Local noise pop murk merchants have pretty much inherited the grimey, grungey, blown out psych pop crown from the seemingly now defunct Iran. They have the same sort of Beatlesque pop sensibility and choose to bury it in all sorts of grit and hiss and crackle and feedback. Total blown out indie jangle, warped and warbled super affected vocals, lurching grooves, guitars drenched in crumbling distortion and swaddled in swirls of fuzzy shimmer, the drums a Neanderthal pound sounding like they were recorded in a cave, the vocals like Lennon heard through a cracked kaleidoscope. This is the NWOSFNP (New Wave of San Francisco Noise Pop), a wonderfully fractured, totally free and massively fucked up pop music. We love it!
Released and designed by the arts and music collective Mount Saint Mountain (who also released the Mall 12" reviewed a few lists back), packaged in a super cool three panel silkscreened chipboard sleeve, adorned with weird hand drawn bulls, and limited to 300 copies!
Now that Iran seem to be dead. And the Church Steps are gone. And the Coach Whips are no more. Well, it's up to Sic Alps to keep the SF noise pop freak flag flying!
It always seemed that sonically, these guys belonged on Siltbreeze, and lo and behold, it has come to pass. For those who are new to Sic Alps, imagine a fractured noise drenched lo-fi garage pop, rife with blown out drums, simple detuned guitars, lazy drawled vocals, tons of reverb and distortion, all tangled up into some seriously catchy pop. Guided By Voices, Strapping Fieldhands, Pavement, but with plenty of hazy sixties psych, a killer lo-fi Phil Spector-ish wall of sound production, and a bit of corrosive noise and fractured amp buzz a la the Dead C.�
U.S. EZ leans way more toward the pop than the noise, many of the songs, eschewing any sort of noise or distortion completely, offering up instead, a sort of shimmery sixties soft pop, all jangly guitars, and reverbed background vocals, but elsewhere the band rocks pretty hard, channeling classic nineties slacker indie rock, through modern noise rock, via some fuzzy retro garage, the result as we mentioned before, often ends up sounding like a Beach Boys or Hollies record on Siltbreeze. Which should be recommendation enough. Dwyer from the Oh Sees says it's worth it just for the track "Gelly Roll Gum Drop"!!
Ultra ultra limited one sided 7"s from local noisepop faves Sic Alps. Pressed on clear blue vinyl, packaged in a plain white sleeve with a black and white sticker and NO information, this just might be the poppiest Sic Alps yet. Beginning with revving engines and super distorted drums, the track soon launches into some sunny jangly reverb drenched pop, all clean jangly guitars, summery sing songy vocals, a super catchy melody, classic old school Phil Spector style lo-fi production, it's almost a shame it's only one song. Like a noise rock Archies, or the Beach Boys recording for Siltbreeze. Good stuff. And, it's a Throbbing Gristle cover fyi!
Here's a short cassette released by AQ pal Mike Donovan (Big Techno Werewolves, Nam, Sounds Of The Barbary Coast, The Ropers, Dial Records) of his current band Sic Alps whome you might recall from their split 7" with California Lightening (featuring members of Erase Errata)! As with most releases by the very DIY San Francisco fella Mr. Donovan, there is only going to be a very small homespun run of these made, so needless to say, don't snoooooze!
Pssst... we also have a small number of some other Folding cassette releases, all with hand made covers -- a short one from Death Sentence: Panda plus a compilation he compiled with artist Chris Johanson called SSSSSOSS2 and ones by Dark Yellow Swans (aka Yellow Swans) and NVH with Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny. Dust off yer cassette deck!
A super limited split single by two raw SF art-rock hotties! On special occasions half of Erase Errata (namely Jenny and Bianca) splinter off to form the dynamic duo California Lightening (no, not Lightning). And when Sic Alps convene they usually star Hospitals' Adam Stonehouse and Mike Donovan (of Big Techno Werewolves and Church Steps and a heap of other projects), but on this record the abovementioned Jenny (oh yeah, and she's also a member of Burmese!) and Flying Luttenbachers' Weasel Walter join in the S.A. fray too. The record sleeve features those participants, minus Mr. Walter, remaking the Lennon/Ono Two Virgins album cover photo. That in itself is an attention grabber, but then there's their music to keep you glued too. Sic Alps proclaim "I Am Grass" in their peculiar hazy, glazed-eye dissonant fashion and California Lightening offer up a churning menace in "Basement". Ultra limited pressing of 300 of which we've only got a handful, so either act now or whimper to yourself when they're all gone!
Hello! A three-song import single from the side project group of famous Scottish postrockers Aidan Moffat (Arab Strap) and Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai). It's really nice, albeit a bit of a novelty as all three songs are covers. There's a gorgeous downer version of #1 hit "Whole Again" by girl group Atomic Kitten, a version of The Fall's "Bill is Dead" that's tighter and better than the original, and a short but sinister rendition of the Mills Bros' "You Always Hurt the One You Love". There's incandescent guitar dripping with emotion, Moffat's whisper-growl of a voice, and a lovely sheen of depression throughout. Well done.
Is Sick Anchors slang for anything?
Reissued documentation of guitarist Mick Turner's punk days, before the Dirty Three and Venom P. Stinger!
