With his early recording "The Hidden Tongue," San Francisco noise composer Randy Yau conceptualizes an alternate perspective on how the physicality of sound is to be perceived. Instead of assigning a value to sound such as "man-made" or "natural," Yau proposes that sound only has two states: existence and absence. The implications of Yau's hypothesis are interesting, yet set up a conceptual groundwork that's difficult to articulate as a piece of sound art. Yau stages these two states as a loud, violent, staccato noise fragments on one hand, and nearly empty passages on the other. With jarring noise bricolage splayed across his album in an almost random factor, the very quiet passages become that which is nerve-wracking as nervous precedents for the blasted screams of incendiary distortion. "The Hidden Tongue" does emerge as an expressive piece of noise manifestation, even if its conceptual agenda is tough to find with the music.
"I guess I had a lot of terrible relationships," snickers noise artist Randy Yau as an apology for the electric violence that explodes from this anthology of early works. Ah, yes, but so much great art has come from the pain of shitty break-ups and romance gone horribly wrong. Spanning his college days at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Coagulation features some of most explosive, nauseating, and abject sounds to pass through the Aquarius doors. Considering that Merzbow, Whitehouse, and Bastard Noise are frequently stocked items here, such hyperbole should not be taken lightly. Where Yau differs from his power violence / extreme noise contemporaries is in focus upon the body. His recent investigations into low frequencies vibrations within any given architectural environment engage a similar poetry, however, in a much more benevolent way. Coagulation is anything but benevolent, purposefully jumping from harsh noise to silence and back to hyper-distortion within just a few moments. These sounds hit you like a ton of bricks, letting up just enough to let you catch your breath, and then the assault immediately begins again. Yau's start 'n' stop technique immediately sets him apart from the neverending torrents of sound from many of his contemporaries.
A word of warning, do not plan on eating a meal during or after listening to Coagulation, as one track in particular the homage to Schimpfluch's Dave Philips entitled "Intermission" finds Yau purposefully vomiting over and over again. I think I turned green; but then again, has Merzbow ever done that? No fuckin' way.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Before starting Ruins, Tatsuya Yoshida played in this unusual 80's avant-progrock band, along with K.K. Null of Zeni Geva, original Ruins bassist Hideki Kawamoto, and mainman (on bass, vocals, & keyboards) Kitamura Masashi. These two volumes collect the "greatest hits" from their many records--a bunch of weirdness, all dark, emotional, complex and heavy stuff, including an interpretation of a Paul Simon tune! Recommended to all fans of Ruins!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Before starting Ruins, Tatsuya Yoshida played in this unusual 80's avant-progrock band, along with K.K. Null of Zeni Geva, original Ruins bassist Hideki Kawamoto, and mainman (on bass, vocals, & keyboards) Kitamura Masashi. These two volumes collect the "greatest hits" from their many records--a bunch of weirdness, all dark, emotional, complex and heavy stuff, including an interpretation of a Paul Simon tune! Recommended to all fans of Ruins!
!!!COLD CAVE ALERT!!!!
Hopefully that got your attention, not only because the world seems to be going totally batshit for minimalist synth poppers Cold Cave, but ALSO because we only have a scant 15 COPIES of this pre-CC group, and it's looking like that will probably be it for all of history, or until someone else decides to come along and reissue it. So you probably want to act now or miss out.
Ye Olde Maids follow a similar path as Cold Cave, in fact you might be hard pressed to tell the difference. But hey, we're not complaining, because like everyone else, we're too busy digging these propulsive, gloomy as hell lo-fi jams. Like Cold Cave, you might want to compare this to New Order or the Cure in terms of atmosphere and in their overall approach. It's easy to see that this is where Wes Eisold began to solidify all his new wavey inclinations after years of playing in hardcore bands, though the songs definitely stand strongly enough on their own. Things are probably a little more noisy and disjointed than what has been perfected with Cold Cave, but for those who can't get enough CC, you will definitely want to grab this one fast. Did we mention that we had only 15 copies?
Hmm, not finding too much to say about the latest from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's. There is much more of an emphasis on synthesizers and less on guitars, though we think it would have come out cooler had they pushed that even further. Some tracks do demonstrate the best possibilities of this very Blondie meets Italians Do It Better sound, like "Dragon Queen", but lots of the songs here just don't commit to being here or there and sort of just are. Not bad really, but not as exciting as we were hoping it would be....
After a couple of insanely hyped singles which altogether clocked in at about 18 minutes total, New York's garage-punk trio The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have mustered enough material to warrant their debut, full-length album "Fever To Tell." As expected the car-crash of thuggish rockabilly licks and punky-disco grooves guided by vocalist Karen O's snarling sexuality and blackened humor are present and sound an awful lot like a female fronted Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, or perhaps more appropriately Boss Hog when they were good. However, there's only about 15 minutes worth of sneering rock 'n' roll on the album; and the remainder of the album comes as a huge, but certainly not unwelcome surprise, as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs round out the album with a handful of slower, darker, and sentimental ballads. These later tracks are not unlike the recent works of PJ Harvey, transforming raucous punked-up energy into emotive songsmithery; however, they may not be exactly what fans of the previous EPs would expect. Hey, don't be discouraged though, "Fever To Tell" still has those 15 minutes of possessed blues to match those previous EPs.
