Ambient post rock bands are a dime a dozen these days, and bands who sound more like Godspeed that Godspeed ever did at this point probably outweigh the legions of Neur-Isis clones. But every once in a while, bands manage to remind us just why we fell in love with that sound in the first place. Danish quartet Seven Mile Journey definitely take that sound to whole 'nother level, brooding, epic, cinematic, like post rock without the rock, a sort of abstract filmic chamber music constructed from rock instrumentation.
Slow building, slow burning, so tense and intense, moody and mysterious. The drums are kept to a minimum much of the time, more for propulsion and flourish than actual beat making, but when the drums do come in, they come in hard and then drive the song, while the other instruments weave lush tapestries of sound, minor key swells, lilting overcast melodies, buzzing strings, simple piano parts draped over keening moaning minimal soundscapes, jangly guitars drifting amidst warm whirring lowercase drones, in some cases the songs build to incredible climaxes, like staring into the sun, everything blinding and chaotic and exploding like some sonic supernova, others just smolder, glowing from within, never quite easing up on the built up tension.
Fans of the usual post rock culprits - Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky - will have very likely just found their new favorite bands, although for us, the band are at their best when they mix it up, removing the drums, spreading out the sound into impossibly emotional and moving imaginary soundtracks, ratcheting up the tension, building and building and building. Epic, transcendent and beautifully cathartic.
We had never heard of these Baltimore heavies before their super limited Record Store Day 7", which sadly, we never got enough to review/list post RSD, but we were impressed enough to keep our eyes peeled for more, and now more has arrived, in the form of this bruiser, and like that 7", SSoS deliver a bludgeoning blast of blown out stoner sludge, crusty hardcore, and brutal blackened heaviness, opener "Ghost Plains" displays all three, starting out Eyehategod style, with gurgling basslines wreathed in a swirling cloud of feedback, before launching into some slithery, sludge-y downtuned creep, bellowed monster vox over thick tarpit riffage and caveman drum pound, eventually splintering into a full on blast of D-beat crust-punk, shrieked and furious, mathy and metallic, and a little bit blackened, only to wind down into some old school big riff classic sounding doom, before adding some frenzied double kick drumming, and some wild shrieked vokills. And while that seems like a dizzying mix, it somehow all gels, the band effortlessly slipping from metal to punk to sludge to doom and back again, some tracks like "Moths" lock into a woozy funeral doom-ic crawl, but before you know it have morphed into a sort of mathy metallic churn, and others are hateful ultra doom sprawls, that also eventually transform into something more dense and driving. Needless to say, absolutely essential for folks who like their metal blackened, crusty, sludgey, stonery, doomy, riffy, crushing, pummeling, downtuned and HEAVY AS FUCK. Includes a 32 minute bonus track that's a whole live show from 2012!
*Acid Mothers Temple Alert*
Seven That Spells is a psych rock outfit from Croatia. But they sound a heckuva lot like Japanese kraut-channellers Acid Mothers Temple. And guess what? They've got AMT guitar guru Makoto Kawabata on hand as a special guest! He obviously feels right at home jamming with these Croatian freaks, together stirring up billowing smoke-clouds of droning space rock, the babbled and chanted vocals giving this the feel of some sort of medieval folk ritual, zapped with swirling electronic FX. And when it comes time for the guitar solo (and that time comes often) Kawabata and co. hold nothin' back. Spaced OUUUUUUT maaaaaan.
Packaging is sorta swank: the cd rests on a foam numb affixed to the inside of a heavy-duty gatefold kind of sleeve, adorned with busty, naked hippie ladies (again, in the Acid Mothers Temple tradition!).
Latest strange sonic missive from aQ beloved UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one from a multi media artist/musician/filmmaker/soundscaper named Lary Seven, who most of us here had never heard of, but who we discovered is a bit of a NYC fixture, a legendarily cantankerous maker of art, both audial and visual, there's very little in the way of details about the sounds here, other than they were recorded live in 2001 and 2004 in different spaces in New York. The first track is a gorgeous bit of looped minimal buzzing, darkly rhythmic, and strangely hypnotic, quiet enough that you can still hear the conversations in the room, which makes for a strange collage of random voices, textured electronic crunch and stuttering blurred glitch, impossible to determine the sound source, but it does seem to essentially be a collection of whirs and hums, clicks and chirps, very machinelike and robotic, like an ungrounded speaker or an instrument with the cable just barely plugged into the jack, creating a strange array of fluctuating statics, which are then sculpted into something that sounds a bit like a way more lo-fi home brewed Raster-Noton recording.
