The predominantly Scottish supergroup returns with another album of dreamy mellowness and an expanded roster which now includes members of Teenage Fanclub and Idlewild. The recognizable sounds of the participants' individual bands (Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian and Mogwai to name a few) are much less obvious this time around - seeming much less like a compilation than a collaborative effort. Last time, we could really proclaim, "That song sounds just like Arab Strap." On Son of Evil Reindeer, The 'Section sounds much more cohesive although still keeping within the wistful, melancholic territory of the bands mentioned above. Comforting blankets of folky pop tunes to wrap yourself in and a few peppier numbers to liven things up a bit. Very recommended for fans of the pretty and bittersweet. Warm hugs and pints for all!
A super-group that'll surely make Scot-pop fans everywhere alternately weep with joy and pee their pants. Are you ready? The Reindeer Section team is a mighty fifteen members strong featuring members of Arab Strap, Belle And Sebastian, Mogwai, Astrid,
This 1949 album saw legendary seven-fingered Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt reuniting for a recording with also-legendary jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli for the first time since World War II broke up their Paris-based combo, the (yep) legendary Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Recorded in Rome with some not-so-notable Italian sidemen four years before Django's death in 1953, it's bebop influenced, although not Django's Les-Paul-inspired interest in electric guitar (he plays an acoustic here, as per his pre war habit). A nice digipak reissue, with lots of informative liner notes, and versions of Django faves from "Heavy Artillery" to "Djangology" to "Swing 42". 23 tracks total. A record collection -- let alone a jazz collection -- without any Django Reinhardt is sadly lacking, and this is a fine demonstration of his immense, shining talent.
Wonderful warm and cozy indie pop from this San Francisco songstress. Ash Reiter has such a beautiful voice, and nice range in songs from the slow and melty to more upbeat and catchy. We're reminded a bit of folks like Feist, Call & Response, The Bird & The Bee, Komeda, Saint Etienne, Au Revoire Simone and The Postmarks. Clocking it at just about an hour, these fifteen songs are packed with some of the most refreshing and effervescent pop we've heard in a long time.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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We'd been digging the Religious Knives for a while now, but only just realized that RK featured two guys from aQ faves Double Leopards, which suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.
Don't be expecting the same sort of blown out abstract dronemusic as Double Leopards though, the Religious Knives are a whole 'nother proposition. The sound is more of a retro spacerock groove, druggy and stoned, laid back and psychedelic. Think Spacemen 3, Velvet Underground, Wooden Shjips, that sort of washed out groove, fuzzy and trippy and grooooovy.
This set recorded at Big Jar Books in Philadelphia, finds the band in almost straight rock mode, unfurling a lazy sun baked drugrock jam, all warm glowing guitars, simple shuffling drums, and reverb drenched vocals. Slightly twangy, a bit of a Dead vibe, some Neil Young, not super avant or experimental, more sort of just solid stoned drug rock. There's even a cover of ? And The Mysterions "96 Tears" transformed into something much murkier and muddy, less of a focus on that main keyboard lick, letting the song become more about the buzzing guitars and the propulsive rhythm, the vocals swathed in effects and buried in the mix, buzzy and gloriously laid back. The final track is a 14 minute psych groove, that eventually builds to a super looped cyclical climax, locked into a relentless hypnorock groove like a more mellow Circle or something, definitely makes to get high, sit back and let the music carry you off into the heart of the sun.
Definitely for fans of any of the above mentioned bands. And like all aRCHIVE releases, super limited, ONLY 600 COPIES! And of course exquisitely packaged. A four panel oversized foldover sleeve, the front panel shortened to reveal the disc face, which is etched around the edges with what appear to be shapes or characters. Cool.
The folks who run the Heavy Tapes label also do time as Religious Knives, and this is their most recent release, a two song 12", each side sprawling and laid back and psychedelic. The A side is all drifting ambience, wheezing chords, warm whirring guitar swirl, tinkling chimes, super spare drumming, all over a muted rumbling like an idling car in the distance. Dazed and druggy and drone-y, a plodding spaced out dirge. We were sort of expecting to be instrumental, but then about half way through the vocals came in, a laconic Velvet Underground sort of drawl, perfectly suited to the cough syrup shuffle of the music beneath it.
The flipside is a bit like an amped up version of the A side. Thick peals of corrosive guitar, howled vocals buried way down in the mix, tons of reverb and delay, repetitive tribal drums, the whole thing a dense and thick, sprawling psychedelia.