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Is Is is the follow-up to Yeah Yeah Yeahs' startlingly different Show Your Bones album. If you happen to think that it in turn sounds starkly different from that album, and more like the hot'n'bothered YYYs of old, well... good ears, my friend! These songs were actually written back in 2004 while the band was on tour in support of their Fever To Tell album. Four of the five were previously available on the Tell Me What Rockers To Swallow dvd (the exception is the track "Isis"). That explains things a bit, doesn't it? On this ep the trio sounds downright wild, loose and furious... a lot of what we thought was sorely missing from SYB. Karen O rocks and rages at the top of her lungs. You almost expect a fist to burst through your speakers. On those few moments when she calms down a little (on the song "Down Boy"), her voice glints with her more familiar, and very Siouxsie-esque throaty inflections. Guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase are right there with her throwing a bunch of their own rawk punches left, right and center. Raw art-punky good.
Three songs, seven minutes. Yeah Yeah Yeah's aren't messin' around. The hot-shit New Yorkers pack every minute full of gritty, high energy, lo-fi, post-glam rockn'fuckn'roll. Singer Karen O seemed to bely a little vulnerability in between shrieks on their debut e.p., but here she exudes confidence. YYY's would be an ideal band to see in someone's packed living room; too bad their lightning fast rise to fame deprives us of that experience! This single is another teaser before the release of their debut full length, expected soon-ish.
A kinder gentler YYY's can be found on their follow up to Fever To Tell, the record which made them international superstars. We are not averse to bands softening their sound as long as they are also finding new more subtle, interesting and pleasing ways to express themselves. The moment Show Your Bones begins it becomes clear that this is a shinier glossier more pop affair. There are a few moments of the more rocking YYY's scattered throughout the disc but this is much more about their full on pop leanings. The first song (and many others on this album) sounds remarkably like it came from Tegan & Sara's latest album So Jealous. Indeed these catchy girl-sung tunes might lure some fans over from those sisters' camp. Her vocals also recall those appealing '80s female singers such as Debbie Harry, Dale Bozzio, and Siouxsie. Perhaps Karen O and co. are targeting the teenage girl population? Not sure, but these are certainly some toned down and tidily groomed YYYs who've made themselves totally presentable for the masses. Really, these tunes are absolutely ripe for some John Hughes movie soundtrack!
This self released five-track ep by up and coming Brooklyn trio is going to give the comparatively more famous White Stripes a run for their money. When she's not absolutely screaming, the girl lead singer wails with a strong gravelly voice and that trembly
A Morr Music supergroup? Yes, It was bound to happen sooner or later, what with such a solid and ever expanding roster of likeminded artists on board. Year Of's members include B. Fleischmann, Martin Siewert, Werner Dafeldecker, Paul Kling, and Christof Kurzmann. As can be expected the Morr Music trademark drowsy delicate electronica forms the core of this group's sound, but there's more dimensions to it than that. Unexpected inflections of jazz and country/folk color and shade the affair with warmer brassy hues than the usual frosty blues and strawberry ice cream pinks of the individual artists' works. Definitely stands apart fom the rest of the Morr pack. The year of what? Whatever it is, it's good!
Brand new disc of solo works from these two one man bands, both of whom traffic in sounds much harsher and heavier in their 'day jobs'. Ventoux is Graham from aQ faves Souvenir's Young America and Forensics, and Years is Ryan from Darkest Hour and City Of Caterpillar, both of whom seem to share a similar sonic focus here, away from the heaviness of their proper bands, both delve deeply into some sonic netherworld where the churning blackened buzz of Locrian intersects with the psychedelic bliss out of Expo 70, and the barren dusky deserty twang of Barn Owl blurs into the cavernous creep of Lustmord.
Years is up first, and deftly unfurls a shimmery electronic buzz that drifts atop billowy clouds of rib cage rattling low end, the insectoid melodies the perfect foil for the suffocating black hole bass beneath, the two delicately intertwined, creating something at once dense and black, ethereal and amorphous. The high end peels away, leaving just that deep Niblockian thrum, before being buried beneath a cascade of almost symphonic sounding high end, a woozy washed out synth heavy swirl that fades out again, leaving just that massive almost physical sounding low end, before finishing off with a haunting minor key bit of cinematic synthscapery, that's both dark and dramatic, and definitely hints at the sound of Umberto and Zombi and all the rest, but still tethered to that intense black hole bass.
