Another excursion into the bleak, be-shadowed world of Tokyo psych-folk trio Suishou No Fune. Four long, shoegazing songs recorded live at several shows/venues. All share certain elements...
Aching, drifting guitar lines quietly howl of beauty and despair, melodies gracefully soaring and then expiring tenderly alongside the echoes of weary vocals and lethargic percussive clatter. This disc is definitely a slow-burn, late-night affair, all-embracing in its epic downer aesthetic.
While Suishou No Fune never sound like they're going to break a sweat (nodding off is more like it), they do channel an additional level of emotional energy into the pentultimate track 3, "A Rain", wherein the drum crashes and vocal cries and guitar wailings all crank it up a notch, more volume and chaos and sheer beauty. But that's the mere precursor to the wall-of-noise presence of the last and longest (21:50) track here, "The Storm Of Light / The Cherry", a grand fuzz finale of amped-up distorto drone... still gorgeously bleak and blissful!
A while back we had this band's self-titled debut (remember the nice pink cover?). Unfortunately we can't seem to get that one anymore, but we do now have this, Suishou No Fune's latest, Where The Spirits Are, released on the Holy Mountain label (home to Six Organs Of Admittance, Davis Redford Triad, Om, Mammatus, etc.). If you've heard that previous album of theirs you'll have an idea what this is about... Or also if you just peep the cover photo: three Japanese guys in shades and Keiji Haino haircuts. Yes you're guessed it, Tokyo Flashback style downer drone psych. Quietly drifting, distorted, dark sheets of guitar accompanied by abyssal cries, not altogether unmelodic however. They can rev it up cacophonously when they want, but for the most part they hold back the heaviness in order to generate a more gentle sort of atmospheric gloom, on such appropriately named tracks as "Apparition On A Moonless Night" and "Black Phantom". Again, murky majesty for fans of Up-Tight, LSD-march, Shizuka, and the like.
3rd album of super bleak, slo-mo deep drone psych from these Tokyo Flashback vets, the follow up to their 2006 Holy Mountain release Where The Spirits Are. There's three loooong tracks here in the gently morose mode you'd expect, with distorted whale-call guitars and hollow, lonely vocals... what you might not expect is the distressed psychedelic harmonica soloing that now features prominently (on track two)! Who knew the wheeze of the harmonica could be so fitting with such mysterious and murky surroundings? The gasping, dying breaths of monomaniacal melody it brings to the proceedings are usually appropriate however.
And we've gotta say, that's a great title ain't it? Writhing Underground Flowers. Like you've wandered into some gloomy cave full of bleached-white fungal growth, trembling in a subterranean breeze, a living mockery of true sunlit floral splendor... beautiful yet terrible too.
Housed in a nice pink cover-sleeve, this album's floating guitar psych is the work of another relatively new Japanese underground psych outfit that we first got turned on to via the PSF label's recent, excellent Tokyo Flashback 5 compilation! In our review of that comp, we described them/their track thusly: "bleak folk duo, very lovely, eventually overcome by space-out distortion". And that same assessment applies likewise to this self-titled debut disc of theirs, except that here they're a trio, with the core pairing of Pirako and Kageo (both guitar/vocals) joined by drummer Tail. 69 minutes, five tracks, delicate, dreamy and drifting. With gentle vocals and electric guitars mostly engaged in ethereal exploration (but capable, at times, of generating speaker-rattling stormclouds, when the trio get into their more slow-burning Rallizes-ish moments) this should be right up the alley of any of you into such bands as Nagisa Ni Te, Doodles, Shizuka, Overhang Party, and Up-Tight.
We took preorders for this (and the deluxe box set version too) a few weeks back, but now we have it in stock, we got a few extras of the regular edition so folks who maybe missed out on the preorder now have a chance to grab one of these!
A long in the works new release from one of our favorite labels, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us amazing records from Boris, Circle Acid Mothers Temple, Aidan Baker, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Atomine Elektrine, Merzbow, Drakh, Rapoon, Wolfskin and more. This latest comes from Tokyo psychedelic drifters and longtime aQ faves Suishou No Fune, who are teamed up here with local psyche rockers Numinous Eye, aka Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space) and Mike Shoun (The Oh Sees), whose recent Clockwork Moon lp we raved about recently on the aQ list.
And this is not a split, no this is both bands together, we imagine in some dark dimly lit space, in the middle of the night, no words exchanged, just a gradual opening up, everyone slowly losing themselves in a sonic trance, and letting the music carry them off, cuz that's what this sounds like, woozy and washed out, laid back and lysergic, the rhythm section simple and shuffling, motorik and darkly propulsive, while the multiple guitars weave tangled melodies, and smear strange shadowy streaks of ambience and atmosphere. Chordal swells pulse of deep rumbles, wound around the unwavering rhythm, while above, the sky is filled with prismatic streaks, aching, lilting melodies, soaring, drifting, ethereal and ghostlike one minute fierce and fiery the next. There are vocals too, wordless croons, that slip into strange falsettos and then back again, a sort of monklike chanting, that becomes almost operatic, there's harmonica too! On the more abstract nearly 30 minute second track, the drums skitter loosely beneath streaks of melodies and shards of disembodied guitar skree, little bits of twang, and distant reverby textures, while the harmonica wheezes and whispers, that track occasionally coalescing into a sort of almost-krautrock, but more often than not, simply dissipating into loose clouds of drifting sound, free form psychedelic exploration, lush and textured, but super open and abstract, the various guitars holding things together with their aching melodic explorations.
"The Rainbow Dissolving In The Ocean" channels a little Haino, in the wailed vocals, over moaning, keening guitar buzz, peppered with flurries of drum skitter and cymbal shimmer, all blurred and smeared into heaving dreamlike billows, eventually building to a wild multi-guitar, psych-noise tangle, swirls of echo and reverb, thick thrumming bass, and swirling percussive shimmers, all wrapped in a prickly field of distorted guitar swirl. And finally, closer "Space Cruising", locks things down rhythmically, the drums and bass, laying down a languorous, sinewy slither, wreathed in shimmery guitar strum, and again, surrounded by constantly shifting streaks of psychedelia, twangs, rumbles, whirs, melodic squiggles, slow smoldering chord progressions, eventually the whole thing builds again to one final blowout, aching vocals, blown out guitars, wild drum pound, the sound noisy and heavy, but still strangely lilting and lovely, definitely channeling the spirit of Les Rallizes Denudes, as does much of the record!
This is a special pre-order for two different versions of the latest release from one of our favorite labels, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us amazing records from Boris, Circle Acid Mothers Temple, Aidan Baker, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Atomine Elektrine, Merzbow, Drakh, Rapoon, Wolfskin and more. This latest comes from Tokyo psychedelic drifters and longtime aQ faves Suishou No Fune, who are teamed up here with local psyche rockers Numinous Eye, aka Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space) and Mike Shoun (The Oh Sees), whose recent Clockwork Moon lp we raved about recently on the aQ list.
