Here it is, at last. The long rumored ART BOOK from Michel Langevin, aka Away, the drummer and visual conceptualist for pioneering Quebecois avant-thrash-metal geniuses Voivod. Away's artwork, the ultimate in sci-fi school binder imagery, helped define his band's unique appeal. Heck, although the music was amazing, one of the other big reasons to buy a Voivod album was to get all that cool artwork, it got to the point that their cds had a piece of Away-art in the booklet for each song, one per page...
We first heard he was putting a book together a few years ago, it was supposed to be published by the Troubleman label, or at least that's what we'd thought, but nothing ever materialized, and then suddenly out of the blue a few weeks ago we got an email from Martin Popoff, the Canadian metal scribe responsible for the three massive Collector's Guide To Heavy Metal volumes we've reviewed in the past, saying that HE was doing a book with Away, and now here it is!
A hefty, hardback, 12"x9" coffee table tome, 184 pages, in full color when appropriate, Worlds Away is what we've been waiting for. TONS of his artwork, of course. Stuff you'll remember from the albums of course, but also sketchbook pages, flyers, demo tape covers, logos, picture discs, as well as art he's done on commission for other bands... Eye candy for Voivod fans oh yeah. And then there's the text, Away interviewed by Popoff, chapter after chapter delving into the world of Voivod, the music, the art and their connection. The early years stuff is surprising but not surprising as we learn about his artistic inspirations as a kid in the '70s (Magma album covers, Gene Simmons' boots...). The history of the band is traced, their evolution from raw thrashers to spaced-out art rockers, along with the evolution in Away's creative / technical process. Turns out the cool monochrome, sorta low res images from the Nothingface album look like that 'cause of the memory limitations of the computer he was using, for instance. Also we get the story behind the 3-D art for The Outer Limits album (which almost didn't happen). We probably don't need to go on, those of you who want this book probably already know it.
FYI, since these aren't cheap, and we're not a bookstore, and it's pretty much for fans only, we only got a few. So if and when we run out it will remain to be seen if we can get more.
VOIVOD!!!!
Along with composing the scores for some of Werner Herzog's greatest films, Florian Fricke was as much a musical pioneer as were his contemporaries Faust, Neu and Cluster. Unlike his contemporaries, Fricke's music is informed as much by music from arounds the world as it was rock and classical composition (in which he was schooled). Sitars, pan flutes and assorted ethnic percussion have as much a place in any given Popol Vuh album as moog synths, guitars, bass and drums. One only need look at his choice of a band name, taken from the title of a sacred Mayan text, to see where Fricke's affinities lay.
Affenstunde, recorded in 1970, was Popol Vuh's first album. The four original album tracks are a combination of dark, droning synth soundscapes, hippy drum circle-ish drum james and improvised moog keyboard workouts. Imagine if you could crunch the bubbly synth era of Tangerine Dream into their dark, early days circa Electronic Meditation and Alpha Centari. In contrast to his later works for film, Affenstunde is much more textural, intentionally devoid of any melody. As a bonus this remastered edition, like the others in this series, comes with an additional -- previously unreleased -- track from the same period. And that cover picture! Hard to resist.
Along with composing the scores for some of Werner Herzog's greatest films, Florian Fricke was as much a musical pioneer as were his contemporaries Faust, Neu and Cluster. Unlike his contemporaries, Fricke's music is informed as much by music from arounds the world as it was rock and classical composition (in which he was schooled). Sitars, pan flutes and assorted ethnic percussion have as much a place in any given Popol Vuh album as moog synths, guitars, bass and drums. One only need look at his choice of a band name, taken from the title of a sacred Mayan text, to see where Fricke's affinities lay.
Popol Vuh's 1975 soundtrack to Herzog's Aguirre The Wrath Of God is a prime example of Fricke's multi-faceted musical aesthetic. At times the score is suitably bleak for the film's content. Most notably the main theme "Aguirre", which weaves in and out through the disc, is about as lonesome sounding as a tune -- which almost completely lacks melody -- can get. Around a slowly pulsing, sustained two notes played on guitar is a grainy mixed chorus. This is the music that's played during the long shot of people snaking their way down a mountain side and later on with the camera fixed on a turgid brown river. In striking contrast to this bleak theme are several pretty & mellow hippy guitar jams, a la Grateful Dead meets Mike Oldfield. As a bonus for this remastered edition SPV has included another mix of the theme "Aguirre" with additional throbbing ethnic percussion by Fricke and Co.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Along with composing the scores for some of Werner Herzog's greatest films, Florian Fricke was as much a musical pioneer as were his contemporaries Faust, Neu and Cluster. Unlike his contemporaries, Fricke's music is informed as much by music from arounds the world as it was rock and classical composition (in which he was schooled). Sitars, pan flutes and assorted ethnic percussion have as much a place in any given Popol Vuh album as moog synths, guitars, bass and drums. One only need look at his choice of a band name, taken from the title of a sacred Mayan text, to see where Fricke's affinities lay.
Recorded in 1971, In Den Garten Pharaos is Popol Vuh's second album. Like Affenstunde, it contains minimal arrangements -- in contrast to the film works Nosferatu and Aguirre -- and the compositions within are more centered around texture and timbre than melody. The album begins with creepy moog and organ drones, some of which would turn up on Aguirre the Wrath of God, evolving into semi-improvised chords and melodies played on rhodes piano along with hand drums. The second track features super heavy and dark church organ drones with cymbals and howling voices and more hand drums. Along with the original album tracks, this reissue comes with two previously unreleased ten minute tracks "Kha-White Structures" parts one and two which are solo moog improvisations by Fricke. All tracks are quite beautiful and haunting. Very nice!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Along with composing the scores for some of Werner Herzog's greatest films, Florian Fricke was as much a musical pioneer as were his contemporaries Faust, Neu and Cluster. Unlike his contemporaries, Fricke's music is informed as much by music from arounds the world as it was rock and classical composition (in which he was schooled). Sitars, pan flutes and assorted ethnic percussion have as much a place in any given Popol Vuh album as moog synths, guitars, bass and drums. One only need look at his choice of a band name, taken from the title of a sacred Mayan text, to see where Fricke's affinities lay.
Certainly Popol Vuh's most popular recording and certainly one of the greatest film scores by any measure, Nosferatu is a brilliant soundtrack. Bringing together elements from plainsong and renaissance music, with Indian sitar and tabla, piano, synth drones, mellow psychedelic rock jams, and folky acoustic guitar. As well, much of the music is suitably lonely and dark enough to accompany the movements of a 500 year old vampire. Like his theme for Aguirre, the opening tune here -- Bruder des Schattens -- features a pulsing two note drone, here sung by a male chorus that sounds distinctly Eastern European, that steadily builds to include wind instruments before inexplicably fading into a pleasant guitar tune. The killer though, has to be the recurring theme "Mantra", a beautiful and haunting piece that references the Dies Irae played on sitar and electric guitar, with progressing versions on the disc adding chorus. Spooky. Highly recommended.
