You might recognize Mr. Dominic East as the lead vocalist for that fine Bay Area band Our Lady Of The Highway, but now please acquaint yourself with Swallow and Swallows. That's his solo indie folk songsmith alter ego and these are his personal home recordings circa 2004-2006. As we've mentioned with regards to OLOTH, East bears a striking resemblance to both Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and The Weakerthans' John K. Samson in not only his earnest vocal delivery, but also his songcraft and heart-baring lyrical intimacy. It's even more evident on this release as he keeps the arrangements to a minimum with spare and solitary guitar accompaniment. Whenever we've played this, someone invariably asks if it's a new (or long lost) Mountain Goats record. Now, we're by no means griping, but geez, these guys are virtually doppelgangers! Not a bad thing when it sounds this gooood!
The debut demo from these East Bay doomlords gets a deluxe vinyl reissue, and will be the first time most folks get an earful of Swamp Witch, and in a seriously overpopulated scene, SW definitely do their own thing, in fact, from the first few seconds, we were a bit thrown off, cuz the vibe was way more stonery and classic metal, not sludgey or really even all that doomy, we were ready for some soaring eighties style metal vocals to swoop in, they definitely would have fit, but before that can happen, the song shifts gears and slows to a lurching crawl, accompanied by some demonic vokill bellows, some serious stonery sludge, but then that opening riff resurfaces, and adds some serious melody to the proceedings, this time with added sort-of-leads, but it's what keeps this from being just another slab of boring doom, and it's that push and pull that makes the track so good, the band easily shifting from that lurching crawl, to the more propulsive classic metal rocking and back again, the cool thing being that you can almost feel the pull of the opposing sound the whole time, the sludge-y parts sound like they desperately wanna explode into melodic metal, and the melodic metal parts feel like they're on the edge of being sucked into the black tarpit dirge of the sludge parts. Then at the end it gets sort of psychedelic, with some crazy, sorta shrieked vocals. Such a killer track, definitely worth the price of admission right there. Then there's the second track, which is a bit more traditionally stonery sludge, but with a KILLER main riff, that again, slows down to an absolute slo-mo creep, a chugging, churning crawl, and so it goes again, the band lurching from stonery dirge to creepy crawl, finally culminating in an outro that's all swirling psychedelic feedback.
The sidelong flipside is a doozy, the brooding title track takes ages to get revved up, building lots of tension, the vibe super cinematic, all swirling feedback, and groaning bass rumble, keening melodies, all blurred into smeary swaths of mournful minor key sound, and when the song kicks in, it's MASSIVE, so heavy and blown out, some seriously brutal ultra doom crush, the sound remaining mostly entrenched in a tarpit dirge, the variations this time for the most time arrangement wise, some mathy chugging, a slightly more midtempo, groovy stretch, with some killer psychedelic guitars, which eventually bliss out into another feedback drenched guitardrone finale.
So killer. Not sure how we haven't heard these guys before now.
And if these three tracks are still somehow not sludgey enough for you, do some searching on the internet, and you can find a killer 'chopped & screwed' version, which finds the whole thing slowed way down, fucked with, looped and layered, stuttery and staggery, replete with weird scratching and DJ manipulations, as well as woozy, pitch shifted DJ Screw like vocals. Wish they would have pressed up an extra lp and included this version too...
Super nice packaging, a heavy gatefold sleeve, with a little baggie with two buttons, the lps pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Also includes a poster, a patch and a download code!
Most of you probably haven't heard of DJ Swamp, which is not all that surprising. His big claim to fame is his stint as Beck's DJ. But the sound here isn't all that Beck, it's a bit grimier and grungier and 'underground' sounding. There's some good stuff on
If we can holler out an aQ Acid Mothers Temple alert (as we have numerous times over the last few years), then we sure can have an aQ Canada alert too, can't we?! So...
*Super duper Canada alert!*
*Super duper Canada alert!*
*Super duper Canada alert!*
If you dig the ornate poetic eccentricities of bands such as Destroyer and Frog Eyes, as well as the rambunctious playfulness of Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire, you'll get the best of both worlds on this new band's album. Go on, take a dip into this Swan Lake. We think you'll find it quite enjoyable. Our maple leaf sensin' antennae went up when we noticed just how much this band treads curiously along those other bands' peaks and meadows. And it's no wonder that the singing has such a strikingly similar soaring all-or-nothing emotiveness because... Swan Lake is Destroyer's Daniel Bejar, Frog Eyes' Casey Mercer and Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug! Yup, a new Canadian supergroup rears its Beast Moans. Inevitably it sounds as if Destroyer's Daniel Bejar took over vocal duties for Arcade Fire. We're by no means raising protest though 'cause the tuneful racket they raise is a genuine pleasure. Equal parts catchy and cryptic and really really good! Very very recommended!
After a few years as a drum-machine backed two-piece, Andy Zevallos and Cynthia Mansourian have joined forces with Jim Andersen (former drummer of The Pattern & Year Future) to make an extraordinary EP of dark post-rock.
Possibly the best song on the record is the haunting "Siren Song" which shows off Andy's talents on the bass and Cynthia's rich vocals to their fullest. Backed by just a tambourine, the bass sounds like Three Mile Pilot's Zac at his finger-picking best.
The minimal pounding of the last track, "Thin and Gold", uses space and delay just as effectively as the opening track "You Were Down" uses relentless and almost breathless pounding. In addition to the bass, drums and heavily effected guitar, there's all these weird little shimmers and buzzes floating around in the backgrounds of the songs, like gothic insects. Recommended.
Brand new tape from LA's� indie headquarters, Not Not Fun, this time a debut cassette from SF's own Swanox.� We've seen a couple live sets from Anthony Bourch, aka Swanox, and he's also a regular here at aQ, so we're happy to finally give this stellar, drugged-out, cosmic-pop opus a home in our humble tape case.