For some reason we didn't realize that Religious Knives was in fact members of late great noise/drone combo Double Leopards, but it does make sense. Religious Knives, albeit a lot less noisy, do seem to explore a similarly spaced out and psychedelically minimal path, but where DL wove thick drones, Religious Knives beagan to move away from the freeform drift and toward a sort of psychedelic spaced out krautrock, all low slung bass, tribal drumming, woozy wheezing organ, deep crooned vox, buzzing guitars all stretched out into longform slow burning space psych drifts that definitely exist in the same space as Wooden Shjips, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, Naked On The Vague, Sun Araw, Fabulous Diamonds and the like. There's also a serious nineties New Zealand vibe going on, which has a lot to do with the deep vocals, but there are also female vocals, and those tracks tend to sound a bit more poppy, but all the songs are rife with long tones and deep drones, the organ thick and buzzy, the guitar spidery and minor key, all woven seamlessly into the band's blissed out psych jams. Hazy and druggy and so good. Kind of surprised more of the Moon Duo / Wooden Shjips / Lumerians / Carlton Melton space/drone rock obsessives haven't flipped out over these guys too, could be because they're less rocking, more moody and brooding and minimal and spare, but we're thinking even so, it's only a matter of time...
Wow, the perfect garage kraut blues for a generation of post-everything youth hungry for something to rock out to. One part free and trippy and one part industrial and weird, here is a band that represents the East Coast jam band effortlessly. Michael Bernstein and Maya Miller, members of the noise/drone outfit the Double Leopards, team up with Nate Nelson (Mouthus) on drums and Todd Cavallo on bass, for a stripped-down session of head-nodding jammers. The Door pays homage to the alchemic aspects of krautrock while setting forth a new chapter in the noise-rock agenda. Stripped down rhythms driving beside ripping guitar licks, lush '60s organ flutters, and mumbly apathetic vocals that don't sound too far off from the vocals of producer Thurston Moore. The door is catchy in a strikingly weird way, like listening to a '60s pop record through a fucked up underwater amp. Any fans of creepy damaged pop will not want to miss this killer record!
Digging up more rare metal history (starting with the Solitude Aeturnus demos vinyl pressing), Rob Preston's Doomed Planet label presents a reissue of obscure '80s Bay Area (non-thrash!) metal act Rellik's lone 12", with unreleased bonus tracks filling it out to full-length status. On vinyl only, of course, and limited to 500 copies, almost sold out. OK, most folks who get this list
Everyone who bought that Soundmurderer drum and bass comp cd on Violent Turd from a while back should just buy this too. Wicked old school drum and bass. Simple and dumb, with lots of Amen breaks and sirens and clipped samples, bass bin rattling lows, tweeter twitching synth stabs, time stretched ragga toasting and just all the big dumb jungle you can handle. This totally brings me back to when the whole AQ crew would go to the only local bar in SF that played jungle, and we would just sit in front of the speakers and LOVE IT. There's a bunch of classics on here (a few that were on the Soundmurderer comp), and there's some brutal 'soul diva' stuff too, but basically this is just classic fucking jungle / drum and bass, that we never get tired of hearing!
Another batch of classic jungle from one of the grand masters of the era (early nineties) Remarc. These are all unreleased dubplates and are all smoking hot. Chopped Amen breaks, huge fuzzed out basslines, and ragga toasting all over the place. Derivative and repetitive, and definitely stuck in the nineties, but if you're anything like us you could listen to this stuff all the time, non-stop and NEVER get tired of it. That Amen drum break is just so wicked. It's hard to beleieve that just a drum beat by itself could be so catchy, but we've had this beat stuck in our heads for the last decade!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Finally available on CD (through a P&D deal set up by Nu Gruv Alliance), The Remote Viewer is one of dozens of artists whose affinity for Autechre has helped fuse a solid variant of IDM (which unfortunately has no name other than 'this sounds like Autechre'). Krispity, krunchity beats paired with dark ominous melodies and sufficient digital clickery are the order of the day on this surprisingly good release which is perhaps closer to the Boards of Canada end of that narrow spectrum of electronica with an emphasis more of space and bedroom melancholia. The LP is also still available for 8.98.
No, not the Whitesnake song, though surely a somewhat ironic reference. Craig and Andrew of Leeds outfit Hood bring us their second album (not including a handful of singles) of pretty downpop electronica. Much like the electronic efforts of their former group or a melancholic Aphex Twin, the combination of minimal breakbeats and soft atmospherics offer listeners a pleasant, though sometimes tedious exploration of the coalescence of organisms and digitalia. Nice, but nothing groundbreaking here. Featuring guest vocals by Nicola of Empress / Boyracer fame.
