscle, more grit, more guitars, more synths, just... MORE. A bit darker, a bit heavier, more buzz and more layers, less blissy and more propulsive. Imagine almost if you can, a more metal Expo 70, and maybe you'd end up with something like Ozmadawn.
We highlighted a disc by an SF band called Horseflesh a short while ago, a killer slab of post industrial krautdrone, channeling the German masters, but also more recent floorcore like Wolf Eyes, Yellow Swans, Skaters, etc. Well, the man behind Horseflesh just so happens to be half of the duo known as Ozmadawn, and on Rise Of The Moth, he and his partner take up from where Horseflesh left off, jettisoning some of the washed out shimmer and industrial crunch for something much more thick and corrosive, blown out and druggy, dense throbbing pulsing blasts of buzzing snarling layered krautdrone nirvana. Falling somewhere between Popol Vuh and SUNNO))), Hawkwind and Vulture Club, gloriously trance inducing outerspace hypno-heaviness. Not to say there aren't blissed out moments, there definitely are, the band unfurls super dreamy synthscapes, that drift and pulse, that feel like they trail off into forever, but those tranquil stretches always eventually seem to build into something equally hypnotic but way more fierce, soon overtaken by coruscating blackdrone guitars, and all manner of thick buzz and oscillating whir, somehow retaining the same sense of mesmer, but within a much more dense and aggressive framework. Simultaneously thick and heavy, soft and space-y, murky and metallic, drone-y and dreamy.
Packaged in cool hand screenprinted digipaks, pressed on black cd-r's, with a screen printed cardstock insert, and each with a unique 'recycled' Ozmadawn sticker.
Latest release from Bay Area blissdronespacedrift duo Ozmadawn, this one a gorgeously and elaborately packaged double cassette of music for sleep, separated into two sections, "For Sleep Or Meditation" and "For Smoke And Spirits".
The first tape is designed as the title suggests, for meditation and sleep, and is indeed a dark, dolorous bit of drifting low end, slow motion rhythmic swells, shimmering drifts of soft buzz and delicately crumbling distortion, lots of space, distant hiss, a softly swirling bit of minimal ambience, but with a dash of grimnity, this is not totally blissful and dreamy, the sounds here are dark and haunting, the mood harrowing, the overall vibe cinematic, the soundtrack to late nights and lost caves, to grey clouds drifting in front of a blood red moon, the various bits of electronic glitch, sound like they could be field recordings, insects, small creatures exploring their nocturnal landscape, all quite beautiful, but simultaneously quite dark.
The flipside gets even more evocative, with a layer of hiss that makes the record sound like it's wreathed in a rainstorm, or at the very least a late afternoon shower, the rumbling and buzzing drifting way back behind a sheet of processed hiss, the whole thing a softly shimmering bit of deep blackened late night moodmusic. So nice.
The second tape, the one designated "For Smoke + Spirits" is indeed a much more stirring bit of soundscapery, right out of the gate, creepy and tense, long tones wrapped around repeated motifs, total scary soundtrack stuff, a slow build from haunting to downright freaked out, streaks of feedback, a low lumbering melody, but right up in front a bit of sustained chordal soft focus skree that will most definitely have your hairs standing on end. Still pretty and mesmerizing, but seriously and cinematically harrowing, eventually building to a full on swarm-of-insects frenzy, a buzzing, swirling, convulsing wall of sound, while underneath, the original creep and drift continues to hover, the mix of the two disparate elements creating something gorgeously noisy, and/or noisily gorgeous.
ULTRA limited, as in 50 copies, we got about a dozen, they come housed in those oversized plastic clamshell cases, the kind that usually contain language tapes or instructional cassettes, the sleeve is hand stamped, hand numbered, and assembled one at a time, featuring a cool reflective front cover, includes a printed insert, and again, will probably be gone in no time...
One of the most infectiously exuberant bands I've ever seen live, Ozomatli are LA's premiere latin/jazz/salsa/funk/hip hop sensations. Don't take those genres lightly -- these guys do it all and they do it with joy and energy. The hip hop is real, so is
Vinyl single from the new album...
Full-length debut for LA's latin/jazz/salsa/funk/hip hop sensations. Includes the "Cut Chemist Suite" in which their famed DJ (also of Jurassic 5) shows his stuff.
For a while now, we've been raving about the various groups/collectives attempting, in their own ways, to sort of reinvent hip hop. Mush and Anticon and all those folks, Dose One, Cloudead, Sage Francis, Sole, Why? etc. And part of the appeal was their apparent disregard for hip hop tradition, removing whatever they felt like, beats, hooks, structures, funkiness, rhymes and replacing all of that with the everything and the kitchen sink. Bizarre samples (jazz, metal, field recordings, whatever), damaged, stuttering massively unfunky beats, stream of conciousness lyrics, and that whiny, white-boy, tongue twisting flow. But it seems like all of that stuff is doomed to remain on the periphery of popular hip hop. Not sure if the world is ready, and by world I mean kids who watch MTV and want nothing more than a new Jay-Z record that sounds EXACTLY like the last one. So what happens when someone with the same idea, reinventing/re-invigorating hip hop, takes a different, more subtle approach? Doesn't bury their respect for traditional hip hop under a wash of effects and Satie loops and epileptic beats. And attacks from the inside. Subversive and insidious. You get something that sounds like it -could- be on MTV and the radio, definitely -should- be, but probably still won't. Onry Ozzborn and his Old Dominion crew have been crafting some of the most original and BEST hip hop for several years now. Staying pretty underground, but not sure how long that can last. This is an amazing sounding record, amazing production, banging beats, wicked flow. But there's this aura of creepiness that is what makes it so appealing. All minor key, and gritty and ominous. You can hear lots of influences, Xzibit, Ras Kass, even Onyx, but it's all filtered through Ozzborn's twisted vision. The weird thing is, this sounds like it really COULD be huge. On the surface it just sounds like really good hip hop. Dig a little deeper more and more strangeness is revealed. Not to say this stuff isn't weird. It is. It's just a little less obvious. Less "Look at me! Isn't this crazy!!" and more "Back off...you have no idea what you're getting into motherfucker..." The samples are strange and original, but they're so deftly woven into the tracks it feels like they couldn't sound any other way, haunting Gregorian chants, rumbling synths, creepy minor key pianos, heavily reverbed electric guitars, what sounds like a bubbling aquarium, and all kinds of stuff. The beats are loping and head bobbing, and Onry's flow is thick and gritty, dark and threatening and downright evil sounding. There are hooks galore, choruses that actually stick in your head. And if that wasn't enough to make this one of my favorite hip hop records of the year, this record has one thing, that automatically qualifies it for major respect...NO SKITS!
