While Andy Stott's last record, 2012's Luxury Problems moved even further into dreamlike murk, blurring his already gauzy sonic palette into something even more hazy and ethereal, there were brief glimpses of Stott's other side, weirdly mixed beats surfacing in the midst of hushed ambience, or a song suddenly splintering into blown out breakbeats. Of course those anomalies were somehow still deftly woven into the woozy fabric of that record's whole, geniusly disruptive variations, that perhaps hinted at not just what once was. But what might soon again be.
Faith In Strangers begins as we might have expected, a darkly delicate field of reverbed piano suspended in clouds of dusty, sun dappled shimmer, foghorn moans, and plenty of space, dreamlike expanses of near silence punctuated by haunting tones and subtly layered drones, melancholic melodies wreathed in a softly psychedelic haze, a faded, washed out ambience, a sound that had it stretched out for the remainder of the record unchanged, we would have been perfectly pleased.
But like Luxury Problems, Faith In Strangers seems to be more about the outliers. It's not long before delicate vocals drift in, again suspended in a softly swirling ether, but pocked by weird distorted chordal fragments, it's not until midway through the second track that the first beat surfaces, and it's a doozy, a loping, downtempo distorted dirge, the vocals much more prominent than on past Stott outings, not really that processed, sultry and witchy, the sound more like an even more abstract Portishead or Tricky's Nearly God project. Smokey and sexy, dreamily distorted, a gorgeously groovy, smoldering downtempo slab of psychedelic avant trip hop. And in fact, much of the record displays a similarly sonic trajectory, gauzy beats, sultry crooned vocals (with minimal processing, unlike the smears of collaged amorphous vocals on Luxury Problems), thick buzzing basslines, the sounds distorted, the rhythms hissy and staticky, classic drum machine sounds tangled up with some beats of Stott's invention.
A few tracks, like "No Surrender", get seriously trippy, ditching any semblance of groove, and instead unfurl a haunting and hypnotic noisescape, all cascading distorted synths, which soon fragment into jagged shards, which then in turn dissolve into blurred ambience, before a barrage of crumbling beats explode into motion, lurching and stuttering, the opening sounds resurfacing in drastically reimagined form, even more fractured and fucked up. The second half of the record is split pretty evenly between big, booming, beats and experimental electro, at times raw and rough, at others dreamy and skittery, and at others, something much more minimal, the final track in particular, mostly just a processed bassline wound around wordless female vocals, everything doused in FX and laid out into softly pulsing swells, eventually laced with spacey blips and bleeps, but for the most part hushed and super abstract, which is generally what we expect from Stott, although in the case of Faith In Strangers, it's actually an anomaly, with the bulk of the record heavy on distorted rhythms, with Stott's distinctive production/sound more in service of the beats, than the other way around.
Luxury Problems is another stunning progression in the already brilliant catalogue of Andy Stott. The game is fully upped on this one, the dark hues even more melancholic, the fogged hiss and forlorn night drones ever present buried beneath sheets of crumbling percussion and is associated ether-rag induced slo-mo ghost house lamentations. It's a haunted sound for sure, as were his previous two mini albums, Passed Me By and We Stay Together, but it seems the bleak vaporous vibes of this Manchester artist are now fully realized. The addition of Allison Skidmore's beautifully woebegone vocals on most of the tracks provides just enough emotional power to really push Stott's vision forward.
Kicking off with "Numb", beautifully dark chords swell underneath Skidmore's plaintive and gorgeous utterances, sounding like that Julee Cruise/Burial collaboration we've all been dreaming of, recorded on a cassette deck and blasted LOUD from some reverberating corner of an abandoned bus station. Sorrowful and droning, the 4-on-the-floor way slowed down, everything blurred out and disintegrated. "Sleepless" is a standout as well, starting with a hissing Zoviet France like syncopated drone, with dubbed out reverb drenched percussion and off-kilter loopy sheets of unraveling hiss, the rhythm track slowly starting to creep in about halfway through. Hitting those drugged out R&B vibes we've been digging so much, a pitched down vocal loop intermingles with the drums, creating a hypnotically swinging, yet dirge like dirt-house stomper. Everything blasted out and fuzzy, the beat goes on, never peaking but developing into a blissed out trance state, time stretched windchimes cascading from left to right as the cut up vocal samples surface from some deep subterranean sonic cavern. Exquisite. "Hatch The Plan" has a field recorded mechanics vibe, starting and ending with what sounds like a rusted squeaking conveyer belt drenched in 'verb, a totally heavy and corroded sub baseline appears. This is one of the more minimal moments of the record. Essentially a bass line, a kick drum, and some percussion, and plenty of space for Skidmore's vocals, which are multilayered to brilliant effect. Elegiac vocal passages double and triple up over this blackened percussive skitter, subtle elements of noisy details peak through the mix, building towards a break in the drums, the angelic chorus of the vocals given full reign in the mix, haunting and sonorous, before the conveyer belt sound reappears and pitches up and up til being left alone, untreated, to cap off the jam. Drugged out and woozy, layers of dirt and skree undulating, altogether creepy, yet still, somehow sublime.
The vibe of the record remains totally consistent throughout, but what's truly great is how Stott finds understated ways to insert some funk into the proceedings. Stott, after all, has some dance floor cred, gained through his garagey bassy alter ego Andrea (also worth checking out is Millie & Andrea, Stott's collab with Miles Whittaker of Demdike Stare), but this is an Andy Stott record proper, so any dance floor tendencies are going to be handled with a handful of bleak dust. The title cut offers the best example of a clever infusion of dance floor tropes. A flickering breakbeat rolls along, slow and low slug swing, stark vocal harmonies commingle with a downtuned & groovy bass guitar line. Suddenly a 'verbed out to the max disco-y conga loop shows up, WAY high in the mix, giving the whole thing a very handmade, mid nineties NYC hip hop by way of Bristol vibe. Cut up and funky, yet with all the forlorn noise dappled feeling emblematic of Stott's sound.
"Up The Box" though, at least rhythmically speaking, may be the greatest departure on the record. It starts as a grinding and mesmerizing caustic drum drone. Again with some serious Zoviet France vibes, reminding us a little of our favorite Demdike Stare moments, the otherworldly percussive grime looping on and on, swirling hissing textures building until suddenly the whole thing turns into a screwed and chopped breakbeat work out! Although dirty and decimated as hell, just a breakbeat and a handful of effects go toward creating this stark rhythmic roller. Finally, "Leaving" caps Luxury Problems with more of Skidmore's beautifully funerary vocal intonations, multilayered and of course with a healthy dose of cavelike reverb, a gloomy gothy synth bass line combined with all the gauzy heavenly texture in these final moments has our collective hearts about to break. SO FUCKING GOOD!
Luxury Problems is definitely Stott's best work to date, which obviously means this is totally essential. The sonic palette here is definitely consistent with all the various releases under his own name, but the addition of the voice adds an incredible layer of emotional depth. Inhabiting a deep and dark nighttime universe, ghostly and mourning, disintegrating and dreary, the perfect soundtrack to those moments of lonely reflection. So utterly recommended! Beautiful Modern Love sleeve design too. (FYI, the vinyl version we had for a moment, but it's now being repressed, we'll list it when we can!)
We missed the vinyl versions of Passed Me By and We Stay Together the first time around, but ended up making the double disc compilation from Andy Stott our Record Of The Week back in December of 2011, now the original lps have been repressed and are available again separately. Here's what we had to say about Stott and Passed Me By:
UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave!
Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened.
The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year!
Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.