The second side / set again features the room sound, footsteps, voices, throat clearing, sneezes, various scrapes and shuffles, until finally, Seven introduces some electrical buzz, which then undulates, pulses and thrums, extremely minimal, lushly layered but in the context of a live performance in a big room, almost like a symphony of appliance hum, eventually, Seven does crank up the voltage, creating another framework of skeletal rhythmic skitter, the electronic fields swirling around a dark, throbbing industrial thud, like some sort of weirdo mad scientist primitive house music, being performed with an array of malfunctioning Tesla coils. Again, pretty dang cool, and another weird and wonderful set of sounds to add to the Tapeworm's twisted canon.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, with cover art by Savage Pencil (see more SavX art and various other Tapeworm cover art in the Art Of Worms book, that's reviewed elsewhere on this week's list!).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Anyone familiar with the Vinyl On Demand label is probably well aware of how utterly amazing their releases are, how well researched, gorgeously packaged, and of course how limited and difficult to track down. We managed to get three titles, all of them amazing, we only have one copy of each, and wanted to give some of our mailorder folks a shot and snagging one of these. So a brief description follows, and we only have a single copy so first come first served.
Another collection of rarities unearthed by VoD, all of the earliest recorded material from the legendary Severed Heads, recorded between 1977 and 1981, as well as some unreleased bonus material from 83-85. Five lps, housed in printed hand numbered sleeves, pressed on thick vinyl, all in a gorgeous printed embossed box.
WE HAVE ONLY ONE COPY!!
Severed Heads never really fit comfortably with any particular convention of the post-punk aesthetics; and when the project quietly disappeared in 2008, their demise was announced without much in the way of fanfare. Essentially a solo project of Australian electronic musician Tom Ellard, Severed Heads began in Sydney back in 1979 with Ellard experimenting with tape loops, DIY electronic kits, and rudimentary noise making devices all finding something of a commonality through lurching rhythms within this primordial soup of sound-making. Eventually, samplers and drum machines made their way into the Severed Heads repertoire, the group's best years from 1983 to 1988 or thereabouts, thanks to their avant-garde smarts throwing a monkey-wrench into synth-punk conventions. City Slab Horror (1985) was the second album that Severed Heads produced for Ink Records (and later reissued through Nettwerk). A deliberately imperfect record, City Slab Horror seeks to work against the latticework of rhythmic structures and melodic fluidity, with samples firing at irregular intervals and atonal pitches running rampant throughout the record. Exposing the rigidity of the mechanized form was one of the common strategems for synth-punk practitioners, with Fad Gadget and The Flying Lizards doing similarly disjointed avant-pop projects. While Severed Heads would eventually streamline into a sensible synth-pop project, City Slab Horror showcased how engaging Ellard could be in his wanderings through mad scientist archetypes, comic book horrorscaping, hiccupping sequencing, and inelegantly playful tunes.
In 1985, Severed Heads were commissioned to collect a retrospective of their (then) six years in existence. Instead of the standard 'best of' anthology, Tom Ellard and Co. took the opportunity to create a sprawling collage of a whole slew of material never heard before, with cutting room edits, tape loop assemblages, live tracks, and numerous experiments that never found their way onto any of their albums. That approach is emblematic of the subversive manner in which Severed Heads produces and contextualizes their heavily mediated electronics, tracks that boisterously flaunt new wave pop structures butted against chunks of machined voltage-control noise and volatile industrial rhythm. On this release, more than pretty much anywhere else in Severed Heads catalog, do comparisons to Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle make the most sense.
Severed Heads were born from a what-the-fuck project called Mr. And Mrs. No Smoking Sign in the punk diaspora circa 1979, with both groups taking on those names as piss-take stratagems of invoking the horror industrial culture for the former, and downright awkwardness for the latter. Tape loops and mediated collages were the crux of MAMNSS and Severed Heads, which never really settled into the gravity-well of industrial culture, maintaining a sometimes overt sense of humor and a number of forays into legitimately brilliant minimal-wave / synth-pop tunes. By the early 80s though, the founding members Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright parted ways with Tom Ellard, who kept Severed Heads going through the '80s and beyond. It seemed Wright left because he wanted the project to move in a more musical direction; and Fielding thought just the opposite, leading to his anti-performance project called The Nobodies where he would set up automatons to perform in his absence.
Since The Accident (1983) was the first major album for Ellard / Severed Heads coming on the heels of a handful of tapes that warbled between primitive electro-pop and tape loop deconstructions. The most notable track on Since The Accident was essentially an afterthought -- the bouncy OMD-esque number "Dead Eyes Opened" which Ellard tacked on to fill up some space on the tape submitted to the label that originally released the album. It quickly became a hit on Australian radio and opened up a considerable amount of doors for Severed Heads (including an opening tour spot for Skinny Puppy). Throughout Since The Accident, there are numerous avant-pop excursions of layering tape loops in varying stages of synchronicity with drum machines and sequences, including the deftly produced tracks "Exploring The Secrets Of Treating Deaf Mutes" and "A Million Angels." But there were also the vertiginous tape loop / turntablist mantras reminiscent of early Christian Marclay / Gum tracks as heard on "Brassiere, In Rome" and "Gashing The Old Mae West" (the latter of which was released as an insane 21 minute "Marathon Mix" of hypno-psychosis on another 12", which obviously couldn't make it onto the reissue of the original lp). Weird and brilliant stuff.