Ventoux is immediately a much darker proposition, launching immediately into a churning, Locrian like black ambience, thick and undulating, softly gristly, laced with shards of melody, and wreathed in ever shifting textures, and like Years, allowing all sort of warm whirl and dreamlike shimmer to creep into the proceedings, so that by the end of the opening tracks nearly ten minutes, the sound has lightened considerably, and has drifted into a sort of sun dappled Nadja style metalgaze drift, a lush blur of softly roiling riffage. The second track grows considerably darker, playing out like some ancient sonic ritual, the sounds massive and glacial, this track too, gradually begins to build, but here instead of blissing out, the noise is cranked up, and not just Merzbow style noise, no instead it's a weird grinding choral sort of swirl, a blackened choir, twisted and tangled into a gloriously chaotic psychedelic ur-drone, which leads directly into the final 'movement', perhaps the noisiest and heaviest of the bunch. A groaning, creaking, caustic landscape of crumbling low end, thick processed burts of strangely melodic noise and dubbed out industrial clang and clatter, all wreathed in a black sonic gauze, but also infused with a strange bit of buried melody, that keeps the sound weirdly warm, and strangely soothing, the sort of sinister blackdrone music that transforms punishing blacknoise into mesmerizing tranced out black ambience.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
These guys are really tough to figure out, we were never that into them actually, until we heard one of their tracks on a Mojo compilation of all places, and even weirder it was a sort of No Depression / Americana style collection, with groups like Iron & Wine, The Low Anthem, and their sound, while slightly twangy, was way more quirky and electronic, a sort of twisted cabaret pop, we ended up digging that record quite a bit, so were excited to hear this new one.
Right off the bat, it's a weirdo winner, processed garbled vocals, over a strange plodding electronic beat, washed over by lush layers of shimmery sound, like a Phoenix song played at 16 rpm, lugubrious and warbly, but strangely appealing. The next song though reveals the band's true colors, which seem to lie more along the lines of groups like Sparks or Pretty And Nice, slightly twisted pop, layered synths, lush production, looped electronic rhythms, skittery drum machines, "Madder Red" introduces lots of "ooooohs" and some abstract tribal drumming, multi tracked vocals, for a sort of more earth take on Animal Collective's abstract pop, which is pretty much where Yeasayer are situated, they definitely have a Pitchfork vibe, their sound definitely absorbing elements of Animal Collective, TV On The Radio, that sort of almost-mainstream pop, but for our money, Yeasayer are just a bit more odd, they definitely have the total pop gene, but they also seem inclined to fuck it up, whether with weird production, strange rhythms, vocal processing, everything infused with a sort of tweaked new wave vibe. Definitely seems like an acquired taste, but could very well be a weird music gateway for folks who want to start their strange sonic education slowly. For the rest of us, it's a pretty cool, slightly off kilter, electronic pop record, that will definitely fit perfectly on your shelf next to records by all of the above mentioned bands... Cool!
So, we raved about Small Cruel Party a few months back, being an unheralded genius of tactile minimalism hailing from the Pacific Northwest; and now we have the reissue of the Yeast Culture album IYS, in many ways, a document originating from the same time and place that's even more cryptic and more obsessive than Small Cruel Party all the while achieving similarly cracked abstraction of sound-art. Yeast Culture was the brainchild of an artist named Abo, who set up shadowy installations, performances, and even a record shop in an abandoned building in Seattle. The days of such romantic squatting are surely over in Seattle, but they provided the context of damp concrete, rusted rebar, and festering mold. Through collaboration and in piloting the ship himself, Abo steered Yeast Culture into a strange beast of DIY musique concrete, self-immolating electro-acoustic strategies and dangerous field recording situations, amidst all that rubble and decay. While there were only a handful of releases to coincide with the seemingly rich history of activity through that space, the 1989 album IYS is the Yeast Culture masterpiece. An enigmatic smear of crumbling events, metallic scribblings, aerosolizing hiss, poltergeist-like clunks of grey noise, and strange whirring machines caught in their last dying breath. What little information that can be found on the record is that the source material was entirely taken from a three day session on an island in the Puget Sound, after which Abo quite literally ripped those recordings to shreds and painstakingly reassembled the artifacts. Like Small Cruel Party and Organum, Yeast Culture's constructions are densely layered and aggregated, with the compositional strategies keeping to a blank linearity. The sounds themselves have the feeling of being an amplification of the wood beetles gnawing through oak trees or an invasion of mechanical insects adopting a scorched earth policy in miniature or perhaps some unwritten noise symphony for Jan Svankmajer's films, full of disembodied teeth chewing incessantly on cutlery and old furniture. As if that weren't enough to entice, there's the artwork - a densely silkscreened poster that wraps around an equally densely silkscreened inner sleeve with multiple belts of paper holding everything in place. As chaotic as the heavily overlaid silkscreens look, the packaging is quite elegant and perfectly reflects the sounds on the grey / splattered vinyl. While the artwork on the original was pretty stunning, it's even better here on the reissue. Yeah, it's pricey; but when you get your hands on this, you'll realize that the price is totally justified given the amount of work that went to each album. Of course, it's super limited and so fucking recommended! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Yeast Culture was a project that blossomed (or would 'festered' be more suitable here?) in Seattle during the mid-'80s, producing eerie soundfields of murky tape-collage, synth-noise, and junkyard ritualism, all of which firmly planted Yeast Culture within the cassette culture that brought forth G.R.O.S.S. tapes, Sound Of Pig, and of course the countless recordings of recycled music from RRR. Yeast Culture operated as something of a squatter collective, occupying abandoned buildings, setting up shows within those spaces, and eventually taking up residence in a warehouse space in (then) ungentrified part of downtown Seattle, with all sorts of installations, screenprinting, photography, and residue smeared paintings oozing out of Yeast Culture's creative output.