For those unfamiliar, The Remote Viewer is an off shoot of the UK band Hood (as well as other projects The Boats and The Famous Boyfriend), and their music is not all that dissimilar, perhaps drawing even closer together with each subsequent release. Both of them fuse indie pop with ambient electronic glitch in their instrumentals and vocal songs and draw from a broad spectrum of influences. Faint pop melodies waft through, percussive chimes materialize occasionally suggesting Far East inspirations. The sixth song "I'm Sad Feeling!" sounds like it'd fit very well alongside the beloved Piano Magic album Low Birth Weight. Ever so delicate and dreamy but with a somber heaviness flowing just under the surface.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Sunny local French ex-pat singer / songwriter Helene Renaut has been playing around San Francisco for a few years now, touring with the likes of Ruthann Friedman, Bart Davenport and Sean Smith. We've always been fans, and before her new record comes out next year (recorded by Jason Quever of Papercuts), we've managed to get a handful of her self-released debut from a couple of years back. Inspired by British folk and French pop, she weaves her delicate guitar playing through wistful and melancholic original songs with a couple of covers, one a beautiful rendition of John Martyn's "Run Sally Run". Perfect for these last few warm weeks of fall! Fans of Sibyelle Baier, Ruthann Friedman, and Francoise Hardy take note!
Spirited debut album from this local French folk chanteuse and multi-instrumentalist. Helene Renaut teamed up with Papercuts' Jason Quever and members of Skygreen Leopards to bring us this sunny and wistful record that is perfect for the fresh beginnings of Spring. Renaut's songbird voice and dulcet harmonies with spare chamber arrangements of guitar, violin, glockenspiel and a brass ensemble remind us of singers we have loved from the past, the airy British folk of June Tabor, the folk-pop eccentrics of The Roches and Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the beautiful fragility of Connie Converse, Ruthann Friedman and Kath Bloom, all with a sense of French pastoralism from her native Brittany. Limited to 250 copies, each one hand-numbered. Quite lovely, indeed!
Lovely split single by local Bay Area (via Brittany) songbird, Helene Renaut and Scottish folk chanteuse Emily Pond, featuring members of Incredible String Band. This is a first of a series of four split seven inches devoted to the seasons from this twee Scottish folk label. Limited to 300, on summer yellow vinyl!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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The latest from New Zealand's Renderers is a dissonant post-punk hybrid of a NZ depressive avant-folk aesthetic (i.e. Graeme Jefferies or Alastair Galbraith) with the US post-punk fury of Sonic Youth or Mission of Burma. Their best full length yet, very lovely. Touring the East Coast in November but, sadly, not coming to SF.
We've been fans of New Zealand's The Renderers for years and years, since back in their Flying Nun and Ajax days in the '90s; more recently, they played one of the SXSW showcases we cosponsored with WFMU, and -almost- did an instore performance here just last week, which poor scheduling unfortunately nixed... but perhaps you saw 'em at the The Hemlock that night, or on another date of their current US tour in support of this fine new release of theirs on the Ba Da Bing label, A Rocket Into Nothing.
With eerie winds howling from their guitar amps, and moody urgency to their rhythms (that's Pumice's Stefan Neville on drums, this time 'round), The Renderers once again strike that special NZ balance of downer-pop indie-rock and noisy, darkly psychedelic effects-laden abstraction they do so well. The married, guitar-wielding duo of Maryrose and Brian Crook share vocal duties as usual, trading off song to song across the record (we must confess, we tend to prefer Maryrose's more melodic, dreamier singing to Brian's rougher, occasionally outsider-y stylings). Sometimes weary, sometimes rocking, it's all quite hypnotic and haunting, this album vaguely rustic, yet with a shoegazing spacerockiness to it worthy of its "Rocket" title...
The only real complaint we can make is a minor one, regarding the packaging, in that the graphic design seems a little careless, and the proofreading a little lax; for instance, what's up with all the excess commas littering the credits in the cd booklet?
It's been a while. The last we heard from this veteran New Zealand indie rock downer pop band (formed around the nucleus of husband and wife duo Brian and Maryrose Crook) wasn't even a Renderers' album, it was 2008's excellent Renderizors disc Submarine, a droney collaboration with fellow, more experimental kiwis the Sandoz Lab Technicians. Before that, you have to go back a few years to the nineties for their albums on Flying Nun, Ajax, and Siltbreeze. Although, some of us here heard 'em in person not long ago, 'cause they played the AQ/WFMU SXSW showcase in Austin this spring, and also made it out to San Francisco not long after, on the way back to NZ.