Circles Of Silver opens Steven Severin's four-part limited edition Codex Astra cd series based on quotations by the infamous Aleister Crowley. On the inside of the digipak is inscribed, "I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning." Although a familiarity with the occult figure and his writings may offer the listener some insight into the former Banshee's inspirations for these recordings, it does not appear to be a prerequisite to be able to listen to (and enjoy) these instrumental compositions. A penchant for well-crafted drone music might be just as handy!
Creeping clouds of smotherous tones fill every crevice while vaporous hisses drift over top. A somber, beautiful 17-minute aural shroud that's sure to pique the interest of dronescape lovers far and wide.
FYI: The second volume of Codex Astra titled Hours Of Gold, the third Idols Of Glass, and the fourth Wand Of Flame will follow shortly. Each volume will be a limited cd pressing of 777. So be sure to get them while you can!
Note to those who prefer records to cds: the four volumes will eventually be compiled and re-released on vinyl as Codex Astra: ABRAHADABRA (release date tba).
Steven Severin's Codex Astra odyssey continues with Hours Of Gold. The compositions were inspired by the words of Aleister Crowley. On the inside of this release is inscribed "Ordinary mortality is only for ordinary people." The all too fleeting 18-minute ep features two tracks of sumptuous dronescape. The first offers some light, glistening with an echoey underwater feel. The second stand in marked contrast as it closes in like a creeping, fog-drenched shadowy form. A lingering ghostly roar. Beautiful.
Sadly, rock has always been a bit of a boy's club. Sure most things are, but rock especially. And it only gets worse as you move toward the heavier and darker side of the sonic spectrum, metal, industrial, noise, women are few and far between. That's not to say there aren't woman making serious noise in those realms, there most definitely are, maybe none more fearsome than Sewer Goddess, aka Kristen Rose who traffics in some of the darkest, heaviest, filthiest sludge, blackened doom and abstract industrial we've heard, and whose particular brand of abject blackened noise is on full display here, a collection of various live performances over the years 2009-2010, and finds Rose, backed up by a full band, and engaging in some seriously harrowing soundmaking.
The opening track begins all thick bass buzz and keening feedback, soon industrial percussion emerges, and Rose's echo drenched wail, the bass buzz coalescing into sludgey dirgey riffage, while all around it guitars and samplers and effects fill the blackened sky with all manner of blackly psychedelic noise, the sound lumbers and lurches, before shifting gears in a flurry of horror movie shrieks, becoming more of a blackdrone, all layered hiss and skree and rumble, chaotic but weirdly hypnotic. The second track, the relatively brief "We Ate Their Eyes", introduces more of a groove, albeit just barely, more like a monstrous dirge, rhythmic and grimly propulsive, buried beneath an avalanche of shrieked vox and caustic low end crumble, before giving way to "Mother Agony" that channels Laibach and Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten into a Swans like creep, all hazy and washed out, the sound laced with streaks of high end, of sonar like pings, of gristly crunch and super distorted buzz, there's a definite Wolf Eyes vibe too, and then the vocals swoop back in, hysterical and terrifying, curdled with effects, it manages to be the most mesmerizingly hypnotic track here, while still retaining an unhinged mania.
The epic "Chained To The Cage Of Existence / A Lifeless Dreaming" seems to be the centerpiece here clocking in at 16+ minutes, and again begins as a blackened rumble, all buzz and blur, peppered with strange industrial clanks and clunks, before erupting into another grinding dirge, Rose's haunting deathlike vox adding a serious creep factor, the song a droned out rift, that seems like it might go on like that forever, until it splinters suddenly into a full on drum driven chunk of blackened noise metal crush, lurching, lumbering, shrieks and atonal riffage nestled amidst swells of black buzz and pounding rhythms and lots of feedback, before slipping right back into a sonic death march that continues until the end of the track, loping and minimal, laced with some cool metallic melodies, again slathered in feedback, and Rose's vox, that here remind us of the hysterical shrieks of black metal horde Bethlehem. And then finally, "Slavepiece" finishes things off, the most metal of the bunch, but sounding like it was recorded on a wax cylinder, the sound brittle and blown out, the band locked into a super in-the-red, feedback drenched riff heavy dirge, that sounds like an even more unhinged take on Brainbombs / No Balls. Fucking awesome, but most definitely only for the iron eared.
Fans of other blackened filth like Gnaw Their Tongues, Aderlating, Demonologists, Gorgontongue, and Hallowed Butchery as well as classic industrial / noise / blacknoise weirdness will be in heaven...