Peter Christopherson, John Balance, and Boyd Rice recorded three tracks in 1985 under the moniker Sickness Of Snakes for a split single with Current 93 entitled Nightmare Culture, which understandably has been long out of print. According to the liner notes by Boyd Rice, there had been talk of the three continuing their collaboration by travelling to Calcutta and hiring a really cheap orchestra to perform some sort of atonal mass, whose content and score had yet to be determined. The adventure never took place, leaving the sum total of the Sickness Of Snakes material at very small amount of material (a fourth track was created for a German compilation around that same time, but strangely is not included here). While this reissue from Soleilmoon is commendable in uncovering these rare and quite impressive tracks, the price of admission is rather steep.
When the trio went into the studio, they had rented one of the Fairlight samplers which had been making the rounds in England, and they happened to get the machine right after Kate Bush had used it for her Hounds Of Love album. Samples of tubular bells, noir trumpets, and saccharine strings got repurposed for Sickness Of Snakes, whose opening track "Various Hands" is very typical of what Coil would have crafted on their debut Scatology, with lugubrious sampled strings marching through a doleful electronic sonata, but topped with the sounds of bombs being dropped into the WWII trenches. Those noir horns and electronic bells spill into an elegaic atmosphere on "The Swelling Of Leeches;" and "The Pope Held Upside Down" is a mangled collage of pigs squealling, for an unsettling coda to this unduly short collaboration. In full disclosure, Coil reissued these tracks on their Unnatural History compilation (also out of print), and Boyd Rice tossed "Various Hands" onto his compendium The Way I Feel. If only there were more tape to be scraped off the studio floor.
The beginning of Sickoakes' Seawards album may make you mildly seasick. The notes ringing out from the guitars list back and forth, bending and reverberating in a woozy fashion. This Swedish post-rock sextet augment the basic rock instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums with saxophones, trumpet and trombones. Their first album's seven tracks are big on haunting, soaring atmospheres with no vocals save for a smattering of dialogue samples. The standout is definitely "Oceans On Hold" with its brisk tempo (sorry no pun intended) driven forth by the slinky swift guitar picking and propulsive drumming. The number gradually slows to a thawing glacial glisten. Yes, fans of Godspeed and Mogwai, there's a new kid in town. A beautiful debut.
First record we've reviewed from this weirdo Romanian black metal duo, whose sound is a gloriously lo-fi folk flecked blackness, that manages to be surprisingly poppy and melodic, while remaining raw and lo-fi. The record opens with a short sort of intro, that is barely black metal at all, an almost post rock lope, all melancholic melodies, and shimmering, softly distorted guitar shimmer, the vocals a growling rasp, the only really blackened element, and even when the record proper kicks in, the drums galloping, the guitars buzzing, the vocals a monstrous bellow, the sound remains brittle and shimmery and melodic, the sound infused with serious melody, when the sound shifts into the bridge or chorus, it's almost like some lost indie rock record, again, the vocals really the only thing tethering it to the metal world at all, fans of the new wave of metal gaze will definitely feel right at home, the same sort of blessed out shoegazey vibe pervades much of the sound here, but there's plenty of other weirdness going on, like the almost disco beat on "Lesben Allo", beneath some chugging metal, and some twisted growly vocalizations, not to mention a trippy psychedelic breakdown part way through, complete with maniacal laughter!
There are moments of more grim buzz, "Kozmikus Zuhanas" manages to crank up the black buzz and the sonic murk, but even then, the melody shines through, keeping the sound from slipping into pure black buzz, but the record is all the better for it, a sort of gloomy blackened pop, while elsewhere the sound slips into lurching blackened doom, but there too, laced with acoustic guitars, and haunting atmospherics, and lets not forget "Melankolikus Transzcendens" which add some bleating horns to the occasion, coupled with frantic double kick drumming, and weird monotone vokills, again, well removed from black metal, and instead, sounding, like some blackened noise rock, or gloom pop, but whatever you call it, we're digging it big time!
Killer reissue of a long out of print 2006 ep from these raw Romanian black metallers. Their sound, then and now, is brittle and brutal, furious and frenzied, a mix of relentless black buzz and galloping classic metal. The Popeye-like rasped vokills ride atop smoldering slow build epicry, and on-the-verge-of-collapse chaos, the sound constantly surprising, being rooted in total old school grimnity, but displaying super ambitious soundscaping, stunning melodies, and an extremely high level of songcraft for the genre. A quick listen reveals all the buzzing blackness you could want, but deep listening is definitely rewarded with an emotional depth, and instrumental prowess, that in a different context could have turned into an entirely different record. As it is, Lelekosveny seems to capture the best of both, resulting in a dense, melodic black metal, rife with pathos, but pathos presented like a spiked gauntlet to the face.
Includes two killer bonus tracks, both covers, by two bands we had never heard of: Angel Reaper and Fantom! Both will no doubt require further investigation.
A few lists back, we got a great response to a disc we listed by Sicilian drone duo Comet III, their debut album Astral Voyager, a totally "kosmiche" trip in ye olde krautrock vein. One half of Comet III, their "space guitarist", has a new cd-r out recorded under the name Siddhi, released by the Italian micro-label Akoustic Desease, and we of course grabbed some asap (they're limited to just 115 numbered copies). So we have a few to share with you and then that's probably it!