Dawnrunner unfolds with deep, distorted guitar ringing out into a wash of cavernous reverb, crumbling minor leads luring you further into utter darkness, sporadic riffs and low-end sizzle offer up the perfect dose of atmospheric haze.� A dash of light leaks from the cavern's end as a shimmering guitar line fades in, the piece shifts from dark to light as the sounds gradually grow into a dense cloud of Popul Vuh-ish bliss. Just when we thought Dawnrunner was solely instrumental, "Through the Alders" rolls along with looong, Daniel Higgs-type vocal chants, slightly discernible lyrics buried in layers of distorted organ (sort of reminds us of the organ on the recent German Oak album we featured last list), moments of spritely flute and layers of murky droning build into a wall of weirdness until a quickly picked, uplifting guitar lead lifts over the psychedelic wash, the perfect summit to this monolithic track. While there's a hefty dose of washed out weirdness and droning decay, there's also a catchy, pop undercurrent flowing throughout, each song perfectly crafted with just the right amount of structure, falling somewhere between Night Control and Flying Saucer Attack, definitely not your run-of-the-mill home spun tape.� Noisy, psychedelic and super distinct, this will no doubt satisfy your fill for far out, loner bedroom weirdness.�Limited to an edition of 100, you know these will be gone in no time, so don't miss out!
Duskrunner is the second full-length from San Francisco's Swanox. A follow up to the 2010 cassette release Dawnrunner, Duskrunner is a dreamy, chemically-aided drive through a neon-lit metropolis. It's incredibly clear from one listen of Duskrunner, Anthony has done his homework on the komische and the kraut - one can hear clear nods to the cosmic atmosphere of Florian Fricke and Popul Vuh, the drum machine and synth experimentation of Rudiger Lorenz, and the lysergic dream worlds of Tangerine Dream. That's not to say this a lazy ripoff album, however. This album uses those themes in a way that feels amazingly like a very specific time and place - San Francisco, now.
"Candle Station" and "No Locals" begin the hazy trip, with delayed 808s and guitars fusing with distant sounding vocals and analog synth buzz. "Bank of the Orient" and the title track continue the theme, with hints and pieces of melody sticking out enough to give Duskrunner a noticeable pop tinge. "The Whistler" is perhaps the climax of the record, a driving, motorik number that builds before ending as quickly as it began. If there was a soundtrack to what it feels like to be broke and sleepless in San Francisco - to walk aimlessly around streets that don't feel like home amid the chaos of a bustling yuppie playground, this is that soundtrack. Highly recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A beautiful and harrowingly dark cassette release from the mysterious new tape label, Caligulan! Based right here in not so sunny these days San Francisco, Caligulan brings the droney, woozy, doomy skull fuck sounds that make a tape head cringe with sorrowful delight!
The Swanox side is one long track, called "Forests Of Pluto", and indeed sounds like an exploration of some alien, yet wooded planet. Deep and dark doomy folk, other worldly voices emmanating from blackened caves, the sounds of ancient trees creaking in the haunted winter winds, reverb drenched guitars plunked by some wraithy wood elf of the unspoiled natural landscape of old. The sounds of Swanox on this release are both haunting and contemplative, letting the mind drift off into the spectral world of tones. Spooky and strangely beautiful music!
The Scraps Of Dogs side is also a dark beauty, but much nosier and much heavier. The first track, "Nag Hammadi" is sort of a metallic drift. The sounds of metal scraping against metal, churning and contorting itself into every changing sonic shapes. Bass tones rumble in a deathlike scree, creating beautifully distorted drones and thick swells of darkened texture. The second track, "Leave Your Body Behind", Is all fuzz and rumble. It sounds like an Orcish army on a death march, in blizzard conditions. The distorted textures undulate in a syncopated way, while more high end elements swirl around your head, like some cold blowing, northern wind. Drifting drones made up of thick fuzz and crackle, mixed up in some evil witch's cauldron, along with a few blackend frog gullets, filtered through the grimmest, most kult coffee machine you could imagine, till it fills your sonic pot with oozing nefarious soundscapes. The coffee machine of grimnity!
The packaging on this fella is beautiful! Much like the Robedoor tape featured on this list, which is also on Caligulan, The cover is adorned with a gorgeous photo of the Northern Woods. More accurately the Pacific North Western woods, where these two doomy bummers originally hail from. The inside is spraypainted to look like some far off galaxy, and there's a beautiful handmade insert to boot! Along with this tape, and the Robedoor, we got the last 10 copies of this gem, so act now or forever hold your deathlike peace!!!
NOW REISSUED ON VINYL!!!
While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years.
At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking.
Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointillist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely.
And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...
For all of the acclaim that we have given to Michael Gira's recent project Angels of Light, nothing that he has done of late has come close to the majesty, power, nihilism, and abjection of Children of God from his now defunct outfit Swans. Arguably, Children Of God is the best Swans record. Period. For a band that has so many great albums -- Filth and The Great Annihilator being just two -- this is saying something.
In many ways, Children Of God is a transitory album, marking the termination of the no wave marches that dominated the early recordings and announcing the centrality of Gira's songwriting prowess which continues on into the recent Angels of Light project. The miltant stomps, barked vocals, and expertly mangled buzzsaw guitars remain intact from those early recordings; but Gira and co. make those sounds even more ugly by juxtaposing them with the fragile beauty of a oboe solo, or a acoustic guitar introduction, or simply the majestic presence of Gira's now refined baritone. While fellow vocalist Jarboe had contributed to previous albums, the empathic dynamism of her voice really shines on Children of God, at times seductively cooing and at others emanating bloodcurdling screams. Lyrically, Children of God is a far more complex affair, extending the mythologies of power beyond grim tales of work as humiliation and all relationship roles cast to the extremities of either master or slave. Love enters the fray for Gira, or perhaps it is sexual dependence disguised as love? Or is it addiction disguised as religion? Gira, who once reveled in his position of terminal abjection, now damns himself to the ecstasies of the flesh and curses of his own megalomania.
World of Skin, found on disc two of this reissue, developed as the quiet alter-ego of Gira and Jarboe. While the later World of Skin albums were virtually identical in sound to the contemporary Swans body of work, the first World of Skin recordings (which at least on one occasion was condensed down simply to Skin) contrasted considerably to those of Swans at that time. The two World of Skin recordings on this disc are the two albums Blood, Women, Roses and Shame, Humility, Revenge. Drenched in nihilist atmospheres of infinite reverb, these songs are very spartan in their arrangements for acoustic guitar and majestic synthetic tones, spotlighting the bleak tales of the themes described in those titles above.
