If sometimes we get a bit overwhelmed, by how much music there is out there, or how many reviews we have to write, all it takes is one record, hell, even one song, to remind us of how lucky we are, and how much we still love music like crazy. Thankfully, those records are not as few and far between as you might think. And this time around, it just might be this one, the first we've heard from either of these bands, both specializing in a sort of retro pop that we love. Still Corners are apparently super hyped, having just signed a deal with Sub Pop, and as much as we dig their track here, it's the New Lines whose song has us freaking out, and wondering why Sub Pop didn't just sign them too while they were at it.
Their track starts off all fuzzy analog synths, and swoonsome organs, and big booming Beach Boys percussion, everything wreathed in a warm layer of fuzzy reverb, a sound that to our ears sounds so genuinely vintage it's uncanny, the sound, the instrumentation, and we would have been just as happy if this intro stretched out and made up the whole song, but then the song proper does kick in, the bass thick and warm and and liquid, the drums propulsive and powerful, a sort of sixties Stereolab, darkly psychedelic, and then when the vocals come in, it's total Zombies classic pop heaven, definitely exploring similar territory as the High Llamas and aQ faves the Rollo Treadway, a hazy sixties psychedelic pop that manages to be catchy and a little trippy, but also super melodic and in its own way true to the era that inspired it, while taking that sound and subtly updating it for the now. We can't tell you how many times we've listened to this track, but many times every day would not be an exaggeration. And The New Lines' side of this split will be well worn out by the time we finally get our hands on their full length. We can hardly wait.
But let's not sell the Still Corners short, their side of the split is pretty dang awesome too. A dreamy reverby waltz, ethereal female vox draped over spidery guitar melodies, and a simple shuffling rhythm, the sound is glimmering, glistening, chiming, the hushed verses giving way to a gorgeous, warm expansive chorus, all slippery slide guitar wrapped around an almost orchestral bombast, everything anchored by a warm wandering bassline. The song grows ever more lush, as pizzicato strings pluck out the melody, only to be replaced by soaring synths, the sound dense and layered and impossibly gossamer, it's easy to see why Sub Pop snatched them up, their full length is bound to be fantastic.
A pretty perfect split for sure, the rare sort of split that not only has you listening to both sides over and over, but has you hankering like crazy for more from both groups. Probably pretty limited, so grab one before they're gone.
Another Record Store Day release we were super excited about, a split 7" between the Night Marchers, which is essentially Hot Snakes redux, with John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt and crew kicking up some super hooky Rocket style noise pop - including this little gem, which might be the poppiest thing we've heard from them yet, with lilting melodies, a bouncy rhythm, and hooks galore, a big chorus, and lots of "la-la-la" style vox, which sort of makes sense since they're sharing this split with San Diego pop combo Mrs. Magician, whose Strange Heaven record (released last year on Reis' Swami label) was easily our pop record of 2012, and MM's side of this here split is more of everything we loved about the full length, a little bit surfy, a little bit garage-y, the sound washed out and reverby, lots of chiming harmonics, fuzzy jangle, kinetic drumming, amazing vocal harmonies, the whole thing a insanely hooky blast of crazy catchy practically perfect garage pop, that has us hankering even more for a new full length.
As mentioned above, this was a Record Store Day release and thus was extremely limited - we do have a handful left, far fewer than we'd like though, and the last we'll see. White vinyl, with a thick printed full color insert.
We're a sucker for a band name, you should definitely know that about us by now. And a lot of you are the same. The thinking is, if you're that creative with just the name of your band, imagine how nuts the music must be?? Sure, that doesn't always hold true, but in the case of the awesomely monickered Tremor Of The Black Manx, the name couldn't suit the music more.
On the same label as last week's record of the week, the bizarre black metal weirdness of Jute Gyte, comes TOTBM, who we know NOTHING about, but it hardly matters, what does matter is that this is some awesomely confusional and fucked up stuff, like some sort of fractured electronic hyper grind, or maybe we could call it grindtronica, or something like that. The structure is definitely grind, the songs are short, the arrangements are head spinning, but all of the sounds seem to be synths and not guitars, although sometimes the sounds DO seem to resemble guitars, maybe they're just super processed, regardless, the result is a strangely synthesized bit of frantic buzz, tangled melody, moody murky drift, all wrapped around skittering, stuttering programmed drums, that go from plod to pound to inhuman blast in the blink of an eye, dragging the rest of the sounds along with it. Really rad, and WAY weird.
TOTBM are teamed up here with Night Troll, who sound like a slightly electronic, WAY fucked up, ultra lo-fi raw primitive black metal. Ildjarn, Bone Awl, Akitsa, if you love that stuff but wish it was WEIRDER, more damaged and demented, with throbbing sub bass, tangled atonal guitars, processed death metal grunts, and all sort of other random fuckery, then this is for you. Total lo-fi stumbling ultra raw outsider electronic black metal. Which to us reads: SUPER RAD.