Live, they were surprisingly heavy, offering amped-up psych-storms something like Bardo Pond. On record, they explore their quieter side too, but this does have plenty of electric psych action, rocking out on tracks like "Fu Man Chu" and "Feels Like Fun", numbers laced with feedback and distortion that would definitely find favor with fans of Neil Young (most of whom have never heard of The Renderers, unfortunately for them). And by the end of the nearly nine minute "Harvesting The Sea", total mayhem erupts, Hawkwind-y electronics doing battle with billowing guitar noise, a la Comets On Fire. Their psych proclivities are also heard on the more hushed tracks like "Sargasso Sea", which finds The Renderers meandering into the blackness and bleakness inhabited by Japanese acts like Suishou No Fune.
Monsters And Miasmas is an album that mixes weary country/folk balladeering with reverby underground rock and roll, providing not just a dark vibe but also honest to gosh memorable melodic songs. Brian Crook's vocals are slightly nasal and remind us of Bob Dylan or Tom Petty just a bit, while Maryrose Crook's singing is sweeter but no less depressive in tone. When she does sound somewhat hopeful, it's still in regard to topics like how she'd prefer living at the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile, the first thing out of Brian Cook's mouth on this album are lyrics about falling into a very deep hole. This is definitely The Renderers we know and love.
Funny name, Renderizors. But it makes sense when you know that this New Zealand outfit is actually a conglomeration/collaboration of two AQ faves: The Renderers (NZ underground downer pop) and the Sandoz Lab Technicians (NZ underground freeform drone)!!
To quote from a previous review of ours, "Sandoz Lab Technicians may be the most fucked-up and most freeform out of all of the mind-expanding, free noise New Zealanders that we have championed in the past (i.e. Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Omit, Anthony Milton, etc.)." Meanwhile, The Renderers are much more in the indie-pop, song-oriented camp, combining post-punk dissonance with bleak depressive melody. Together, you get something that's a very very lovely best of both worlds. Haunted howling winds of gentle feedback quietly accompany the so sweet and so weary female singing from The Renderers' chanteuse Maryrose Crook. Spooky drones both threaten and cajole. Lethargic balladry struggles stoically amidst storms of psychedelic electric distortion, with nihilistic, nasal male mumbling also sharing the mic with the more breathy vox of Ms. Crook. At times we're reminded, maybe mysteriously, of everything from the Velvet Underground to Bardo Pond, Slap Happy Humphrey to Richard Youngs, Pumice to Doodles... and even the echoey '60s dark psych pop of obscure AQ faves Gandalf... though really we'd hope that saying "imagine a mix of The Renderers and Sandoz Lab Technicans" would do the trick! Recommended.
You'd never know from listening to Porcelain Opera, that the man behind Rene Hell is also the man responsible for the noisy weirdness of Secret Abuse, and is a member of crusty dirge punks Deep Jew, cuz Porcelain Opera is a whole different world of sound. One that fuses the muted minimal electronic pulse of Basic Channel, with the tripped out psychedelic synthscapes of folks like Emeralds and Oneohtrix, but it's so much more than that. The sound definitely dips liberally into that eighties retro soundtrack vibe of folks like John Carpenter and Goblin, but filters it through a mysterious post industrial electronic aesthetic, creating thick swaths of garbled vocal synth tangle, laced with shards of strange glitched out crunch, and crumbling distorted buzz, voices surface and swirl, twisted and tweaked, a haunting alien robot electro, that will quickly give way to a glimmering pop ambient drift, all shimmering motes of sonic light, floating on layers of ethereal thrum, total sun dappled new age kraut synth bliss. The whole record is like some sort of sonic feverdream. Warm wisps of blurred glitch underpins squalls of processed vox, and propulsive new wave synth crunch, pulses thump beneath a glimmering sky of chiming overtones, and strange softly warped fuzz, murky burbling electronics smolder and sprawl into blackened synthesizer dronescapes, peppered with short bursts of white noise static, and jagged shards of cut up vocals, eventually, building to a deliriously warm wall of shoegazey buzz, before finally finishing off with a swirling blur of intertwined synth melodies, like some sort of retro prog smeared into something much murkier and more washed out, bleary eared and ephemeral.