Both of these albums have been reissued before in various guises and have gone through prolonged periods of being out of print. Hopefully, Gira will keep both of these amazing albums in print from now on. They're so absolutely necessary, I might have to buy it again...
Throughout their tumultuous career marked by numerous extended tours across North America and Europe, Swans had always been a monstrously good live band. Often fueled by vodka and amphetamines, Swans' frontman Michael Gira never gave the impression that a Swans live show was a mere perfunctory gig in support of an album. His theatrical persona was to be massive cathartic experience, in which his expressions of abjection were to infect the rest of the audience through his commanding baritone bark and the musical hammer that made up the rest of Swans. In essence, to bear witness to Swans performing live was to have ones soul drained.
The inevitable translations from these performances onto the recorded media have always suffered from the obvious lack of Swans physical presence; but were more than adequate in providing documentation for how they sounded live. "Feels Good Now" was a semi-legitimate bootleg released back in 1987 of the Swans European tour. It had been 'authorized' by the band, but I'm pretty sure that it was just released anonymously by Gira. Nevertheless, this features a good chunk of the material from Swans' "Children Of God" album, which, if you're asking me, is easily Swans' best recording, filled with an oppressive atmosphere from militant rhythms, staccato guitar stabs, and call-and-response vocal incantations from Gira and Jarboe. While that album has gone in and out print a number of times (as I write this, it's out of print), "Feel Good Now" wouldn't be recommended as a substition for "Children Of God." But if you're already familiar with that album, this is an excellent addendum.
An aptly named album for a time and a place and a band. Swans' first full album came out in 1983 from the gritty underbelly of New York City, before Guiliani has kicked out all the freaks, criminals, and artists. The sound of Swans engorged the primal violence and psychological dread that had been first broadcast under the banner of No Wave a few years earlier. Led by the tyrannical Michael Gira, who probably only learned how to crack a smile some 15 years after the inception of Swans, barked and grunted lyrics which might be easier read as agitprop slogans, decrying the perceived imbalances of power through sex, money, depravity, and (later) religion. He controlled and commanded his band to perform pummeling excesses of rhythmic brutality with lurching basslines and atonal splashes of guitar shards forming the barest sense of what could pass for a melody. At the time of Filth, Gira had two thugs - Roli Mosimann and Jonathan Kane - behind drum kits, augmenting their panzer-korps marches with bloodyknuckled sheets of metal and pipe fights tossed into that engine at unpredictable moments and angles. For all of the furious muscularity and self-inflicted violence of Filth, Swans could color their claustrophobic slabs of sound with empathizing spells of existential misery. "Power For Power" is probably the best example of this, with guitarist Normal Westberg (the longest standing member of Swans aside from Gira) chopping the melody that could very be knocking on the door of The Stooges' raga-dirge "We Will Fall". It should also be noted that John Gossard swiped the title "Weakling" for his cult black metal band, and like Gira, used the term not to self-identify but as a damning epithet. The song itself is a depressive trudge of basslines alternating with dissonant guitars and shoved along by a strangely spry rhythm from one of the drummers, while Gira (taking on the role of the weakling) insists that all of the shit around him isn't real.
Filth still stands as one of the great achievements of an already highly acclaimed band. It's never been an easy listen, and never will be. Newly remastered and comes with a poster!
This double cd is a documentation of the very earliest abject thud-rock from the Swans. Along with the first full studio album, "Filth," this features a whole slew of early live material, with their bleak tape squeals accompanying their trademarked atavistic pummel. It should be noted that this is the third time "Filth" has been issued, and the second for "Body To Body," with 24 minutes of unreleased live material not found anywhere else.
The necessary vinyl reissue of the 1992 album Love Of Life! A propulsive, almost jubilant Swans is heard here, foreshadowing the Americana twang that Gira would later adopt in the Angels Of Light after Swans called it quits in the late '90s. Gira's great trick on this album is that he layers his shimmering, chiming guitars into slowly building walls of dissonant harmonics that rasp out of the acoustic instrumentation. It's a much more sophisticated dynamic than the emaciated bombast of such claustrophobic Swans recordings like Greed and Holy Money; and comparatively, it makes for a more subtle incarnation of Swans, even when Gira implores his multiple drummers to hammer away at their kits with militaristic flair and insistent rumbling.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
The second disc of the limited edition deluxe set is totally... fucking... awesome. This revisits Gira's capacity for relentlessly punishing dronerock, which had been clearly missing during his Angels Of Light period over the past decade. But this disc seamlessly emerges out of the slowburning crescendos from the aforementioned Soundtracks For The Blind and the amphetamine riddled noise mantra Number One Of Three that Gira produced as The Body Lovers. In many ways, this *could* be Number Two Of Three, as the Body Lovers project was supposed to be a trilogy of deconstructed Swans guitar swarm, chorales of car horns, and brute atonal fury. A single track spanning 46 minutes, Swans present a series of powerdrone movements with bass and rhythm guitar locked into militant marches that guide an scathing crosshatching of atonal guitars and electronics. The infernal nature of these sounds brings the scores of Hermann Nitsch's aktions to mind, and even some of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies at their most punishing.
This double disc set is quite limited, we've sold a whole bunch already and are down to only about 10 copies, and then that'll be it (though the regular single disc version is in stock, and that one's on sale for the next 2 weeks). If you're ordering this deluxe one, and we run out, let us know if it's okay to send you the normal standard version...
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
And no, the vinyl sadly does not include the music from the extra disc found in the limited deluxe cd set.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Slow, militant explosions of huge percussive blasts, guitars, and bass rhythmically collide with the vocal bark of Michael Gira. An awesome document of the pure power of their live performances from 1986 that shows how far Gira has gone from this period ('Holy Money' / 'Greed') to the recent Angels of Light album. Finally out on CD.
Swans always wrote every song like it was going to be their last. Even so, the announcement that this was finally it, after some 15 years of honing word, gristle, rhythm and half-melody into some of the finest, most enduring, if (unsurprisingly) somewhat unfairly overlooked works in the whole rock cannon, comes as a shock.
That they decided to submit to cold economic reality and call it a day rather than face another soul-destroying struggle with media indifference and a diminishing fan base is sensible enough. But what is truly sad about the whole Swans saga coming to an end is the fact that the music they've been making these past years is every bit as powerful as the extraordinary, torturously slow, delayed-drop gallows rock with which they announced themselves at the start of the '80s.