And this is not a split, no this is both bands together, we imagine in some dark dimly lit space, in the middle of the night, no words exchanged, just a gradual opening up, everyone slowly losing themselves in a sonic trance, and letting the music carry them off, cuz that's what this sounds like, woozy and washed out, laid back and lysergic, the rhythm section simple and shuffling, motorik and darkly propulsive, while the multiple guitars weave tangled melodies, and smear strange shadowy streaks of ambience and atmosphere. Chordal swells pulse of deep rumbles, wound around the unwavering rhythm, while above, the sky is filled with prismatic streaks, aching, lilting melodies, soaring, drifting, ethereal and ghostlike one minute fierce and fiery the next. There are vocals too, wordless croons, that slip into strange falsettos and then back again, a sort of monklike chanting, that becomes almost operatic, there's harmonica too! On the more abstract nearly 30 minute second track, the drums skitter loosely beneath streaks of melodies and shards of disembodied guitar skree, little bits of twang, and distant reverby textures, while the harmonica wheezes and whispers, that track occasionally coalescing into a sort of almost-krautrock, but more often than not, simply dissipating into loose clouds of drifting sound, free form psychedelic exploration, lush and textured, but super open and abstract, the various guitars holding things together with their aching melodic explorations.
"The Rainbow Dissolving In The Ocean" channels a little Haino, in the wailed vocals, over moaning, keening guitar buzz, peppered with flurries of drum skitter and cymbal shimmer, all blurred and smeared into heaving dreamlike billows, eventually building to a wild multi-guitar, psych-noise tangle, swirls of echo and reverb, thick thrumming bass, and swirling percussive shimmers, all wrapped in a prickly field of distorted guitar swirl. And finally, closer "Space Cruising", locks things down rhythmically, the drums and bass, laying down a languorous, sinewy slither, wreathed in shimmery guitar strum, and again, surrounded by constantly shifting streaks of psychedelia, twangs, rumbles, whirs, melodic squiggles, slow smoldering chord progressions, eventually the whole thing builds again to one final blowout, aching vocals, blown out guitars, wild drum pound, the sound noisy and heavy, but still strangely lilting and lovely, definitely channeling the spirit of Les Rallizes Denudes, as does much of the record!
There are two versions of the record, a super deluxe boxset version, with extra music in addition to the extravagant packaging, and this one, the standard version, which is nearly as limited as the deluxe box, only 170 copies made, and each comes in a handmade and hand painted tip-on style mini lp sleeve with a printed Japanese obi, every one totally unique, we're only gonna order as many copies as we actually get orders for, so if you want one, and you probably do, you should definitely order it now. We'll have them in a few weeks and can send them off then.
One of the best singers from Indonesia, Elvy Sukasih has one of those timeless voices that just effortlessly sweeps you off your feet. It's a combination of seductive flare sure sounding confidence that only the greatest of the great divas possess. Coming of age at the time that Dangut music was starting to bloom, she became one of its pioneers. Mixing Arabic, Indian, and some electric instruments into a high fevered eclectic sound that would become all the rage in Indonesia. While many would follow in her footsteps she actually was doing what would be later called Dangut before there was even such a thing. Recording since her teenage years in the early 60's all the way to today, she belongs in that special class of singers like Ofra Haza and Asha Bosle (Dangut music shares a similar sound and feel to lots of Bollywood music) who have managed to make music that respects their culture while at the same time transcends geography and has the capacity to enter all kinds of hearts.
It's always pretty amazing when reissue labels continue to set high standards with rediscovered music. Especially when you think the well has surely gone dry, that they must have to heap loads of praise and hyperbole on a record that no one has heard of to get folks to buy it, only to have it not be as good as one hoped. That's what we were expecting going in to this 1969 private press Jim Sullivan record, when the label was describing it as a cross between Fred Neil and David Axelrod, two of our favorite musicians. While the description is somewhat apt, we couldn't help in our excitement over what we were hearing to come up with better comparisons like the Memphis swamp-folk of Tim Rose, the string-driven downer folk-blues of Tim Hardin or the lysergic folk-pop of Hoyt Axton (especially his debut, My Griffin is Gone). Needless to say, we are loving this record!
U.F.O. is a unique hybrid of Southern-fried world-weary folk with classic top-notch LA studio production sheen. Backed by the legendary Wrecking Crew, Sullivan's earthy but wide-eyed existentialism is cradled in stunning atmospheric orchestral arrangements that give deeper scope to the song's melancholic luster. Why this wasn't a major studio release at the time is a mystery because it sure sounds like one. But mysteries seem to have dogged Jim Sullivan throughout his life, as he strangely disappeared in 1975 in the New Mexico desert. His belongings abandoned, his motel room untouched.
Light in the Attic has done an incredible job of piecing together Sullivan's backstory and disappearance, but with no definitive resolution except for the legacy of one of the best lost folk records we've heard in a long while. Highly recommended!
This is the debut full length from Italian psychedelic garage pop combo Sultan Bathery, and if you can disregard the punny band name (that some of us didn't even notice), you'll be treated to a heaping helping of everything we love about that 'sound', a lot of fuzz, a little bit of jangle, a loy of poppiness, a little surf rock, some tripped out Spacemen 3 drugginess, all wound up into some seriously addictive, crazy catchy surf garage fuzz pop pound, that falls sonically somewhere between local garage rock heroes Thee Oh Sees, and the now sadly defunct San Diego surf pop geniuses Mrs. Magician, there's even a bit of swampy swagger that reminds us of another more obscure aQ fave, the late great Railroad Jerk, which for us is high praise indeed! And to be honest, on first listen, we weren't totally blown away, SB sounded great, but sounded a lot like so many other bands, but repeated listens has revealed this to be a serious garage rock gem, with some fucking great songs, and we find ourselves listening to this like crazy, which as always, is about the best recommendation we can give... WAY recommended for fans of the above mentioned bands, as well as other aQ faves like the Liminanas, Lorelle And The Obsolete, Davila 666, etc.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Led by John Reis, of so many San Diego bands (namely, Rocket From The Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, and more recently Back Off Cupids and Hot Snakes). Very rawk. For punks who find his other bands too arty! This is incredibly raw and fresh, completely unpretentious gasguzzling powermad rock'n'roll. And you have to admire their balls in making an album that cost absolutely nothing to record: used tape, used DAT, busted 8-track cut down to a 6-track. Really.
Jussi from Circle (how many of our reviews start with those 3 words?) is a big big fan of this band, a stripped down minimal blues boogie duo who also hail from Finland, and now have this compilation cd out on Jussi's Ektro label.
One chord, two chords, three chords maybe, they do the most basic blues progressions over-and-over-and-over-again, it's super simple and super repetitive stuff, hypnotically head noddin' for sure, kind of lazy and laidback. They do sound a bit like Circle, if Circle were just guitar and drums and played the blues out on a backporch somewhere, drunk on moonshine, endlessly chooglin' away. A few tracks add a bass player, a few also have singing, but mostly this is all instrumental, just drummin' and strummin', primitive stompin' and geetar honkin', nothin' but. Real simple. Zen blues or something. It's so monomaniacal it almost gets ridiculous; we mean really, while we do like this, at the same time, it might be totally stupid. Or awesome. We can't even tell. But like we said, Jussi from Circle is a big fan. And there's 80 minutes of this stuff here, the disc is packed to the brim, 23 tracks in all, five of 'em previously unreleased, the others taken from 7"s and albums going back to 1995.