This recording marked the first release for the collective, originally released on cassette in 1987 (or thereabouts) and has been reissued in the same format as the original with collaged wallpaper mounted to board and xeroxed drawings sandwiched around the hand-painted tape and held together in a plastic bag. A bit cumbersome as an object, but certainly true to the tape culture mentality of the time. Drawn out sessions of clanks, bangs, and scrapes within those dank industrial spaces dominate the Yeast Culture ethos, but the group slices into murk with zoner synth sequencing (much more industrial minded than the Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, Caboladies set), masticated vocalizing further mangled through electronics, tactile object manipulation, field recordings, and tape compressed noise. All together, it was not all that far from the contemporary work of Cranioclast, Premature Ejaculations, P16.D4 (at their most primitive), and even some of the looser Nurse With Wound collages. A great document for sure, and in all likelihood, pretty damn limited!
Matt Yee-King, one of the stars of Bristol UK's 'Trash' electronica collective, here presents a solo disc which appropriately enough is released on Aphex Twin's Rephlex label. Yes, it sounds a lot like Aphex: skittering drum n' bass derived beat programming meeting with both pleasant melodies and distorted noises. Quite nice.
We won't spend too much time on this one since we only got 20, and it's very likely there's probably WAY more than 20 of you who want one of these long out of print lil' gems.
This release is from a while back, it's a single 11 minute track, a collaboration between the Yellow Swans and Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core. We were lucky to get -any- of these, a bit of random postal confusion is what did it. A box of 20 got lost in the mail, the band made 20 more to replace them, but then the lost box resurfaced and we managed to lay claim to all 20 of the extras! And a good thing too. This is some of the most gorgeous stuff we've heard from either / both of these outfits. Warm atonal guitar strum, angular and purposeful, mournful and minor key, drifts above a bed of skittery glitch and rumbling drones. Eventually the guitars disappear beneath a wild wooly sheet of shrieking sonic turbulence, a whirl of moaning melodies behind a thick curtain of freaked out feedback and squealing skree. Nice and noisy!
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE THE LAST 20 COPIES THERE ARE! SO ACT FAST!
Be warned. This is another one of those tiny, tiny, tiny editions from Digitalis; and it's undoubtedly out of print from the source. Yek Koo is the solo project of Helga Fassonaki, the Los Angeles half of the trans-Pacific duo Metal Rouge, who blew us away with their last record on Root Strata. She follows a similar path as Metal Rouge on Psychic Atonement For Land Deaths, mining a deconstructed post-Krautrock vein all the way down to its droning core. It's all voice and lapsteel on this album; and not surprisingly, she shares more than a few similarities to the freeform atmospherics of Heather Leigh Murray (Taurpis Tula, ex-Charalambides) or even to the earlier Grouper albums. Much to her advantage, Fassonaki uses her voice with a restrained panache when it comes to these distant siren songs bathed in thick clouds of reverb and delay. The lapsteel itself melts into magical cascades of bliss out drones, roughly swirled ambience, and sustained chords. Everything comes together into three gorgeous longform pieces of seductively creepy feral drone work. Fans of Fursaxa, Grouper, and Charalambides should not miss this one! LIMITED TO 81 COPIES!!!
What initially sounds like a super distorted overblown recording of Hendrix playing his wild "Star Spangled Banner", or a super grinding fuzz drenched synth noise psych rock blow out, or some insane ultra processed Japanese psychedelic solo guitar freakout, is in fact, a 40 something man, covered in blood, holding a huge piece of contact mic'ed broken glass in his mouth. Huh?
Such is the musical world of Mr. Justice Yeldham. We weren't sure what to expect actually, conceptually we were definitely intrigued. A guy who records himself smashing his face against panes of glass, moaning and humming into the glass resulting in all sorts of bizarre alien sounds, and often ending up with the glass shattering and much blood being shed. He had us at glass and blood. The cd sleeve is even a patchwork of bloodied band-aids (euwww).