Into extreme abject industrial blackened sludge??? We are, especially when it's this good. So, if you're like us you too will be smitten by the mighty Sewer Goddess. Metallic, filthy, noisy, droning nightmare dirge in the tradition of such sonic terrorists as Godflesh, Swans, Gnaw Their Tongues, Wolf Eyes, Zeni Geva, early Scorn, and Neubauten. Naturally, we've been fans since we first heard Sewer Goddess a few years back - you'll find a worshipful review or two on our site of some previous releases... Now here's the latest from Sewer Goddess, an album entitled Painlust. Not subtle, no. At times bleakly ambient, at others out-and-out grinding, Painlust, with such cheerful (not) songs as "Flog", "My Grave", and "Black Meat And Bones", merges the industrial metal with the more creepily cinematic soundscapery. It's a disc of powerful, feedback-filled sound design, replete with anvil-clank rhythms and distorted atmospheres, death-knell drumming and depth charge guitars, pummeling heaviness shrouded in murky electronic FX, and harsh anguished screams from the Sewer Goddess herself - the band's frontwoman Kristen Rose, who is also capable of an wide range of effective vocal approaches, from aching melodic wails to hissing shrieks to an ice-cold monotone declamation, often processed and treated and layered, becoming a one-woman chorus, these whispers and echoes sounding like sick 'voices in your head'. Let them in and grovel for the Sewer Goddess. Seriously good stuff for those into 'this sort of thing', as we said. Makes us imagine mechanical monks performing some sort of assembly line cult ceremony in a hellish factory/church.
Elsewhere on this week's list (in fact, probably right above this review) you'll find the Disciples Of Shit cd, a collection of live recordings from blackened industrial noisescaper Sewer Goddess, aka Kristen Rose, a seriously brutal, but blackly beautiful collection of caustic live performances. Now that you know what Rose is capable of on stage, here's a glimpse of what she can do in the studio, and as you might expect, it's not to far removed, if anything, it's darker, heavier and LOUDER. But otherwise the same sort of droned out industrial crush, a bleak cinematic blackness that definitely reminds us of Gnaw Their Tongues, lots of industrial clank and clatter, a keening distant high end tone that seems to drift atop monstrous hissed vokills and streaks of blackened sound, the long stretches of buzz and crush infused with mysterious melodies.
The flipside is more riffy and dirgey, with some seriously creepy (and weirdly sexy) whispered vox, the buzz thick and corrosive, all tethered to a lurching mechanical rhythm, all within thick clouds of hiss and hum and whir, the vibe moody and murky and very soundtracky, but still bleak and menacing and seriously harrowing, shades of Wolf Eyes too, but the more we here from Sewer Goddess, the more we're beginning to think she really sounds like nobody else.
SUPER LIMITED, comes in a cool silkscreened jacket with a printed fold out insert.
When we first heard about a band called Sex Church on Load Records, we were pretty much expecting a wild costumed troupe spitting out gouts of speaker shredding cacophony and grinding metallic noise, and while there is a certain amount of noise and cacophony going on here, these guys traffic in something wholly different, a gloomy post punky sort of downer pop (much like Daily Life, who also had a record on Load), all clanging minor key chords, pounding dirgey rhythms and buzzing swirling synths, the opening track sounds like a slightly noisier take on some lost Joy Division live jam, or some classic goth group revved up and supercharged. And then when the vocals finally kick in, all deep and dramatic, wreathed in echo and delay, the mood grows dark and doomy, the drums pounding out a tribal rhythm, the bass lurching and lumbering in throbs and thrums, the sound building to explosive psychedelic crescendos before slipping back into slithery deathrock grooves or loping postpunk crunch. Fans of outfits like Naked On The Vague, Crystal Stilts, Total Control, Soft Moon and the like should go apeshit for these guys, and while they definitely borrow heavily from the gloom/goth classics, think Kommunity FK, the Mission UK, Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy, Wipers, Scientists, Bauhaus, Fields Of The Nephilim, once those sounds are filtered through a more noise rock / post punk aesthetic, it ends up pretty heavy, hooky, noisy, darkly poppy and sorta irresistible.
"We Don't Care" The Sex Pistols in San Francisco Jan 14, 1978 a one hour special with highlights from the winterland concert (their final date) plus the KSAN Radio interview.
The best way we can think of to describe Sex Worker, the solo project of Daniel from Mi Ami, is like a lo-fi, lysergic pop Prince, the music is minimal and electronic, slipping from James Ferraro like warped tropical loopscapes, to super minimal dubbed out house, to eighties disco by way of Ariel Pink, to lo-fi 4-track electro, the perfect back up tracks for Daniel's sexy crooned falsetto vox, but there's more to Sex Worker than faux soul, shit gets pretty fucked up throughout.