From the ceaseless unresting mind of Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer, House Of Low Culture, Split Cranium, etc.) comes this all new project of blistering, suffocating post-sludge-noise. What is most immediately captivating about Sumac is how much more aggressive their music feels compared to Turner's previous projects. Sure, he's a man who has often dealt in heaviness, but The Deal is an altogether much more abrasive, frantic and confrontational affair - the guitars often channeling an altogether Godflesh-ian/Swans-ish degree of apocalyptian disdain - like skyscraper sized plates of metal scraping together, but obscured by mathy bouts of incomprehensible time signatures, propelled onward by some of the most furiously intricate drumming we've heard in quite some time. And that's to say nothing of the howled vocals, grotesque & anguished, bordering on the death metal. There are actually plenty of quiet moments technically speaking, but even those feel far from peaceful, serving instead to exacerbate the nauseous itchy dread-urgency that this record drips with. It's certainly not the easiest journey Mr. Turner's ever taken us on, but it's without a doubt one of the most fascinating & fulfilling. Recommended!
Wow, did you know that the debut record by purported Peruvian princess Yma Sumac (1922-2008), was the biggest selling release of 1950? This isn't that album, Voice Of The Xtabay, though, rather it's her 1971 (yes, once again, 1971 blows the mind) rock-oriented comeback attempt, Miracles, this remastered reissue being the first time officially on cd for this rare record, which didn't stay in print very long originally, due to legal differences between Sumac and her label. So not so many folks heard this one, but now they can, if they dare!
While one could perhaps imagine something even more far-out from Sumac in '71, her fabled five octave range offering tantalizing possibilities for Yoko Ono or Brainticket style freakouts, this is definitely NOT your father's lounge music, either! Before titling it Miracles, they almost called it Jungle Rock, and it was definitely an attempt to introduce Yma Sumac to a new generation of fans. In this effort to be hip and happening, the inventive orchestration and contemporary rock band backing (fuzz guitars, swirling organ) come close to being as wild as her voice.
Interestingly, this album found the "Queen Of Exotica" once again teamed up with the "King" - Les Baxter, her collaborator on Voice Of The Xtabay! He was brought in to compose and conduct, and is responsible for writing all the tracks here but one (a cover of popular Peruvian folk number "El Condor Pasa").
These songs, with titles like "Medicine Man", "Flame Tree", "Azure Sands", "Zebra", and "Magenta Mountain", certainly showcase Sumac's remarkable voice - soaring altissimo, deep growling, startling squeaking, everything in between - as accompanied by swinging, fuzzed out psych rock grooves and otherworldly arrangements. Downright "lysergic" as some would have it. Others might call the combination corny... some of this sounds like the most unhinged nightclub act ever.
Leadoff track "Remember" sets the pace, Sumac's band ready to rumble, guitars crashing in like maybe she's gonna start singing "Jumping Jack Flash" but her vocals are all wordless whoops and warble (like a human Thermin) and ludicrous, Muppet-like grumble. Crazy stuff. This even reminds us a bit of the sort of Third World garage psych now being comped on such recent collections as Thai? Dai! and The Sound Of Siam, an interesting synchronicity. Who was unintentionally inspiring who?
It's hard to know what Yma Sumac purists will think about this over the top, modish Incan instro-hipster act. (Are there Yma Sumac purists?) This album's certainly a strange one, all right, utter extreme eccentric exotica. Exotic for the "jungle" themes, and all the more exotic now for its dated psychsploitation angle.
Brought to us by one of our favorite reissue labels, Australia's Omni Recording Corporation, who make sure provide extensive, fascinating liner notes (touching on this album's kinship with other albums of "psychedelic opportunism" of the era like Muddy Waters' Electric Mud, Bo Diddley's Black Gladiator, and Chubby Checker's New Revelation) in the colorfully illustrated cd booklet. Also, three previously unreleased bonus tracks have been added to the disc!
21 tracks of vintage Yma Sumac exotica, and we do mean exotica: monkeys, volcanos, and pagan rituals all figure into these songs, taken from classic albums like "Voice Of The Xtabay" and "Legend Of The Sun Virgin". This is a good starting place for anyone who has yet to explore the Technicolor work of this "Peruvian" singer and her lounge-y '50s sounds. Her four and a half octave voice will wow you, the liner notes are informative, and you get the "hits" here plus some unreleased tracks ("Inca Waltz" for one) as well.
A few weeks ago, we listed Yma Sumac's last commercial effort, the incredibly awesome and strange lounge-rock hybrid from 1971, Miracles. So we thought this week we should balance that with her first major label release, the stunning proto-exotica of Voice of The Xtabay from 1950. Recorded with Les Baxter a full two years before his Ritual of The Savage album (which is widely considered to be the cornerstone release of the lounge exotica trend with many tiki bars and hula dance lessons to follow in its wake), Voice of the Xtabay still has an air of being somewhat authentic sounding, namely due to the otherworldly quality of Sumac's four and a half octave vocal range and her incredibly striking beauty that made it easily believable that she was actually descended from a true Inca princess (whether that was true or not has always been debated throughout her life and career and still persists after her death). A lush Technicolor fantasy of erupting volcanoes, chanting virgin maidens and jungle animal sounds, gorgeously orchestrated, Voice of The Xtabay is truly a unique record. The cd also features all the tracks from her Inca Taqui record from 1953 with her husband Moises Vivanco taking over the composer duties. Transcendent!
Where were you in '92? If you were anything like some of us you were getting swept off your feet by the amazingly infectious sound of a new breed of indie pop bands who were pumping out catchy gems that were as just as hook laden as they were raw and energetic and feisty.
Summer Cats are a brand new band who just so happen to be channeling that same golden age of indie pop, with some pretty sizzling results! Featuring both female and male vocals, and songs with no wasted space, Songs For Tuesdays is an album that reminds us why we fell in love with bands like Superchunk, Velocity Girl, and Tsunami back in the day. They even manage to capture the full on pop side of The Breeders on some of these songs. Summer Cats are able to tap into that same kind of of wide eyed exuberant songcraft, whipping out the kind of summer (duh!) jams that are meant to be blasted LOUD on neverending summer days. Slumberland continues to be the label to trust when it comes to smart and satisfying pop done so right.
We kind of think the Summer Cats have gotten a bit overlooked in the awesome rebirth of Slumberland records. We loved their peppy and additive full length and this new 7" is making us hope that more folks get turned on to their totally upbeat, immediate and yes, totally Summer soaked sounds, in the tradition of the glory days of sugary pop fueled indie rock like Superchunk, Velocity Girl, Rocketship, Tiger Trap, Heavenly, Henry's Dress, and Boyracer. And with all the disjointed and warped lo-fi sounds we've been bombarded with lately it sounds so damn cleansing and beyond refreshing to hear some seriously sunhsiney pop. Summercats understand that to play this kind of music it has to be all killer and no filler, and they totally get that. Both these songs immediately jump into their hooks and pop glory and leave no room for wasted space or lingering moments. It's immediate, way catchy and gloriously sunny.