But when we finally got the disc, the sounds were just as amazing, maybe even more so than the process, which is definitely a rare occurrence. How many records have we gotten, where the story of the recording was way more fascinating that the resulting music? Way too many. The thing with this Yeldham disc, is it's actually quite listenable as well. Ostensibly a noise record, the sounds here are anything but run of the mill noise, they range from strange fuzzy drones, wailing streaks of coruscating feedback, crumbling synth like blasts (parts of this almost sound like samples from the Justice record!), grinding gnarled squalls of super distorted buzz and every strange fuzzy buzzy stop in between. And every once in a while you have to remind yourself that THIS IS A GUY WITH HIS FACE PRESSED UP AGAINST A PIECE OF GLASS! A piece of glass that just may shatter at any second. And the more feverish and frenzied the sounds become, the more strain is placed on the glass, and the more imminent shatter and bloodshed becomes. So weird, and so goddamn awesome.�
Comes in a cool velour lined cd sleeve, adorned with images of band-aids and blood, inside a full color booklet with tons of photos of Yeldham performing live, amazing and intense, some weird, some strangely beautiful, some super disturbing, most of them really bloody!!
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As we sit in the middle of an atypical heatwave here in San Francisco it's made us think hard about what our summer jams are going to be, and luckily the debut album from Yelle has just hit stateside and we can officially proclaim that this will be one of our party records of summer '08! Hailing from France, Yelle evokes that special infectious magic of French pop in all its incarnations with a healthy dose of electro and a fun hip-hop disposition. It's sort of how we would imagine a collaboration between Stereo Total and M.I.A. would sound. Yelle is fun and full of color but sharp and strong enough sounding so it doesn't just become disposable fluff. This is exactly what we hoped would be playing everytime we ever walked into a dance club. Suave and and so damn sassy!
Oh-la-la - this young French lady makes some of the most exciting and satisfying dance music around. With her second album she's proven she is no fluke, or one hit wonder, as this is just as action packed, fun filled, and free flowing as her great debut. It's really hard to make a solid dance record that doesn't just rely on a few hits and then the rest is just forgettable filler, Yelle has no room for filler in her life, as every single song on here brings the goods with such exciting results. This makes us think of what it might sound like if some really cool French electro-producers produced a record by Kylie Minogue or Goldfrapp. But it's really Yelle's energy and charisma that makes her stand way ahead of the electro-dance-pop pack, as you always feel such a human and real element driving these contagious songs. This has summer jams of '11 written all over it!
Connecticut label Music Fellowship is doing a series of three-way split cds -- we already reviewed the second release in the series, the lovely "Crickets And Fireflies" by the triumverate of Kinski/Paik/Surface of Eceyon. Now, here's the first, and like volume two it's also a bunch of spaced out drone-on indie rock, music well in keeping with the photo of the Northern Lights that adorns the cover. Yellow6 is a British feller we're not familiar with, looping his guitar nicely. Rothko should be more familiar, and with them it's not guitars -- it's basses. Last but not least Landing work their improv-drone magic. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
Many of the sounds coming out of the recent surge of girl group inspired bands that we've been digging have been more on the garage and lo-fi rocking side of things, but Yellow Fever are mining that same sort of girl group glory with a more direct song based approach with totally stunning results. We hear echoes of the Young Marble Giants and their disciples, like Klang or Quixotic, albeit slightly more twee. We'd imagine that if Calvin Johnson heard this he would sign YF to K in a heartbeat, the music these gals conjure up definitely has many of the same endearing qualities of some of our favorite K records over the years.
Get Grass Widow and Girls At Dawn out of the fuzzy dirty garage, and bring them upstairs to the warm and comfy living room and you're getting an idea of where Yellow Fever are coming from. The songs are really compact and stripped down. Like Kim Deal and Julie Doiron doing extra minimal Aislers Set covers. Yellow Fever are amongst an awesome new breed of bands from Austin, Texas who are starting to get wider attention (weird that they weren't included on the new Matador compilation, Casual Victim Pile featuring a bunch of other bands from Austin). But it does make perfect sense that it's their friends the Vivian Girls who have released this on their own record label, Wild World, they for sure share a similar spirit and plenty of musical reference points, even though they approach their sounds from slightly different angels.
This is totally hitting the spot!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
As their recent bay area shows confirmed, this band completely destroys. Three twenty year old Japanese girls, playing grinding thunderous metal. Coming soon: a split 7" with S.O.D. and a new album.
The infamous Yellow Swans return -- this time without any D-something word in front -- and continue to blur the line between noise rock and good ol' noise. Given that they have approximately a billion tape/cd-r/whatever releases, you may want to assume that all the tricks are out of the hat and this is just in fact another Yellow Swans record, but you'd be wrong. At All Ends is somewhat of a departure from much of their previous work, and it focuses more -- okay, a bit more -- on melody and song structure. Gorgeous sheets of noise, gut-punching blasts of sonic destruction, percussion and vocals both reverbed and distorted into total oblivion, and an underlying sense of danceable rhythm. Through it all, this album is one of those noise rock epics that proves the it-all-sounds-the-same haters wrong and shows that its possible to celebrate, break some shit, AND have a good time doing it. Recommended!