Space guitarist indeed. This is way spacey, yet with a folky vibe. 5 songs, 45 psychedelic minutes. Drifting electronic drones, quiet and lovely. Rustling percussive rattle. Repetitive guitar ornament. Slow and stately. Mellow melancholic bliss. Forgive us the sentence fragments, it's just that we're trancing out within Siddhi's cosmic, elemental embrace...
As we said, super limited. Packaged in colorful, stiff cardboard sleeves.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Techno Animal) and Kevin Martin (God, Ice, Techno Animal) get together again as The Sidewinder to mix up some heavy modern lo-fi electronica. On the always-interesting Mille Plateaux label.
So many grind/metalcore/hardcore bands over the years owe more than a few pennies to Boston's hardcore/grind pioneers Siege. In fact, a lot of those bands owe them EVERYTHING!
Much like the length of their songs, their time as a band was brief, but in just two short years they laid waste to many with their intense sound and energy. Bands like Napalm Death and a whole slew of early Earache/Noiseville acts made pretty decent careers for themselves taking that Siege sound and running with it, some of them continuing to do it even now, in fucking 2007!
This cd collects all their compilation tracks as well as all the "official release" stuff, and while this ain't a very long player, Siege managed to get to the point REAL QUICK, without wasting much more than some picks, some guitar strings, a bunch of drumsticks and last but not least YOUR GODDAMN EARDRUMS! One of the greatest and heaviest punk (metal?) bands ever!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Experimental quintet fronted by Martin Siewert and including former Naked City keyboard player Wayne Horowitz. Meditations on water dripping are conceived here as a continuous performance. Churning guitars blend into tinkering effects and improv drum sweeps with a surprisingly lovely effect.
This actually came out a few months back but we've been waiting and waiting for more to show up in stock so we could review it...now they're here, so here goes: it's Austrian experimental guitarist Martin Siewert's new solo album, wherein he gets into more of an electronic pop thing than we've heard from him before. Has Siewert gone techno? Well there IS some poppy, techno-ish glitch blip stuff on here, and it's good -- but the two longest tracks (like, 14 minutes and 18 minutes) get into a droney, textural zone similar to the electro-acoustic improv work we've enjoyed by Siewert in the past. And one of these epics benefits from the live drumming of Tony Buck of AQ-faves The Necks! Also appearing on the album are prior Siewert collaborators Werner Dafeldecker, Patrick Pulsinger and Radian's Martin Brandlmayr (no slouch in the drumming dep't. either!).
Experimental electro-acoustic improv label Erstwhile has put out a lot of great stuff, but this is perhaps their best release in a while! Too Beautiful To Burn documents the musical meeting of two Martins, guitarist Martin Siewert and drummer Martin Brandlmayr, both from Austria. Siewart we've heard before playing in groupings with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Werner Dafeldecker, Taku Sugimoto, Kevin Drumm, and Jim O'Rourke to name a few. Meanwhile, Brandlmayr we know as the drummer for the fantastic Viennese post-rock outfit Radian. Together, with Martin S. manipulating guitars, lap steel, electonics and synth and Martin B. playing drums, percussion and vibraphone, they've conjured a wonderful 5 track, 45 minute soundscape, ranging from Raster-Noton or Sachiko M style sine-wave tonalities to more vigorous abstract noise that at times even reminds us of the Dead C.
This is spacious, minimal, very beautiful stuff, with layers of gentle electronics, hiss and drone, and glitchy rhythms. Radian fans can perhaps imagine an ambient version of that band, more mellow and drifty. With the guitar as sound source, certainly fellow Austrian Fennesz would be another referent. The duo's live playing gives this a physicality so often absent from laptop computer music, so even though their sounds enter the hard-disc realm at some point, they retain a warm, human element. You can get a sense of how this originated in a live event with two musicans interacting. Extremely successful, and indeed, too beautiful to burn -- so buy it.
Pretty much every black metal band in the world owes their very existence to Venom, hell, the very name of the genre comes from the title of a Venom album, and while the sound has changed over the last couple decades, the template is not all that different, buzzing guitars, galloping drums, satanic lyrics. And sure, the sound has indeed spiraled out in every possible direction, from dirgey depressive buzz, to lightning speed blast, few have taken the sound further OUT than Japan's enigmatic Sigh, who throughout their nearly two decade existence, have incorporated Morricone style motifs, psychedelic rock, lounge-y jazz, over the top cabaret and lots of saxophone into their already twisted blackness.
So what to expect when Sigh decide to take on a set of songs by their black metal forefathers? Well, perhaps we might have expected something a LOT more demented than this, but hell, it's a bit refreshing to hear Sigh just sort of thrash and rock out without going totally haywire. With special guests Dan Lilker from Brutal Truth and Shane Embury of Napalm Death, Sigh have let their sexy saxophonist Dr. Mikannibal (who is really a doctor apparently) sit this one out (although she does sing a bit) so the band can spit out 7 kick ass blasts of old school pounding metal. Which is exactly what you get. These versions are not really all that far removed from the originals, heavy and intense and furious, but also wild and sloppy and a bit chaotic and loose, which when you think about it pretty much perfectly captures the peculiar essence of Venom. They picked a couple strange songs to cover too, the bluesy "Teacher's Pet" and the epic dramatic piano workout of "Mayhem With Mercy", but for the most part this is nothing but thrashing and buzzing old school black metal, heavy on the metal.