With the sunlit psych melodies of, say, the Olivia Tremor Control, and the hushed sweetly plaintive vocal delivery of Flaming Lips, Fuck, For Stars, or Grandaddy, plus a much smaller, more intimate right-there-in-front-of-you sound, Summer Hymns have made a pretty album. It's not the best of the current crop of bright eyed young Elephant 6 popsters, but it's pretty good nonetheless.
As with their two previous full lengths, Athens' Summer Hymns have made a nice album that's certainly pleasant enough but not particularly memorable. Head songsmith Zach Gresham and drummer Philip Brown have taken their pretty psych pop sound, complete with Flaming Lips-y / Grandaddy-ish plaintive vocals, and with the addition of two new members named Matt (Dawson and Stoessel) have fleshed out their sound with a whole lot of mournful, twangin' pedal steel, as well as some banjo, mandolin and dobro. Been listening to a lot of Gram Parsons, I'll bet. The result is mellow and pretty but, well, nothing special. I'd recommend any Court and Spark record over this one.
Although the moniker "Elephant 6" does not appear anywhere on this disc, it might as well. Summer Hymns is from Athens, Georgia, like the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel before them, and they're sporting the same ole pretty pop-psychedelic melodies and drawings and lyrics and what have you. It's unfortunate that they add nothing that's original to the mix, but fans of Elephant 6 stuff will still find much to like.
With the big revival that disco has enjoyed the last couple years we thought no time better than now then to dip into the vaults for some true vintage disco classics. The meeting of worlds between German producer Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer really was the blueprint for much of the cosmic disco that would follow and be revived and reinvented in recent years by labels like Italians Do It Better (Glass Candy, Chromatics, Farah, etc.) as well as folks like Escort, Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and mega pop-stars like Madonna and Beyonce. But hard as they try, none of them can match the true ecstasy of cosmic dancefloor delight that Moroder and Donna Summer created together in their golden years of collaboration circa 1975-1979.
Bad Girls came at the tail end of their collaboration, as the '80s and on would find a much less coked-out Donna Summer creating way less memorable material after this golden era. While our all time favorite and pretty much totally perfect Donna Summer records are probably Love To Love You Baby, and Four Seasons Of Love, Bad Girls contains some of our favorite Donna Summer tracks!
While not every one of the fifteen tracks on Bad Girls is a classic, the majority are so smoking and fun! Recorded in 1979, Moroder and Summer were aware that the heyday of disco was waning a bit so there are healthy hints of new wave, pop and even a few ballads in the mix, but the strength of Bad Girls is all about its bright uptempo thrillers that will always stand the test of time.
Summons Of Shining Ruins is the nom de plume of Japanese post-shoegazing guitarist Shinobu Nemoto, who had released a rather exceptional piece of cinematic ambience for Experimedia in 2009 that came and went rather quickly. This is another one that will disappear in the blink of an eye as well, given the tiny edition of this pressing. There's only 53 copies around, probably due to the inclusion in the packaging of an antique chemists label culled from chain of British drug stores that at one time sold such things as 'liquid extract cascara sagrada' and 'camphorated oil.' A nifty piece of esoterica to go along with this tape of woozy, muffled drones from Nemoto. The tracks are much less dramatic than the album he did for Experimedia, instead these sullen ambient movements slowly waver along grey streamlined tones with upwelling melodies moving to the foreground from time to time. Certainly on par with the murky cassette work that Maeror Tri and Troum produced way back when, or maybe even some of the Lovesliescrushing driftworks but given a tape hiss makeover. Nice.
The sun is warm, the sun lights the way, the sun brings life... what's in a name? Well, it's certainly no misnomer for this group. It'll Be The Same is the second album from Sun, not to be confused with SUNNO))), although these guys are also a duo (Oren Ambarchi and Chris Townsend) and half of 'em (Mr. Ambarchi) have collaborated with SUNNO))) in the past. This Sun isn't from Southern Lord, but from the southern hemisphere (Australia), and play purely pop music, slow and soft and hushed but nothing doomy or blackened at all... some gentle droniness certainly does creep in, experimental glitch techniques n' textures that are of course what we might expect from Oren Ambarchi, who after all is known for solo albums along those lines (in fact, there's a great new one by him, actually on Southern Lord, reviewed on this list too). There are layers of static and field recordings (Townsend's children's voices, perhaps?) that along with Oren and Chris's own voices and guitar strums are formed into six moodily relaxed, truly sun-dappled, electro-acoustic folky-pop songs... a calm, cryptically detailed setting for lovely, wistful vocals that remind us of the Skygreen Leopards' Glenn Donaldson and Richard Youngs.
We loved Sun's first self-titled album (and extra disc of experimental remixes) back in 2003, and are happy to finally hear this excellent follow-up!
Aussie guitar experimentalist Oren Ambarchi has been a prolific gent of late, mainly doing droney improv glitch stuff we've been diggin'. But we know there's other musical sides to his personality as well -- after all, we first encountered him playing in the loud n' noisy scatological Boredoms/Buttholes influenced band Phlegm back in the early '90s. So now here's another, new and different Ambarchi project, a duo by the name of Sun (not to be confused with the doomster duo Sunn) that pairs Ambarchi with one Chris Townend (described as an "Australian music figurehead" whatever that means). And it's not noise, or drone, or improv, or electronics -- it's full on indie-pop! Really nice too, with laid back drum beats, gentle vocals, and pretty guitar strum. They're called Sun (and there's some la la las sung) but they'll have you thinking of rainy days too with their lazy, wistful songs. It's got that 60s Beatles/Floyd filtered through 90s indie-pop thing, like a Elephant 6 band or the Aislers Set or something.
Originally released in 2001 in Australia only, Sun's debut has now been licensed by Staubgold for the rest of the planet. What's great is that they've also tacked on a 2nd bonus disc of remixes, featuring all the tracks from the album redone (or done in) by the likes of Pluramon, Hrvatski, Christoph Heeman, Rafael Toral, Pimmon, Mapstation, Tom Recchion and Norbert Moslang of Voice Crack! Quite an international lineup of experimental artists there, reinterpreting the music of Sun in ways closer to what you're used to hearing from Ambarchi. Droney and fucked up, these mixes add a lot to the package, making it not just real nice but really interesting as well. And what other pretty pop duo would get Voice Crack to do a remix?? I guess Ambarchi might just be angling to become the next Jim O'Rourke...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
For all the deserved attention and press the whole Los Angeles musical underground has been receiving in the last couple years, we still think that Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, is perhaps the most unique musical visionary to come out of that scene. Beyond being so prolific, the quality of his proper records just gets increasingly better and better. On Patrol was one of our favorite albums of 2010, and with Ancient Romans, Sun Araw continues to move forward from that dubbed out blueprint and expand on what has become one of the most singular sounds of any new band of the last decade.