These last Swansongs, spread over two cds (which, appropriately enough, last a lifetime) cap and conclude all the major Swans concerns. At the same time, the instrumental fragments and interludes that punctuate the fully developed pieces hint at all the Swansongs that now will never be, just as they provide tantalizing glimpses of the future directions that Swans motivating force Michael Gira, and longtime partner Jarboe, might take.
The musical scope of Soundtracks is as breathtaking as it is thematically devastating. Along with its immediate predecessor, Die T�r Ist Zu, it constitutes the cement that binds all their preceding music into a single, formidable body of work. The subject of this body of work is the human body itself, and the daily toll taken on both body and soul by pointless, spiritually unsatisfying work. The tape collage "How They Suffer" underlines the physical frailty that permeates the set. It features two tape extracts, one of Jarboe talking to her mother, who is facing the onset of old age; the other is Gira's father talking about the detached retina that has left him blind. The piece is as moving as it is characteristically bleak, in that it offers no solace other than the sense of calm acceptance in the two voices. This admission of more directly autobiographical material is rare for a group which always spoke in the first person to articulate universal, and universally ugly, truths. Perhaps the sense of mortality the piece invokes accelerated The Swans' decision to call it a day.
Where the younger, earlier Swans would subject the body to a vicious pummeling, simulating the cruelty of the exchange values that at base govern our lives, the latter day Swans will pile into a singular riff with the musical intention of providing a release. Monotonal guitar pieces like "The Sound" and "Helpless Child" combine the controlled frenzies of Glenn Branca's guitar orchestras with the emotional intensifications of Austrian blood-artist Herman Nitsch. Where before there seemed no end to The Swans' riffing, now the piling up of overtones finally bursts into the light that illuminates the earlier darkness. But the songs are scarcely less grim. "All Lined Up" is even more devastating in its updated version than it was in its original take on Gira's solo album Drainland. What was once a flesh parade is now a march of the dead�ghost shapes iridescent in the winter light and the narrative intoned in Gira's most weatherbeaten baritone. Time and again, Gira and Jarboe pick at the scabs of their past to see if they can still bleed. Empathy straddles the Greed/Holy Money and Children Of God eras with the narrator cursing a lapse into kindness as a betrayal of weakness, while the last song "The Final Sac", reprises the notion of love, divine or otherwise, as a form of dominance and submission.
Right up to their dying moments The Swans have stayed true to their witheringly bleak vision. It has absolutely no comparison in rock. Indeed, if Gira's obsessive way of putting a small, yet complete vocabulary through endless permutations of the same, seemingly self-loathing theme can be compared to anything it should be to the novels of the late, great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Meanwhile, another Austrian, the satirist Karl Kraus, summed up why he and their like keep gnawing at the same corpse: "Because," he said, "I persist in believing there's life in it yet."
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Scary stuff from the Swans' final tours.
While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years.
At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking.
Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointilist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely.
And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...
My co-worker Byram once asked the rhetorical question of Morton Feldman, "what self-respecting composer doesn't have their ouevre divided into three periods?" Maybe this is a reasonable question (albeit a bit silly), yet the same division of aesthetics ceratinly applies to Swans. Their first period centered around the butality of the "Cop" and "Filth" albums and had been described as "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography" with aggressively barked vocals from Michael Gira directing a muscular thud of clinically precise assaults, neither punk nor metal, but an abject creature of its own making. "Children of God" and the World of Skin side project marked the middle period with Swans, shedding some of their purposeful ugliness in favor of expansive dirges that matched a more complex mythological content, with a sublime and throroughly ashen beauty. "The Great Annihilator" from 1995 stands at the pinnacle of that final period for the Swans. The militant goose step rhythms remain as punishing as ever, but have been subjected to the all-encompassing swarm of buzz-saw guitar, bass, and keyboard drones. Yet amidst these dense orchestrations, the interlocking vocals of Gira (with his commanding baritone) and Jarboe (with her lilting theatricality) adeptly counter the jagged fury of the multiple guitar arsenals. A handful of bands from black metal circles (especially Katatonia and Beyond Dawn) have drawn heavily from this period of Swans, with considerable success; but the original is quite a masterful work. Finally reissued, with a bonus live cut.
Swans, Version 2.0 continues with The Seer, and how could it not be monstrous, epic, and utterly all-consuming? When Michael Gira reactivated the Swans several years ago, he did so with the intent of constantly touring the band, who furiously and methodically pounded through every set with Gira devilishly commanding to his band "More, you fuckers, MORE!!!" The songs which dominated the universally acclaimed 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky became grotesquely engorged during the live sets, with each track telescoping in length and straining with each note, each rhythmic smash made more intense than the previous one. The shows were exhausting from the perspective of the audience, and Gira's marathon-length sprint must have been hell on the band, but unlike previous incarnations of Swans, it was obvious that Michael Gira was full of joy in orchestrating all of this controlled havoc.
So, we come to The Seer - an album devised as a template malleable to the pressures of the Swans live performances. How these songs will sound at the end of the Swans 2012 tour, who the hell knows? Even outside the context of the forecasted mutation, The Seer is a beast of an album. The opening number "Lunacy" is a brightly charged march through dissonant guitar monochords and militaristic snares, before giving over to a wild-eyed chorale featuring the vocal talents of Mimi and Alan Sparhawk of Low. With Gira in charge, the emotional fragility that's emblematic of Low becomes lupine in its collective howl. "Mother Of The World" reprises the jackbooted rhythms found on the first Swans records, with a jagged guitar chord scraping bloodily against the unrelenting groove. The title track itself is a 32 minute piece that lesser bands would have used as an entire album with its massive crescendos of drone-rock pummel crashing down to a doomic plod and extended passages of slumped distortion, as something of a breather before ripping into another frenzy of gleeful obliteration.