Too Many Voices is the fourth record from Andy Stott, and manages to fuse two disparate sides of his sonic personality - a penchant for fractured beat experimentation, and a mastery of moody techno minimalism, here pushed even further out, well removed from those early records that initially captured our hearts. Not sure if Too Many Voices is meant to be tongue in cheek or self deprecating, but vocals are all over the place, and often not blurred into woozy melodic smears, with much of the album playing like some warped future soul, or alien neo-R&B.
There's still plenty of musical obfuscation, the opener lays down some Pop Ambient style shimmer, but then fucks it up, managing to inject some jitter and skitter, without losing any of the druggy tranquility, if anything, it's some sonic slight of hand, that allows Stott to basically slice and dice sounds, cram jagged cuts against other jagger cuts, and make it sounds like some sort of divine electro-lullaby. And from there on out, all bets are off. "Butterflies" drapes an aching falsetto vocal over some retro beatsmithery, and wreaths it all in hazy streaks of angelic thrum, wisps of breathless throb, and a production that sounds like it's melting and warping before your very ears. "New Romantic" sounds like Stott doing his best eighties electro pop, some super distinctive drum sounds, a new wave bass line, and some hazy vox that sounds like a super washed out ethereal Spandau Ballet demo, but of course filtered through Stott's fractured sensibilities. The future jams unfurl over the rest of the record, the sounds dipping into witch housiness, into melancholic downtempo, into slow motion electro, into hazy skeletal grime-funk and even into some almost Cocteau Twins sounding vocal heavy dream pop. It's a beautiful record for sure, but also baffling in its own way, somehow managing to be just what we wanted from a new Stott record, and absolutely not at all what we expected!
We missed the vinyl versions of Passed Me By and We Stay Together the first time around, but ended up making the double disc compilation from Andy Stott our Record Of The Week back in December of 2011, now the original lps have been repressed and are available again separately. Here's what we had to say about Stott and We Stay Together:
UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter.
We Stay Together dials back the murk that was all over Passed Me By a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave!
This one seemed so unlikely, we figured that it couldn't be right. That maybe "Batillus" was the name of the track. Or that the Batillus in question here, being remixed by minimal electronic mastermind Andy Stott, was just another beatmaker/soundscaper with the same name as the Batillus we knew, but in fact, the Batillus here IS none other than the NY metal crew whose records Concrete Sustain and Furnace we've raved about on the aQ list in the past. Apparently, Stott and Batillus shared a bill, Batillus professed their love for Stott, and a collaboration was born. And it's a doozy. The opening few minutes sound like a slightly darker version of what we're used to from Stott, all hushed staticscapes, buried pulsations, slow shifting textures, warbly minimal thrum, a sculpted landscape of hiss and hum, but soon the buzz grows more sinister, the rhythmic pulse, more ominous and caustic, the sound growing more industrial and metallic, and then the vocals come in, super processed and slowed down, a raspy, mechanical demon bellow, doused in reverb and delay and FX, dubbed out hard, and draped over a blurry tangle of tones, and a slow motion stutter step rhythm. So goddamn good. And as always, with a remix like this, it mostly leaves us wishing there was actually a proper band, that just sounded EXACTLY LIKE THIS. Who knows, maybe Stott and Batillus will join forces and make a full length together. Here's hoping...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Best band name ever? Definitely a contender. Never really thought that the Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley had anything like this in him, but this album is pretty damn good regardless! Almost living up to the ridiculous moniker! Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners was Shelley's oddball synth-wave project that began even before the Buzzcocks broke up in 1981. Back then, he took up the habit of inviting any number of unmentioned 'guests' over to his studio to jam with anything and everything in the studio; and these Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners recordings came from the many tapes that he had made by these means from 1980-1984. Who those 'guests' in Shelley's studio might have been is anybody's guess. Our guess though? Maybe Eric Random, maybe Francis Cookson, maybe Sally Timms from The Mekons. Regardless, the resultant recordings are an electronic-heavy art-punk with plenty of weirdo synth meanderings, Keith Levene sounding guitar splinterings, dub-inflected basslines, and scatterbrained effects. None of the punk-pop hooks from the Buzzcocks are found here, even when guitars, bass, and drums enter the picture; it's pretty much all about the studio as instrument with lots of effects swarming about the drum machine rhythms and bare-bones post-punk grooves. One could think of The Storm Bugs, Crawling Chaos, The Psyclones, or Jeff & Jane Hudson. Vinyl-only, and sorry, there's no download card with this LP.
Movie soundtrack or not, this cd is probably well worth nabbing because it features a new Spoon song and a stirring instrumental score by Spoon's Britt Daniel and Brian Reitzell! Apart from them, this soundtrack features a typical mixed bag of current hipsters and cred-heavy veterans that you'll find on most of the recent big budget ensemble cast movies (particularly those starring Will Ferrell). Here you also get Maximo Park, Delta 5, Califone, The Jam, The Upsetters, Wreckless Eric, M83 and Vangelis. For their part, Maximo Park rollick and riff on "Going Missing" with a guitar line that could easily have been nicked from Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner". All in all, a pretty decent mix tape!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Affiliated with the Manchester electronica terrorist outfit V/VM (Jansky Noise has provided additional production on a few tracks), The Stranger has produced one of the best records to emerge from that school of circuit / brain frying. Released on the outsider West Coast label Phthalo, this cdr release (limited to 250) is an alchemic concoction of boiling and crashing swells of digitized drone and sporadic post-Autechre break-skitter. Recommended!
Over the last few years, we, and most readers of the aQ list have become a bit obsessed with the Caretaker, as well as the man behind the curtain, Leyland James Kirby, who as the Caretaker, and also nder his own name, has created a body of work at once moody and mysterious, murky and out of time, a series of releases that sound like the musical version of faded photographs, old 78's spinning in ghostly parlors, that ethereal, ephemeral sound a glimpse into some lost era, or some alternate otherworld, needless to say, pretty much everyone at aQ is utterly smitten. Apparently, The Stranger is yet another moniker Kirby has employed in the past, although this is our first exposure to him as The Stranger, and maybe not surprisingly, this iteration of Kirby's The Stranger has ended up on Modern Love, home to lots of other aQ faves, including most notably perhaps Demdike Stare and Andy Stott. Which makes sense considering the sound of The Stranger, which seems to be a darkly minimal, hushed and hauntological, slo-mo electronic creep, positioning itself somewhere between the skeletal electronic minimalism of Stott, and the ritualistic psychedelic hauntology of Demdike Stare. With plenty of Kirby's washed out, faded sound, buried melody mystery lurking just below the surface. And really, below the surface is where most everything is going on here. The sound is extremely minimal, hushed and at times barely there, a few cursory listens in the store, has us thinking this was a bit boring, like nothing was going on, barring some hissy static, and buried rhythms, with all of the tracks bleeding into a single monochromatic whole. But what a difference some headphones make, and we do recommend headphone listening for this, cuz once the volume is cranked, and the rest of the world is shut out, The Stranger reveals itself as something warped and wonderful, some twisted deep listening, heavy on the rhythm and texture, in fact, it's essentially a deftly crafted landscape of slow shifting rhythms and textures, straddling some sort of avant ultra-minimal techno, and something much more atmospheric, the 'beats' are barely there, often fragmented shards of percussion, buried pulsations, clouds of static that just seem to have haphazardly formed sort-of-rhythms, on some tracks they do drive the proceedings, but on others, they simply bleed into the background, with a few tracks sounding like pure ambient field recordings of subterranean pipe fights, "We Scarcely See Sunlight" sounds like Kirby recording himself in the sewers, playing the iron ladders, creating primitive rhythms from metal on metal, while all around him the sounds of the city filtered from above add deep moans and distant rumbles, while "Spiral Of Decline", sounds almost like the gothic industrial of Vatican Shadow, albeit with Kirby's strange idiosyncratic sound design (the cool main rhythmic component that sounds like marbles rolling around in a plastic tube!).