The moment the album starts, you immediately understand that you are at the beginning of a ceremony, some sort of stange sonic ritual, which requires the listener to open up to completely, wholly trusting in these sounds to carry you away. With dirty, hypnotic organs for the opening tones, setting the stage for the textured and layered dubbed out trip that will unfold over the next 80 minutes. More then almost any band we can think of, Sun Araw is a master of creating a unified vibe. The tracks on Ancient Romans just melt in and out of each other, you lose track of what song is playing, and instead just get lost deep in the fuzzed out grooves, and tripped out meditations. It's hard to explain when music feels this spiritual, it's just something you feel and trust. And with Sun Araw we get that feeling so intensely. It places you in some dusty, archaic temple that we could imagine was transported directly from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Once inside the temple, you forget about the trivial details of the everyday, and instead leave your body and find yourself somewhere mystical, magical and totally transcendent. This is going to be a contender for record of the year!
A reissue of record number two from Sun Araw, aka Magic Lanterns guitarist Cameron Stallone, and much like the other SA releases, Beach Head is a fuzzy, druggy, washed out, effects heavy psychedelic krautdrone new age blow out. Four extended tracks of smoldering minimal drift, soft cacophonies of bells and chimes wrapped in streaks of feedback and swirls of spaced out FX, undulating tendrils of sitar buzz, warped calliope melodies, and muted almost folky twang, everything sun dappled and Technicolor ear candy.
"Thoughts Are Bells" is indeed a bell heavy intro, a slow building, dronescape of percussive swirl, smoothed out angular guitars, and a slow motion avalanche of effects and buried melodies. "Horse Steppin'" is all laid back tropicalia via Ariel Pink, and broadcast through loud speakers hung from palm trees on some deserted tropical island. Flirting with Ducktails style lo-fi tropical garage pop, but transforming it into a reverb drenched bit of slow dreampop, that almost sounds like Animal Collective being spun manually at about 10rpm, the guitars glisten, the drums are muted and barely there, the vocals are soaked in echo and delay, everything laid back and stretched out and washed out, hazy and lazy and bleary and deliriously dreamlike.
The rest of the record doesn't deviate too much from those first two tracks, "Beams" manages to fuse the two, the sort of raga drift of the first with the slowcore blurpop of the second, into a Spacemen 3 style druggy drone, replete with woozy basslines, ethereal guitar atmospherics, and all the other various elements, vocals, drums, buried in a glorious sonic murk, while "Bridal Filly", takes the same combination, but stretches it WAY out into something even still more indistinct, an almost Tim Hecker-ish landscape of blurred grit, and pixelated melody, softly pulsing melodies, weightless wordless vox, muted percussion, swaths of thick buzz, eventually coalescing around another lumbering bassline, into some total stoner zoner psych drone spacerock drift. Awesome.
On the 7th full length from Sun Araw, we're not quite sure if Cameron Stallones is pushing boundaries or testing our patience or a little bit of both. Since his (in our opinion) best ever effort Ancient Romans - both on his collaboration with the Congos & M. Geddes Gengra and then on his Inner Treaty ep, he rode a divisive line around here between sublime devotional immersion and deliberately distancing bro-jam cacophony. We had begun to become a bit wary, and we're still somewhat on the fence here, though ultimately, we like this better than the last two aforementioned previous releases. On Belomancie, he reigns in his kitchen sink cluttered dub clouds for a type of long-form minimalism, but not one pivoting on repetition. Rather, Stallones uses a reductive musical approach to create a complex overlaying string of obtusely connected phases that lead the listener into strange sonic spaces. Designed for active listening, one could spend some time with this record and never hear it quite the same way twice. Yet, the synth tones are laid out and built upon so slowly that it seems like ages for a song to take its form and it will likely come across as either a rarefied mystique of plaintive searching or boring meandering noodling depending on your engagement and patience.
Jeez, guitarist Cameron Stallones has been on a roll lately with his solo endeavor Sun Araw. His third lp on the hugely prolific Not Not Fun label, Heavy Deeds picks up where the Phynx left off, more slow grooving jammers that fall somewhere between psych soul and pop-hop. Wailing delayed-out guitar, tons of wah and tons of soul, catchy vocal passages call out over and over as a leisurely turning lumber plods on with a hypnotic groove. Kinda like listening to a Suicide song on half speed while starring at the sun on a warm beach in Florida, whip out the hula shirts and Robitussin, it's going to be a trippy afternoon. All five tracks are so densely layered with all kinds of organ flutters, ripping solos, mumbling vocals its easy to get lost in Sun Araw's psychotic world of ultra catchy, mind melting blues. There's no doubt this kid has loads of talent, and is super productive, and we have to say we really dig Sun Araw's ability to balance pop sensibility with over the top psychedelic melt-down. There's enough here to get a song or two stuck in your head, without the music being at all straight forward or simple, pretty rad. Oh and by the way, the cd version comes with a killer bonus track titled "Hey Mandala"!
Brand new chunk of hazy, druggy, dubbed out psychedelic groove from Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, and it's a doozy, still dipping heavily into reggae and dub for inspiration, with wah wah guitar, woozy groovy bass, and now with what sounds like African high life style vocals, all draped over a wavery droning synth, which adds a weird bit of tension, the sound a dizzying hybrid, but one that kind of works, the guitars grow more active, getting crunchier, adding texture and melody to the proceedings, but all still wedded to that main groove, which pulses and undulates seductively the whole time. If you dug the last few SA records, this jam will be right up your alley. The weird thing here is the B side, which finds Stallones covering Teenage Fanclub, and utterly transforming it into some strange tropical dubbed out power pop jam, all gauzy and shimmery, laced with bird sounds, all sorts of FX squiggles, still underpinned by that droning synth tone, but there's real riffing, and real singing, but tenuously wrapped around all the murky swirl and dubby drift underneath, but again it kind of works. If you weren't familiar with the original, you might not even realize it's a cover, but if you are, you might just like this version too.
Cameron Stallones is back from his pilgrimage to Jamaica, where he made that FRKWYS album with The Congos, and now offers up a new Sun Araw album on his own Sun Ark imprint, full of damaged grooves and new twisted strain of avant dub weirdness, fragmented and spaced out, stumbling and super loose, the guitars spidery and echoey, the rhythms skittery and a bit abstract, the vocals doused in effects and WAY up in the mix, the whole thing sounds like it's melting, gradually decaying, peppered with blasts of fuzzy synth, swaths of swirly organ, percussion that sounds like clinking bottles, shuffling processed glitches. The tracks stutter and hiccup, never locking into a groove, so much as drifting and slipping from sound to sound, a series of swells, often fading out to near silence, before slipping back into it, some folks here thought it sounded kinda like Blues Control making a reggae album, while someone builds furniture next door (!), but some of us definitely got a serious Fastest vibe, total fractured outsider whatthefuck weirdo reggae action that will definitely have lots of folks scratching their heads and wondering what the hell is happening here. Although plenty of other folks will flip for Stallones' new, more damaged incarnation. Listen to the sound samples, and you'll know pretty much right away, which side you'll find yourself on.