Disc two opens with the much ballyhooed appearance of Karen O on the brief, lilting number "Song For A Warrior." It's more of an intermission for the band to shake out their arms and ears before Gira launches into another lengthy percussive workout, which is exactly what he does on "Avatar" - lockstep grooves for drums and bells rise up through a drone-rock ascent of guitars, bass, and vocals uttering languid melodies throughout before Gira commands the drummers into an furious crescendo of control, power, and noise. "A Piece Of The Sky" slowly unfurls through a shimmering drone density with plenty of Ligetti references but is probably also a thoughtful homage to Gira's amphetamine driven deconstruction on the brilliant Body Lovers cd from 1998, with a temperate Swans lurching forward into a near symphonic ballad. The finale "The Apostate" is a 24-minute vehicle for the screeching drones of lapsteel player Kristof Hahn, emitting divebombing raids across the throttled basslines, yelped vocals, and of course those interlocked rhythms.
We've got the limited 2cd combo which comes with a bonus dvd of live material from the last tour, during which Swans worked through variations of tracks that made their way on to this album, including "Avatar," "The Apostate", and "The Seer", with two gems from Children Of God and a few from My Father Will Guide Me...
And yeah, The Seer is just as good as everybody has been saying.
The latest masterpiece from these aQ-beloved musical misanthropes has moved well beyond the already boundary stretching sound of their previous album The Seer, and continues in a similar direction, shedding elements of song, and moving closer and closer to pure sound, with most of the tracks here unwinding like free form / free rock explorations, with only the barest hint of structure to keep them from drifting into utter shapelessness, but even then, whatever sonic constraints that are put in place, seem to be disregarded most of the time, the resulting records is hardly a rock record at all, but a gorgeous collection of brooding soundscapes, allowed to sprawl and ooze and drift and build, almost like an even more ephemeral / abstract Godspeed, and yet somehow, the tracks here are infused with an intensity, and sonic dread, that marks this as pure Swans.
That said, the opener "Screen Shot" might be the most curious of all the tracks here, as it's centered around a baseline, and drum part that are without a doubt, bordering on 'funky', so much so that before we even heard the record, people we posting online that the new Swans sounded like Primus. Which weirdly enough just made us want to hear it more. And when we finally did, well, we could definitely see that, but only Primus slowed down and stretched out and infused with a terrifying malevolence, and really, that funkiness become something else in a matter of minutes, some mutant strain of grim grooving bunkurfunk, that sounds more to us like Skull Defekts, and Michael Gira's vocals a dead ringer from the shamanistic conjuring of Defekts collaborator Daniel Higgs, but before you know it, the song blossoms into something even more tripped out and psychedelic, a swirling piano loop, jagged shards of guitar, eventually exploding into a wild cacophony that could go on forever, but instead burns bright and quickly fades out. An intense, invigorating start to what just might be the best of the modern Swans records.
There's not a track here that's less than 5 minutes, with the bulk closer to 15, and one clocking in at a stunning 34, and as mentioned above, they've done away with traditional compositional concerns, and have instead endeavored to craft their own modern minimalism, and it's truly stunning, from the slow core creep of "Just A Little Boy", that sounds a bit like the Necks via Woven Hand, but stretched out into one extended slow motion balladic dirge, laced with some truly terrifying vocals, to the atonal lope of "A Little God In My Hands", which sounds like multiple New Orleans jazz bands playing at once, before settling into a gorgeously creepy march, all glimmering electronics and swirling melodies, and some twisted call and response vocals.
Then there's the record's centerpiece, the 34+ minute "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L' Ouverture", which lurches right out of the gate as maybe the most rocking song here, a lumbering drum heavy riff, that instead of turning into a song, just locks into an endless hypno-rock cycle, that you never want to end, and for a while, it seems like it never will, before eventually setting into another apocalyptic swampy creep (and again reminding us of Woven Hand), before beginning and epic, majestic slow build, a vocal chorale draped atop a dark cacophonous roar, that gets almost metallic before dissipating into a free rock sprawl, all long tones, and drones, moaned vocals, and warm electric piano shimmer, as well as some FX heavy percussion, and finally a wild freaked out psychedelic squall. Disc one ends with a hushed horror ballad, all moaning distant horns, and sinister vox, and atonal melodies swirling throughout. And most bands would hang it up there, but this is the Swans after all, so we're only halfway there.
The second disc begins with a twisted bit of malformed Tom Waitsian weirdness, all groovy percussion, swirling junkyard ambience, and some strange vocals refrains, before erupting into some swampy garage rock swagger, slithery and sinister, distorted and psychedelic, the sound layered and dense and seriously fierce. From there on out, To Be Kind seems to open up into some sort of alternate universe rock opera, brooding ballad gives way to horn flecked death march dirge, wild kraut-funk groovery grows more and more atonal, pocked with elephant bleat blasts, and feral vocal bellows, long stretches of kosmische drift, and jazzy piano shimmer slowly evolve into another bout of swampy swagger, "Nathalie Neal", a piece that's drum driven and intense (and named for an aQ pal!), before finally finishing off with the title track, a haunting, subdued finale, all dramatic croons and whispery chordal drift, that bursts into a full on freakout, blistering arcs of distorted guitars wreathed around pounding drum damage, and billowing swirls of psychedelic noise, the rare piece of music that is as exhausting and exhilarating to hear, as it presumably is to play.
Totally transcendent, dizzyingly ambitious, stunningly executed, and thus utterly and totally recommended. Creepy baby face cover art too! And, while they last, we've got the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a live dvd, featuring performances of several songs from this album along with renditions of "Coward" and "The Seer". That's if you get the double cd, your other option is the swank triple vinyl, but no dvd with that, but it does have a download.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With an overzealous major label deal, the collapse of Rough Trade (who just signed the Swans after that deal with MCA), and the subsequent signing to the doomed-from-the-start Sky records, 1988 - 1992 was a tumultuous era for the Swans which saw their primal fury distilled into bleak acoustic-based dirges. "Various Failures" collects the best work from "The Burning World" (the MCA album), "Love Will Tear Us Apart" EP, "10 Songs For Another World" (the 2nd World of Skin album), "White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity", and "Love of Life"... all of which are currently out of print.