"Providence Or Fate" comes about as close to the Caretaker as anything here, with it's crackle wreathed orchestral shimmers, the faded melodies and washed out ambience, the whole thing hushed and darkly lovely, reminding us of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck as well, but here those dreamy swatch of sound are tethered to a primitive tribal rhythm. And so it goes, from clattery crunch to blurred thrum, tinkling chimes wreathed in rainfall like static, to glitchy avant drone dub minimalism, barely there downtempo slowcore electro drift, to groaning gothic dirge.
As always, super striking Modern Love packaging, the cd in an oversized multi-panel sleeve, both the cd and lp adorned with mysterious, dripping, grey scale images of an old abandoned building.
The Strangulated Beatoffs are a weird weird band. But then what did you expect from a band called the Strangulated Beatoffs? Or from a band that features members of infamous noise punks Drunks With Guns?
This demented duo sometimes use samplers and loops to make fucked up hypnotic grooves and seriously demented electronic weirdness, but as is evidenced by Greatest Hits, they're also puerile purveyors of sick sludgey noise rock and filthy drunkrock dirges. Greatest Hits is mostly a collection of seven inches, the earliest recordings of the Beatoffs circa 1988-1992 or so and thus are maybe the closest sonically to the late great Drunks With Guns. Some tracks like "Porky The Pig And Bess" and "Heeby Jeeby/Practicing To Be A Doctor" are heavy dirgey space rock drug jams that sound like they could have been yanked from a Butthole Surfers set, while others, like "Lick My Butthole" musically sound like Dutch post metallers Gore, but with the addition of some goofy fucked up lyrics, and some damaged shards of buzz and crunch.
"It's A Vile, Vile, Vile, Vile World" is a super lengthy collage of looped eighties Carpenter-ish soundtracks, that sounds like it could be James Ferraro, but it's from at least a decade before Ferraro delved into lysergic pop music, so the Beatoffs are unsung musical pioneers! Fuck yeah! There's a Troggs cover too, but you'd never know it, a murky field recording that sounds like it was captured in the bar around the corner from the show, there's a dorky acoustic ditty, some strange carnivalesque child molesting weirdness, some Mentors like punk rock, but the finest moments are when the band do their best Butthole Surfers, crafting longform drone dirge drug rock, all swirling spacey effects, gnarled looped guitars, and mesmerizingly motorik beats...
If you're not sold by now, maybe this will sway you: Strangulated Beatoffs are one of Andee's all time favorite bands. EVER. So much so that he contacted them about reissuing all of their records, maybe even a box set, but all they wanted to release on tUMULt was their record of Genesis covers! (And then he never heard from them again.) How rad is that???
Featuring ex-members of Drunks With Guns and White Suburban Youth although you would never know it from the sound. Besides having the best band name ever, the Beatoffs take simple stolen sounds and loop and distort them until they become incessant and
Besides having one of the best band names ever, Strangulated Beatoffs have to be one of our favorite modern purveyors of what-the-fuck sonic weirdness, a group whose sound is impossible to pin down, sometimes a Drunks With Guns like dirgey scumrock sludge, other times, a twisted outsider electronica, groovy and loopy one minute, noisy and punishing the next. Although, not sure where this record would fall on that spectrum. To Begin with, as the title might have given away, The White Album is in fact, the Beatoffs' version of that classic Beatles record, here reimagined as something altogether more lo-fi and noisy, but by Beatoffs standards, not necessarily all that weird. "I Am The Walrus" starts things off, and sounds pretty much like a noisy psychedelic rock band doing a pretty straight ahead version, lo-fi and wreathed in guitar noise, but then things begin to devolve with "Norwegian Wood", the vocals a WAY up in the mix, atonal drawl, over simply strummed guitars, the song peppered with belches and studio chatter, and a whistle solo (!). Damaged and a little bit twisted for sure, but still strangely respectful to the original. Which is, quite surprisingly, how much of this plays out. "Ticket To Ride" is a pretty decent cover, all grungy guitars, and plaintive vocals, buried drums, distorted and blown out and psychedelic, then "Rocky Raccoon" is a warbly sprawl of darkly psychedelic croon and strum, echo drenched, and woozy. The rest of the record plays out similarly, the Beatoffs delivering a fuzzed out, droney, psychedelic take on this classic record, sounding like some warped, wasted bar band, inadvertently transforming the Beatles original into something that sounds more like Liquorball. And if you're wondering where all the other songs are, well, check out "Dear Prudence", which crams fragments of ALL the rest of the White Album, into a single song!
This recording from 1989 has been reissued on vinyl now by Skin Graft, as well as on pro-printed cd-r (yes cd-r not actual cd, not sure why).
We've been waiting for this reissue for 16 years. In fact, we briefly entertained the idea of trying to release it ourselves. It's a record we have been obsessed with since it came out in 1994, a super limited self released lp, a record we taped for everyone we knew, played for everyone we knew, the kind of record that inspired that sort of undying dedication, a totally unsung, indie pop gem from the early nineties, that attained a degree of infamy with a handful of weirdo music obsessives, but remained well removed from the spotlight it so richly deserved. Spin magazine even declared it one of the "Ten Best Records You've Never Heard", which probably sadly still applies, 15+ years later, but maybe not for long. Not if we have anything to say about it.
Those of you who are in your thirties or forties, no doubt remember the era that spawned the Strapping Fieldhands, think Trumans Water, Thinking Fellers, Sun City Girls, Pavement, the Grifters, Guided By Voices... The Strapping Fieldhands would go on to make a bunch more records, but Discus is where it all started, and is STILL the group's masterwork, a chaotic and confusional jumble of nineties indie noise rock and British Invasion pop, and as the liner notes point out, there's also a definite pre-British Invasion skiffle feel to many of the songs, skiffle being the sound that inspired the sound of the Beatles and the Kinks and all the other British bands of the era. The record itself is a hodge podge, a stumbling, glorious ramshackle jumble, slipping from gorgeous perfect pop, to angular free noise drift, to dirgey balladry, to rollicking rocking, to super experimental sound collage, most of those elements and sounds blending and mixing, into a sound, and a collection of songs, that sounded like nothing else then, and nothing since. Folks into Elephant 6 might be surprised to discover there was a band doing something similar, and arguably better already, and everyone who digs the new wave of noise rock / garage pop, a la Sic Alps, Oh Sees, it would be hard to imagine that those guys hadn't heard and dug heavily the Fieldhands.
The opening of "Boo Hoo Hoo" still gives us chills, the jaunty whistle, the woozy jangle, the faux British vocals, the immediately irresistible hook, the chorus with it's cloying melody and random cowbell, still one of the greatest pop songs ever. In fact, the opening three tracks, are another one of those timeless classic opening sonic salvos that remains pretty much untouchable. "Boo Hoo Hoo" is followed by "Sad Lament Of The American Indian", which begins all dirgey and druggy, totally reminiscent of Thinking Fellers / Sun City Girls and Polvo too, the chords warped and off kilter, the drums stumbly and chaotic, before slipping right back into another incredible pop jam, wrapped in streaks of feedback, hooky and jangly, and so catchy, but still so warped and just slightly twisted. "When You Came" rounds out the opening trio, with its dramatic slow build, and heartfelt sort-of-chorus, at which point the record begins its decent into (even more) madness, skipping gleefully from perfect pop to whatthefuck and back again. "Coffin Cello" is all splattery percussion, detuned twang, twisted vocals, moaning and groaning, if anything it sounds a bit like Cromagnon, total caveman psychedelia, which leads right into "Battle Down The Quarter Mile", a total classic pop gem, with strange looped basslines, descending crystalline guitar melodies, distorted vocals, and another KILLER chorus, which again slips back into an organ drenched, ultra lo-fi, droned out bit of weirdo outrock, before returning to poppier climes, "Mysterious Girl" is another impossibly perfect and hooky chunk of jangle pop, this time laced with cello, and other strings, which leads directly into "Luminous Bodies", a weirdo track that starts out almost punk rock, muted and murky, before blossoming into a meandery bit of poppy dirge, laced with synths and crunchy guitars, and those amazing, sort of British vocals, and so it goes. Push and pull, back and forth, tease you with a bit of sonic confection, only to bludgeon you with a flurry of chaotic crunch, and then nurse you back with still more pop prettiness, sometimes the demarcation between the Fieldhands' two distinct sides, not so distinct at all, which is precisely what makes them, and this record in particular so magical.