1st actual cd from these exciting Bay Area noisemakers.
Once again, our favorite SF sonic expats (now Portland based) return with another killer slab of drone-y goodness. This time bearing the mark of 'Descension' (for those new to the Yellow Swans, every record they are called something different, a different 'D' word preceding their name, unclear if it is related to sound or mood or what, but it's always different!) and sounding less noisy and more darkly introspective than ever. Which as far as we're concerned is a very good thing. But noiseniks, fear not, there is still some abrasive brutality lurking hear and there within. Read on...
The A side begins as a moaning and groaning minor key deep ambient drift, wreathed in crackle and static and bits of high end shimmer. Mournful melodies are muted and smeared into the backdrop of one of the prettiest dreamiest things the YS have ever done, but it doesn't last long as about halfway through they burst into a full on cascading crumbling wall of blown out buzz. There's still some moodiness underpinning the chaos, but by the end, there will most definitely be drops of blood on your headphones.
The second side foregoes the noise completely, as the 'Swans offer up a delicate and slow burning washed out dronescape, cavernous low end, gurgling buzzing tones layered into murky muddy harmonies, slowly shifting, industrial and machinelike, but still thick and warm and organic sounding. This might just be the chunk of buzzing lovely low end creep that finally hips the dirgedoomdronee set to the Yellow Swans...
LIMITED TO 489 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Pressed on crazy thick vinyl and housed in a gorgeous blue on black hand screened sleeve. ----* ----* New BLACK METAL Cassettes : ----*
Deterioration was originally released as a tour only cassette, which is interesting given that it seems more instantly accessible than many of their more widely available and well-known records. Of course, even though this Portland duo has since broken up, it's going to take a while to slowly sift through their catalog and really make sense of it all. The earlier days found these guys making overtly political noise tracks, devoid of really any discernible melody at all. Towards the end, the final releases (the 12" split with Ex-Cocaine, the 12" collaboration with Burning Star Core, the full length At All Ends, etc.) showed a somewhat different side. More obviously psychedelic, more melodic, and seemingly an increased attention being paid to composition. Not to say that the older tracks were completely improvised, because we can't definitively say without asking, but there is a greater cohesion and flow with releases like this one. It really is a shame the guys parted ways, because the last year or so of their records seemed like one collective Revolver. If you're a fan of YS and haven't picked up anything in a while, you'd be well-served to check this one out.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
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It's hard to believe these guys broke up close to two years ago, they keep a higher profile than most active bands, and they definitely release more records than lots of proper not-defunct outfits, but we're not complaining, amongst the many floorcore bands out there, these guys definitely shone brightly, whereas most were content to just plug in a rack of effects and make an ear splitting racket, these guys always did more with their noise(s), sometimes subtly, sometimes not so, even at their noisiest and most abrasive, they infused their crunch and skree with melody and texture, and were definitely capable of crafting some moments of sublime beauty, which is where this newest, and supposedly final Yellow Swans release positions itself. Gorgeously ambient, but Yellow Swans ambient, which means rife with strange layers, and sublimated rhythms, noise, but soft noise, the first track explodes in a cloud of grey noise, but it never gets too harsh, instead the duo soften the edges, add a lurching buried pulse, wrapping everything in a gauze of smeared melody, and woozy shimmer, it almost sounds like krautrock broadcast via shortwave and played back on a wax cylinder, but at extremely high volume, gritty, and hissy, but washed out and dreamlike, all wrapped around a skeletal rhythm, looped and mesmeric, it's only 4 minutes, but we definitely could have dug this track stretched out to fill up the whole record. The 13+ minute "Opt Out" begins all spaced out and dreamy, lots of shifting textures, undulating layers, hazy chordal streaks way off in the distance, eventually building to a white hot squall of psych noise, that is definitely harsh and heavy, but within the chaos of colliding sound particles, rhythms skitter subtly, melodies loop and intertwine, it's almost like pretty Merzbow, if that were even possible, which it seems it is...
The rest of the record dials back the noise, instead opting to drift and shimmer and creep, letting the sounds ooze and sprawl, sending notes into the ether, like sonic flower petals drifting on a swirling churning black stream, bits of guitar chime and ring out, the recording glitches out, sound cut out, throb, and pulse, swells of almost SUNNO)))-like buzz surface and then dissipate, streaks of near pop ambience hover over bells and chimes, and looped melodies, fractured chunks of warm whirring sound, crackle and hiss and rumble crafted into crystalline expanses of prismatic glow, long ominous drones unfurl into hushed black ambience, shot through with warm, languid psych guitar skree, with the tracks occasionally building to a howling lysergic speaker shredding climax, but just as often splintering into warped shards of melted muted melody, and allowed to drift lazily and slowly settle into the darkness below, or rise to the heavens above. So gorgeous. These guys are definitely missed.