From the label's catalog:
'CD reissue of the legendary vinyl album with which French composer/arranger Andre Popp explored the boundaries of audio technology back in 1957. Hackneyed tunes like "La Paloma" and "The Beer Barrel Polka" were reinvented by way of weird orchestrations and sound effects. The result: a milestone of musical creativity-- "The most extremely eccentric studio orchestra LP of all-time." (Marshall Crenshaw in MOJO)'
One of four new releases this week on the always impressive The Tapeworm label, this one from pianist Andrew Poppy, who offers up a handful of lovely piano sonatas on the A side, stately and subtly cinematic, a mix of modern classical and baroque elegance, mesmerizing and not so minimal, every track in constant motion, lush cascades of notes over hypnotic almost looped and near rhythmic arrangements, haunting and cyclical, a little Satie, a little Reich, dark and brooding, but with flourishes of sun dappled melodicism.
But it's the flipside that most folks will probably find the most exciting, a 'dub' version of the pieces on the A side, entitled "Infernal Dub Furniture", which casts all the melodies and arrangement in a new, soft focus, woozy, dreamily druggy light. The sounds smeared into an almost Caretaker like blur in some places, a dizzying barrage of careening fragmented melodies in others.
Repetitive and less 'dubby', than just sort of fucked up and tripped out, but definitely dubby in the sense that it adds lots of texture and rhythm, even a little groove that wasn't present in the standard sonatas, a gloriously lysergic sprawl of dizzying collaged sounds, whirling washed out piano shimmer, and gristly melodic buzz. Some seriously droned out abstract drone-dub piano-noise bliss for sure.
If you turn the title of this piece into an Acronym, it may seem that Andrew Poppy has been thinking far too long about Dr. Who (T.A.R.D.I.S. - the phonebooth that enabled time / space travel). Anyway, Poppy is an electro-acoustic composer who spent his time in the '80s as an in-house composer/engineer for ZTT (the label responsible for Frankie Goes To Holywood - though I don't think he had anything to do with them) and arranged a number of minimalist chamber ensembles. Inspired by the patterned abstractions of Steve Reich and Terry Riley as well as the sci-fi imagery of time travel (specifically Dr. Who), Andrew Poppy composed this piece, which calls for pointilist plucks from a solo violin to be asynchronously re-inserted into the score after being electronically treated. The overall sound is synthetic and sublime (much like Coil's early use of the Fairlight sampler) unlike the detacted electric treatments of Feldman or Marchetti.
Listen closely to all the recordings by Mark Gergis, and you'll discover a very interesting, subversive thread running through all of his work. Whether it be in his impeccable contributions to the Sublime Frequencies series (i.e. Choubi Choubi, Cambodian Cassette Archives, I Remember Syrai, Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan), the gleeful recreation of Thai Pop in Neung Phak, or his media reclamation projects Mono Pause and Porest, Gergis delights in what mainstream American culture discounts as alien, invalid, or profane. On occasion, this delight has been tempered with a political animosity, as is most evident in Gergis' curatorial choices on the Choubi Choubi collection of Iraqi pop songs; but through his experiments in media sabotage through Mono Pause and his solo project Porest, Gergis' recontextualization is spiked with searing dissent. Mood Noose is the second outing for Gergis as Porest, and it's a bit of a detour from the Negativland / People Like Us like collages of his earlier work which relied so heavily on black humor in its juxtaposition of sound. Nevertheless, Gergis has constructed an impressive and wholly decentered album in Mood Noose. Opening with spy-thriller horns marching on top of crunchy electronic rhythms, Gergis presents Mood Noose as something of a splattered electronica album full of rewired circuits, hypersaturated granular synthesis, Geiger-counter pinpricks, and slabs of digi-noise. At times, the album seems more in keeping with the Dada-electronic works of Stilluppsteypa or even a fragmented version of some of Bruce Gilbert's solo projects. But these references don't hold much water by the end of the record, as the compositions take wildly divergent paths, as collages of barking dogs and warbled moans crash into Russian pop songs. The most disturbing segment to Mood Noose is the violent argument between a couple as read by two computerized voices, offering a dispassionate delivery of "ouch, Tom, you're hurting me." This is one of those records that will certainly haunt you well after you've stopped listening to it.
In the great tradition of Negativland, People Like Us, Tape Beatles, Evolution Control Committee and Stock, Hausen & Walkman comes Porest (a.k.a. Mark Gergis of Mono Pause). Porest dis-assembles the world, leaving no cultural and musical stone unturned, to create a twisted, irreverant, post-folk ethnography. We visit a psycho-sexual homicidal Austrian engaged in making "fist dumplings", reciting his quaint and surreal story a la Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". We're taken on a journey into a world where plastic sheep have been raised the same way for thousands of years, a world where Dan Fogelberg is an avant garde yodeller and where our heroes died for our syrup. Sprinkled throughout are instrumental numbers of equally dis-membered cultural origin, on par with Stock, Hausen & Walkman. Brew yourself a hot cup of Oolan tea, slam several shots of hard NyQuil and let Porest lead you on a journey through musical un-history.
Let it be known, that Tourroists! is a difficult record, and those with a stubborn lack of cultural objectivity will be wise to avoid this album. You have been warned!
Up until this album, Mark Gergis, the man behind Porest (as well as Mono Pause / Neung Phak), has been quietly mapping out his own course of ethnomusicology that hinges upon the complex layers of cultural perception between the US and the third world. Neung Phak stands as his Thai Pop ensemble, in which he exquisitely explores the particulars of SE Asian pop music complete with re-creations of radio dramas and the eccentric hybridizations of eastern and western idioms; he's also been responsible for some for some of the best collections from the Sublime Frequencies series (i.e. Choubi Choubi and Cambodian Cassette Archives). Porest is Gergis' media-manipulation project, and Tourrorists! will undoubtably go down as his most inflamatory and most provocative work. Tourrorists is a scathing political record that unabashedly takes on the themes of 9/11, Guantanamo, Arabic conspiracy theories about Israeli secret police (Mossad), and Christian missionaries. However, unlike the politically charged works of Negativland, Gergis refuses to center the album from a particular political or cultural institution (whether that be atheism, socialism, anarchism, etc.); instead, he challenges the listener to question his or her own politics and cultural perspective about any of the topics. Case in point, "Let's Roll" recontextualizes various media snippets from the 9/11 hearings as well as Jihadist rhetoric through computerized voices that emulate the inflection of an American woman, an American man, and an African-American man. There's something intrinsically disturbing about these dispassionate spoken texts, not to mention the wildly contradictory banter between these three characters. Similarly, Gergis collages a particularlly banal public service announcement into a matter of fact "Soilent Green is people!" declaration. Gergis also gives an English translation to the classic collaboration between Aaviko and Kabar on "Eye of the Leopard" originally sung by the only known escapee from Guantanamo. Alan Bishop from the Sun City Girls also makes a stunning cameo on the summery groove of "Hoyda." None of this speaks of the intricacy of Gergis' musical productions which run from mangled electronics, plenty post-SCG Syrian pop numbers, and canned bossanova rhythms; but, it's the ideological content that renders this album a pipe bomb. Tourrorists! is bound to piss you off or offend you in some way shape or form; and we mean that as a very high compliment.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Justice plays machines & wants you to know he did not succumb to overdubs. The music's introverted, sly. Thick 'n' gooey.