A weird record for sure, but one that should definitely appeal to fans of Emeralds, Oneohtrix, Expo 70, and other modern kosmische space kraut weirdos, but Rene Hell definitely takes that sound, and makes it all his own, exploring the way out, outer fringes of modern electronic synth kraut psychedelia...
Full length number two from Rene Hell, aka Jeff Witscher, is, according to the man himself, a bit of a departure from the sound of his first record, the aQ beloved Porcelain Opera. The Terminal Symphony, is as the title suggests, Witscher's stab at creating a modern minimal classical music record, using the same sounds and tools as he did to create his first record, but here, reimagining those sounds in a different context. The songs tighter, more controlled and composed. The opener is a thick caustic corrosive drone, the synth sound super buzzy and distorted, dense and pulsating, wreathed in effects, and pelted by blasts of static and industrial crunch, seemingly random rhythms careening back and forth, very dark and meditative, before giving way to the sci-fi synth pulse of "Quiet Detail Muse", murky effected vocals riding atop the undulating synths.
"Cello Suite #3" is most definitely not, instead it's a dizzying collage of random voices, bits of glitch and hiss, a looped high end melody, flurries of fragmented effects, the result a sort of creepy electronic ambience. "E.S. Des Grauens In Fifths" sounds classical, but more like alien kosmische new age krautdrone synth classical, percolating melodies, buzzy and fuzzy over sweeping swells and lush layered shimmer, the sort of soundtrack that must accompany watching an alien star emerge from some distant planet. "Baroque Ensemble Coda" too is a strange little cloud of swirling electronics and intertwined melodies, looped and rhythmic, and in its own way strangely psychedelic, the track soon shifts gears and becomes a landscape of rubbery pulsations and layered shards of buzz and hum.
The whole record, for all its classical aspirations, manages to be dark and droney, softly chaotic and lushly layered and looped, and without the background on the record and its genesis, one might not notice anything 'classical' about it, playing out instead as just a super melodic, fantastically varied, and surprisingly dreamy experimental minimal electronic record, bloopy and bleepy one second, a frantic avalanche of overlapping melodic loops the next, warped and atonal outer space psychedelia one second, blurry, bleary sun dappled new age synthscape the next.
Fans of The Porcelain Opera will definitely dig this, and again might quite possibly not notice a dramatic difference, but then does it really matter, the sounds are divine, and to some they may sound more 'classical' to others they may just sound like more of the same, either way, we're digging it.
Fantastic split from aQ faves Rene Hell, and until now unknown to us Three Legged Race, both 'groups' paying homage to early electronic music, experimental tape music and science fiction outsider bedroom private press weirdness.
Rene Hell offers up a 4 part series of zoner synthscapes, lush layers of buzzing rumbling electronics, buried, barely there vox, haunting and cinematic, with distinctly pop music melodies, but here suspended in charged fields of squelch and whir and buzz. As the songsuite progresses, the sound shifts to something more new agey and washed out, total Tangerine Dream style kosmische bliss out, swirly and hypnotic, space-y and sun dappled, total trance-y synth age drift, which again changes tone and drifts into something a bit more ominous like the opening track, more cinematic creep, slow, low tones, mysterious and atmospheric, subtly rhythmic, soft swells over buried pulses, finally moving into the closing track, which manages to fuse those two sides of RH's sound, the fluttery super nova synthkraut bliss and the brooding minimal electronic flutter, darkly dramatic, rife with dense chordal swells, swirling black ambient atmophere and more of those muted murky voices.
The flipside is similarly dark and mysterious and electronic, courtesy of Three Legged Race, aka Robert Beatty, who starts his side off with an unexpected chunk of woozy, lo-fi Scott Tuma like loner folk guitar haze, all murky and spidery, underpinned by a soft field of hauzy crackly thrum, glistening melodies drifting in the ether, hushed and lovely, until... in swoop some super twisted processed robotic vox, heavily effected and distorted and crunchy, totally at odds with the rest of the song, but it somehow sort of works.
After a brief swath of Radiophonic Workshop style electronic percolations, raw outer space shimmer, sixties sci-fi sound effects and hauntological bleep and bloop, the record blossoms into a sprawling stretch of glitched out primitive analog electronics, sounding a bit like Bruce Haack, but way more fractured and distorted and processed, a malfunctioning starfield of sound that manages to be weirdly melodic and subtly rhythmic, the background growing louder and murkier and more ominous as the track progresses. So good. Both sides are incredible. Way recommended for fans of the burgeoning new wave of spaced out sci-fi synth drone, especially folks who might be on the hunt for something darker and weirder and slightly more cracked.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!