Swans are one of the few bands whose live recordings should be paid attention to; and in their lengthy career, a smattering of semi-authorized bootlegs and Gira-sanctioned live recordings trickled in and out of print, including the epic Feel Good Now 2lp documenting their Eastern European tour for Children Of God, the Swans Are Dead recordings from the final tour with Jarboe on board, and the charmingly titled album Public Castration Is A Good Idea. After the Swans Are Dead album was released, Michael Gira called it quits for a while; but his thirst for heavy pummelling percussion and discordant slabs of guitar noise proved greater than his desire to write beautifully plaintive country numbers. Swans reformed in 2011 with a magnificent fury evidenced on the album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky; and Gira issued the marching orders shortly thereafter for Swans to head out on the road, a crew that included his original guitarist Normal Westberg. The tour was as relentless as Swans' music, with Gira and company crossing the globe in support of the album.
To support the record to follow My Father Will Guide Me, Gira issued a limited edition set of live recordings from that tour exclusively through the Young God Records website. That edition sold out so quickly that he issued a second pressing in a handsome double digipack with a much greater distribution. While the recording quality is exceptional, what's truly impressive is the brutal precision that Gira directs his band to pursue through the entire Swans catalogue. On this recording, there's also a great distribution of older material alongside most all of the cuts from My Father Will Guide Me. The highlights include the surging drone-rock groove of "Apostate" with Gira barking above his natural baritone and the Nietzchean commands that Gira bellows during the doom-thud of "Sex God Sex." The prettiest and most restrained number is "Your Property" originally written back in 1984 for the seminal album Cop, which would never be mistaken for being pretty or restrained. The difference in listening to Gira now as opposed to Gira some 15 years ago is that he had a huge chip on his shoulder needing to prove to the world that he was worth something. Now, he's fully confident in his abilities and in the choices he's made for his artistic career. He knows that Swans are awe-inspiring and terrifyingly great. So should you.
The necessary vinyl reissue of the 1991 album White Light From the Mouth Of Infinity! Swans were in a time of transition, after what M. Gira considered an epic failure in their one and only major label release, The Burning World (1989), and it is also worth noting that founding member / guitarist Norman Westberg had parted ways with Swans at this juncture. The tempered acoustic strum that Gira first mapped out on Burning World carries over as the much more aggressive underpinning of the crashing hypno-drone-rock of much of White Light, most dramatically cast in the downer blues ballad "Failure" and the J.G. Thirwell coproduced drum-corps march of "Power & Sacrifice". The lilting jangle of the guitars and the brightly rendered drones that hang throughout both that album and Love Of Life counterpoints Gira's booming vocals, all of which helps to conjure a very triumphant Swans sound, effectively surging with huge crescendos of texture and density out of monolithic chords, riffs, and rhythms.
A three cd compendium of work tracking two very prolific years for Swans, including the 1991 album White Light From the Mouth Of Infinity, the 1992 album Love Of Life, and full disc of bonus material! Swans were in a time of transition, after what M. Gira considered an epic failure in their one and only major label release, The Burning World (1989), and it is also worth noting that founding member / guitarist Norman Westberg had parted ways with Swans at this juncture. The tempered acoustic strum that Gira first mapped out on Burning World carries over as the much more aggressive underpinning of the crashing hypno-drone-rock of much of White Light, most dramatically cast in the downer blues ballad "Failure" and the J.G. Thirwell coproduced drum-corps march of "Power & Sacrifice". The lilting jangle of the guitars and the brightly rendered drones that hang throughout both that album and Love Of Life counterpoints Gira's booming vocals, all of which helps to conjure a very triumphant Swans sound, effectively surging with huge crescendos of texture and density out of monolithic chords, riffs, and rhythms. Further, Love Of Life foreshadows the Americana twang that Gira would later adopt in the Angels Of Light after Swans called it quits in the late '90s.
Bonus material spans a bunch of various sources - the Love Of Life EP, the Omniscience odds & ends collection, the 'official bootleg' Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room, the World Of Skin album 10 Songs For Another World, and three unreleased / live / demo tracks!r
You've heard this, right? No? Well now that you can get a copy for under $100, now's a good a time as any to start at the beginning of the Swans discography. Repressed on its own for the first time since 1990, these four tracks don't quite pack the same violent punch of the misanthropic masterpiece Filth that would come out a year later, but what does? In a way, these tracks more closely resemble the modern re-tooled Swans then the hateful pounding of Filth/Greed/Holy Money Swans. Post-punk basslines and repetitive rhythms that for any other band would probably be their most primal and violent record, but this is Swans we're talking about here. Michael Gira is more political dissident then tyrannical strongman on here, with vocals managing whole sentences rather than barked orders. A must-listen for any Swans fan, and perhaps your only chance of owning these tracks on vinyl short of ponying up for an original!
We recently listed the amazing Not The Spaces You Know, But Between Them quadruple lp box set on Three Lobed, which contained exclusive sidelong tracks from Sun City Girls, Sonic Youth, Comets On Fire, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry and more (we still have a handful of copies left! but only a few�), apparently folks who preordered copies direct from the label, got a little something special in their box. THIS. A brand new ep from Pete Swanson, who was one half of the late great noise/drone duo Yellow Swans, but who since then has been carving out a pretty decent niche for himself as a solo artist.
This latest disc is just about the prettiest thing we've heard from Swanson, a hazy, washed out bit of what sounds like solo guitar, or more specifically, sounds like it COULD be solo guitar, what it actually sounds like is warm lush layers of chordal shimmer, dreamy tangles of lilting melody, everything warm and sun dappled, distorted but not harsh, more sort of thick and smoldering and lush, the sound does get noisy, but again, it's the sort of dreamy noisiness we dig, a thick swirling cloud of psychedelic shimmer, all soaring guitars and whirling FX, in fact some of Swanson's playing here reminds us of legendary NZ guitarist Roy Montgomery - the same sort of hazy, brittle tone, a similarly constructed soundscape of blurred riffs and smeared melody, softly propulsive and dreamily druggy.
The final track might be our favorite, a gorgeous assemblage of keening high end tones, all woven into a darkly melodic bit of abstract, majestic drift, mournful, melancholy, but strangely and hauntingly epic, WAY too short at 9:29, would have been happy to have that track stretch out to fill up the rest of the cd. So nice.
Pretty sure this is limited to, we got a bunch direct from Swanson himself, but since most of these ended up on those boxsets, not sure how many more we'll be able to get when we run out...