Woah. Somebody somewhere just had a fantasy come true, and it's got nothing to do with the bondage photos that often adorn Merbow releases. It's Japanese noise master Masami "Merzbow" Akita jamming with American stoner rock outfit Porn, who feature none other than the mighty Dale Crover of the Melvins on drums. Also Tim Moss on guitar, and heaviness engineering guru Billy Anderson on bass! Add in the Seldon Hunt art/design and this promises to be quite heavy, or noisy, or both. Definitely both, though it sounds much more like a Merzbow record than anything else. Shrieking electronic skree all over the place, with some plodding boombastic drums and heavy guitar riffs struggling through the dense muzzzzzz. Kinda what you might expect!
There are a dozen Roman numeral numbered tracks, each one individualized with Merzbow's noise dynamically varied and vibrating, from crinkum-crankum glitch to high pitched whine to howling, whooshing zapping. Porn's contributions (occasionally) add more structure and momentum. Distorted (natch) vocals surface at one point, the drumming speeds up.... or at other times, despite Porn's presence, the Merzbovian brutal harsh noise simply takes over entirely.
There's certainly precedent for Merbow to mix it up with "rock" music. His Hard Lovin' Man album some years back featured samples of Deep Purple, ferinstance - and of course let's not forget about his couple collaborations with Boris!! Maybe, like those, Porn + Merzbow will be a "gateway drug" for some stoner/doom fans to get into the total noise thing (note however that Merzbow here is far more extreme than his relatively subtle performance on Rock Dream with Boris).
Also, as (in principle) Merzbow fans, but ones often overwhelmed by his prolific output, we're quite partial to his collaborative efforts, giving high marks to recent discs he did with Keiji Haino and Richard Pinhas, juxtapositions like this one which somehow enhance the effect of Merbow's noise aesthetic.
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Here's a new album from Iceland's Pornopop. By now the Icelandic sound is unmistakable, isn't it? And this band definitely resonates in such fragile, frosty, fanciful fashion. A lullaby brethren of Mum and Sigur Ros for certain (the cover art even resembles that of the former), but their more explosive moments as on the track "Death Tape" also bring to mind the more unpredictable, unconventional Einar Bendiktsson of The Sugarcubes. Apart from such exceptional outbursts, this is poignant and wistful with a seeming wide-eyed innocence and timid yearning. Sweet, yes, but not to the point of syrupy. Definitely also for fans of the gentle and mild-mannered Jose Gonzalez, Sondre Lerche and Jens Lekman.
Psst, this is another of the uncommonly sumptuous array of releases from the young music label Dynamophone. As we mentioned earlier in the review of labelmates Balustrade Ensemble, they've only been around since mid-2006, but already have a bountiful catalog with many more on the way. Particularly if you've been recently enjoying the aquatic drone releases on the Mystery Sea label, you might wish to check out the seemingly likeminded, but more melodically inclined Dynamophone artists. An absolute treasure trove of shimmering and dewy listening delights. Delve in immediately (also see: Balustrade Ensemble, Disinterested, Po, Halou, A Lily, Curium, and R/R Coseboom)!
Latest solo outing from former aQ-er Jon Porras, one half of dronefolk desert doom duo Barn Owl, and the man behind Elm. This is only Porras' second record under his own name, and shares space on this week's list with the new tape from Painted Caves, the latest solo project from his Barn Owl partner Evan Caminiti. And like Painted Caves, Porras on his own doesn't stray too far from the dusky sonic soundworld the two have conjured up on past Barn Owl records, the basics are definitely the same, washed out and woozy, twang flecked and atmospheric, evoking burnt orange sunsets over wide open expanses of barren scrub, of slow moving stars in a pitch black sky, a little bit Earth, a little bit Ennio Morricone, an abstract alien Appalachia wedded to slowburn psychedelia. But Black Mesa, instead of reinventing a sound, that really doesn't need to be reinvented, simply pulls it apart, Porras strapping on his guitar, newly acquired synth under his arm, and moves deeper into this lost blackened landscape, slowly sinking deeper and deeper, a swirl of echoing chords left in his wake, or alternately, slowly drifting heavenward, held aloft on lush billowing clouds of chordal swirl and smoldering psychedelic drift.
The drone element, as always is paramount, these tracks like soft focus, slo-mo country ragas, if anything Porras' mastery of the form becoming more complete, able to fuse delicate crystalline shimmer, to heaving blackened churn, even adding simple skeletal rhythms, and heavily effected vocals, the sound on Black Mesa at once more melodic, but also strangely more malevolent, but very subtly so. Some lost soundtrack, a cinematic score to an endless wander through burnt black wastelands, Porras' sounds illuminating only so much, leaving much of the world cloaked in shadow, but as that light flickers, various bits of this lost world are gradually revealed, in some cases only to be lost again to the ether, but in others, revealing to the listener a new path, a less trodden course that leads even further into the unknown. With nothing but these haunting otherworldly sounds to guide us.
Another gorgeous, dark sonic gem. Fans of Barn Owl, Elm, Earth, Six Organs, and other purveyors of smoldering psych and black drone drift, will feel right at home here...
Light Divide is the newest full length from Porras, who is likely better known to most folks as 1/2 of drone-doom duo Barn Owl (or to many of you as a former aQ-er), and on his solo records, as well as on recent Barn Owl records proper, Porras has seemingly been distancing himself from the twang flecked smolder of the earlier BO records, a sound that won them great acclaim, but found them permanently aligned with their sonic forebears in Earth, both sharing a similarly washed out, deserty sonic palette. But as Porras began to experiment more with synths and electronics, and even beats, his sound blossomed into something much more his own, eventually arrive here, at Light Divide, which takes the psychedelic witch house murk of Porras' solo project DVVLLXNS, and melds it to a dreamy, pulsing drift, not all that far removed from Kompakt's Pop Ambience, in fact, opener "Apeiron" would have sounded right at home on any of the Pop Ambient compilations, as as longtime readers of the aQ list know, there's hardly a higher compliment.
And if you can imagine a sort of witch house / Pop Ambient hybrid, that's definitely shorthand sonic band math for Light Divide. The aforementioned opener is all soft focus synth swirl, dense ominous drones underpinning the ethereal shimmer, the track flecked with tinkling high end sonic sparkles, laced with distant percussion, and instead of a beat proper, it's like the sounds are being subtly twisted and shaped into gristly pulses, and lush chordal swells, a blackened kosmische drift, that's heady and hypnotic, a gorgeously haunting late night sonic sprawl that manages to be both cinematic and expansive, claustrophobic and introspective.