Meandering and gloriously unfocused, The Inner Treaty definitely lacks some of the catchiness and groove of past Sun Araw releases, but for what it lacks in those areas, it makes up for in confusional weirdness, lacing its sundappled WTF dub with James Ferraro weirdo-wave retro VHS wooziness, and Ariel Pink / John Maus style avant drama-pop, and tangles it all up into something totally bizarre, something in fact that is so fucked up, it's like a musical car crash, we don't necessarily WANT to keep listening really, but somehow can't seem to stop ourselves. Very reservedly recommended, and even then, only for folks who like their music a bit baffling. Which come to think of it, is probably a whole lot of you.
As if the music of lysergic, lo-fi drugdub one man band Sun Araw wasn't flipped out and damaged enough, on this latest joint, those already tweaked and twisted sounds get even more far out, the vibe WAY druggier and spacier, a 26 minute blast of crumbling wah-guitar laced psychdub comedown in the form of three skull caving soul freeing innerspace excursions.
"Last Chants" begins with a dense swirling cloud of white noise and damaged effects, shot through with barely there melodies, and loose detuned riffage, as the noise gradually fades out, it reveals the strange slow motion cough syrup psychfunk dub drawl lurking underneath, woozy wah guitar, echo drenched Sly Stone vox, streaked with shards of high end shimmer, distorted fuzzy crunch, all hazy and blurry as if run through a series of bongs, all roped to a loping lugubrious barely there rhythm.
"Midnight Locker" is way more dubby, fragmented rhythms, and strange vocal oooh's, drift in a sea of swirling whirring low end thrum, woozy bass slithers throughout, cowbells surface here and there, little bits of wah, spidery tendrils of psychedelic guitar, the buzz and blur eventually recede leaving just a strange assemblage of percussion and guitar, all over a distant rumbling shimmer, but mostly it's spare and spacious and still seriously drugged out.
And finally, "Deep Temple" starts out almost like a proper dub jam, but within seconds, that woozy groove is wreathed in gorgeously blown out prismatic sheets of shimmery sound, an impossibly shoegazey dub drone bliss out of the highest order, twisted and looped, and as the track progresses more and more heavy and psychedelic.
The cd version tacks on an additional 18 minutes, 2008's Boat Trip ep, which is a bit more lo-fi and a bit more minimal, long stretches of low slung bass rumble, thick swaths of shimmering drones, crumbling distorted heaviness, reverbed vox, loping and hypnotic, still dubby, but not nearly as blown out and explosive, a sort of meditative dreamy druggy coda. So cool...
As if the music of lysergic, lo-fi drugdub one man band Sun Araw wasn't flipped out and damaged enough, on this latest joint, those already tweaked and twisted sounds get even more far out, the vibe WAY druggier and spacier, a 26 minute blast of crumbling wah-guitar laced psychdub comedown in the form of three skull caving soul freeing innerspace excursions.
"Last Chants" begins with a dense swirling cloud of white noise and damaged effects, shot through with barely there melodies, and loose detuned riffage, as the noise gradually fades out, it reveals the strange slow motion cough syrup psychfunk dub drawl lurking underneath, woozy wah guitar, echo drenched Sly Stone vox, streaked with shards of high end shimmer, distorted fuzzy crunch, all hazy and blurry as if run through a series of bongs, all roped to a loping lugubrious barely there rhythm.
"Midnight Locker" is way more dubby, fragmented rhythms, and strange vocal oooh's, drift in a sea of swirling whirring low end thrum, woozy bass slithers throughout, cowbells surface here and there, little bits of wah, spidery tendrils of psychedelic guitar, the buzz and blur eventually recede leaving just a strange assemblage of percussion and guitar, all over a distant rumbling shimmer, but mostly it's spare and spacious and still seriously drugged out.
And finally, "Deep Temple" starts out almost like a proper dub jam, but within seconds, that woozy groove is wreathed in gorgeously blown out prismatic sheets of shimmery sound, an impossibly shoegazey dub drone bliss out of the highest order, twisted and looped, and as the track progresses more and more heavy and psychedelic.
The cd version tacks on an additional 18 minutes, 2008's Boat Trip ep, which is a bit more lo-fi and a bit more minimal, long stretches of low slung bass rumble, thick swaths of shimmering drones, crumbling distorted heaviness, reverbed vox, loping and hypnotic, still dubby, but not nearly as blown out and explosive, a sort of meditative dreamy druggy coda. So cool...
Latest cloud of smoked out dub psych damage from this one man band, a massive sprawling double lp, every song bleeding into the next, one epic druggy abstract sonic trip. The Sun Araw sound keeps drifting further and further out, and in the process, approaching something that sounds a bit like reggae, but filtered through a cracked Not Not Fun filter, and a bank of busted amps and malfunctioning effects pedals. Oh and pot smoke. Lots and lots of pot smoke.
Woozy, warbly, prismatic, sun baked (and just plain baked), stripped down, dubbed out, inner space drift. Wah Wah guitars hover over skeletal rhythms, reverb and delay coats everything in earshot, disembodied chantlike vox are draped over SA's twisted mutant lo-fi dub. The record drifts into some warped murk, still peppered with plenty of upstroke reggae guitar jangle, but wrapped in wheezing keyboards and some super distorted fuzz bass.
The second record begins all ethereal and new age, some hushed glimmering ambient drift, near static, before launching into some dubby krautrock, muted and muddy and minimal, flurries of keyboard tangle spray notes at the relentless motorik pulse, still more abstract vox and lots of gorgeously spidery guitars, all tangled up into minor key melodies that seem to fade into the background, the whole record sort of hazy and ghostly, while somehow remaining krauty and dubby. The sidelong final side strips everything away, or piles it all on, blurring and smearing and winding everything into a dense layered drift, looped and hypnotic and psychedelic, that wouldn't sound out of place on a Monopoly Child Star Searchers record. Rad stuff. Thick vinyl, full color gatefold sleeve, and yeah, probably limited.
Take the blown-out pop psych euphoria of Les Rallizes Denudes, throw in a dash of Parson Sound's hypnotic kraut feel, and you're getting close to honing in on the futuristic yet tribal psych jams effortlessly conjured up by Cameron Stallones, a member of Long Beach's Magic Lantern who goes it alone as Sun Araw. From the prolific folks at Not Not Fun, Phynx resounds with a heavy California daze, a drugged out, bluesy blend of face melting drones, fuzzed out guitar riffs, and repetitive clangy rhythms. Ritualistic and somehow modern, Sun Araw walks the line between pop and drone. Moments of the album are dense with catastrophic buzzing thickness, and other parts are more rockin' with a pretty defined heavy groovin' psych feel. All very guitar based, we're reminded of dudes like Ignatz, but less lo-fi and intimate, definitely more rhythmic and percussive. We're even sort of reminded of Brightblack's older stuff, heavy lethargic blues on Robitussin.
But Phynx is much more dense and perplexing. Layers of fuzz on top of layers of vocals on top of layers of drones...you get the idea. A seriously engaging album, there's tons of variety and small details to get all wrapped up in. And not to mention the sweet picture on the cover of some mysterious blindfolded figure in the dim hall of a library! Don't miss out on this California tribal psych gem!
Two words we never thought we'd need these two words in a review of solo lysergic space psych outfit Sun Araw: Funky. And Reggae. But indeed this latest slab of effects drenched trip out, indeed requires both of those descriptors to do it justice.