The vinyl version (and ONLY the vinyl version) includes a bonus disc, featuring 70 minutes of extra music, including what sound like reworked and extended versions of some of the songs on the record proper...
Between the Yellow Swans and the Skaters, you could fill up a whole shelf at home with limited cd-r's. If you figured Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Birchville Cat Motel, Gray Daturas, Hototogisu, Axolotl and all the rest into the equation you might just need a whole room. So here's one more to try and squeeze in if you can. Recorded live in 2005 at Sound & Fury, a record store in Australia and limited to 150 copies (we got the LAST 24!), we have to say it'll be well worth the trouble to make room for this in the cd-r wing of your musical collection as it's another kick ass installment in what is now a MASSIVE, but surprisingly consistent body of work. This live set is all droney which you know we love (and we know YOU love). The first near twenty minute track is one long shimmer, a warm low end thrum supporting a pulsing dog whistle skree and in between all manner of creaking industrialism and drifting guitar warble, thick whirring vacuum cleaner fuzz and moaning distant feedback. Track two takes the sounds of track one and roughs them up, adding more volume, more power and ultimately more noise, a big thick layer of feedback and rumble and rrrooooaaarrr. The final fifteen minute track continues in a similarly droney direction with another layered soundscape of ultralowend power and ultrahighend sinewave squeal. This time the low end is thicker and more distorted, like a guitar pressed up against the speaker, while the high end is just a distant sheet of white hot shimmer, while in the foreground, guitars oscillate and pulse, not full on noise, but not melodic necessarily either. There are most certainly melodies (or fragments of melodies present, but they are suffocated by the Swans' bulldozing sonic swells. Another winner. Hototogisu heads and fans of other such sonic mayhem will love it!
Packaged in a simple brown cardstock sleeve with a black 'Y' wax seal. Hand numbered and limited to 150 copies, includes an actual photo insert. Each one is different.
We have 24 copies and then these are gone for good!
Another archival release from the now defunct and greatly missed floorcore noise duo Yellow Swans. We have not been able to keep this in stock, we sold out twice before we had a chance to review it, and now we have 5 copies, maybe the last 5 copies, as this was limited to 500 copies and is already sold out and out of print at the label. So act fast and be lucky if you want one of these.
This Mort Aux Vaches session from 2007 finds the 'Swans at their heaviest and noisiest. On first listen, it's a wild psychedelic squall, heaving walls of crumbling distortion and blown out buzz, Skullflower, Total, that sort of thing, but closer listening reveals all sorts of prettiness beneath, lilting melodies, haunting refrains, keening feedback, unlikely harmonies, in fact, the more you listen, the more the 'noise' seems to peel back, letting the strange melodic beauty underneath shine through. Which was sort of the magic of the Yellow Swans, creating massive roiling swirls of chaotic beauty, sculpting otherwise harsh and hellish sonics into impossibly beautiful soundscapes, weaving buzz and rumble and drone and whir and howl and grind and crunch into dense shimmering clouds of otherworldly sound.
INCREDIBLE PACKAGING, maybe the most over the top Mort Aux Vaches yet, the usual fold over sleeve held shut by a little metal fastener, but affixed to the front a three dimensional sort-of-sculpture, depicting a little girl and a yellow swan, an image from some old storybook but rendered in three dimensions like it was pried off the front of some old building. Super cool.
And again, we only have FIVE copies. Be prepared to be disappointed... Sorry.
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It's been a seriously productive year for the Yellow Swans. Multiple cd-r releases, some 7"s, a Australian tour with pals the Grey Daturas, as well as loads of splits and collaaborations with folks like Axolotl and the Skaters as well as teaming up with the Daturas for a couple releases as well. Phew! But thankfully, there seems to be no end in sight. With all those releases, it's a bit surprising to realize the Yellow Swans only have one proper non cd-r release, and that one flew so far under tha radar we wouldn't have known about it at all had one not drifted through here used a while back. So here we have a brand new, shiny silver, actual cd, non-cd-r, blast of Yellow Swans nooooooooooize! Joined on a few of the tracks by fellow noisy folks Inca Ore, Gerritt and Christina Carter (of Charalambides), Psychic Secession is another gorgeous chunk of sweet sweet noise, equal parts glistening shimmer, crushing and jagged skree, skittery diembodied rhythms, haunting ghostly vocals, blistering sheets of distorted electronics, squealing feedback, chiming reverb drenched percussion, glistening delicate ambience, even some ultra processed psychedelic rock, all woven into a dense chaotic and surprisingly gorgeous whole!