Oh WOW! We're so so thankful to Light In The Attic for unearthing these amazing recordings by Wendy Rene. It's been a little while since a soul reissue totally blew us away, and became THE record that we found ourselves listening to over and over. But this collection has done just that, Rene's voice, one of the most deep, soulful and emotive we've heard in ages.
Otis Redding was so impressed with Rene as a teenager, that he helped make sure she got signed to Stax Records (Otis Redding would play another, more haunting and tragic part in Wendy Rene's life. She was on tour with him and decided to cancel her trip last minute, leaving him on a plane that would end up crashing and taking his life).
For some reason, none of her songs ever caught on as hits (makes no sense to us!) but each and every one of these songs completely grab you and send slight shivers up and down your spine, so warm, raw and honest . Her voice and presence rank right up there next to vintage Irma Thomas, Aretha Franklin, and Helen Smith. And the songs here are the sort that get under your skin, with a conviction embedded into every moment that you just can't deny. Her recording career was very short, and this collection of unearthed tracks, from 1965-'65, show that she recorded more memorable songs in a year, than many artists do in a multi-decade career. ESSENTIAL!
Previously recording under the moniker Brume but now choosing to work under his given name, Christian Renou has spent 17 years home-taping, obsessed with re-created the electro-acoustic elements from French musique concrete. "Fragments and Articulations" is a archetypal album for Renou (or Brume for that matter, as he's not really changed his attitude with the intentions or attitudes with the change in his working name), reprocessing various recording through tons of electronic effects, computer algorithms, and tape splicing techniques. Not so much an album but a collection of three distinct compositions, Renou thematically links these pieces as various strategies to re-organize fragmented sound. The first piece finds Renou returning to a old recording of a drum solo, when he was in the "mutant jazz rock" group Uria back in 1982, and transforming those skittering percussive stabs into a tinny set of textures processed with an erratic flapping oscillation sort of like an electronic equivalent of a singing saw. He counterpoints these densely processed flanges and pointillist marks with a thick electrified drone from malleable sinewaves. The second track is far more calm, transforming a field recording (possibly of rain?) into a deep space floe of spartan tones, not unlike Richard Lainhart's bowed tam-tam excursions. The final piece is particularly abrasive to the point that SF sound artist Randy Yau amicably described it as "power electronics." Renou has processed recordings made from a homemade radio receiver that may not have worked very well, but none the less provided a wondrous array of jarring noise and swirling tonalities. The digitized chop job adds to the dramatic conflict of raw sound. Altogether, the album is quite alien.
An almost complete collection of all the early recordings of primal primitive lo-fi Ohio garage punk pioneer Mike Rep, who has remained more of a footnote than forefather, which is downright criminal listening to this stuff again. Recordings from the mid seventies to the early nineties, this revamped version of a 1992 lp compilation shines a light on the undeniable lo-fi pop garage rock genius of Mr. Mike Rep, who some folks may know as a producer of records by modern day practitioners of a similar sound, like Guided By Voices, Strapping Fieldhands and Times New Viking, and hell, if you dig ANY or all of those groups, or any of the legions of groups that followed, Mike Rep is gonna blow your mind. Especially when you consider he was doing warped garage pop, lo-fi home brewed jangle weirdness, 20, 30, heck almost 40 years before Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees and the Sic Alps and all the rest.
Psychedelic, jangly, rocking, droney, fucked up and far out, this stuff is twisted and magical, warped and catchy as all get out, from a blissed out all instrumental version of a 13th Floor Elevators jam, to a bad ass Strapping Fieldhands cover(!!), the sounds veers wildly, yet somehow not incoherently from chaotic horn flecked grinding garage blowouts, to a fuzzy Stooges-y chunk of sci-fi hard rock crunch, to shimmery reverby sixties sonic sunshine, to flute flecked outsider folk, to snotty snarly ULTRA lo-fi punk rock stomp, to trippy over the top uber dramatic glam doom, complete with Asian melodies, and bizarre vocal effects, to Velvetsy hypnotic looped drone-rock, to twisted cabaret pop, to full on fucked up and freaked out druggy audio meltdown. So fucking great. And the fact that so many folks haven't heard this stuff, well, time to right that wrong. ANYone into weirdo lo-fi pop and weirdo garage rock, should buy this NOW. Comes with a whole bunch of unreleased tracks, and a download card.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