Weird only in that it's not that weird at all for Sigh, so folks expecting something fucked up and demented might be a bit disappointed, but most metalheads will be in heavy metal heaven, er, hell.
Released as an lp, packaged with a cd (not a cd-r) containing all the same songs!
Whoa! We were taken by surprise (in several ways) by the sudden appearance of a new album from Japanese black metal mavericks Sigh. We all loved the avant garde, psychedelic, stoner rock horror show of their 2001 disc Imaginary Sonicscape but we hadn't heard much about them since. Well, the press release for Gallows Gallery explains that this sixth Sigh opus was recorded last year but Century Media, previous label, refused to release it because it allegedly makes use of experimental, illegal "sonic weapon techniques" developed during World War II! Warning is given that this album could be hazardous to the listener's health -- in fact, supposedly one of the members of Sigh was hospitalized during the recording sessions due to the effects of this sonic weapon stuff. But... we're having a hard time believing all that! If you're expecting some sort of bowel-rupturing, flesh-decaying subsonic rumble you'll have to get a different cd (I'm sure we can find you something). Listening to this record is more likely to leave one puzzled rather than sickened.
Having heard it, our guess is that the REAL reason that Century Media dropped Sigh is that, even by Sigh's previous standards, this is just so darn eccentric, confusing, and (to us) amusing. We're thinking that if this "sonic weapon" stuff exists, it operates in the realm of psychological warfare, 'cause it does seem possible that this music could drive a person insane. IT certainly is! Kind of like the way a catchy jingle might drive you crazy. They've definitely upped the pop element of their sound here. That's right, POP. But not normal pop that could ever be, uh, popular. No this is weird...weird....weird. And it's still metal of course. Just not black metal really, more like European "power metal" with speedy drums and hooky choruses. But their voices are kind of chipmunky, and there's weird effects, psychedelic organ jamming, throat singing, sitars and saxophones... Yup, their genre-fuckery is still in full effect. This might sound like Dag Nasty punk one second, Iron Maiden metal the next, with a schmaltzy lounge-jazz interlude following that! And the James Bond theme gets hinted at as well. Totally the sort of thing that should be on Trey Spruance's Mimicry label, though it's on Baphomet instead.
Apparently whatever Japanese insane asylum wherein the guys in Sigh reside allows visitors, as this album features members of the Meads Of Asphodel (who are about the only band in the world that we'd say are all that similar to Sigh!), Necrophagia, The Red Chord, Yakuza, Dark Tranquility, Firewind, and Thine, helping out with the shredding guitar runs, dramatic narration, saxophone solos, and things like that. Someone else also contributes a trancey techno remix of one of the album's songs at the end of the disc, preceeded by the untitled electronic noises of track ten, which we suspect might be the "weaponized" one. So...be careful, especially since it's gonna require repeated exposure to ever figure this album out.
It's kinda weird to call an over-the-top symphonic, genre-shifting black metal record predictable, but that's only because we're dealing with Japanese weirdos Sigh here. If you've listened to them before, you just KNOW that you're gonna get all manner of twists and unexpected turns in their labyrinths of songs. If you haven't listened before, well, this is a good of place to start as any, especially seeing as with each Sigh release, it seems they only up the unpredictability factor. There are parts that definitely bring the riff in a straightforward thrash or black metal way, but in classic Sigh fashion, those moments disappear just as quickly as they started and give way to more frenzied symphonic weirdness. Graveward never lets up for even a second to let you stop and think about the part you just heard. Maybe it sounds like we're talking shit but these are all the things that make this record worth hearing. It's weird, it's Sigh, what else is there to say? Check it out. If the sound samples aren't working, they will be soon, it's just that we're having trouble deciding which ones to make, they're all pretty equally ridiculous - we're trying to find the one that has this, like, campfire and harmonica western boogie part that's totally bizarre, hopefully we can figure out which one that was...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Want weird? Watch out for this Japanese black metal band that tries to combine New Wave of British Heavy Metal guitar licks with Schoenbergian classical chamber music--it's like Venom sitting in with Bernard Herrmann to score a horror flick. One guy in the band is credited with, among other things of course, playing the triangle! See the quote at end of this month's AQ-L for more info!
It's a panic attack of over the top black metal theatrics from this notoriously 'round the bend band from Japan! The frantic tempo barely ever lets up as Sigh cram as much in the way of grandiose keyboards, blazing fretwork, thundering drums, and pompous choirs as they can into every nutty nook and crazy cranny of this album. The rapid, rasping delivery of the liberetto is dizzying too... we say "liberetto" because this album is divided into three acts, and has a definite operatic feel to it. Black metal opera. At 200 mph. It's like they've been listening to a lot of Devil Doll and Cradle Of Filth back to back, on crack.