"Recollection" takes the same template, and manages to make it even more skeletal, creating a crystalline latticework of click and thrum, of hiss and static, lots of reverb and echo, hazy and amorphous, like the digital dub of Pole pulled apart until there's barely anything left, a hazy, somnambulent dream-drift. "Divide" piles on multiple layers of hum and thrum, all softly undulating, lush and lustrous, tonal colorations gradually leached from the sound, leaving just thick rumbling swells and shadowy smears of melody, pocked with soft shards of static, and all blurred into a slowly shifting cloud of softly psychedelic shimmer.
"New Monument" might be the most kinetic of the bunch, gnarled melodies all tangled up below fields of hazy and smoothed out crackle, laced with whip crack percussion, single bursts swaddled in reverb and sent drifting into the ether, gradually blossoming into what sounds more like some sort of slow motion gothic ambience, a mutated 4AD miserablism, stretched out into a strangely percussive bit of wistful drift, before bleeding right into the closer "Pleiades", which finds the previous track being swallowed whole by lush billows of low end thrum, the result a drowsy, shadowy slo-mo dub, that halfway through is transformed into something much more kinetic, bathed in a soft sonic glow, the percussion and buried pulsations roiling below the surface, the sound closer to something like Vessel or oOoOO, which makes us think the next Porras solo joint could end up on Tri Angle or Blackest Ever Black. Fantastic stuff.
Orilla Oscura is the latest solo record from Jon Porras, former aQ-er, and one half of dronedoom duo Barn Owl. It's Porras' second release this year (along with Black Mesa), but this one takes Porras's signature sound, all smoldering twang flecked drift, and haunting droned out mesmer, and applies it to something much more high concept, and the results are pretty fantastic.
Using old tapes as the basis of Orilla Obscura, Porras slowed down and manipulated the source tapes, adding effects and various textures, and then approached the compositions as if the guitar was a tool with which to explore these ghostly sounds, the haunting mysteries revealed by these old tapes, do in fact make the perfect background for Porras' haunting sonic ruminations, so much so that in many places it's difficult to tell what's guitar and what's tape, the various sounds bleeding into one another, long passages of somnambulant drift, give way to some soaring, almost shredding (at least the barn Owl / Porras version of shredding) distorted guitar blissout, lush distorted layers of guitar aimed heavenward, quickly drifting back to earth and settling into another sprawl of slo-mo soft psych drift. The tapes seem to provide texture as much as anything, adding plenty of hiss and hum, giving the sound a rough around the edges feel, and a mysterious warmth. Divine and dreamy, and beautifully ghostly.
To be fair, the sounds here are not hugely removed from Porras' other solo work, or as Elm, or even his work with Barn Owl, but it is a stunningly subtle progression, as he continues to push the boundaries of his own explorative guitar ambience, continuing to delve deeper into the dark and dusty corners of abstract psychedelia, and with each record further refining the sonic essence of shadow and light, rendered here in lush, sweeping epics of spectral guitardrone and heaving swells of warm chordal shimmer. So nice.
Housed in a super heavy full color gatefold jacket. Includes a download coupon as well!
Initially sold exclusively on the recent European Barn Owl tour, now finally available at aQ, here's Revisitor, a dvd-r of super 8 films and original music from one half of Barn Owl, former aQ-er Jon Porras, released on his own Dolores Press imprint. It's a hazy washed out collection of haunting grainy black and white images set to a score that is quite different than what we're used to hearing from Porras, in Barn Owl or solo, especially considering that there are no guitars here, all electronics and electronic sourced sounds. Long stretches of hazy grey ambience, of industrial whir and hushed minimal thrum, tons of space surrounding abstract swirls of whipping-wind shimmer and deep sonorous echo drenched pulses, blurred metallic layers slowly unfurling in clouds of soft focus effects, a series of minimal soundscapes that slip easily from rich and lustrous and lovely, to haunting and ominous, one second a gauzy softly psychedelic smear of dreamlike chords, the next, a rumbling sinister sprawl of low end blur peppered with strange percussion and some downright doomy sonic swells. The visuals are equally stunning, strange hooded figures performing strange rituals, rolling hills and the silhouette of trees against a slate sky, a stormy coastline, the crashing surf, the lens dappled with rain drops, the sunlight glistening on water, birds flitting through thick clouds, and plenty of more abstract images as well, strange lights, plenty of shadows, textures and mysterious moving abstract shapes, random reflections, impressionistic images of candles, and instruments, hands and hidden faces, all lost in deep fields of rich black.
Originally limited to just 30 copies, now available in a slightly less limited run, housed in a printed origami style sleeve, each disc hand stamped.
Both the Barn Owls have solo records on this week's list, elsewhere there's Evan Caminiti's new single on Trensmat, and then there's this, the long awaited new solo record from the other half of dronefolk duo Barn Owl, Jon Porras. We'd been hearing about this record for ages, Porras' long in the works heavy shoegaze record, but this is no MBV/Lovesliescrushing worship, nope instead, Undercurrent is a logical offshoot of the dark twang flecked drone and drift of Barn Owl, a bit less murky and more crystalline, prismatic, the opening track emerging from a cloud of swirling layered thrum, blossoming into something more more melodic than usual, spidery melodies, draped over a smoldering backdrop of rumble and drift, of hum and shimmer, the sounds a blurred chorale, building to a dreamdrone climax, epic and majestic and powerfully emotional.
The whole record reveals itself as a sort of hazy psychguitar gem, Porras deftly layering darkness and light, wreathing pop in shadow, infusing churning darkness with pop warmth, "Seascape" is a gauzy blisscape, but is underpinned by ominous roiling black sonic clouds, which build and build and eventually swallow the rest of the track, the drama in the melodies struggling to escape the pull of this black hole, haunting and ominous and so intense. "Shore" is another strange melding of hazy drift and rumbling blackened drone, only in this case, the blackness is driven back, revealing the warmth within, the song's second half unfurling all reverby and abstract, while that blackness whispers in the background.
The clean guitar sound is definitely reminiscent of Roy Montgomery, the same sort of softly effected shimmer, but it's that sound combined with the more dense and dark guitarscapes, that create Porras' distinctive Undercurrent, "Peering" another example, wreathing those soft smeared swells of sound with dark grinding slabs of blurred blackness, and roiling riffage. The record closes with "Gaze", a pulsing sprawl of washed out woozy guitarscapery, again a beautiful bit of atmospheric drift, disguising the darkness that lays beneath, but again, light triumphs over darkness, and the record unwinds with a stretch of super spare wide open ambience, the guitars letting lose tendrils of melodies, wrapping them in reverb and letting them float delicately in space, as they fall gently to earth. Eventually piling up into a gorgeously layered final soft squall of bleary and blissful psychedelic haze...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Lampreys And Gigolos is the debut album from this SF storytelling songsmith, and quite an impressive introduction it is! The songs that Chris Porro crafts run the gamut from earthy heartfelt folk ("Secret Story") to straight-up catchy pop ("Pop Star") -- often akin to the broad scope of Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices. His warm, lilting voice is sometimes reminiscent of Ken Stringfellow and Jonathan Auer of The Posies and other times of Chris Isaak. Along the way, Porro embellishes his path with interesting lil' noise details and lush string and organ treasures here 'n' there. Nice!