Imagine the Sun City Girls, but if instead of being obsessed with Southeast Asian music, they were obsessed with the Kinks and the Bee Gees, Discus would have been their Torch Of The Mystics. Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand, another pop classic from the same era, is considered by many to be essential listening a classic of the era, while Discus often slips through the cracks, which is odd when you consider that both groups, and both records, are essentially products of the same sonic obsessions, but Bee Thousand, for all its quirkiness and brevity of song, still goes down a whole lot easier than Discus, which is perhaps one of the main reasons Discus remained an acquired taste, but as we all know, the easiest listening is not necessarily the most satisfying, so if you like a little grit and grime with your jangle, some whatthefuck with your timeless hooks, some noise with your pop, then this will undoubtedly be your new favorite record. And all the kids who have been digging the new wave of home brewed retro lo-fi garage pop, are gonna be in for a shock when they realize their favorite bands are basically doing what the Fieldhands were doing 15 years ago, and if anything Discus is WAY weirder, WAY poppier, and WAY BETTER!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Fantastic compilation of their out of print early singles.
Two brand new songs from one of our favorite bands EVER. Regular readers of the aQ list no doubt remember back in 2010, when we made the Strapping Fieldhands' Discus, our Record Of The Week. Go check it out, we gushed like crazy, cuz, well, that record rules, and even decades later few bands could come close to matching the twisted pop brilliance of Discus. And while the band made some killer records afterwards, we hadn't heard a peep since the early 2000's. But here we are, after a decade of near silence, treated to two new perfectly imperfect slabs of the Fieldhands' warped popsmithery, and holy shit do these guys still sound as good as ever. The A side, "Impossible To Say", is all warbly sixties style jangle, complete with woozy horns, all fuzzy and psychedelic, like classic Kinks but seriously tweaked and not a little bit druggy. The vocals that weird faux British accent that pretty much defined Discus, the song catchy and warped and fantastic! The flipside is also pretty Kinks-y but more of a ballad, but Fieldhands style, a heartfelt ditty about a bearded lady, who of course ends up "Sitting On Her Whiskers". So great. Here's hoping there's a new full length on the horizon...
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!!
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.
Vinyl-only full length including the really good newish song that they played at their only (to-date) San Francisco show: "Ben Franklin Airbath."
Paul Dickow, one of Portland's brightest musical minds, has been a part of some of the most breezy, intricate and hypnotic recordings over the last decade in bands and projects like Fontanelle, Nudge, and Emergency. His third full length as Strategy finds him sounding better then ever. Combining multitrack live instrumentation, old-school synthesizers, digital sound design, and pieces of improv sessions and practice recordings, Dickow creates a seamless sound with an organic warmth that shimmers throughout. Subtle dubby beats with washed out ambiance, dreamy drifty shoegazing, a strong sense of rhythmic melody and surprisingly subtle pop delivery. Kind of like a Kompakt record with way more tricks up its sleeves. We started thinking that this is what playing Seefeel and Pole at the same time might sound like. We've been listening to this nonstop, it's one of those rare records that's just as satisfying to have on while doing other stuff, as it is to listen to with undivided attention. So nice!
This SF band seems to have something of an identity crisis. It's sounds like they just can't seem to find one of their own. With each album, they sound like another band... who already exist. Last time it was Pavement (and a great version of Pavement it was too), and prior to that it was the Go-Betweens (and they managed that nicely as well). Actually on Love & Distortion they've reverted back to the latter again but perhaps with more soft Brit shoegazerness, Blur boyish peppiness and some Sonic Youth atonalisms too. Sounds like it could have been recorded in 85, or 89 or 92. While they do what they do quite well, it's just not all that original and sounds like a junior version of all of the bands mentioned above.
MPEG Download: "The Simple Things Are Taking Over" [/audio/stratford4simple.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "The Simple Things Are Taking Over" [/audio/stratford4simple.m3u]
One of the hardest working bands in San Francisco demonstrate on this second release their own brand of atmospheric, dreamy pop. Combining pretty boy/girl vocal harmonies. Reminiscent of Mazzy Star, Opal, and the Go Betweens.
Here it is, the first release by The Stratford 4 on their new label home Jet Set Records. It follows their two well-received self-released cds (one of which was the totally great "This Could Be Heaven" from last year). I've got a good feeling about this
We just found a small cache of this presumably out of print record at one of our suppliers, a 2001 reissue of the 1976 debut solo album from the late Egyptian-born singer Demetrio Stratos, famous as the frontman for the Italian "International Popular Group" Area. That avant-prog ensemble was rather more experimental than most, bringing in jazz improv, electroacoustic composition, and more - including what we have previously referred to as "dramatic and bizarre vocal experiments". Despite our love for Italian prog, we've never had an opportunity to review much by Area, but they were one of the best. Just ask Tatsuya Yoshida, he'll tell you that next to Magma from France, Area were probably one of his biggest inspirations for his band Ruins.
This solo album from their singer doesn't really sound like Area, though. Or rather, it appropriately focuses only on one specific aspect of Area, taken to an extreme - Stratos' vocals. We won't say "singing" though, not exactly. This is an album of CRAZED acoustic voice-only sounds, along the lines of later efforts by Phil Minton, Jaap Blonk, Makigami Koichi, and Mike Patton. Heck, we're pretty sure Mike Patton must own a copy of this record, it's basically the blueprint for his debut solo album on Tzadik, 1996's Adult Themes For Voice. We like this better though (sorry Mike).
On Metrodora, Stratos, who considered himself a "vocal researcher", presents the results of his research into what he can do manipulating his voice acoustically. Dramatic and bizarre indeed, as well as interesting and amusing. Gurgling groaning hissing hooting croaking shrieking. Overdubbing and multitracking (as well as extended techniques) allow him to do call and response with himself, to create dense droning hums and carry on nonsensical conversations in multiple voices (on the rhythmic, repetitive title track sounding like Tatsuya Yoshida's a cappella Zubi Zuva group). At times it's like a zooful of primates gone wild, at others much more 'musical', Stratos eventually doing some wailing, undulating singing in more typical Area-style on "Mirologhi (Lamento d'Epiro)" parts one and two, where he also manages to create what sound like synthesizer and percussive sounds in the background. Definitely a classic in the field, and, once you're into it, remarkably listenable.
Some seriously bleak death industrial from Peter Andersson (of Raison D'etre) along with his partner in sonic crime Tobias Larsson. Long tracks that rumble and hum, grind and throb. The slow build of opener "Now Ever Sleep..." sets the stage with a terrifying suffocating creepy-crawl that manages to build in intensity without building in volume, it's like a black hole getting blacker, with greyed swaths of hiss and swirls of crumbling shimmer, underpinned by distant death drums, stunning and harrowing.