Starting off years and years ago as Japan's truest "Nordic" black metal act (with their first album set for release on Euronymous of Mayhem's record label, before his murder by Count Grishnack of Burzum), Sigh went on to establish a career of horror soundtrack-inspired genre-fuckery that had critics comparing 'em to John Zorn and the Boredoms as much as Burzum. After their brilliant mashup of stoner rock psych and black metal mayhem on 2001's Imaginary Sonicscape, this cult took things maybe a bit too far for some of their fans with the unexpected (even for them) chipmunk-voiced poppy power metal moves of that album's long-awaited follow-up in 2005, Gallows Gallery. WE were happily confused and amused, though. And now Sigh has sharpened their blades to shred even harder on this album, dispensing with the chipmunks and also with the occasional saxophone lounge jazz and techno detours that popped up on Gallows Gallery. Absurdly bombastic, mixing heavy metal heroics with Morricone melodies, the fierce, frenzied, fixated Hangman's Hymn is as ridiculous as anything they've done but also undeniably, insanely impressive and entertaining.
Japan's best black metal band (along with Sabbat) are back with their first US domestic release, having just been signed by big metal label Century Media. We've always been fans of their fucked-up genre-mangling horror movie soundtrack metal, and this might
Japan's Sigh are back again with more of their batshit bonkers symphonic black metal as only they can do it. If you liked their previous dizzying disc Scenes From Hell, or most of the ones before that, then In Somniphobia is a no brainer. More of their over the top orchestrated million mile an hour eccentricity, that can stop on a dime to veer from prog-power metal bombast to classical soundtrack atmospherics to frenzied oompah action to, uh, "Baker Street" style sax soloing. With buzzing synths and sound FX, widdly guitars and filthy vokills, jagged industrial beats and loungey jazz interludes, there's a LOT crammed into each of these eleven tracks. Unusual (for metal) instruments used include sitar, jaw harp, shortwave, sarangi, accordion, glockenspiel, etc. etc. And one thing they don't neglect (along with the kitchen sink) is a large dose of MELODY. Some of it's kinda cheesy, to be sure, but in chaotic juxtaposition with everything else, that melodiousness comes off as crazed and creepy as well. And makes their avant-garde metal surprisingly listenable. Sigh fans already know more or less what to expect... for everyone else, it's kinda like Cradle Of Filth as if conducted by John Zorn, or Mike Patton!
Guests include Metatron from likeminded loons Meads Of Asphodel and Kam Lee of Death/Massacre fame. And the cover art is again by Eliran Kantor, who has come up with an amazing painting here.
By the way, we just figured out that Sigh's studio albums have a special naming convention to 'em, kinda like how Morbid Angel's are arranged alphabetically (Altars of Madness, Blessed Are The Sick, Covenant, Domination, etc.). The first letter of the title of each Sigh album is either an S, I, G, or H, and chronologically in order, they've spelled out S-I-G-H-S-I-G-H-S-I so far...
Japan's strangest black metal band returns with another mind-boggling rock 'n roll horror flick soundtrack-styled disc that surpasses their previous efforts in the genre-bending department. As enamored of John Zorn as they are of Venom, this trio combine catchy metal licks with 20th century classical. At one point in their the song "Black Curse" the band lurches into a country western vamp that'll make you think you've wandered into a Jim O'Rourke record! Such curious shifts though are executed so smoothly though that this comes across much better than the sort of Satanic Mr. Bungle you might imagine. The "metal" pick of the month, next to Satyricon.
Ready to return to the bizarre black metal (and beyond) world of Japan's Sigh? You'd better be, since that's where we're going, straight to, well, HELL. Hell for those who would prefer to listen to something simple and straightforward, that is! Scenes From Hell, Sigh's eighth studio full-length, is again an idiosyncratic mix of metallic symphonics and cartoonish chaos, complex and careening. If you liked both their last couple of albums, Gallows Gallery and Hangman's Hymn, you should be happy with this ('cause it's sorta like a blend of the two). In other words, it's for folks who like their metal ornate and over-stimulating. There's A LOT going on here. Piano, horns, thrash guitars, piano, classical string quartet, rasping vox, vocoder, even the sex appeal saxophone of new co-vocalist Dr. Mikannibal (not a medical doctor, she has a PhD in physics apparently). Whew! Sigh's unusual brand of orchestral metal is compositionally eccentric and utterly grandiose to say the least, like an over the top mash up of Cradle Of Filth, Carl Stalling, Ennio Morricone, Finntroll, Devil Doll, Arcturus, Dragonforce, Uz Jsme Doma, Hammers Of Misfortune - or imagine a black metal Koenjihyakkei, if you can - it's THAT hyperactive, heavy and heretical. Not to mention, performed to perfection.
The eight busy tracks here race through twists and turns, sounding both vicious and mournful, cinematic and circus-y, and very very Japanese. Even when they've got a horn section tooting away more like an oompah band than black metal, it's still freakin' hellish. So dizzying we're STILL trying to take it all in, but this review should suffice for now...