If the exuberant outpouring of song from the likes of Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, Hidden Cameras, and Wolf Parade get you all giddy and weak in the knees, then we might have a new fave for you! But particularly like the former two, Port O'Brien can get serious too and take a more solemn tone. On the more hushed songs (which are also some of the album's best) such as "Stuck On A Boat", "Don't Take My Advice" and "Will You Be There?" the lights are dimmed and the instrumentation stripped down to a skeletal folksy assembly of Van Pierszalowski's brittle, emotive young voice and guitar, and Cambrian Goodwin's comforting pluck of the banjo. Glowing warmly throughout the proceedings, almost as if at a distance, are some understated violin and cello backing. The album's title says it all. When everything else fails you (whether you be the player or the listener), music is where you will always find solace, stimulation, escape. And Port O'Brien does so in each of these achingly bittersweet songs.
On the opening track of their debut album When The Rain Comes, Oaklanders Port O'Brien struck us as being quite vocally reminiscent of the frailty of This Heat (particularly their vocals in "Fall Of Saigon" from their self-titled album). From there though mainman Van Pierzalowski keeps things much more in a straightforward rough-hewn folkiness mode that in turn brings to mind early Bright Eyes. Some rousing whistlin' and hollerin' embellish the tune "Split" which is followed by the ultra hushed delicate number "Dance With Our Ashes". Nice.
Joining the likes of AQ fave M-bands Mogwai, M83, and Magyar Posse (and they've also even been compared to a few S-artists Ulrich Schnauss, Stafraenn Hakon and Sigur Ros), This Italian group ever so gallantly and gracefully toss their finely crafted musical hat into the ever-expanding global atmospheric postrock arena. Port-Royal's sprawling 78-minute long Flares is a soft, hazy blissed-out dream of an album filled with shimmery ambient washes of glacial guitars peppered with occasional wisps of electronics and samples. Each and every time we've played this in the store, it draws many enthused queries. Really really calming and really really pretty. Positively sigh-inducing.
These masked mysterious weirdo death metallers just drifted through town, their show, like their sound, a grim, almost dada-esque twist on classic death metal, a swirling chaos of gnarled buzzing riffage, blasting loose limbed drumming, and the creepy grunts and growls of hooded front man 'The Curator', the whole band masked and draped in black, spewing huge swells of twisted sonic malevolence.
All three Portal full lengths were huge favorites around here, every one a dizzying assemblage of warped blackness and fractured death metal fury, murky and muddy and washed out, frenzied and freaky and gloriously fucked up. Visually and sonically like a metal Faxed Head, Portal's death metal bears only a slight resemblance to regular death metal, which is precisely why it's so appealing.
This super limited picture disc 7" compiles 2 of the 3 songs from Portal's 2006 demo tape Lurker At The Threshold, and while re-recorded versions of both these songs found their way on to the Outre full length, these older, more raw (believe it or not) versions are well worth checking out. "Omnipresent Crawling Chaos" explodes in a blast of murky metallic grind, frenzied and frantic, but so blurred and smeared as to render it a strange shadowing deathmetalscape, all lurching and lumbering and blasting, a swirling black sonic cloud. "13 Globes" is another chunk of blown out grinding metal crush, but with some cool woozy warbly minor key melodies, stuttering start stop rhythms, and insane tangled riffage, all wrapped in a melted murky lo-fi blacknoize gauze.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pressed on super thick 70 gram vinyl, super striking picture disc adorned with creepy Lovecraftian artwork, either already out of print or darn close, so get one while you can...
Record number two from these mysterious Australian technical death metal weirdoes, whose sound, as we mentioned in our review of their debut, Seepia, is anything but traditional death metal, instead, the grunted vocals and crushing downtuned riffs and all the traditional death metal tropes are completely subverted, tangled and mangled into damaged and demented squalls of chaotic blackened noize, having plenty in common with a band like labelmates Wold, as well as old school DM legends like Gorguts, Suffocation or Immolation�
The sound on Outre is a murky buzz drenched sonic swamp, riffs buzz and blast, but are so doused in effects, so dripping with muddy distortion, they appear to be nothing but droning streaks of downtuned sound, until once in a while when they surface to chug briefly, offering up some brief dynamics before being swallowed up again by the band's relentless blur. The vocals are a subsonic demonic gurgle, barking, howling, growling and mewling, but again, so buried in fuzz and hiss, it just sounds like another layer of black buzz. The melodies are dark and twisted, like some vile black weed, the production is dense and thick, the sound druggy and seasick, warped and warbly, the whole thing sounding a little like some cross breeding experiment gone wrong. Gorguts, Wold, Black Flag, Faxed Head, all melted down and heated up and then poured into your cd player, a similarly noxious downtuned buzz oozes from your speakers, a distillation of Portal's convoluted and cracked take on death metal, a sound black enough to be black metal, noisy enough to be noise, and fucked up enough to be, well to be anything this fucked up sounding.
Strange swaths of synth, atonal detuned guitars, simple industrial plods, monstrous slow motion doom, blasts of speaker shredding ultranoise, billowing black ambience all pepper the proceedings, but at its heart, the sound of Outre is most definitely blasting brutal death metal, but the sort of death metal we always wanna hear, warped and twisted and damaged and filthy and crusty and noisy and buzzing and blackened and doomy and completely fucked.
Packaged in a super deluxe mini gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeve, and including super intense band photos, each band member (Aphotic Mote, The Curator and Horror Illogium) wearing a black hood (or what appears to be a mangled witches hat pulled all the way over the face), all standing in front of an old piano, each photo faded and sepia tone, one wielding a violin, the other clutching what appears to be the horn from a Victrola, the third empty handed, but with a noose hanging from his neck. Weird.
Gorgeous and long overdue reissue of this out of print death metal classic from Australia. But don't let the words death metal throw you. We're not huge fans of straight up death metal either. But this is anything but straight up. In fact this is most definitely one of the weirdest, most damaged death metal records we have ever heard. From the same label that brought us the truly bizarre WOLD record from a few lists back, this is sort of along the same lines as the no-wave death metal of Gorguts' classic Obscura record, Portal takes traditional death metal and douses it in chaotic noise, twisting the arrangements into serpentine blurs, so fast and furious that it almost becomes a buzzy blurry drone, any faster and it would be a full on noise record, like Total or Skullflower playing death metal maybe. But then on top of that, replace all the standard downtuned DM riffs with impossibly manic squiggly Black Flag like riffing, sounding quite a bit like little metal spiders running up and down the neck of the guitars. Riffs and squeals of feedback shooting out like bolts of lightning, the drumming impossibly complex and blasting away beneath the churning ocean of writhing riffs, the vocals just another squirming barely discernible presence amidst the super distorted tangle of metallic riffing and blasting drums. Sometimes all the disparate sounds lock into weird metallic stuttering loops, buzzing and repeating hypnotically. And every once in a while the metal dissipates into gorgeous, gauzy, ambient drones, whirring and shimmering, like old machinery and black and white films, backwards loops, strange pitch shifts and gritty industrial percussion, a dizzying swirl of abstract sound, very reminiscent of Jeck or Basinski, but those respites are brief and are soon swallowed up by further waves of Portal's confounding crush.