The rest of the album manages to up the intensity even more, splintering at times into bursts of caustic, near metallic brutality, with sheets of grinding noise, heaving machinelike swells, super processed vokills, a swirling morass of sonic miserablism. But those moments are balanced by hushed passages of tranquil ambience, and long stretches of what sounds like air conditioners and heating units and the mundane sound of city life, blurred and smeared into blackened streaks and muted rhythmic pulsations.
Now we've got a nice Japanese cd reissue of this (previously, but no longer, available on the somewhat shady Radioactive label). It's more expensive but better. Our review of it before ran something like this:
Some fairly heavy (maaaan) stoner psych blues rawk action here from 1971. Yep, seventy-one. We won't try to tell you that the lone album from Japan's Strawberry Path was one of the best rock releases of '71, 'cause of course there were so many great albums out that year. But if you're a fan of heavy rock of the era, especially the weirder stuff from overseas, you should check 'em out. There's plenty of wailing guitar and jammin' organ on here, but also some mellow moves too so it's maybe more '60s than '70s sounding, and VERY Jimi Hendrix influenced. And we'd guess they were also into such Western acts as Steppenwolf, early Deep Purple, Grand Funk and possibly Black Sabbath. In the realm of early '70s Japanese hard psych they're on par with Speed, Glue & Shinki and Foodbrain, but not quite as as solid as the best Flower Travellin' Band or Blues Creation. These guys (a duo of Shigeru "Jimmy" Narumo on guitars and keys, and Hiro Tsunoda on drums and vocals, helped out by various guests) went on to form the even heavier Flied Egg, who released an LP on Vertigo, a track from which is heard on Andy Votel's Vertigo Mixed disc in fact. This is totally in that Vertigo vein, with classical flourishes of flute and strings, hard-rockin' boogie blues riffage, wild vocals, kickin' drum breaks, acoustic interludes... it's an acid-prog mix that isn't always in the proto-metal direction we might want but we'll take what we can get. Plus you've gotta love the song titles, which are either really cool and weird like "Maximum Speed Of Muji Bird (45 Seconds Of Schizophrenic Sabbath)" or totally indicative of what you'd expect like "I Gotta See My Gypsy Woman" and "Mary Jane On My Mind". Woah, yeah.
Recently we've reviewed the two excellent Flied Egg albums, reissued on cd by Universal Japan, as is this -- if you dug those, Strawberry Path is also up your alley (Path?).
Some fairly heavy (maaaan) stoner psych blues rawk action here from 1971. Yep, seventy-one. We won't try to tell you that the lone album from Japan's Strawberry Path was one of the best rock releases of '71, 'cause of course there were so many great albums out that year. But if you're a fan of heavy rock of the era, especially the weirder stuff from overseas, you should check 'em out. There's plenty of wailing guitar and jammin' organ on here, but also some mellow moves too so it's maybe more '60s than '70s sounding, and VERY Jimi Hendrix influenced. And we'd guess they were also into such Western acts as Steppenwolf, early Deep Purple, Grand Funk and possibly Black Sabbath. In the realm of early '70s Japanese hard psych they're on par with Speed, Glue & Shinki and Foodbrain, but not quite as as solid as the best Flower Travellin' Band or Blues Creation. These guys (a duo of Shigeru "Jimmy" Narumo on guitars and keys, and Hiro Tsunoda on drums and vocals, helped out by various guests) went on to form the even heavier Flied Egg, who released an LP on Vertigo, a track from which is heard on Andy Votel's Vertigo Mixed disc in fact.
This is totally in that Vertigo vein, with classical flourishes of flute and strings, hard-rockin' boogie blues riffage, wild vocals, kickin' drum breaks, acoustic interludes... it's an acid-prog mix that isn't always in the proto-metal direction we might want but we'll take what we can get. Plus you've gotta love the song titles, which are either really cool and weird like "Maximum Speed Of Muji Bird (45 Seconds Of Schizophrenic Sabbath)" or totally indicative of what you'd expect like "I Gotta See My Gypsy Woman" and "Mary Jane On My Mind". Woah, yeah.
The return of prodigal sons Strawberry Smog, a band of bay area artists and musical friends (featuring former members of Pale Hoarse and Touched By A Janitor) some of whom have been roaming around the East coast since we last heard from the band when they dropped off their limited tape and cd combo debut before skipping town a year ago. Now they got a super packed cd of two full length albums released together of infectious sun-dappled jangle rock and psych-tinged folk. The sound is less laid-back, and more ambitiously arranged and recorded. They still wear the sixties / seventies west coast folk-rock banner very proudly, sounding somewhere between Kaleidoscope (US) and West Coast Experimental Art Band with just a tinge of Britishness in the studio experimentation. The momentum is upbeat, but varied enough that songs maneuver from poppy rock jams to psych folk to deep roots and trad tropes quite effortlessly. Recommended for fans of Woods, The Fresh and Onlys, Cool Ghouls and any of the bands mentioned above!
The latest musical project from longtime San Francisco artist and musician Kyle Ranson (previously of Pale Hoarse and the artist behind the human faced dog drawing on Thee Oh Sees Putrifiers II album), Strawberry Smog is a lo-fi indie pop group in the vein of Woods and the Fresh & Only's with an eye on sixties west coast pop-psych structures through a home grown folk-busking lens. Sort of like Olivia Tremor Control mining Incredible Submarine Band influences instead of The Beatles, the songs are catchy, well-written and infectious invoking a druggy California sunshine vibe without a whole lot of unnecessary gimmicks. The tape comes with a cd of the same material. Can't wait to hear more!
EXTREMELY LIMITED!!!!!
Here's yet another one of those bands that we'd vaguely heard of (or perhaps not) but never really encountered actual records by, and now that we have we can't figure out why they weren't a bigger deal! I think I first became aware of 'em via the thanks/influences list on a Pentagram album. Kinda always assumed they were your basic British blues rock but on the evidence of this, their 1970 debut they were something a little different than the Cream/Zep sort of thing I'd imagined. They're rather more like a '60s psych-pop singles band, of the garagey/Nuggetsy variety, with the fuzz factor and sheer guitar heaviness cranked way up toward proto-metallic levels. More psych than prog, more pop than blues. Kinda punk too. Very kick ass and energetic, catchy and rockin', venturing from the paisley-painted pop melodicism of "Around The World In Eighty Days" to the slamming punkish "Only What You Make It" to a number of extended fuzz guitar workouts... but first and foremost it's good old-fashioned hard rock. Think Thin Lizzy. Or Dust, or Budgie. Or even early, early Rush (one song here always puts Byram in mind of "Working Man"). But as mentioned it's got a poppy '60s garage vibe unlike a lot of those acts... And there's enough proggier, psychier elements loaded in here to pique the interest of a wider audience than just the hard rock lovers among us. The guitar parts especially are full of odd harmonies and melodic richness that bring to mind Amon Duul II, if Amon Duul II could have managed to fit their open ended song structures into a tighter blues rock straight jacket. What makes Stray's music work so well is their attention to structure: keeping their compositions on a tight leash and avoiding the esoteric meanderings that can be a pitfall to many prog rockers. This and their sense of dynamics, knowing just how and when to throw the switch and rip the seat of your pants, is what must have made them a seriously kick ass live band (and apparently they were super popular as such in and around their London, England turf, but unfortunately never managed to cash in on the hard rock success like some of their contempories). They recorded numerous albums, of which this first one is likely their best (though their second LP Suicide is a good one too, and we're just not that familiar with the rest of their '70s output), but their biggest claim to fame might be that Iron Maiden covered one of their songs on a b-side ("All In Your Mind", the very first track on this disc). Stray's version was way better btw.