When Man With Potential, the latest solo record from Pete Swanson, one half of late great floorcore noise outfit Yellow Swans, first came out late last year, it sold out so fast, we never got a chance to list it, in fact we got so few copies we sold out before most of US even got to hear it, so we weren't really sure what the hubbub was all about, other than it involved 'beats'. Thankfully, it's been repressed. And thankfully, Man With Potential is nothing nearly as simple as a noise record with beats, although it is quite noisy, and is definitely the most rhythmic thing we've heard from Swanson. Opener Misery Beat unfurls a dizzying swirl of creaks and squeaks, bloops and bleeps, into a dizzying churn, the beat hear more implied, a pulsing chunk of crumbling low end dragged along in the loop, but then about three minutes in, the proper beat does in fact drop, a pounding four on the floor house music thud, pulsating beneath the glimmering field of high end skitter and dubbed out bleepage. But let's not forget that Swanson was born of the noise scene, so the track gradually builds momentum, picking up all manner of sonic detritus on the way, heaving swells of super distorted chordal crunch, keening shards of blunted noise, that chittering high end also getting louder and more distorted, until finally, the track sounds like some crazed hybrid of an electronically simulated runaway train, and the noisiest rave ever. It's pretty fantastic stuff, managing to be hypnotic and repetitive, but staying totally engaging and mesmerizing throughout. Follow up "Remote View" follows a similar pattern, this one a bit more dubbed out and woozy, the melodies more stately and melancholic, still wreathed in the same crunch and keen, the sound gristly and corrosive, but weirdly dreamy and drifty as well, sounding almost like a slightly house-ier Portishead by way of Merzbow. Elsewhere, the beat is sometimes sublimated, relegated to a heartbeat like pulse beneath thick sheets of blown out, in-the-red melodic buzz, and carefully sculpted prismatic noise, and still elsewhere, Swanson channels old school gabber through a thick haze of Our Love Will Destroy The World like soft cacophony, and still elsewhere crafts some straight up electro-pop club music, but buries it beneath an avalanche of glorious noise, strangely melodic and lush, almost shoegazey, but an awesome sort of buzz drenched blissiness. And then there's the title track, which might be the noisiest of the bunch, and sounds a bit like several record playing at once, a head spinning collision of Astral Social Club at their beat heaviest, and Our Love Will Destroy The World (again) at his loopiest, but together, it's a wild chunk of swirling psychedelic noisiness that is again surprisingly listenable, eventually blossoming into a wash of blissed out noise drenched dreaminess.
This lp comes with a bonus cd, which is NOT a digital version of Man With Potential, but is instead a whole 'nother record called Man With Garbage, which seem to be culled from the same sessions, as they display a similarly noisy beatiness, although it definitely leans more toward the noise side of the equation, the sound a bit more lo-fi and raw, but even at its noisiest, strap on the headphones and dunk your head in that roiling torrent of sound, and you'll discover all manner of muted melody fractured poppiness and swirling dreamy hooks. "Returns" is a heaving big beat almost Nadja-worthy doomic churn, while the two part, 25 minute "Challenger" is less about beats, and more about texture and timbre, flitting from full on face melting white noise, to stuttering staticky melody flecked crunch and crumble, to blurred blown out psych-noise dreaminess.
We imagine this pressing is probably limited too, so grab one before they're gone. Again!
The latest record from former Yellow Swan finds Pete Swanson continuing to explore/dissect/reimagine/reinvent his own mutant strain of techno. Like on his recent Man With Potential lp, the sounds here are raw and chaotic, home brewed and noisy, a lot like what you might have imagined a techno Yellow Swans might have sounded like. The framework is classic, a thumping four on the floor, but it's the setting and surroundings that makes Swanson's sound so compelling. Very much like the more beat oriented jams of Our Love Will Destroy The World, or the dancefloor experiments of Astral Social Club, Swanson seems to be coming at techno from a similarly genuine, yet sonically removed, angle, a bit of kitchen sink, mad scientist noisiness, with lots of the sounds obviously culled from an arsenal of synths and drum machines that are not all that dissimilar from what he employed in his noise making floorcore days. But Swanson has definitely proven himself, this is no mere dalliance, these jams are fierce and driving, and in a weird way, seriously funky. The title track here is a mesmerizing blast of super layered, heavily textured techno, that has SO much going on. Total maximalist techno, tangled melodies, chirping fragments of high end, thick shard of rumbling bass thrum, the sort of groove you never want to end. The VIP mix of the same song, just strips back the melody, and piles on the noise, adding even more hiss and glitch, the bassline pushed up in the mix, woozy and hypnotic, the sounds sharp and jagged, and yet the whole thing somehow still so mesmerizing and kinda catchy. The idea that you could get this sort of thing stuck in your heard, seems preposterous, until you find yourself humming these sort of melodies, hours later.
The B side is the real gem here, a sprawling expanse of minimal noisescapery, all washed out shimmer, fluttery fragmented high end melodies, and super spare skeletal skitters, everything beneath a layer of gauzy ethereal hum, the vibe way less electronic, and more sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker style soft noise ambience, the beats not so much beats, as just more texture, buried rhythms and blurred pulsations, even filling up a whole side, you'll find yourself lifting the needle and playing it again and again and again.
Saucy retro Chippendales cover art too.
One half of former Bay Area / current Portland noise drone outfit Yellow Swans, and Jyrk label head honcho Pete Swanson unleashes the innermost desires of his distortion pedals, who were switched on and then allowed to do whatever they liked. Swanson was just on hand to direct the sound back and forth through the mixing board. The result is Static Space, and you'll be amazed at the sorts of sounds distortion pedals can make when left to their own devices. From a thick grinding, metallic slither through dense thickets of fuzzy drone and machinelike buzz, to wide open expanses of slowly shifting melodic moan and glistening shimmer, to a strangely guitar like whir that builds into a massive wall of fuzz to the final 13 minute stretch that sounds like some sort of minimal soundscape of barely there white noise whir, occasionally colored by bits of melodic feedback. Darn pretty for a couple of little metal boxes and a mixing board. But Swanson has been working the same sort of alchemy for years in the Yellow Swans, so we probably shouldn't be all that surprised. Pretty darn cool, and of course...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!! We will not be able to get more. Packaged in gorgeous hand made sleeves with a thick textured gold oil painting affixed to the front.