Packaged in a gorgeous gatefold mini lp sleeve, with striking glossy filigree on the front cover, a printed inner sleeve and booklet with lyrics / liner notes.
Death metal weirdos Portal return with another blast of incomprehensible sonic destruction, an avant garde, sepia tinged nightmare that perfectly indicates how appropriate a name like "Portal" is for a group like this. It's like stepping into another world - in this case, Australia, home to all kinds of unprecedented and bizarre metal groups like dISEMBOWELMENT, Halo, and Nekrasov. Simply put, Portal are fucking weird. Not only that, they are intense, and while no one will mistake this for anything other than scary as hell metal, the insane song structures and bizarre instrumentation - harsh and totally unique riffing, cyclonic drumming, and super guttural death growls (the only sort of "normal" thing about the group, but in this context they still sound pretty much unlike anything else) - are something different altogether. It's like whoever is playing guitar decided, after completely mastering his craft, to throw out all knowledge of standard guitar chords and build the band's sound off of hithero unknown chords that are sour, sludgey, and just completely fucking out there. One wonders just how the hell the band remembers where they are going, but somehow they get there like only they can. The overall sound on Swarth, and pretty much all of Portal's releases, is like a buzzing insect caught in a torrential downpour on the moon, or in some parallel dimension... or something. If you haven't figured it out yet, it's pretty hard to pin this stuff down, which is certainly a quality we appreciate in a genre plagued with formulaic ripoffs. So take comfort in the fact that there is hardly anything you could have ever anticipated in a metal group and go from there. It might just change the way you look at things - ESPECIALLY death metal!
Latest from these Aussie blackened death metal weirdos, and like all the records before, Vexovoid is another exercise in twisted sonic psychosis, the sound here weirdly polished and well produced, but that's really relative, as older records sounded like they were recorded in a subterranean icestorm. And at times sounded less like a metal band and more like some mysterious noise group. But here, the sound is seriously heavy, the riffing less blurred and indistinct, which would seem to be disappointing, but instead, makes this a way more satisfying listen. The opening track "Kilter", named we can only assume for the fact that it's about as far from off kilter as any Portal song we've ever heard, starts off all chugging and churning, frenzied and frenetic, looped and woozy, a dizzying swirl of downtuned riffage, and and avalanche of chaotic drumming, all wound into a tight, taut, gnarled sprawl of tranced out hypnometal crush. When the song finally kicks in proper, the vocals come in all murky bellow, and the riffs blur and smear and ooze, into a washed out, psychedelic buzzscape, that is somehow crazy catchy, as well as being baffling and brutal, and when the sound slips back into that opening churn, totally mesmerizing.
And so goes the whole record, the band either consciously going for a different sound, or just stumbling into what for them probably seems weird in comparison to their normal sound, not the other way around. In some ways, Vexovoid seems the most faithful to their country's metal heritage, oozing the sort of slo-mo death metal vibe of their forebears (Albeit not really slow at all, but somehow it FEELS slow, sludgey and filthy and dirgey, even when it's blasting away at lightspeed), most notably diSEMBOWELMENT but of course, for all of the polish here, this shit is still way demented, when the music drops out, the vocals are harrowingly hellish, and then the riffs, are fantastically droned out, the arrangements dizzying in their complexity, this is warped tech-death insanity that seems to get weirder and more out there as the record progresses, lurching from death metal pound, to woozy, atonal dirge, to tripped out, psychedelic guitarscapery, to doomic pound, to spare spacey drift. Might be our favorite Portal yet, but then it seems we say that about every one...
You just never know what to expect from Mac MacCaughan's Portastatic project. He's taken it through playful numbers based around keyboards, samples and programmed beats, some respectful '60s Tropicalia inspired excursions and film soundtracks. Yet, he quite often brings it all back to sweet, breezy guitar-driven pop that evokes the glow of a summer evening sunset and draws Portastatic closer to Superchunk territory. Autumn Was A Lark is the newest release, and although this appears to be a five song EP, it actually boasts fourteen songs total. That's right folks, you get eight bonus live on the radio acoustic performances). The band tackles covers of songs by Bruce Springsteen ("Bobby Jean" and "Growin' Up"), Ronnie Lane ("One For The Road") and Badfinger ("Baby Blue") with great aplomb, and offers up an alternate version of "In The Lines" (the original appears on their last album) as well as a punchy new song called "Autumn Got Dark". If you enjoyed Summer Of The Shark, scoop this goodie up too. It's sure to please!
Oh Mac McCaughan, we will always have the softest spot for you and the remarkable pop gems you never run out of. From the heyday of Superchunk, to the fine label you run, to the way you helped put Chapel Hill on the musical map, to the way you always come through with that perfect song that we will undoubtedly have stuck in our heads for months to come. Be Still Please is a pretty great representation of the current state of Mac's song writing. From the all out catchy rock of "Sour Shores" and "I'm In Love With Arthur Dove" (contender for song of the year!), to the multi instrumentation and more somber grown up sentiments of "Black Buttons" and "Song For A Clock." Last week when Mac's buddy Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo did a guest DJ spot at KUSF all his selections came from older records from the 50's 60's and 70's, while his last selection was the sole contemporary track and it was the closer from this album, proving that what makes Mac such a great songwriter is exactly how and why he has created such an impressive catalog of timeless pop gems.
Mac McCaughan reins in his Portastatic project even closer to his main band Superchunk's sound. It seems he just can't keep the power pop out of the mix, and y'know what? We don't mind one bit 'cause despite his being adept at many other musical styles, he's a master of energetic pop. While some other veteran popsters' recent releases have elicited groans of "ho hum more of the same?" That's definitely not the case with Bright Ideas. Somehow at his hands, it's always fresh'n'new, and never seems tired or reheated. On past Portastatic releases he's dabbled with Tropicalia, jazz and electronics, and he does occasionally toss things up a bit on this album. Check out the breezy sixth song "Truckstop Cassettes". The super-duper Bright Ideas highlight though is the song that follows it, "The Soft Rewind". It's McCaughan in absolute top form, and seems tailor-made for your friends' mixtapes... let alone your own repeat listens. Great stuff!
Born of his compulsive love for Tropicalia, that distinctly Brazilian take on '60s psychedelia that Aquarius also loves, Mac of Superchunk has recorded 5 of his most favorite pieces made famous by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Os Mutantes. Although we feared the worst, actually it's not bad at all. Very pleasant. And another thing we like to see -- there are very detailed credits so that Tropicalia newcomers may seek out the original versions. Plus it's a hoot to hear the voice of Superchunk singing in Portugese!