Sure, much of the record is spent slithery sexily through dimly lit neon soaked eighties nightclubs, crooning in dark basement underground discos, and speeding along empty roads with tinted windows and the top down, but the sound definitely gets weirder than all that, brooding and ominous and almost sci-fi here and there, super distorted and blown out elsewhere, the vocals an anguished howl over buried beats and warped looped melodies, loopy squelchy playful electronic skitter butted up against, skittery, stuttering almost skipping sounding soundscapes of warped FX drenched buzz and warbly glitched out crunch, before finally settling back down for the final 10 minute workout, "Honeymoon Babylon", haunting and electronic and minimal, the beats crumbling and distorted, laced with ghost like melodies, and all sorts of creepy effects and twisted production, and after a brief bit of falsetto crooning, the song devolves into an awesomely fractured futuristic electro jam, all droney and woozy and seriously druggy and psychedelic.
If you have a particular penchant for balladry that has the power to move you to tears, please do yourself a favor and check out the wonderful Canadian singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith! Highly lauded by critics and notable fellow songwriters - Elvis Costello,
Canadian loner Ron Sexsmith is a master of the melancholic. Beautiful, subdued songs that'll leave you with a lingering cloud of woe. You may already know his voice from the songs he co-wrote and sang with Neko Case on her 'Furnace Room Lullaby' album. Definitely for extra-downer fans of Rufus Wainwright, Nick Drake or Jeff Buckley.
No, it's not a new Atom Heart release of drill & bass mambo-core, Sexteto Electronica Moderno were a Uruguayan group which recorded four albums between 1968 and 1972. The "Electronica" in their name most likely refers to the fact that they used heaping amounts of Hammond organ, electric guitars & bass and other electric instruments in their otherwise typically acoustic jazz instrument line up. All but the final number on this collection (a vocal number with lyrics sung in Spanish) are cool tropical jazz instrumentals and their sound fits snuggly betwixt the likes of Herb Alpert, Cal Tjader and Ethiopian groovemaster Mulatu Astatke with a dash of Les Paul-esque guitar (not Paul's double speed over-dubs mind you). This is an excellent pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow for any seekers of rare exotica and 60's bachelor pad music. This collection is a best of, featuring tracks from the four albums the group produced in its career. Along with several originals are some great renditions of such classic numbers as Burt Bacharach's "The Look Of Love" and "I Say A Little Prayer", as well as Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime, Moi Non Plus".
Fucking hell. Where did this guy come from? And why the hell haven't we heard anything else that he's done? To answer the first question, Sexton hails from the quaint hamlet of Franklin, Tennessee and had travelled up the road to Nashville to collaborate in the (now defunct) outsider noise-junk collective Horsehair Everywhere - another project we've not heard, but by all accounts conveyed a psychedelic violence through stoned happenings for collaged film, scabrous dronemuzik, and stoned antics. Sounds a hell of lot like The Starving Weirdos to us; and Geoffrey Sexton seems to be taking a page out of the Brian Pyle playbook with his underappreciated acoustic-dronology project RV Paintings. Sexton's prepared guitar drones ooze with a subterranean murkiness, growling and undulating towards dramatically dense codas on each side of this tape. The scraping textures give the impression of Sexton rummaging around some crumbled farmhouse, generating resonant frequencies out of antebellum glass and earthen rumblings from piles of rounded bricks all sweating in the humid Southern summer heat. Think Parson Sound, Thuja, and yup RV Paintings and you're getting somewhere close to what Sexton is doing here on 197 Black Pendulums. Fucking great.
Here's a super obscure blast of long lost Southern garage punk caveman drug rock blooz stomp from a short lived band, who existed for a brief stretch way back in the late nineties, featuring members that would go on to play in aQ beloved weirdo avant black metal outfit the Mausoleums. But don't be expecting any tripped out black buzz or pop flecked post BM trippiness, this sound of Sexual Confusion was something else entirely, primal, and raw, primitive and fucking fierce, this dense squall of swampy, swaggery punk rock energy was written and recorded when the band members were just 17, and was originally released as a cd-r, limited to just 30 copies and sold at one of the few shows the band actually played, including several at Christian coffee houses, where they would wait 'til right before they played to announce the name of their band, and according to the scant info about these guys we could dig up, one of those shows was the Tampa Bay Oi! fest, where the skinheads were most definitely not amused.
Citing Black Flag, the Godz, the Germs, the Fugs, Teengenerate, the Stooges, 13th Floor Elevators and the like as influences, we also hear shades of Green River, the Lyres, Wipers, Aussie outfits like the Scientists, Feedtime, King Snake Roost, pretty heady stuff for a bunch of deep South teens, but these guys pulled it off big time, laying down a pretty convincing sprawl of filthy, furious, sweat soaked, bloody lipped, thud rock, all swaggery, heavily flanged guitars, murky caveman drum pound, whiny snarled vox, slipping easily from organ driven old school garage rock creep to stripped down, lo-fi dirge pop to full on punk rock, fist in the face, fuck you up and get high, skull caving pound. The tracks laced with wild psychedelic synth squiggles, churning swampy bass buzz harsh howled vocals, their debt to classic sixties garage rock jangle on display big time, but all fused to some serious furious punk rock energy, and further warped by the occasional stretch of druggy acoustic blues, tweaked and twisted tangles of angular, atonal psychedelia, brutal bursts of near hardcore pummel, super rad backwards guitar, spaced out sitar raga style buzz, and long droned out layers of undulating high end shimmer, but ultimately all of that weirdness is only window dressing for a pretty serious set of songs, that still sound pretty fucking bad ass more than a decade later.