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A pretty amazing collaboration between two heavyweights of the Los Angeles noise scene. Swanson, of course, of Yellow Swans infamy from his years up in San Francisco followed by countless solo recordings of mad scientist noise exploration; and Holger helming the desk as Hive Mind and half of Pure Ground, while running the Chondritic Sound empire. The two had performed earlier this year opening for Surgeon and Drew MacDowell, and this cassette offers an insight into the working process between these two artists. On the A-side, a rather simple hi-hat trigger acts as the rudimentary click track for the two to contort and modulate their snarled distortion and crumpled noise with shivers of white noise snaking through the mix, that is almost sorta catchy even though it's super fractured and jagged. More like super early Cabaret Voltaire or SPK without all of the death factory imagery. The B-side flickers through grim synth-noise drones percolating against almost raga-ish drum programming that's buried in all of the murk and unkempt gauziness. We got the very last copies of this from Chondritic, FYI!
As much as we love discovering new genres, it's almost more exciting to watch those new genres develop, transform, and spawn new and infinitely varied subgenres. It used to be that the evolution of scenes and sounds took months, maybe years, as bands toured and records made it to new listeners, but with the advent of the web, Facebook, MySpace and the like, it can now take weeks, hell, even days. And it seems like electronic music, more than most genres gets constantly and consistently mutated into new forms. At any given time there seems to be some sort of '-step', pick any word, and there's some microgenre, dronestep, drugstep, slugstep, doomstep, and of course the billions of variations on techno, jungle, downtempo, IDM...
The most recent IT genre is dubstep, even the new Britney Spears single features a killer blast of synth heavy dubstep, and of course dubstep as been evolving constantly, and while we tend to like our dubstep dark and heavy, with booming beats and massive ribcage rattling bass, we found ourselves mesmerized by a guy called Clubroot, and strangely blissed out, atmospheric take on dubstep, stretching out the sounds into hazy droney shimmerscapes, stripping the beats way down, and weaving lush landscapes of dubby skitter and swoonsome drift. Two albums and a couple 12"s (a new one reviewed elsewhere on this list!) and we still couldn't get enough.
And then along comes UK trio Swarms, who follow a similar path, taking dubstep somewhere else entirely, melding a minimal dubby shuffle to the abstract avant electro soul of How To Dress Well and Burial, weaving soulful vocals into clouds of softly swirling effects, pointilist piano, subtle guitar jangle, shimmering synths, taking elements of shoegaze and post rock, slow build dramatics and hazy atmospherics, layering them into washed out, dreamy and druggy expanses of sultry, laid back R&B flecked dubstep drift. Swarms augment the usual studio assemblies with plenty of organic instrumentation: guitar, violin and piano, and the vocals, these guys don't just slap on some soulful crooning, no they transform vocals into another instrument, sometimes speeding them up into little hooks hip hop style, other times they wreath the vocals in echo and delay and reverb, and pull them out into ghostly streaks, the male vocals are sometimes slowed down, and become a sort of chopped and screwed warble, but the vocals are just one part of the whole, and what a lush, expansive, multi layered kaleidoscopic whole it is. Totally mesmerizing, hypnotic, trancelike, sun dappled and dreamy one second, haunting and ominous and otherworldly the next, the songs woven into an epic sonic travelogue, a mysterious songsuite, a hazy glimpse of a musical otherworld, a transmission from the ether, a blurred impressionistic projection of dubstep from an alternate dimension. Incredible.
You thought rap and metal sounded good together? (Or not?)
Well, how about thrash metal and PIRATES?? A match made in Heaven. Or hell! Or on the high seas! Kinda silly, but fun for sure... the thrash metal is furious and tight and heavy, the vocals aren't especially 'pirate-y', but the lyrics certainly are. And there are some awesome between song interludes, featuring clips from movies and samples and various other bits of pirate dialogue and drama...
Pietro Mazzocchin was an Italian malcontent whose squalid noise and power electronics made sporadic appearances in the catalogues of Broken Flag and Aquilifer Sodality in the early '80s. The New Sadism was one of his monikers, Observation Clinique another, and then there was Swastika Kommando which had the distinction of getting published through Broken Flag. There were three tapes that Gary Mundy / Broken Flag released all in 1983, as well as a couple of Swastika Kommando pieces on a Crusade cassette compilation from the same year alongside Mauthausen Orchestra, LXSS, Kleistwahr, and some terminally obscure noise outfits. It has to be said that there doesn't really need to be much of a trigger warning to be issued for the Swastika Kommando, whose nom de guerre could very well be a red herring of political incorrectness as an act of minor transgressivism instead of some right-wing declaration of neo-fascism. Death In June and Der Blutharsch, in particular, have long walked the tightrope of appropriation-as-commentary versus outright patronage; and Swastika Kommando falls right into that category. Well, certainly not aesthetically; and Mazzochin is an exemplar of early power electronics, adhering with the grim, monotone horror peddled by many of his fellow Italians at that time (MB, Mauthausen Orchestra, Sigillum S, Giancarlo Toniutti, etc.). For whatever reason, Mazzochin stopped making music in 1985. What is it with the Italians and their flair for a dramatic cessation of activity? (See Maurizio Bianchi in 1984 / 2010 and Mauthausen Orchestra in 1986). "Mental Answer" may be probably the most realized of all of Mazzochin's works with a thrumming / all-consuming bass-drone that engulfs a dub-delay wash from an incomprehensible tape-recorded monologue. Spooky shit, indeed. "Der Arbeiter" - a possible reference to the 1932 tract of democratic liberalism penned by Ernst Junger who called for a society run by warrior-worker-scholars - is a primal screech of 4-track overload noise via synth-squalor and chant-punctuation vocalizations. "Untitled" is an ironclad beast of feral noise, finding some comradry with the British noise propaganda from Total and Ramleh. The privately pressed cassette "Public Assault" didn't seem to be a live documentation, but the liquid trills of synth-noise very much embrace an in situ coloring of sound organization amidst the hurricane/engine roars of tape + room noise. All of that said, there were just 152 copies of this boxset pressed up. Damn it.
Like the title indicates, freestyle raps galore, Sway and King Tech inviting a host of hiphoppers to do their stuff on the Wake Up Show. Some names: Pharoah Monch, the Jurassic 5, Eminem, Akinyele, GZA, Masta Killa, Onyx, DMX... Good stuff.