Mac MacCaughan of Superchunk and Merge Records composed a bright little soundtrack for what is probably a bright little indie film. Portastatic has always been his bedroom side project and while at times that has resulted in wonderfully inventive stuff played out on synths and samplers, this time any originality has been subsumed under the need for innocuous background music that helps the film along. Nice but non-essential.
Diehard Portastatic fans might experience a few glimmers of recognition when they hear this score that the band did for For Who Loves The Sun, an indie film by Matt Bissonnette (this is the second time they've worked with Bissonnette, previously they did the soundtrack for his 2002 film Looking For Leonard). For the most part though if no one told you the name of the artist you probably couldn't tell. There aren't any big tell-tale signs such as vocals to give it away. What you would know though is that this is one fine piece of soundtrack work. The twenty two lush instrumentals (ranging from 32 seconds to just under three minutes long) feature an elegant blend of fluttery oboe, trillsome flute, warm piano and strings. Breezily pleasant and unobtrusive incidental music. Sure sounds like Mac MacCaughan has been studying his collection of Henry Mancini and George Gershwin film scores!
Mac McCaughan is really one of indie rock's true heroes. First there was his band Superchunk that helped define indie rock and helped put Chapel Hill on the map in the '90s. Then there's the label he runs, Merge, who have put out incredibly influential records by everyone from Magnetic Fields to Neutral Milk Hotel to the Arcade Fire. And then there's his so-called side band Portastatic who actually have been more active and prolific then Superchunk have in recent years. In many ways Portastatic served as his outlet for sketches and stripped down songs that maybe weren't meant for Superchunk yet still had his trademark vocal and guitar sound. This two disc set compiles a slew of singles, b-sides, demos and covers. We have to say while it's sort of an uneven collection there are some total gems on here, especially the covers, hearing Mac do The Undertones "Teenage Kicks" and Hot Chip's "And I Was A Boy From School" makes it all worth it. And despite a few tracks that cold have been left in the vaults, there are some total classic sounding Portastatic jams making this a must have for all bigtime Mac fans.
Mac of Superchunk's latest solo foray finds him playing more and more with looped beats and playful keyboard doodlings.
There it is again, Mac MacCaughan's unmistakable sweet boyish voice! His new Portastatic album is filled with the loveliest, breeziest pop warmth. One dozen super pretty and lovingly crafted tunes with slip-slidin' guitars, violin accents and female vocals courtesy of Ms Janet Weiss (Quasi, Sleater-Kinney) on the album's opening song and highlight "Oh Come Down". Aaaah, delightful! And to top it all off, there's a petal pink watercolor painting on the cover by Mac, as well as a little flower painting in the cd insert by Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley. Hurrah!
MPEG Download: "Oh Come Down" [/audio/portastaticohcomedown.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Oh Come Down" [/audio/portastaticohcomedown.m3u]
Mac McCaughan must never have a moments rest! The blazing batons in his successful juggling act? To name just a few: running the fab indie label Merge Records, leading the supremo-pop outfit Superchunk as well as assorted side projects, and composing film
Techno is a genre of self-quotation and unrepentant appropriation, always looking in the rearview mirror at what just happened to predict what will be the hot-shit trend on the dancefloor tomorrow. So to be able to trace an entire strain within techno's taxonomy to a specific record is quite rare. The 1996 album Biokinetics by Porter Ricks is one such record, setting the stage for pretty much every electronic artist who would flock to the banner of Chain Reaction through a stylized hypnotic, narcotizing techno haunted with deep atmospherics, dub murkiness, and subaquatic allusions. Porter Ricks was the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who pursued "techno as a nautical sound experience." By the time the first Porter Ricks single emerged in '96, Koner had already developed his signature isolationist approach to slow-motion sound-design blustering with arctic metaphors through the dronemuzik classics of Nunatak Gongamur (1990) and Permafrost (1993). So when Koner began exploring techno with Mellwig, the approach to techno was less about 64-bar measures and more about constructing an evolving atmosphere girded to quintessentially German techno engineering that could be taken for a sonic portrait of tidal flows, map coordinates, sonar blips, and the vastness of the deep blue sea.
Biokinetics opens with the magnificent "Port Gentil" whose steady techno pulse coalesces through overlapping patterns from muffled pulsations of white noise and distant locomotive rhythms, later topped by a radiant metallic drone. The somatic oscillations of "Biokinetics 1" hardly makes for a techno track at all despite the insistent rhythms, but the eerie heartpulse dub of "Biokinetics 2" takes an isolationist reproach to everything adding its own desolate pulse and some subterranean reverb. Granulated hiss and slippery drone shimmer blossom through the final tracks "Nautical Nuba" and "Nautical Zone" that look forward to what Wolfgang Voigt would produce on his seminal Gas albums Zauberberg and Konigsforst. It sounded awesome in 1996, and it sounds awesome today.
The vinyl is limited to 700 copies!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"Symbiotic" is a split release between stalwart bleak technicians Porter Ricks and Techno Animal, in which the tracks of each are presented in alternating fashion. While Porter Ricks has made the best Chain Reaction records for the label, Thomas Koner and Andy Melweg have moved away from the heroin house aethestic for a sound that complements the oppressively dark hip hop futurism of Techno Animal. Surprisingly cohesive for an album that could easily fall apart in lesser hands.
When we first got an earful of Aftertime, the debut solo release from Roly Porter, who was/is one half of the dubstep duo Vex'd, we were pretty surprised. We had been expecting something more along the lines of that duo's lush dark beatscapes and swirling skeletal stutters but instead were treated to something entirely different. The beats almost entirely jettisoned, bar the occasional squall of rhythmic splatter, or super spare muted pulsations. The vibe is much more abstract, and droned out, a sort of dark cosmic mimimal modern classical? But somehow filtered through the grim industrial crunch and crumble of groups like Wolf Eyes. The sounds at times caustic and grimly grinding, but more often then not, woven into a sprawl of sweeping musical melodrama, lush, soaring string like shimmers, underpinned by gristly buzz, and dubstep style bass warbles, but sans the 'step'. The dub vibe too, minimal, but still pervasive, imagine if you can, the lush, hushed, cinematic ambience of Stars Of The Lid crossed with the blackened industrial crush and sculpted noise of past Record Of The Weekers Cloaks, it's almost like the most dense, and bleak, sonically sinister intros to the darkest dubstep jams, expanded into whole tracks.
But these are not just glorified extended intros, Porter crafts roiling landscapes of abstract ambience, a series of sonically harrowing epics, the opener sets the stage, all moaning tones and extended drones, very symphonic, but again, rough around the edges, as if the sounds are slowly decaying, the soundtrack to some otherworldly post apocalyptic wasteland, which leads right into the first track proper, which sounds like an alternate soundtrack to The Conversation as imagined by Organum. Dense sprawls of metallic rumble, laced with buried electronic squiggles, sonar like pings, all wreathed in a layer of gauzy, crackly, washed out sonic grime, and the whole thing wrapped around a weirdly dreamlike melody, drifting hauntingly through this heaving cloud of soft black noise. Eventually, the sound blossoms into something even more intense, blasts of electronics, shards of noise, all somehow fashioned into a dizzying barrage of almost beat-like buzz.