What better way to find a band to release a split with than to just pick a band that features essentially the same members? Such is the case with this two way split between buzzing black hordes Nightbringer and ritualistic dark ambient ensemble Temple Of Not. Most bands would probably just combine the two, and have a black metal band with long drone passages, or vice versa, but these are two entirely different sonic entities, and both are amazing. Hailing from Colorado, these groups were brought to our attention by Wrest from Leviathan, who is VERY selective about the metal he listens to, so much so that when he repeatedly sang (growled?) the praises of both these bands we knew we had to check it out.
Nightbringer buzz darkly through a thick black void, with loping midtempo tempos over furiously fast riffing, and some completely insane drumming, not just blast beats, but wild fills and strange unlikely rhythms. Occasionally the band slows down, at which point the music takes on a creepy majestic air, like court music for some hellish black temple, but it's not long before the band bursts back into full speed blackness. Super atmospheric with bizarre blasts of hyper speed buzz as well as stretches of dense droning riffage. Heavy and dense and evil. These guys definitely wouldn't sound out of place on NED alongside Deathspell and Antaeus.
Nightbringer's occultic ambient alter ego Temple Of Not is just as dark and heavy, but realizes their evil through drone not buzz, with two lengthy glacial crawls, thick soundscapes of whirring rumble and dreamlike shimmer. But be prepared, this is not normal ambient music. Part way through the first track, the song is disrupted by huge speaker shredding bursts of what sounds like a garbled black metal transmission from an alternate universe, repeated over and over building into a strange fuzzed out super distorted rhythm before drifting off again, allowing the song to wind down into blackness. The second ToN track is even more spare, but still haunting and ominous, disembodied vocals drift above a slowly shifting, layered landscape of throb and thrum, warble and whir, guitars and synths intertwined and tangled up in a slow drift skyward, the last few minutes punctuated by a simple distant pulse-like distant drum beat. Very primal and ritualistic. And the perfect compliment to Nightbringer's hellborne onslaught.
Recommended by AQ and Wrest endorsed!! You know what that means...
Three tracks. Two artists. One solo track each. One collaboration. Each 22 minutes and 22 seconds long. Benny Nilsen provides the first track, and it's a signature piece for him with a long slow ascent of skull-cracked drones. The icy sounds of this piece, its spectral, shadowy allusions are more keeping with his earlier work as Hazard, a grim, post-industrial production of steely ambience. Very nicely done. The same can be said for Z'ev's track, as he's become far more adept with digital production in recent years. His arsenal of percussive strikes is at the core of his solo track, yet Z'ev has deftly smeared much of the metallic reverb and sustained magnetic vibrations into a monstrous low end composition of slow motion explosions crossing paths with Lustmord's Heresy or The Monstrous Soul, minus the death-obsessed imagery. These two tracks are clearly worth the price of admission, but it should be noted that the third collaborative track is pretty pointless. After 17 minutes of silence, the two merely present a room mix of the two of them playing drones and percussion. Eh.
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At the end of the 'alcohol trilogy' that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa released via Helen Scarsdale, the dark isolationist rumble which dominated the previous two and half records was shattered by a robotic sequence of bleeping analog synth tones which spiralled deep into the void of the arctic night sky. Such a dramatic juxtaposition is not uncommon within the realm of Stilluppsteypa, but less so for Mr. Nilsen. And those Derbyshire / Dockstader / Oneohtrix like tones found on Passing Out (the finale mentioned above) is clearly the jumping off point for Space Finale - an epic 90 minute cassette of analog synthesis, captured, spliced, and cut, all on a Revox 2-channel tape machine. Amidst the vintage synth blips and sustained tones, Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa offer another narrative composition that moves from the vacant space station overrun by some unknown alien virus into the lair of the mad scientist who meanders dabbles on his Wurlizter (or some kind of organ, if it's not an actual Wurlizter) in minor key melancholy when not toiling away on an abomination that will somehow destroy the world. Shadowy ambience, fuzzed out tape hiss aggregation, weird dropouts and glitches on the tape that would make Leif Elggren proud, and much much more. With so many cassette releases being issued as 10-15 minute programs, it's very welcome to come across a full 90 minute tape! Limited to 200 copies!!! We got 20 and they're going fast...