Oh, but maybe we should mention the guest spoken word appearance by Current 93's David Tibet?! And there's also a vokill cameo by Kam Lee from '80s Florida death metal pioneers Mantas and Massacre. Huh, David Tibet and Kam Lee on the same album, wow.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Noisy, lo-fi (read: poorly recorded, but that's the charm (read: novelty)) "art" punk from New York (where else?). The press release says "DNA meets High Rise" and makes many no-wave references (what better way to hype your band?). Don't want to be a prick and write this band off just yet, but it sounds like a bunch of emo kids decided emo wasn't hip anymore and decided no-wave
Some of us here at aQ feel like Brooklyn's sightings have never really gotten a fair shake (and some of us here, also, never gave 'em a fair shake!). Their particular brand of speaker-fried, uber-distorted, 4-track noise bludgeoning has never really caught on in same way as some of their Load Records cohorts, despite being every bit as jagged, intense, brutal and engaging as anything else that label has to offer. That said, over the course of a half dozen records Sightings have slowly and quietly (well, as quietly as a band this mammothly loud can do things...) refined their aesthetic, adding subtle electronic tones and touches, and moving slowly away from the confrontational pummeling that characterized their earlier recordings.
For Through The Panama, their 4th full length on Load, Sightings have taken a step further toward reinventing themselves completely. Gone are the blown out production values, the throat shredding yowls, and the muscular relentlessness of their earlier records. In their place? Cleaner production courtesy of Andrew WK and a simmering, sinewy intensity that ties together a range of disparate influences (This Heat's fractured tape loop groove, DNA's angular guitar skree, to name but two...) into something so tightly wound that it feels constantly on the verge of completely falling apart. The whole thing churns along at a low boil of muttered vocals, rumbling bass, tinkling piano flourishes and rhythmic density with occasional bursts of their old, frenzied selves breaking through. It's almost like you can hear the band trying to reign everything in and failing in really fantastic ways.
Hopefully this will be the record that pushes the band out of the shadows and garners them the attention they deserve. Totally, thoroughly, completely recommended.
The pristine, calming baby blue and pink bars that make up the cover art of this release give not a hint of the chaotic sonic stew contained within. Sightings are a New York cacophonous trainwreck spewing a distorted murky mess of vocal screaches and howls over
This is the dissonant and flailing full length follow-up to their debut 7".
Another obscure chapter in post-industrial history is reopened thanks to Russia's Monochrome Vision label. Sigillum S is an Italian project which began in the mid '80s, landing their first outing on the tastemaking label Broken Flag in 1985. The trio mined the sex'n'death concepts which Throbbing Gristle and SPK brought to the foreground through their autopsy and porno collages as part of their social critique through extreme imagery. Sigillum S was far more sensationalist in their use of this imagery, to the point where much of their titles hold the same poetic wordsmithery of death metal's ultra-violence. "Five Or Six Corpses" and "Chewing A Just Used Condom In Her After Coming Bliss... Ageing And Death Of Masses" are just two of the more colorful titles to be found on Studs And Divinity, a super rare cassette originally released on the cult-industrial label Minus Habens back in 1989. Crowlian ritual, dissolute hedonism, and sexual transgression were some of the other theatrically 'taboo' subjects for Sigillum S (along with plenty of other modern primitives from that era); but like Clock DVA and their offshoot The Anti Group (TAGC), Sigillum S stood as technologically savvy engineers of cybernetic noise, dark-minded ambience, and sporadic rhythmic excursions that could transcend some of their dodgier concepts. Studs And Divinity is one of the more successful ventures of Sigillum S, opening with a scalding piece of high-frequency plasma that spills through a minimalist/maximalist network of hiss and white noise. The aforementioned "Chewed A Just Used Condom..." is a cross between the roughly hewn loop practices of Phillip Jeck or Christian Marclay and the depressively neo-folk orchestrations for maudlin strings and electronics from Der Blutharsch or Novy Svet. For such a title, the piece is surprisingly lovely. Elsewhere, splintered electronics and flanging power-drones entangle within decentered arrangements, splattered crescendos, and the occasionally rhythmic lockstep that parallels what Greater Than One was doing around the same time. Remastered from the original cassette and now fleshed out with two bonus tracks from back then as well. Nice.
Another marvelous album from Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, one of the founding members of the Icelandic experimental / electronica ensemble Stilluppsteypa. Generally speaking, the themes of contradiction and tension that run through Stilluppsteypa's recordings also appear in the solo work of Sigmarsson, although he spends much more time allowing all of his ideas to unravel, slowly articulating each sound before offering semiotic and / or acoustical counterpoints. "A Little Lost" opens with a fluttering drone from a digitally enhanced church organ sounding quite similar to the sounds heard on "Ship" his sublime debut for Trente Oiseaux. Flicking in and out of audibility, these drone hamonics subtly couple with a quiet smoldering of static to offer an expanse of lulling sound. Throughout the album, Sigmarsson slowly dismantles the hypnotic atmosphere, first with pronounced lapses of the drones in favor of delicate textural sounds, then through a series of repeated chunks of elemental grit sliding backwards and forwards against the grain of the drone, and climaxing with a tumultous blast of digital noise shaped into offkilter metal riffs which abruptly cut to some drunk yokel barking the alarm call from a German U-boat. Sigmarsson's genius becomes apparant in how he has moved from the calm beginning of the album to this abrasive pinnacle with a self-contained intelligence and sly continuity in sound construction. The album returns to a sense of calm through the final track, a lengthy remix of mutant minimalism provided by Irr.App.Ext, the sorely under-represented project of Santa Cruz artist Matt Waldron. Very, very nice!