Another list, another fantastic release from local label Time Released Sound. This the latest from a one man band called Stray Ghost, who fuses washed out soft focus atmospherics, a la Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, with more modern new classical composition. Lush blurry soundscapes, ebb and flow, gauzy expanses of hushed hazy thrum, which give way to delicate pointillist piano, sweeping and darkly dramatic, haunting and quite lovely, swirling strings, the sound cinematic and at times near symphonic, a sort of faded dreamlike chamber music, shifting easily from layered ominous clouds of brooding electronics, to spare, contemplative drift, to delicate, crystalline shimmer, the sound wistful and melancholy, the spare prettiness and the lush brooding swells, continually blurring into one another, creating a gorgeous bit of electronic / neoclassical modern minimalism.
As with all TRS releases, the Stray Ghost comes in two versions, the standard, which is a proper cd housed in a heavy digipak, which subtly mirrors the meticulously designed packaging of the deluxe version, which is limited to just 100 copies, and is packaged in a handmade sleeve created from hand sewn sheets of antique Braille paper, all held in an origami style black fold up sleeve, hand stamped and Braille labelled, inside various pockets containing antique charts and drawings. As always. WOW.
Another list, another fantastic release from local label Time Released Sound. This the latest from a one man band called Stray Ghost, who fuses washed out soft focus atmospherics, a la Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, with more modern new classical composition. Lush blurry soundscapes, ebb and flow, gauzy expanses of hushed hazy thrum, which give way to delicate pointillist piano, sweeping and darkly dramatic, haunting and quite lovely, swirling strings, the sound cinematic and at times near symphonic, a sort of faded dreamlike chamber music, shifting easily from layered ominous clouds of brooding electronics, to spare, contemplative drift, to delicate, crystalline shimmer, the sound wistful and melancholy, the spare prettiness and the lush brooding swells, continually blurring into one another, creating a gorgeous bit of electronic / neoclassical modern minimalism.
As with all TRS releases, the Stray Ghost comes in two versions, the standard, which is a proper cd housed in a heavy digipak, which subtly mirrors the meticulously designed packaging of the deluxe version, which is limited to just 100 copies, and is packaged in a handmade sleeve created from hand sewn sheets of antique Braille paper, all held in an origami style black fold up sleeve, hand stamped and Braille labelled, inside various pockets containing antique charts and drawings. As always. WOW.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of our favortie New Zealand outfits finds its way to one of our favorite SF labels. AQ pal Antony Milton's free-noise duo Street finds a new home on Glenn from Jewelled Antler's Pink Skulls label and it's a perfect match. Street follow in the dirge-y drone-y footsteps of NZ greats like the Dead C and Gate but add their own special something. Huge warm swells of guitar, organs, effects and all sorts of other noisemakers, pulses and throbs, speckled with glitchy amp buzz and splattery industrial grind. Those same ingredients are somehow tamed briefly to force all that buzzing snarling fury into a rumbling, wheezing pop song, but a pop song pregnant with the possibility of total implosion. The record stretches out and meanders a while, through a creaking soundscape of whining violins and rickety melodies, shimmering tonal buzz and distant clinking and clattering, before the riff drops, a basement, garage sale, no-fi Stooges dirge, with damaged guitars and tortured vocals. Then it's guitars against the amps in a big room time, as huge swaths of feedback and guitar roar, swell and swoop like sonic ghosts who have shuffled off this mortal coil. The final twenty minute track finds Street out-sunroofing Sunroof! with a static feedback/ampbuzz grinding shimmer that hangs motionless in midair, vibrating and threatening to float away, but never does, instead it's a mesmeric drone, endless and boundless. So good. Still definitely one of our favorite New Zealand exports.
What is it about New Zealand? And the ease in which New Zealand bands seem to be able to transfrom 'noise' into something more. Much more. Street+X is a duo, employing violins, microphones, organs and REALLY BIG AMPS in a tiny room. Totally mesmerising, hypnotic, dreamy, shimmery, noisy, dirgy, lo-fi, high-end, spaced out DRONE ala Sunroof!, Total, Skullflower, Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Gate, Vibracathedral Orchestra, etc. I never get sick of this stuff and this is some of the best I've heard, Fans of the above mentioned bands NEED this.
Boots Riley of The Coup and Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine.
It's another, like-no-other, claustrophobically constricted creepy-crawl through the mists that seemingly, steamingly enshroud the Tasmanian rainforest lair of that far off island's major (only?) one man black metal export, Striborg. Mists that buzz with fuzz, like a metallic miasma, a sonic cloud of fog-smog composed of atomized Burzumic bits. Damaged, droning distorted fuzz. If Fuck Buttons or Growing listen to black metal, we bet they'd like Striborg! And as far as we're concerned, a new Striborg disc is always cause for grim celebration... this one, following both Ghostwoodlands and Solitude from 2007, is fresh for spring 2008 (remember, that's fall below the equator, hence Striborg's current Autumnal Melancholy).
As is Striborg's wont, this album consists of either epic-length (several close to 15 minutes each) black metal numbers, or somewhat shorter, more "experimental" isolationist electronic interludes. On those pieces, such as the "The Scrying Mirror", the quietly lovely "In Oppressive Silence", and "The Manifestation Of Black Residual Energy", Striborg could be mistaken for some particularly scary 20th century classical composer or ambient soundtrack artist. But even when he unleashes the full black metal attack, with drum machinery and anguished rasps, it's still pretty darn "experimental"!
With plodding tempi and enervated emotion, the likes of "As A Hermit Hiding In The Trance Of Night" and the title track trudge forth like a sleepwalking zombies, with each step forward, sinking slowly into the quicksand-like foundation of the ever-present fuzz, which really comes to an unholy, catastrophic climax with the Merzbovian noise blow-out of album-ender "Transfiguration Of Terror", a two-minute track following the one here with perhaps the album's most metal-est riffing, "Meandering In Sorrow", a well-named 14:35 indeed. As with all Striborg releases, recommended!!
A lot has changed since we first hear Striborg, and his truly idiosyncratic Tasmanian rain forest black metal. Since then he's released about a million records, some on Southern Lord, and frontman Sin Nanna has performed and recorded with SUNNO))), so it would seem he's not nearly as kult as he once was (but much better known). But the weird thing about Striborg, is no matter how popular he gets, or how many records he puts out, NO ONE will be more kult. Hell, he lives in Tasmania, in a shack, and records record after record of some of the bleakest, depressive and totally fucked black metal we've ever heard.
A big part of Striborg's sound is the production, which fluctuates wildly from record to record, and sometimes even song to song, and while we love EVERYTHING he's done, we're particularly partial to the older stuff, as if is so completely wacked and so impossibly lo-fi, someone here once described it like listening to a boombox in the shower, but that's exactly how a black metal record should sound, or at least THIS kind of black metal record.
We got a bunch of these double lps, figuring that we had reviewed the cd at some point, when in fact, this was one of the many that slipped through the cracks. We do have this on cd, both the original version and the recently reissued Displeased version, if you want either, or both, but this is about the vinyl version of these two bleak black grim classics.
Seems weird to take two records and lump them together on a single disc, but Striborg has been doing it since the beginning, usually a new-ISH record, with an older demo tacked on, and since his sound remains pretty consistent, typically the two record work well together, but what's different here is that Black Desolate Winter and Depressive Hibernation were both recorded in 2005 and released together, and thus feel like two parts of a single whole. Each record is all about the title track, "Black Desolate Winter", the song, is 30 minutes long! Surrounded by shorted blasts and bits of drone and black ambience, "Depressive Hibernation" is nearly 15 minutes, it too, surrounded by shorter tracks, the whole disc finishing off with the nearly 11 minute "In The Gloom Of The Foreboding Night."