Ah, the plight of the supergroup touring the world with fits of drunkenness, wanton groupies, the drudgery of long travel days, and of course a couple of good gigs between. Such is the fictional landscape mapped out by the dada-punk sound artists BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson & Helgi Thorsson (aka Stilluppsteypa), and Anla Courtis. Nilsen & Stillupsteypa have been working together for many many years now, alternating releases between Editions Mego and The Helen Scarsdale Agency, proving to be a rare commodity in the realm of avant-electronics that a collaborative project can develop beyond the one-night stand of hedonistic improvisation followed by bouts of slumped file-sharing. No, their wintery psychedelic collages of existential madness, sheering drone, VHS horror sound design, and Haflerian confusion have developed into one hell of an expressionist vocabulary. In bringing the tireless traveller and exemplary paratactilist in his own right Anla Coutis into the fold, the notion of these four embarking on some stupid-ass world tour akin to the Travelling Wilburys seemed apt. So, they ran with it in the same lysergic madness that Leif Elggren musters in his ludicrously brilliant artforms. The languid drones of the opening number "Aurora Australis" (named for the southern hemisphere polar-light phenomenon) suspends cryptic field recordings and nocturnal creaks upon corona-glow drones that ebb and flow with a psychological tension that Lynch & Splet mastered on the Eraserhead soundtrack, but here pocked with frightening gasps for air and violent jabs of noise. Side B's title "Fish Is God" seems like the punchline to a surrealist's knock knock joke; and if that may be an apt analogy, these four take that credo of absurdity rather seriously. Rolling out oceanic swells of rippling tone that rise up its tidal crescendo only to have its motion cut out with a dramatic tug to silence before an unsettling chunk of guttural vocalizations of an one-man orgy fitted to scabs of fragmented white noise. It's hard to really tell what Courtis may be up to in these procedures, as the album is very much a continuation of those amazing records that Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa have crafted over the years. Brilliant stuff.
Holy shit! Is this fucking cool, or what? First of all, it's got a fucking piece of tile mounted to the cover. Second of all, it's limited to a mere 276 copies. Thirdly, some of the copies we got enjoy a delightful bouquet from the industrial strength adhesive used to bind the tile to cardboard sleeve, that may give an additionally psychoactive property to the album. And fourthly it's another brilliant collaboration between our favorite Scandinavian sound artists BJ Nilsen (from Sweden) and Stilluppsteypa (from Iceland), who had blown us away on their previous duets Vikinga Brennivin and Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna.
We're not really sure who Milan Sandbleistift is, but he's authored the other side of this split LP. His contribution is a teethgrinding piece of dirty drone wandering from lonely 8-bit electronic tones like a random piece of gear yanked from one of the Wolf Eyes' suitcases and allowed to growl in futility amidst a cloud of hiss and crackle pushed towards a radioactive self-immolation. It's pretty fucking cool, but even better is the glacial, grim drones from BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa. They've long mastered a twisted, rumbling ambience that's dark and dense, mysterious and haunting, deep and rich, that always straddles the precision of laptop jockeys like Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Stefan Mathieu, etc. and the blackened atmospheres of Corrupted, Earth, SUNNO))), etc.; and their two sprawling tracks on this split LP are marvelous additions to their catalogues of drones that drift across the Arctic Sea on a massive rusted ship between Sweden and Iceland.
STRICTLY LIMITED to 276 copies of which we only got a handful. So once these are gone, they're gone forever.
Latest releases from blackened soundscaper Thaniel Ion Lee, who we first heard in his guise as Blood Escutcheon, who split a tape with black metal weirdos Cloak Of Displacement, and then released a cd-r (both sadly out of print). He then released a cool boxed cd-r called White (which we just got back in and you'll find listed elsewhere on this week's list), and is back again, now in a duo called No Copper, whose sounds is less droned out and blackened than Blood Escutcheon or his solo record, and more abstract, ritualistic soundscaping, inhabiting a soundworld more along the lines of say No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man or Avarus, long buzzing tones, pounding abstract drums, scrapes and creaks, lush layered drones, raw and lo-fi, minimal, but gorgeously thick and washed out, caustic in places, noisy in others, but all blurred and smeared into a dark landscape of echo drenched reverberations, melodic fragments, rhythmic experiments and black ambient shimmer, all flecked with bits of folky flutter and strange abstract sonic filigree. Fans of Lee's other projects will definitely dig.
The flipside is occupied by an outfit called Tropical Trash, who may or may not also be called the Coconut Crimewave Big Band, but who prove themselves worthy foils for No Copper, with a sound that pushed even further into avant rock territory, a sort of free jazz / avant noise, heavy rhythmic, twisted electronic freakout heavy rock crush (!), the group fusing pounding drums to clouds of swirling glitched out swoops and swirls, before launching into some seriously blown out heaviness, thick churning riffage, pounding drums, all peppered with some bleeping electronics, and a sheen of hazy buzzy soft focus noise, a killer slab of classic electronic flecked noise rock, that definitely has us wanting to hear more! The band soon return to scrabbling and abstract skitter, the rock crush ditched in favor of some experimental abstraction, which is bombarded over the course of the rest of their side with some seriously fierce drum damage,
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Housed in cool hand screened origami style cardstock boxes, each one hand numbered, with a printed insert.