The record gradually introduce more and more melody, Porter's dense electronic blurscapes balanced by lushly melodic stretches of layered string like shimmer, a definitely modern minimalist vibe, but then of course, those bits of melodic tranquility, seem to sink into Porter's crumbling distorted electronic morass, sometimes completely, leaving just roiling expanses of buzz and hiss, glitched out crunch and keening electronic bleat, but just as often, striking some seemingly impossible balance, lacing this heaving sonic hostility with something totally at odds, soaring strings, lush chordal swells, which transforms the sound into something else entirely. Later huge demonic foghorn like low end rumbles moan ominously, adding a weird almost demonic drama to otherwise near tranquil drift, that low end constantly expanding, into black, gristled drones, woven into the aforementioned string sweeps, but often drifting into the background, leaving gorgeous bits of hazy minimal drift, mournful piano, swaddled in soft swirls of lush thrum, even at one point bursting into what might be the most moving moment on the record, with a soaring minor key melody, achingly melancholic, driven by a strange super distorted, crumbling almost metallic sounding 'riff' that mostly adds texture and heft, and reminds us of another longtime aQ fave Tim Hecker, as well as the recent record from Seirom, a more blissed out offshoot of Gnaw Their Tongues.
An utterly gorgeous collection of minimal electronic soundscapes, grim buzz laden modern chamber music, and black drone ambience, a record we've been wanting to make our Record Of The Week for over a year now. So glad we finally can. Absolutely recommended, and of course, most definitely for fans of Ben Frost, Stars Of The Lid, Tim Hecker, Cloaks, etc...
Life Cycle Of A Massive Star is a pretty ambitious title for a record from post-dubstep beat junkie, but if Roly Porter's last record, Aftertime, which we made a Record Of The Week, was any indication, a lot has changed since Porter's time in the dubstep duo Vex'd. Not that we didn't love Vex'd, we definitely did, their brand of dubstep was way out on the fringe, dark and dour, warped and skeletal, washed out and hazy, but none of this is to imply that Porter's post Vex'd output would in anyway be classified as dubstep, BUT some of the soundscapery that made Vex'd so interesting is definitely in full effect, even more so on this new one.
Aftertime was a sprawling experimental epic, more sound design than anything, abstract and ambient, like the score to some mysterious abstract art film, reminding us of another aQ fave, Ben Frost, and like Frost's albums, it was most definitely a record that had us wondering why this guy was not in Hollywood, crafting music for big budget sci-fi blockbusters and twisted art house flicks. So we were actually expecting more of the same, but Life Cycle Of A Massive Star threw us for a loop, the opener "Cloud" does actually sound like a Vex'd jam, a pulsing, pulsating Field like melodic stutter/loop, with some clipped vocal fragments, you can almost imagine the drop coming at any time, a barrage of rib cage rattling bass wobble, and percussive machine gun stutter, but it never does, instead, it locks into a super hypnotic cycle, that has a bit of a kosmische vibe, a sort of synth-age mesmer, but the main pulsating melody is surrounded by dark swirls of keening minor key shimmer, giving the whole thing a super tense, and intense vibe, at least until the last couple minutes, when the loop peels back, revealing an ominous, majestic symphonic score, that could have been lurking below the surface the whole time. And even then, slowly devolves into a creepy stretch of abstract ambience, and post industrial soundscapery.
The rest of the record tends toward the sound design of Aftertime, but with some of the newly revisited Vex'd audio of the past. Deep subsonic rumbles, buzzing Eastern melodies, groaning and creaking machine like clatter, clouds of crumbling static, soaring swirling strings, moaning cellos, operatic vocals, that track, sounds like a Vex'd opera, melancholic strings, deep dramatic vocals, peppered with little bursts of percussive skitter, and a 'beat' of sorts, that's more like the opening looped stutter, again a la the Field, but here, wed to the stately operatic majesty, the result is like some post modern electro-opera symphony, super ambitious, and absolutely epic. After a gorgeous track of hushed ambience, the final track gets seriously cinematic, opening with some ominous drones, some blurred barely there melodies, a little bit of orchestral shimmer, creepy chordal swells, distant clang and clatter, like the sounds of an abandoned space station, lovely and cosmic and subtly harrowing, a fantastic bit of sound design evoking images of being lost in space, trapped millions of light years from home, in a huge metal obelisk, floating in starless black, all complete with a gorgeously intense symphonic score.
Portion Control were always an obscure proposition despite their longevity. This British trio started in the early '80s crafting a hyper minimal form of claustrophobic electronica that proved to be a huge influence on the work of Skinny Puppy and Depeche Mode; but their influence on these acts never trickled down to bring them greater acclaim over the duration of their career. During the '80s, they issued a handful inventively reductivist / muscular electronics girded by proto-techno rhythms and fleshed out through filtered and flanged electronics. The monotone barked vocals have been hyper compressed and shoved way in the back of the mix are pretty much the same technique that Nivek Ogre brought to Skinny Puppy a few years later. Portion Control were never intending on making poptunes of the shock-horror model or angsty youth model that those bands they influenced became so known for; instead, Portion Control's skeletal, hard rhythms thrusts immediately to the foreground with the metallic-flanged vocals, idiosyncratic / disjointed sequencing, and unidentifiable police scanner activity muffled at the background. When a melody comes along as on the strident "He Is Patriotic" or on the jittery death-dub of "Mass Disorder" or the proto-acid squelchiness of "Fiends", it can be quite a shocking juxtaposition given the calculated minimalism throughout the rest of this work. Imagine an even more stripped down DAF or Liaisons Dangereuses, with those Skinny Puppy vocals! The Portion Control back catalogue has gone through various reissue campaigns, including a ponderous 7lp boxset on Vinyl On Demand; and an even more comprehensive 5cd boxset, with I Staggered Mentally featured prominently on both sets. But here, we get another excellent reissue from Dark Entries, who give it a great remastering job, a booklet with tons of information, and a bonus track!
This song has been floating around for a couple years now, but it's so fucking cool to get it on wax along with an awesome remix as well. "Chase The Tear" may be the most uptempo and potentially dancefloor ready track we've ever heard from Portishead, without losing any of the sensuality and seduction that is always at the core of their songs.
The song was originally released as on online only benefit for Amnesty International (and proceeds from this 12" will be going to AI as well!)
It's one of the most exhilarating tracks the group has ever made, it's a total kraut-synth show stopper! The remix/cover version by Doldrums on the B side is fucking cool too.
NOTE for mailorder customers, if you're considering ordering this: Unfortunately this week's shipment from Matador/4AD/XL arrived today with one corner of every single piece of vinyl in the box slightly bent, argh. So, don't order this now if you're super anal about such things. We'll get replacements next week. Folks buying this in person in the shop, of course, can see for themselves if they mind the bent corner or not. Sorry!