Striborg initiates already know what to expect, stumbling off kilter drumming, brittle buzzing guitars that sounds like swarms of insects, mournful melodies, the production very much like a boom box in the shower, the drums more of a pt pt pt pt than a blast or a pound, the vocals a wail buried in the mix, the guitars, sometimes all spidery and arpeggiated, but more often than not lost in clouds of furious buzz and crumbling distortion. "Black Desolate Winter" is a depressive buzzing black epic, that slips from lurching blast to woozy midtempo plod and back again over the course of its half hour, with ambient outros, appropriately creepy and warped sounding before and after.
Depressive Hibernation is more of a proper record, "Entangled In The Black Roots Of The Forest" is another chunk of frenetic buzz, doused in sheets of white noise distortion, but with some of the most tweaked vocals ever, raspy and demonic, but super effected so they seem to go spinning off into distance. "Depressive Hibernation" the track, begins all pretty and melancholy, but when the guitars kick in, they're barely riffs at all, it's like someone turned on a white noise generator. A shriek and then some simple drumming turn the track into a creepy Burzumic plod, the super processed shrieks continue on, making for another of the weirdest BM tracks ever. The rest of the disc plays out equal parts deep black drones, and fucked up and freaked out buzz drenched blurs, peppered with bizarre vocals, buried drums and maybe even a riff or two.
Needless to say, there is a reason, Striborg was always the barometer by which we measured all other 'fucked up' or 'damaged' black metal, and listening to these records again, it seems to us that Striborg might still reign supreme!
Striborg on vinyl is rare, so we were super psyched to get these, heavy vinyl, deluxe heavy weight gatefold sleeves, and of course limited limited limited!!!
Lovers of damaged demented bizarre baffling freaked out and fucked up black metal rejoice!! We couldn't be more excited if there was a brand new Benighted Leams record. FINALLY, we're able to review and list a record from one of our all time favorite outsider one man black metal bands, Striborg. Most folks have probably never actually heard Striborg, even though this will mark release #15 or thereabouts. But it wasn't for lack of trying on our part. We have been completely obsessed with Striborg since we first heard him a few years back and have been trying to get enough copies of ANY of his releases to list. Everytime we found someone who carried Striborg records, we would order 30 or 40 or 50, and would get 1 or 2. Or more likely none. We even resorted to writing letters to the band (he apparently lives in a shack in the woods with no phone and no computer!) And while most folks have never -heard- Striborg, you've probably at least heard OF him. Whether it was in an aQuarius review, we've referenced Striborg as the ultimate outsider black metal band in reviews of records by black metal weirdos Dead Reptile Shrine, Lugubrum, Draugar, Detsorgsekalf, Hidden and more, or on the recent black metallized SUNNO))) record Black One, which even had a track named for the dark mastermind behind Striborg Sin-Nanna.
But what is it exactly about Striborg that has everyone freaking out?
Five words for you: Tasmanian rain forest black metal! And it's just as grim and weird and as amazing as that might lead you to believe. We have Southern Lord to thank for this, the first readily available Striborg release, which continues his tradition of combining multiple releases on single cds, this one includes the brand new 2006 recording. Embittered Darkness, as well as the super rare Isle De Morts release recorded almost a decade ago, way back in 1997.
So what exactly does Tasmanian rain forest black metal sound like? Definitely grim, and lo-fi, ultra personal, demented and damaged, Benighted Leams, Abruptum, Dead Reptile Shrine, Necrofrost, Emit, Furze, Urfaust and all the rest of the baffling black metal hierarchy should give you a rough idea, but Striborg, is even further out, way more fucked up, more strangely psychedelic and freaked out, a doomy drone drenched black buzz, a growling fuzzy missive from the depths of some dark netherworld.
Haunting washes of gauzy synthesizer, mournful minor key acoustic guitars, dreary overcast swaths of depressive melancholia, and you think other black metal bands are buzzy?! Striborg take that black buzz and whip it into a furious freaked out frenzy, a guitar buzz like a million bumble bees, but sped WAY up, a prickly, fuzzy swirl, even at it's most doomy and plodding, Striborg drenches everything in that overblown buzz, a thick sandpapery ambience, that is the metal equivalent of walking through the pouring rain, under a full moon, through a graveyard at the edge of the world. Sin-Nanna growls and gurgles his obtuse black ravings in an impossibly creepy animalistic voice, somewhere between a rabid dog, a tiny demon, and a wicked old witch, often everything will drop out and all that will be left is a buzzing tangle of hissing harsh vocal and fuzzed out black riffing. Buried in the murk and mire are weird, rehearsal space drums, really flat and dry sounding, erupting in spastic and chaotic burts, not just blast beats, but instead bizarre blasts of percussive tangle amidst stretches of almost punk rock drumming, although most of Embittered Darkness is spent at a crawl, a buzzing midtempo dirge, as doomy as it is black, if not more so. Imagine an ultra lo-fi doom metal Xasthur, slow motion misery dotted with occasional barrages of black metal buzz and once in a while surges of slithering black ambience.
So totally creepy and beautiful, fucked up and gorgeous, a massive soul crushing slab of doom drenched black metal brilliance.
Isle De Morts, from 1997, is a lot more traditional, and a lot faster, almost every track a frenetic and frenzied burst of blackened and buzzing brutality, lo-fi but completely blown out and in the red, channeling Transylvanian Hunger era Darkthrone, but filtered through Striborg's cracked sonic kaleidoscope, rendering what might have been just some classic Norwegian BM worship, as a creepy and cracked world of ultrabuzz and overblown acidfried blackness, blast beats so fast they sound like radio static, guitars so buzzy and blurry they turn into thick washes of crumbling prickly sound, and croaking toadlike vocals so high in the mix it sounds like the band is in a different room. So gloriously fucked up and freaked out. One listen is all it takes to see why Striborg towers above all his bizarre black metal contemporaries, ruling the doomed and damaged kingdom of ultrapersonal black metal dementia with an iron fist, a busted 4-track and a growing legion of buzz hungry minions!
Deep in the damp backwoods of Tasmania (yes, Tasmania!), one of our very favorite one-man black metal bands lurks. Sin-nanna is that man, Striborg is that band. The eagerly awaited Ghostwoodlands is the latest manifestation of Striborg's musical misanthropy, another extreme and extremely "outsider" statement of black metal idiosyncrasy and fucked up brilliance.
Starting with track one, "Bete Noirs", every other track on Ghostwoodlands is an ambient episode of beautifully droning, isolationist electronics, psychedelic blackness that's not overtly metal at all (and could give some additional weight to the ridiculous rumor we once heard that Sin-nanna is actually Australian dronologist Oren Ambarchi). The longer, even-numbered songs, though, are indeed recognizable as a species of black metal, wherein Sin-nanna's guitar (and voice, and keyboards, and much else) still sounds like some noxious gas escaping under pressure. This aerosol mist of grim musik is, as always, accompanied by his own primitive "timekeeping", percussive thump and clatter full of many confusional fills, blasts and beats. This drumming is seemingly (and sometimes startlingly) one of Sin-nanna's primary expressive outlets, having more active physicality than the spectral presences of his other instrumentation -- and its artistic effectiveness proves that desire trumps ability in his realm. With woozy alien synths wandering over from the "ambient" tracks, Striborg's steam clouds of croak-encrusted, broken-down black metal require hails all around. Indeed, the next time someone asks, "what's so great? -- and what's so fucked up?" about Striborg, track two here is one we'll immediately want to play 'em. The slowly paced, 19 and a half minute "Wandering The Wilderness Of Eternal Misery" is a monument to Sin-nanna's unique genius, as we're sure you'll agree after just a few minutes into it, when you're fully enveloped in his hissing, buzzing, chuddering world, and the ambient Aphex synth droplets start falling amidst his percussive extemporaneity. So good! Like a brain-damaged Burzum, and we mean that in the best possible way. And these abnormal atmospheres continue throughout the rest of the disc, furthering our love of Striborg. A great followup to the taster offered by the Striborg / Xasthur split single we listed just last week!