The A side is all fuzzy bloopy bass, over a groovy loping rhythm, lots of wah guitar, drenched in effects, little squalls of psychedelic freakout here and there, super stripped down, synthy and spacey and yeah, a little bit funky. But in some weird way it totally works.
The flipside offers up, right out of the gate, some funky timbales, more wah guitars, he whole thing pretty blissed out and druggy for sure, with super tripped out stereo panning and warm wheezing organ, and a distinct and undeniable rocksteady vibe.
We're trying to remember if these tendencies were present in past Sun Araw outings, and we feel like they must have been, but it's not until now that they were allowed to blossom, seems strange, and it definitely sort of is, but we're digging it. Try to imagine the a totally drugged out, abstract, fuzzy, reverby, effects doused slightly funky, lo-fi reggae drone space jam, and this is probably it!
Some deep and heady devotional vibes from this unlikely dream collaboration of Sun Araw, M Geddes Gendras and reggae legends The Congos for the latest installment of the RVNG label's FRKWYS series. Reminding us of a more churning and lysergic exploration of Dadawah's long form Nyabinghi jams, Icon Give Thank as this disc in the series is titled, turns the standard dub-reggae expectations on their heads and instead offers a strange brew of soft swells, smoky psych drift and oceanic dub interludes, punctuated by the honeyed falsetto vocals of elder statesmen Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson from Congos. This release has garnered the most divisive stance of the FRKWYS series among us at aQ so far, with some of us considering it one of the better collaborations and for others a squandered opportunity smacking of colonialism. Granted, the sound design relies heavily on the Sun Araw side of the coin, but his approach is hardly "the white boy playing reggae" criticisms this release has occasionally garnered. The sound, for one, hovers hazily in the air like swirling smoke while the grounding bass is pushed back way in the mix instead of anchoring it rhythmically. Each member of the collaboration has come together on the premise of praise and invocation of thanks, making this project a more spiritual concern than just a good-times-get-high-let's-jam together record. By the end of it, we're in a completely different headspace altogether, in reverent clouds of the Divine.
And along with the cd, you get an hour-long dvd disc, called Icon Eye, a travelogue/documentary all about the collaboration process.
We first discovered the raga drone duo Sun Circle via a cd-r sent to the store, direct from the band, and as mentioned in the review of that very cd-r, somehow the disc got lost, only to be discovered literally YEARS later, only for us to finally listen to it, and be totally blown away. The band was as adept at growling howling humming dronemusic as it was at ephemeral atmospheric ambience, crafting their own variations of classic ragas, filtered through an aesthetic as informed by modern music, noise rock and who knows what else, as it was Indian classical music and 20th century minimalism.
On their newest, Lessness, as the title suggests, the band do indeed work with less, each side of the double lp performed on single instrument, either drums, tamboura or gong, but in doing so, manage to transform the minimal instrumentation into something lush and expansive, rhythmic and hypnotic.
The first side is just drums, and is most definitely the most minimal of the bunch, maybe too minimal for some, with just a very simple spare rhythm, pounded out on a drum, maybe several, but the sound is spare, and simple, but listen close, and listen for the whole of the side, and the sounds grow ever more complex, on the surface the rhythm never wavers, but as you get sucked in, the sounds do seems to come alive, the overtones, the subtle shifts in timbre, constantly evolving, but so subtly, it might not be noticeable unless you're in it for the long haul and have those headphones strapped on tight. Total rhythmic raga bliss.
The second two sides are both produced with just tambouras, and the sound is incredible, thick and layered, gorgeously lush, an organic, and living sound, the subtle colors of the sound reflective and prismatic, constantly shifting, intense and mesmerizing and strangely meditative and psychedelic. On the second tamboura side, the sound becomes a bit more structured, but only a bit, buzzing steel strings, subtly rhythmic, locked into a looped groove, deep rumbles beneath a repeated fragmented melody, the most traditionally raga sounding of the bunch, and like the two sides before it, seemingly unchanging, as if it really was looped, but this is the sort of sound that rewards deep listening, and blossoms into a world of complex sound, just below the surface.
Especially on the final side, which is all gongs, and very much like the Karen Stackpole records on Dielectric, the sounds is deep and resonant and so sonorous, ringing out, layered here and there, but more often left to just hover in space, before fading away, only to have another tone take its place, no processing, just the glorious sound of vibrating metal, dark and mysterious, meditative and hypnotic. So gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!
Originally released for a Japanese tour with Grouper and Ben Vida, Tapes is a collection of, yep, you guessed it, tapes, from this drone duo, whose last two records were big hits around here, SC's sound a super minimal blend of hushed layered dronemusic and cosmic ragas, often creating epic pieces from single sound sources, like the gong piece on the Lessness lp, which might be one of our favorite Sun Circle tracks ever, a sprawl of deep sonorous shimmering metallic thrum.
Tapes, as we mentioned, collects a handful of previously released, and now out of print, cassette releases, and offers them on cd for the first time, along with two previously unreleased tracks, none of the songs here titled, instead, presented with a description of where they came from, how they were created and sometimes how limited the original release was.
Six tracks, the longest 22:24, the shortest 13:05, all gorgeously minimal, and each displaying a different side of Sun Circle's sound. The opener is from a 2007 split tape limited to just 50 copies, and is a 21+ minute synthscape/rage, beginning with pulsing analog synths, very tranced out and hypnotic, before a metallic buzz begins to form, and slowly builds, eventually blossoming into a thick layered drone, rich and lustrous, there also seems to be voices, all these sounds woven into thins softly undulating streak of warm effulgent sound, which continues on even as that initial synth fades out, finishing with a hazy bit of metallic shimmer and buzz. the second track is from another split tape, this one from 2008 and limited to 100 copies, and begins as a slow burn bit of abstract drone/drift, smoldering and humid, that initial drone laced with streaks of complimentary sound, longform tones, swirling overtones, the whole thing almost sounding like a symphony in slow motion. Hazy and shimmery and dreamy. The final track on the first cd is a collage of ALL of the live sets from a 2007 tour, just voice and organ, but 11 different performances layered on top of each other, resulting in a sweet slab of thick warm blur and buzz, super mesmerizing, culminating in an explosive noisy final movement.
The second disc begins with a live track, taken from a 2009 tour tape, limited to 100 copies, and begins as a delicate drift, which is soon joined by some bagpipe like buzz (harmonium?), wheezing chords over that warm minimal shimmer, very ritualistic sounding, just drifting and drifting, until the second half where the sound seems to become more muted, the edges worn to a dull glow, the sound a bleary blurred expanse of soft metallic shimmer, driven by a simple rhythmic beating drum. The second track is taken from the same tour tape, and was recorded in 2009 right here in SF at the Swedish American Hall, and is the most rhythmic of the bunch, starting out with some tribal drumming, all over a distant low end thrum, it's not until about 3 minutes in, that a buzz begins to surface, quickly burying the drums beneath its unwavering, slow shifting whir, some serious soft noise mesmer, that goes on and on and on, completely sucking the listener in, before fading out about 12 minutes later, leaving just those drums to finish things off.