In addition to the original 'album', this limited reissue tacks on a handful of demos, which in most cases we would expect to just be shittier versions of the proper songs, but here, the tracks sound possibly even better in demo form, super raw, even more lo-fi and blown out, wasted and murky, the sort of filthy drugged, out, busted up sonic filth these guys were made to wallow in.
A cool and totally DIY daily planner/calendar for 2012 that's also filled with tons of awesome tips for life in San Francisco, covering everything from knowing your rights as a worker to free nights at theaters, fish to avoid, taxi cab numbers, 24 hour diners, weekly food cart meet-ups, farmers markets, knitting patterns, needle exchange places and more... all done with a total lo-fi punk rock aesthetic, plus there are loads of listings for cool events happening during the year. Rad for people who live here to have as a resource and functioning calendar/daily planner, as well as any of you out of towners who think you might be coming to SF at any point in 2012, or hell anyone who just wants a bad ass daily planner.
It also comes with a cd compilation of San Francisco bands including Full Moon Partisans, The Dont's, The Abi Yo-Yo's, and more.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
New songs from Miss Barbara Manning and band. Features a Pretty Things and a Faust cover, plus Aquarius' own Cathy blowing bubbles on "Ladies of the Sea."
Bruce Russell says: "What ought to bother you is that on the evidence of the microscopic pits in this piece of metal foil you all damn near missed out on a Free jiz/pus extravaganza of earth beating proportions. The Sferics didn't rock, they were rock... Theirs was a tenuous balance of incompatible elements and unworkable ingredients that for a brief time in the year of our lord 1989 teetered its way into a few ears and onto some dodgy old cassettes in some battered shoeboxes." Kiwi chaos lovingly reisuued by fellow chainsmoker Darren at Drunken Fish.
One of three new releases this week from what might be our favorite tape label, The Tapeworm, who as always remain impossibly sonically unpredictable. This one from the oddly named duo SGR'CAV is in fact a collaboration between someone you likely know, Cristian Vogel, and someone you likely don't, SOS Gunver Ryberg, and together, these two whip up a very Tapeworm worthy soundscape of staticky alien broadcasts, haunting chordal drift, lots of hiss and hum, loads of space, a field of warped sonic events that seem to be drifting in a haze of near silence, the sound building to thick tarpit buzz, then splintering into skittery blasts of fragmented crunch, occasionally smoothing out into gauzy swirls of soft focus shimmer, but just as often, collapsing into tangled collages of psychedelic free-noise ambience. At times primitive and lo-fi, at others, heavily textured and caustic, and still at others, dark and delicately lovely.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
We had been hearing about these guys for a while, super hyped underground hip hop from Seattle, the first hip hop release on Sub Pop, word was Shabazz palaces' sound was seriously fractured and fucked up, hip hop deconstructed into all new shapes, and when we finally got a listen, that proved to be actually pretty true, warped loops, shuffling abstract beats, bizarre production, thick and polished one second. murky and muddy the next, swirling effects, horns, soulful vox, sci-fi synths, all blurred into tangled smears of avant hip hop abstraction.
And the main rapper's flow was definitely recognizable, a voice we had heard before for sure, but it took someone else telling us to make the connection - it's the guy from Digable Planets! Never would have guessed, on first listen, SP couldn't be further removed from the jazz-hop of Digable Planets, but the more you get into Black Up, he more subtle jazziness reveals itself, but that jazziness is set amidst all manner of lurching lumbering, jagged stutter and abstract skitter, the sound futuristic and psychedelic, but rooted in classic hip hop, we hear hints of Sensational, Company Flow, Antipop Consortium, Cannibal Ox, this record would definitely sound right at home on Def Jux or WordSound, but for as weird as this is, there are definitely some serious hooks, and might even have the potential (however slim) to actually crossover, but for now, kick back, and let these woozy warped sounds wash over you, and luxuriate in what is probably the best hip hop record of the year...
The cd version comes in a super swank gold flecked black velvet sleeve, while the lp is in a cool black on black jacket and includes digital downloads of all the tracks.