One of two cassettes that we're listing from Serbian cassette / objet d'art label No Basement Is Deep Enough. The artwork itself is totally fucking ridiculous - a gold painted wooden frame with faux-baroque trim that perfectly houses the plastic clam shell with an ironic / not-ironic photograph of the handsome mug of Mr. Sigmarsson himself, looking all the part of a 'serious' composer. Yeah, it's very cool looking; and Sigmarsson is the mad genius behind the long-standing, dada-electronic-drone outfit Stillupsteyppa out of Iceland. Sigmarsson does have a smattering of solo releases, and the sonic solo fruit doesn't fall that far from the Stillupsteyppa tree. A strain of very dry, black comedy can be found in much of Sigmarsson's work, evident in the title to this cassette and the snippets of half-strum, seemingly drunken Icelandic folk tunes that periodically get collaged into the arctic wash of holy minimalist organ drones, backmasked swells of maudlin orchestral music, skin-crawlingly Otto Muehl-esque vocal garblings, delirious tape-noise machinations of slasher film incidental music / sound design, and riveting miasmas of dreamy post-Derbyshire radiophonics. Much of it sounds very much like Sigmarsson's one-time collaborator Andrew McKenzie aka The Hafler Trio, especially in those manic collage drones that McKenzie cranked out in the late '80s and early '90s. It's a wild trip that could only be engineered by Sigyrggur Berg Sigmarsson. We've only got 5 of these, and there will be no restocks, sad to say.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is a member of the transplanted Icelandic trio Stilluppsteypa, whose work has evolved over the past decade from avant-rock wackiness to studied drone / glitch work but has always maintained an off-kilter and at times absurdist approach toward their concepts. "Ship" is Sigmarsson's debut solo recording and continues in the minimalist direction that
What a strange and wonderful trip it has been for Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson! Despite a journey that currently extends into its third decade, Sigmarsson's course as an artist has never lost its youthful charm, emotional resonance, and Scandinavian grandeur. Since 1994, he has been the crux for the Iceland outfit Stilluppsteypa. Once, a damaged art-punk trio of drunken Dada noise, Stilluppsteypa effortlessly reinvented itself into one of the more adventurous of glitched, fizzed, and digitally abraded outfits right before the paranoiac lapse of Y2K, only the shed those clothes for taciturn sound design of radiophonic drone and polar spelunking which earned them more than their fair share of exemplary dronological recordings often joined by the esteemed BJ Nilsen. Dotted throughout Stilluppsteypa's catalogue of recordings, you will find a few recordings from Sigmarsson on his own, occasionally reflecting a similar aesthetic course to Stilluppsteypa; but often veering even further towards austere minimalism and colder than cold electronics. The ice that is in Sigmarsson's veins belies some of the summery poetry that he has affixed to his solo work. His early masterpiece Ship ripples with sepulchral organ tones and rumbling frequencies that were in many ways the personal soundtrack for Sigmarsson's excursions of floating in the sea around Rejkyavik, while staring at the sun daydreaming about clouds, girls, booze, etc. What could be better? So Long is an album that began around the same time as Ship, in the form of extracts of luminously dark organ drones whose pools of sound never made their way on to any other recording. Slowly over the years, Sigmarsson began shaping those lumps of aural clay into a somber wanderings of soft noise, gorgeous hypno-mesmerism, radiant black drone, and elegantly subtle melodies buried under six feet of snow. Until, the next Thomas Koner record, we can delight in the heavy drones from Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson!
While the majority of contemporary digital minimalists furrow their brows while contemplating which filter to tweak in order to get the perfect attenuation of a completely inaudible sound, a few practitioners of minimalism have managed to dig a little deeper
The artwork is a series of poorly shot photographs of urban detritus, grimy hallways, discarded plastic bags, refrigerators filled with frozen meat, empty bottles of vodka, children's drawings, and even a portrait of Sigtryggur after an extended bender. Not the most readily discernable collection of images, but provides the sense that Sigmarsson still views himself as the chaos-loving Icelandic punk who founded Stilluppsteypa a decade ago. Match the music and the images with such idiosyncratic titles as "If I Remember, I Have Always Been Certain" or "The Sometime Charm," and Sigmarrson has developed an intriguing set of semiotic puzzles that may or may not have any solutions. When asked by Rob Young of The Wire if his Stillupsteyppa was willfully obscurist, his obvious answer was "In a way we are astronauts, we are filling in the missing gaps." Anyway, this is an album the more than lives up to its title.
Signal is the Raster supergroup/collaborative effort between Frank Bretschneider (aka Komet), Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), and Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto). Having set up an arsenal of laptops, black boxes, and oscillators, Signal's caustic electronics have produced a synthetic aural approximation of the Pantone spectrum of grey. Dessicated rhythms form terse electronic structures within layers of timestretched sinewaves and digital clickery. Nice work.