Finally, the last track is previously unreleased improvisation, overtone singing performed in a acoustical echo chamber, and then layered over recordings of gongs from an earlier tour, and if there's anything we can think of that could sound better than that, we sure don't know what. The voices and gongs wreathed in reverb and natural echo and delay, the notes stretching way out, all manner of harmonies and overtones, totally heavenly minimal dronemusic, and barring a brief squall of crunchy distorted noise, the whole track is hushed and delicate, drifty and dreamlike. So good.
Nice packaging too, two color silkscreened origami style folded cardstock sleeves, with a printed insert, featuring all the liner notes.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This mysterious musical missive showed up here way back in 2007, and quietly slipped through the cracks, and sat huddled on a shelf in the closet, until just a matter of days ago when we re-discovered it, and thus, we present to you, the last 10 copies of this long out of print cd-r, released in a limited edition of 100.
It was so long ago, we're ashamed to admit, we don't remember much about the band or what they're all about, so we'll go purely on sound (which is probably what we should do anyway).
Two looooong tracks, the first begins quite strangely, a thick undulating dronescape made from voices, howls and hums and croons woven into a strangely soothing wall of textured sound, we kept expecting it to shift but it never does, 19 minutes of pure voice raga, it's super intense, and so raw and intimate and organic, when it ends, like all dense drones, it feels like all the air gets sucked out of the room.
After the fervent intensity of the first track, the tranquil beginning of track two is almost jarring in it's softness, drifting clouds of bells and chimes, spread out over lots of space. Once again, we kept expecting the song to kick in, but instead, it's another exercise in space and tension, ultra minimal and percussive, the chimes and bells ring out and are allowed to decay to almost near silence, before the next flurry of tinkling and chiming. Really gorgeous and strangely zen.
This sort of stuff requires dedicated close listening, headphones help, but that sort of listening is indeed rewarded.
Packaged in a beautiful cardstock sleeve, with paste on liner notes and abstract cover, a metallic gold sticker, and a cd spray painted gold. Once again, there were only 100 copies and that was a year ago, so these are definitely the last copies we'll see...
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Sun City Girls fans rejoice, the vinyl reissue of their epic crowning acheivement "300,003 Crossdressers..." is upon us. Originally released in 1996 on double cd only, "Crossdressers" almost certainly surpassed "Torch of the Mystics" as the Sun City
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
After an almost three year hiatus (Sublime Frequencies seems to have been garnering the Girls' attention and finances these days) the Sun City Girls have racheted up the Carnival Folklore Resurrection project with two new titles, both of them live performances by the trio on the radio. This second set, CFR volume 13 was recorded on Kim Sorise's show on WFPK in Louisville, Kentucky in April of 2004. Both sets are quite similar in execution, spanning the gamut of SCG's musical tendencies. Either of these performances could be seen as a great introduction to the group or, equally, one for serious fans only. It's all here: overseas shortwave and field recordings, Uncle Jim rants, skronky improv madness, pretty instrumental interludes, re-engineered soundtrack themes and bizarre mixes. If there's a noticeable difference in the balance of material on the two releases we'd say that Radio One & Two has more Uncle Jim ranting and field recording mixing, while 98.6 Is Death has more actual live rocking, jamming and skronking in the studio.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Volume 4 in this never-ending (well, 150 volume) monthy series of Sun City Girls releases is here. It's jazz. It was recorded live in Seattle, December, 1997. It is now beginning to sink in that they really are going to put out a new cd every month for the rest of eternity (well, 150 months). This will really separate the true SCG lovers from the mere SCG likers, won't it now?
An absolutely essential, vinyl-only Sun City Girls release, one of our all time favorite SCG records since Torch Of The Mystics. The bad news is, A. it's really expensive, and B. we only got 15 copies and it's totally out of print. So SCG fanatics best act fast if they want one of these, cuz holy shit is this one mindblowing and ear tickling release...
The packaging alone makes this worth the price tag. An ultra thick, eye popping sleeve, housed in a die cut lp slipcase, with metallic embossing on the front. Inside, it's a one sided white vinyl lp, with the flip side gorgeously silkscreened. And there's so much stuff crammed inside the sleeve, it weighs a ton. There's multiple 12"x12" full color flats that seem to be alternate cover art, lots of random sized artwork, all on thick cardstock, two sheets of stickers, a band photo, a childhood photo of SCG Charlie Gocher (who passed away recently) and a page of confusing SCG linernotes from some zine from way back in 1999. Hard to say if that means this was previously released, but none of us have ever heard it.
So when you go to play the record, don't be confused by the needle hovering endlessly on the edge of the disc, it plays from the inside out, backwards, so set the needle down next to the label and let 'er rip. And as if the direction of play was any indicator, the music is almost entirely backwards! And it's amazing. Dark and droney, creepy and haunting, a little bit circusy, but mostly dizzying and hypnotic. Imagine listening to the darkest scariest SCG album backwards.... (and in fact, this is apparently the backwards version of "The Venerable Song (The Meaning Which Is No Longer Known)" from the LP Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings released on Majora way back in 1993!)...
Haunted vocals and mysterious chants and howls, fluttering flickering flutes all drift and hover over a gorgeous landscape of backwards drones and strange pulsing rhythms, created from that swooping backwards 'ffffzzzzt' sound that music makes in reverse... We weren't sure what to expect, but we've been listening to this nonstop, over and over and over, so goddamn good.
Not sure how limited this was (other than REALLY), and apparently there were a million different variations of color and inserts and whatnot in this already tiny micropressing, but we only have 15, and once these are gone, they are gone forever.
Eclipse continues with installment number two in their ongoing and immense task of reissuing the entire Sun City Girls cassette catalog. As we discovered with their previous release of the first two cassettes "God Is My Solar System" and "Superpower" they've taken the liberty of both including odds and ends from other cassettes and leaving out bits and pieces here and there to boot. Which is all good and well, as it leaves those dedicated fans who hold onto the original cassettes with a special keepsake and allows SCG neophytes and collectors alike to both enjoy a time capsule look at the trio in its infancy and a handsome limited edition package to share with our kids when we retire. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The tracks taken from "Bleach Has Feelings, Too!" come to us from recordings made by the Girls between 1982 and 1984. It's a snapshot of three precocious teenagers as they fuck around with a radio evangelist's call-in show, spin some sex records that would make the makers of Flexi-Sex blush and lay down the groundwork for their trademark punk rock free jazz skronk. The tracks on "To Cover Up Your Right To Live", culled from 1983 and 1985 recordings, present yet another disparate facet of the SCG aesthetic, namely that of the (ir)reverent cover tune. Along with fuck you style jams to VU's "Waitin For My Man" and "The Summertime Blues" there's also some kick ass takes on the theme to the "Wild World of Animals", "Caravan", and "Back Stabbers". Forget the album's shortcomings in regards to its definitive aspirations. This is a fine gatefold edition with great photos (demonstrating once again that the Girls are the best dressed men in show business) and, like the cassettes from where this comes, will be long gone and out of print in short time anyhow.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Further classic SCG's vinyl makes it onto cd, in this case, featuring three long & live tracks.