Second full length from these twisted hip hop alchemists, fronted by one of the guys from nineties hip hop jazz-bo's Digable Planets, but Shabazz Palaces is something else all together, a twisted strain of avant hip hop that's deconstructed, and mutated, and all twisted up. The first SP record, Black Up, was heavy on the murky, woozy, and warbly, a futuristic Afro-psych woven into stuttery beats, lurching slo-mo creeps, and all manner of warped loops, but on Else Majesty, something strange has happened again, with the sound moving even further away from call sic hip hop, but somehow drifting a bit closer to the laid back jazziness of Digable Planets. Give a listen to the samples below and you'll see what we mean. The vibe is less dark and shadowy, less grim and ominous, but at the same time, the sound is still mysterious, and darkly psychedelic, but infused with a strange sort of hopeful glow, a positivity, it's like Shabazz Palaces 'feel-good' record, but even then, this is some weird, tripped out shit.
The vibe is mellow, dreamy, the beats are al over the map, from classic loping hip hop grooves, to wild dense skitters, the music is warm and lush, swoon some synths, cascades of kosmische shimmer, vocals are clipped and cut and looped into weird hiccuping grooves, disembodied riffage surfaces here and there, as do swaths of smooth jazziness, the record peppered with short sonic fragments, mutated electro-hop, carnivalesque baroque electronica, some smoldering broodiness, all processed guitar shimmer, and brushed, hushed percussion, theremin like melodies, old school funk all twisted up into weird sonic shapes, big beats blurred into dizzyingly avant electro-soul, the sound in constant flux, between tracks and mid-jam as well, it's almost like someone flipping the channels, flitting between various strains of mutant hip hop, some shadowy and drowsily druggy, but most of them, groovy, and funky and weirdly posi, like a more psychedelic, and way more demented De La Soul maybe, at least this time around, but who can guess what other weirdness the next record will bring. We can only imagine...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Shabotinski is the oddball Viennese electronica work from Christoph Kurzmann (from Orchestra 33 1/3) and Dafeldecker. Oval like digital skittering produce subtle melodic episodes linking irony laden jazz-electronica-pop medleys ususally found on Cheap Records. The song fragments sound remarkably similar to the electronic facets of Six Finger Satellite, if they had a sultry trumpet player meandering over the post Kraftwerk / Section 25 drum machines.
Working from a similar blueprint as Tortoise, Shabotinski uses the studio as an instrument to warp and mutate the basic rock/jazz structure. Yet, the dissonant grinding tones so familiar to Mego's brand of electronica saves this from sounding like Tortoise, their offshoots or their disciples.
Okay 'new weird America' obsessives, drone nerds and limited vinyl fetishists... on your mark, get set, go! Vinyl only. Limited to 400 copies. Already sold out. We have the last 30 copies we could get. Features members of the Double Leopards and the Magic Markers. And to top it all off, it's actually also pretty darn great. Slowly drifting, warm murky ambience, the drone-y haze barely obscuring the moaning of distant feeding back guitars, simple atonal strumming, machine like creaks and simple muted percussion. All smeared into one fuzzy indistinct whole. Blurry guitars stretch into vast expanses of ambience and found sounds, eventually getting more active, scraping and squeaking, never enough to disrupt the droning dreaminess, while the original guitar seems to thicken and distort into a pulsing and throbbing slab of super thick drone. Nice!
We've been dying for this. Shackleton's live set for Fabric, a collection of unreleased tracks, exclusives, and even a handful of older classics (reworked into wholly new and never heard before versions), all woven into a sprawling, claustrophobic avant dubstep soundscape, that manages to be groovy, and creepy, haunting and abstract, rhythmic and skeletal, super minimal and strangely funky, almost like some hauntological take on dubstep. Ritualistic, occultic, with plenty of looped, super minimal rhythms, strange disembodied voices, mysterious samples, reverb drenched soulful croons drifting through fields of hazy shimmer and dubbed out ambience, occasional cinematic strings, lurching lumbering low end, lots of haze and gauze and blurred atmospheres, all looped and layered and stretched out into ethereal streaks of spectral sound, but unlike a lot of dubstep, Shackleton is more about the beats, and the surrounding ambience is super subtle, sometimes so much so, that it sounds like the beats are just skittering through empty space, but it's all a deft arrangement of tension and release, it's precisely how Shackleton weaves this moody, intense, and darkly claustrophobic soundworld.
Oddly enough (or maybe not), much of the sound here reminds us of African Head Charge, the same sort of abstract spiritual dub vibe, but stripped WAY WAY down and spaced WAY WAY out. Druggy and psychedelic, as much as rhythmic and hypnotic. So great. Even though it's a comp / DJ mix, and not a proper album per se, it might just be the best Shackleton release yet!
Like all Fabric mixes, comes in a cool metal box, with a printed inner sleeve, and a heavy printed cardstock slipcover.