The latest chunk of clinical otherworldly, stark white dancefloor anti-funk from the always amazing Raster-Noton label comes from Signal, who we haven't heard from in ages, a sort of modern minimalist supergroup, featuring Frank Bretschneider (Komet), Olaf Bender (Byetone) and label head Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto), and you might think with that many cooks in the sonic kitchen, the result would be dense and messy and chaotic, but anyone even slightly familiar with these guys and this label know that nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, this is just as minimal and stripped down as anything we've heard from any of these guys�
But like much of the later Raster-Noton releases, the label's Ikeda-ish trademark super spare high end low end sine wave click and buzz has been tempered with bits of melody, subtle hints of groove, the result a strange alien robot dancemusic.
Beginning with a thick swirl of buzzing synth, almost like an electronic SUNNO))), the buzz quickly gives way to a glorious minimal skeletal funkiness. Where Chain Reaction took minimalism into a fuzzy, grungy underworld and wrapped it in murk and whir, these guys lay the whole thing out in a bright white space, all metallic edges and sanitized surfaces, a gloriously machinelike and propulsive future funk abstraction of techno created in some alien vacuum. The best part about this Signal disc is that in addition to all the stark minimalism and clipped robotic beats, they've also introduced some, well, maybe 'dirty sounds' might be the best way to describe them in this context, some air conditioner hum, some spurts of Geiger counter glitch, bits of blurry fuzz, smears of distortion and crumbling effects, some low end buzz that is chopped up into what almost sounds like metallic riffing. Rather than sounding out of place, they simply add more texture, more grit, make the music sound slightly more human and less alien, they also serve to highlight just how clinical and awesomely austere the beats and sounds are when those bits of buzz and hum drop out, a dramatic sonic shift that almost makes your ears pop. Awesome.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ultra minimalism from the three heads of Noton/Rastermusic - Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), Frank Bretschneider (aka Komet), and Carsten Nikolai (aka Noto) - whose combined effort is abstract digital sound structures based on the very simple clarity of sine waves and noise modulation.
Yet another jam packed issue of outsider rock, modern music, free jazz and everything in between. If you already read the Wire, you should definitely make room for Signal To Noise, they both cover similar sonic territory, but each with their own bent, meaning they compliment each other pretty perfectly.
This month Animal Collective is on the cover. And inside: Akron/Family, Andrew Hill R.I.P., Astral Social Club, The Terminals, Rod Poole R.I.P., People, Future Rapper, Khate, a piece on the Chicago drone movement, and a seriously massive collection of reviews, cds, lps, books, performances, installations and more.
If you read the Wire, and we know lots of you do, you sure as hell should be reading Signal To Noise as well. Very similar, so lots of stuff that should appeal to you Wire readers, but different enough to make it it's own unique beast. Lots of great writers, and of course they write about tons of amazing music.
This time around, Diamanda Galas on the cover. Inside: Atlas Sound, experimental banjo player Paul Metzger, jazz combo Edmund Welles, chamber group Slow Six, pianist and harpist and Coil sidekick Baby Dee, artist Jeff Schlanger, psych rock trio Radio Massacre International, NY noiseniks Carlos Giffoni, Dom Fernow and Brian Sullivan, and of course reviews galore, shows, installations, performances, dvds, cds, lps, books and even mp3s! Always a great read. And like every issue WAY recommended for music nerds and sound freeks.
Latest issue from this amazing modern music magazine, giving the Wire a serious run for their money! This time around Jarboe's on the cover, obscured by trees, while inside: Arbouretum, Harris Wulfson, Blood Brothers, guitarist Peter Walker, jam band The Slip, vocalist Lauren Newton, saxophonist Jean Derome, tripped out poster artists Patrick and Amy Borezo, the Globe Unity Orchestra, composer Milton Babbitt, trombonist Steve Swell, Sean O'Hagen of the High Llamas and then an overwhelming array of reviews, insightful and well written, books, live performances, tons of cds, dvds lps and even mp3's, 7", 3"s and tapes, and finally a whole mess of reissues...
We usually don't pay too much attention to the tags on Bandcamp. After all, bands can make tags that say ANYthing. And often it's the artist's perhaps not entirely objective assessment of their own music. "Psychedelic, black metal, ego-trap, drunk-wave, psych folk." Sure, that's something we'd want to hear (okay, maybe we wouldn't), but it doesn't and couldn't exist. But occasionally, the tags do speak to us, and give some insight into an artist, and even more occasionally, they NAIL it. Los Angeles MC Signor Benedick The Moor (who's also a member of weirdo hip hop outfit True Neutral Crew) has only two descriptors: 'experimental prog rap' and 'krautrap', and really, how could we not wanna check it out after reading that? And holy shit, that's actually what it sounds like. Not only is SBtM a killer MC with a super unique flow, the music is crazy, definitely proggy, all over the map, strings, and martial drums, what sounds like epic soundtrack music, alongside super distorted, grimy beats, and distorted metal guitars, wild synth squiggles wound around pizzicato strings and booming tympani, one track sounds like Surfing With The Alien, another sounds like primitive, outsider sci-fi-hop, and another is a wild barrage of video game music. The production is in constant flux, as are the arrangements, it's a seriously wild ride, but one that's super ambitious and is the kind of forward thinking hip hop that should be as big as Drake or Kanye. It's way more fucked up and experimental for sure, but considering how weird much of mainstream hip hop has gotten, the time just may be right for Signor Benedick The Moor to sneak into the spotlight. Here's hoping.