This will be coming out in the states on Load Records, but not until way later in the year, so for now we got this Australian import version which comes in a super spiffy oversized cardboard sleeve and is a completely different (supposedly 'noisier') mix than the forthcoming Load version!
Recorded at the same time as the recently listed (and now out of print) collaboration between the YS, Axolotl and Gerritt, this disc treads much of the same sonic space, glistening high end feedback, distant crumbling drones, smears of sparkling glitchery, burbling underwater cd skipping, grinding industrial whir. Not jagged or harsh at all, not what you would expect from these noiseniks. Quite dreamy and soothing, all the harsh bits have the edges smoothed into a slow flowing dronee bliss-scape. Comes with a photocopied copy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Vietnam speech and comes in a gorgeous hand painted sleeve. As with all Jyrk cd-r's it seems, SUPER LIMITED, already out of print, and we have the last 30. So again, act fast if you want one of these. Once they are gone they are gone for good.
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Another one of those 'it had to happen' matchups. New Zealand's inimitable Campbell Kneale aka Birchville Cat Motel and the formerly Bay Area now PDX based noiserock dynamic duo The Yellow Swans. As we're huge fans of both of these outfits, it would take a pretty serious fumble to disappoint, and we're happy to report that this is anything but.
Two massively thick snarls of corrosive fuzz and buzz. This is some serious noise for sure. But as a testament to the skill at work here, this noise is imbued with all sorts of melody and color, for every harsh streak of blown out amp melting feedback, there is a delicate burbling melody, for every wall of skull crushing synth damage, there is a a smooth drifting smear of glistening shimmer. It's ugly on the outside, sure, but like your mom always told you, beauty is only skin deep, and just below the blistering scaly monster skin of these two bursts of furious amp damage, is all manner of loveliness, subtle tonal shifts, gloriously rich overtones constantly swirling and blurring together, it's a little like some Sunroof! wrapped in bit of Merzbow, or a dense swirl of Growing all wrapped up tight within a crunchy Masonna shell.
Sure sounds good to us...
Another prime match-up between two long time AQ favorites, who almost sound better together than they do apart. Portland's dynamic duo the Yellow Swans and one man violin terror Burning Star Core, together for this super limited lp, two shows recorded over the past couple years, both extended noise-drone fests.
The A side starts out surprisingly tranquil, sounding more like Sunroof! or the Double Leopards, here the trio are augmented by an extra member, another AQ fave, Mike Shiflet. A sea of bleary eyed faux sitar buzz beneath slippery Eastern sounding violin, sawing away in dense clouds of delay and reverb. A super hypnotic sonic sprawl that eventually explodes into a wall of psychedelic skree, blown out distorted guitars, malfunctioning electronics, jagged bursts of static, a furious freaked out noise jam.
The flipside came out a while back as a cd-r on the Yellow Swans' Jyrk label, but we only ever had 20 of those, so odds are most folks never got to hear it. Which was a shame as it is definitely some of the nicest stuff we've heard from either of these outfits. So here's one more chance to get an earful. Warm atonal guitar strum, angular and purposeful, mournful and minor key, drifts above a bed of skittery glitch and rumbling drones. Eventually the guitars disappear beneath a wild wooly sheet of shrieking sonic turbulence, a whirl of moaning melodies behind a thick curtain of freaked out feedback and squealing skree. Nice and noisy!
Pressed on thick 140 gram marbled red/purple vinyl, housed in a super swank sleeve, each one stickered and hand numbered. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
This has been a big year for Bay Area noise combos, with loads of releases, write ups, tours and much higher profiles in general for bands like the Skaters and the Yellow Swans. Oakland free noise duo, the Yellow Swans, also run their own label Jyrk, responsible for lots of AQ favorites recently, including the Yellow Swans / Grey Daturas 2 cd-r collaboration we listed not too long ago. This time around, Dove Yellow Swans (they often switch between different D-words reflecting the sound or mood of each particular record) have taken a handful of older releases and chopped 'em up, and re-assembled and re-worked them into an entirely new beast, forty seven minutes of sputtering, splattery, free noise, drone drenched, druggy and damaged, malfunctioning electronic chaos. However, unlike most noise outfits, the Yellow Swans know a thing or two about dynamics, and are quite adept at taking all sorts of horrible noises and weaving them into an entirely listenable, and often quite gorgeous whole. Drum machines spit out all sorts of random beats and sounds, stumbling and clattering and careening around your head like shotgun pellets, beneath a thick wash of shrieking feedback, sick sounding synths, super processed vocals, and distorted and dizzying guitars. A little bit Wolf Eyes, a little bit Sunroof!, a little bit Merzbow, but all twisted and tangled into it's own deliriously damaged Yellow Swan-ed shape.
Packaged in a cool oversized cardboard gatefold, with a bit of black felt to protect the disc. Cover art by Devendra Banhart. And as always, extremely limited!
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