This has been out for a while, but we hadn't been able to track down copies until now. It's been a while since we've heard from Shackleton, and we were sort of amazed to realize that this was the first proper album from Shackleton we'd ever reviewed, there was a Fabric mix, there was a collaboration with Pinch, a collection of ep's, a split with Mordant Music and Vindicatrix, and those awesome Skull Disco comps, but this is the first record proper. Even though technically it's not a proper album per se, apparently the whole first disc here was in fact a series of ep's, recorded using, yep you guessed it, some sort of Italian drawbar organ (whatever that is), and this the tracks seemed to all belong together, and they definitely do, the sound seems less dark, and more playful than on past Shackleton recordings we've heard, gone is much of the dubsteppiness, the droniness, the darkness, and in its place, a much more vibrant and multi hued soundworld. A dizzying concoction of stuttery beats, of swirling melodies, strange voices, fragmented samples, blurred collages spinning across the stereo field, slipping easily from synthy, krauty mesmer, to almost Eastern sounding Muslimgauze style beatscapes, from crackle drenched minimal house music, to dubbed out abstract low end minimalism, and from swirly almost soundtracky ambience, to skittery Kompakt style techno. The vibe is super varied, every song constantly mutating and shifting, some serious avant techno ear candy for sure, but it definitely makes it a tough one to describe, however, as far as listening, it's endlessly mesmerizing, every track here deeeeep and lushly layered, multiple beats, weird loops, lots of samples, mysterious voices, all deftly chopped up and reconfigured into some serious hypno-techno mesmer.
The second disc was originally intended to be a bonus 12", but there ended up being too much music to fit on a single 12", and thus became its own record, and as the title suggests, was written to be more spacious and abstract, which it is, but really it's all relative. This is no pop ambience, it's Shackleton's warped take on 'quiet' music, which is really not that quiet at all, full of sputtering rhythms, ping pong beats, buzzing synth thrum, thick swaths of rumble and hum, and spare skeletal rhythms. The opener is seriously dark and sinister, more like the dubsteppier Shackleton of old, but a bit more droned out, but really, that's as dark, and as quiet as it gets. Part two adds female vocals, woozy melodic percussion, bigger beats, warbly samples, sheets of glitchy squelch, fluttery flutes, there's a definite kitchen sink thing going on, but Shackleton can pull it off, and while this is not strictly ambient, or even really quiet, it is pretty abstract, and impressionistic, lots of tranced out loopage, mesmerizing melodies, plenty of texture, the tracks lengthy explorations of some warped sonic otherworld, pairing maddeningly repetitive melodies, with ominous spoken word, African chants, bloopy bleepy effects, all of those elements constantly blurring and looping, drifting in and out of phase, it's like a modern chill out dancefloor plunderphonia, and it's pretty goddamn psychedelic, and seriously, mind meltingly addictive.
For the dubstep obsessed among us, especially those of us who aren't scouring DJ shops for white labels and limited 12"s, this collection is a godsend. Gathering up, as the title suggests, 3 eps from one of our favorite dubsteppers, Shackleton, who faithful aQ-ers probably remember from the Skull Disco collections, the Steppas' Delight comps and the recent split with Mordant Music. The music of Shackleton is not just your regular old dubstep, it's super lush and expansive, skittery and groovy, dark and haunting, and these jams are no different.
Spare and skeletal, yet impossibly full and dense, minimal on the melodies as well as the beats, these eps are super stripped down, even by Shackleton standards, these tracks are not as bass heavy as you might imagine, more light and ethereal, not light in spirit, but in sound, the vibe is still dark and mysterious.
The strange vocal snippets in "(No More) Negative Thoughts", the twisted woozy melodies and stuttery hand claps on "It's Time For Love", the cool tabla laced drift of "Mountains Of Ashes", the super dark and noisy droniness of "There's A Slow Train Coming", which is about as sinister as it gets here, the record is jam packed with cool stark beats, and all sorts of moody melody and bleak ambience, culminating in the closer "Something Has Got To Give", with it's chopped up vox, creepy processed laughter, koto style strings, shimmering minor key drones and the brittle barely there beat, it's almost like a dubstep soundtrack for a lost giallo, malevolent and cinematic and seriously sinister!
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.
Another amazing artifact unearthed by Dagored, this time a lost classic from Shades of Joy, which on first glance appears to be the soundtrack to Alexander Jodorowsky's brilliant film El Topo, but is in fact music inspired by the film, and is meant to not only compliment the film but also Jodorowsky's larger artistic vision. Shades Of Joy is a massive 15 piece group who specialise in exactly what you would expect from a huge seventies psychedelic rock group: organ driven acid rock, with Santana like wah guitars and epic drug addled jams. As this is a sort-of-soundtrack, the sound shifts quite a bit, from the aforementioned acid rock, to schmaltzy easy listening to full on freaked out free-jazz fusion work outs to dark and dangerous funk, to the opener, a Morricone inspired mini-epic, all spanish guitars, flutes and trumpets. Really cool.