PS. God what we wouldn't give for a Striborg / Keiji Haino collaboration!!!
For a while it was practically impossible to get records by our favorite one man Tasmanian rain forest black metal misanthrope Striborg. We listed one or two years ago, and constantly had a couple copies of titles in stock, but rarely were we able to get enough copies to list, or to get them at all consistently. Finally after years of trying unsuccessfully to track down all the Striborg discs for you, the faithful AQ outsider black metal elite, Displeased Records over in Holland finally began a pretty comprehensive Striborg reissue campaign recently, remastering the sound, fancying up the artwork, but most importantly, letting all you freaked out damaged black metal obsessives get your ears on some of the most amazing, most fucked up black metal music ever. And it still is as far as we're concerned. We love Furze and Necrofrost and all that, but there's something special about Striborg. All you have to do is check out some of our other reviews where we go on at length about the magical mysterious soundworld Sin-Nanna aka Striborg has crafted over the years. Thick washes of static and hiss, washed out buzz, stumbling chaotic drumming, gorgeous dreamlike atmospheres, mournful and melancholy, depressive and miserable, but at the same time, blessed out and dreamy, a haunting blackened ambience peppered with bursts of blurred buzz and abstract metallic crush.
But one thing we can guarantee you we never thought we'd see, was a Striborg DVD!!! But here it is, and while secretly we were hoping for some glimpses of the man himself, lurking in caves, and creeping across moors, instead, what you get, quite appropriately we might add, are landscapes, rocks and snow, epic vistas, dark forests, cloudy skies, gorgeous skylines, lush rain forests, vines and leaves and branches, and of course lots and lots of trees. Much of it shot night vision style, like the Blair Witch Project, but a lot of it long tracking shots, like some mysterious nature documentary. Some are overlaid with video experiments flickering shapes and formless video static, pulsing and throbbing, spinning and shifting, others are washed out or filtered, others are negative, but some are just left the way they are, lovely shots of unspoilt nature. All perfectly complimenting the sounds of Striborg, whether it be creepy ambient shimmer, or blurry buzzy stumbling blasts. It's like being some sort of wraith or spirit, floating bodiless through some lost land, devoid of humanity, drifting through dark forests and moonlit landscapes and winter wastelands.
But those hoping to catch a glimpse of the man himself will not be disappointed after all. There's a "Forest Gallery" which is a slide show see to music, a series of striking forest images, but also, TONS of photos of Sin-Nanna, be-robed and corpsepainted and wandering through the Tasmanian rain forests, as well as drawings of trees (many of which were included in past cd releases) and most shocking of all, several photos of Sin-Nanna sans corpsepaint, just a metal dude with long hair and a Darkthrone t-shirt.
As if that weren't enough, there's also a "Treeography", which we were originally hoping would be some sort of list of Striborg's favorite trees, or at least a tour of the forest complete with the information about all the trees, but instead is a discography, and then another slide show of jittery super eight images of Sin-Nanna and the forest, underlit, creepy and flickery, so beautiful.
In fact all the films here are gorgeous, were they not "black metal videos" it wouldn't be hard to imagine these as experimental short films in some obscure film festival. Definitely recommended. Essential for Striborg freeks, and weirdo black metal fanatics, but equally recommended for adventurous viewers and listeners, who might just be looking for something truly strange and creepy, blackened and beautiful.
Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves just why Striborg continues to be quite possibly our favorite freaked out, damaged and demented outsider black metal one man band EVER. Not that we need reminding, but with so many releases, it's easy to take his intense and intensely fucked up body of work for granted.
Thankfully, after literally years of trying to track down all of the Striborg releases, Displeased Records is reissuing them all (the ones Southern Lord didn't release), most with new artwork, and many with extra tracks. So over the next few months we'll be getting everyone back up to speed on the confusional and chaotic soundworld of the mighty Striborg. Starting with Mysterious Semblance from 2004.
For those of you who already love Striborg, then this is a no brainer, if you don't already own this, you absolutely should. It's amazing. Dark and heavy, fucked up and drone-y. But for those new to Striborg, this is as good a place to start as any.
As with all Striborg releases, it's as much about the mood and presentation, as it is about the music. A bizarre forest world of buzz and blur, of haunting synths and cryptic messages. The record is adorned with various images of the forest, the jungle, trees and leaves and vines, some photos, others primitive drawings, no band photos, at least here, just the bizarre lyrics and all sorts of images of the dark wood.
Then there are the song titles, "Sour Pale Ghostly Dawn", "Mysterious Semblance Of Spectral Trees", "Lurking The Murky Damp Forest", "Looming Black Apparition", and appropriately depressive and ghoulish lyrics to match. And while we can't get enough of all that stuff, that sort of evocative imagery, the haunting and mysterious world those images and words evoke, it wouldn't mean anything if the music was equally as dark and creepy and fucked up. And as you probably realized by now, it absolutely is.
Mysterious Semblance is one of the doomier sounding Striborg records, lots of slow plodding tempos, swirling ghostly keyboards, long drawn out droning riffs, the tracks long and hypnotic, repetitive and trancelike. Lots of extended expanses of creepy crawly black ambience, like the opening tracks, long streaks of warbly organ, and wavery synths, drifting like a black fog, little twinkle of far off percussion, but for the most part, pure swirling dark ambient creep. Up next is the sort of title track, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes, and begins with more chiming shimmer, then the guitar comes in, and its that unmistakable Striborg tone, like someone just turned on the radio between stations, or began vacuuming the house, sheets of white noise buzz, the riff so indistinct it almost just sounds like a static buzz, here the buzz washes over a gentle lilting keyboard line, very Burzumic, but even more minimal and trancelike, the song eventually breaks into some serious blasting buzz, but the sound is so washed out and drone-y it's almost impossible to tell. The rest of the disc drifts back and forth between long stretches of scary ambient whir and blown out buzz, "The Ghostly Pallid Hand Of Fear" being maybe our favorite, the drums super loud this time, a stumbling double kick, under a lurching buzzy riff, the vocals all dubbed out, with weird metallic reverb, the voice echoing into the void like some sort of demon robot. Fucking awesome.
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, including the 15+ minute "Lurking The Murky Damp Forest", which sounds as murky and damp as the title would lead you to believe, the guitars and drums muted and muddy, but the vocals, super effected and creepy, lots of metallic reverb again, but this time a strangled croak like a black metal Gollum (although Gollum's pretty black metal already). The other two tracks are on the ambient side, but both suffused with thick distorted buzz, all gloriously washed out and drone-y.
We're always tempted to proclaim every Striborg record as our favorite, but that must just mean they are all sort of our favorite. Which makes perfect sense really. It's like each is some grim buzzy chapter in some epic black metal tome, every one drawing from the other, able to stand alone, but way more effective in the ongoing epic tale of Sin Nanna, Striborg, and whatever murky black forest he calls home.
And while they last we'll have the Mysterious Semblance discs with the super limited silver metallic cover (the rest of the layout is revamped as well, but once we sell out of this batch, it'll be back to the non-silver cover, and everything else will remain the same).