Up until now, we'd managed to hear very little from electronic soundscaper / audio experimentalist Lee Noble, but we definitely liked everything we heard, but this will be the first LN release to make it on the aQ list, which in some ways is perfect, as it's not a split, but instead a collaboration with aQ faves Ensemble Economique, aka Brian Pyle, from another aQ fave The Starving Weirdos. It's a perfect collaboration, in that it's impossible to tell exactly who is contributing what, and while the lush, organic, near cinematic sounds here do display shades of EE, Motion Forever expands on those sounds with Noble and Pyle crafting swoonsome swirls of Caretaker-esque shimmer, and Jeck like turntable ministrations, everything woozy and warbly, a nocturnal drift that gives way to some creepy skeletal lo-fi pop, laced with plaintive vox and detuned strum, all atop a layer of electronic buzz. A mysterious strain of slowcore that gradually disappears in a cloud of warm thrum, draped in tinkling chime like melodies, before returning to the Jeck / Caretaker like skeletal balladry of the opening few minutes.
The flipside introduces muted rhythms, beneath softly swirling synths, and over distant soft focus drones, all laid back and dreamily druggy. Strange samples surface throughout, the sound shifting into something much more dirgey and almost new wave sounding, haunting and otherworldly, with processed vox and distorted piano pound, a ghostly, spectral electronic dirgepop finale that is as good as anything we've heard from either participants!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
For now, the AQ list / site may not reflect it, but we have been MASSIVE, almost obsessive fans of the work of one Nordvargr, who we first discovered as the driving force behind the mysterious black metal dark ambient outift MZ412. He would later go on to record some of the most gorgeously bleak, martial ambient / drone musick as Folkstorm, Toroidh, and under his given name Henrik N Bjorkk. He is a modern master of dark ambient death drone. Most of his records have been really tough to track down, so we were super excited to be able to get enough of these to list. The name Drakh may be even less familiar to you than Nordvargr, but some of you may immediately recognize him as Nordvargr's partner in MZ412! So the hopes were quite high for what basically amounts to a new MZ412 record. And thankfully, you dark ambient death drone doom fanatics will not be disappointed. This is a crushing black souled threnody. Massive sheets of dark sound, shift and shimmer, disembodied voices crumble into sonic shards, oppressive walls of suffocating rumble, roll endlessly into the dark oblivion. But what sets this apart from other dark ambient / drone records is the guitars. Yep, guitars. About halfway in, bookended on either side by bleak shimmering lowend ambience, sirens wail, and drones creep slowly onward, as huge downtuned guitars unfurl slow motion riffs, lugubrious and lumbering, so distorted, and tuned so low you can hear the chords crumbling into pieces, while the whole thing lurches forward, through a cloud of black tar mist. It's like a Sunn 0))) track stuck in the middle of a Lustmord record. Like endless blackness being painted even more black. Like dropping a black hole into another even blacker hole...
This went out of print almost as soon as we got the original Total Holocaust import version in four or five months ago but has now been resurrected and re-pressed domestically thanks to the dark souls at Southern Lord, who apparently like this stuff as much as we do. Here's what we had to say about it first time around:
We barely even have to review this. Just the names of the two artists should be enough. Nortt, whose "Pure Depressive Black Funeral Doom Metal" was a massive favorite around here, and of course Xasthur, who rivals Leviathan as perhaps the most brilliant and important of the modern USBM hordes. Nortt offer up four tracks of miserable drone dirge, with mournful piano over a swirling abyss of black riffs and simple drumming, each chord slowly dissipating into nothingness before the next chord hits. Depressingly gorgeous and wrist slittingly sorrowful. Reminiscent of Corrupted's Llenandose, albeit way more grim and dismal!
Xasthur gives us three tracks, equally depressive, but here, instead of tarpit tempos and drone-like dirges, the depression and misery is communicated through creepy minor key riffing, mournful melodies and what sounds like clean chant-like singing, almost choral, but buried so low in the mix it almost sounds like just another instrument. Xasthur has totally perfected the swaying seasickly black metal waltz, with relentless double kicks, anguished vocals struggling to communicate from beyond, and warm and woozy, arpeggiated guitars. So good.
You're probably getting as tired of hearing this as we are saying it, but it has to be done. THIS IS SUPER LIMITED!! IN FACT, IT'S ALREADY OUT OF PRINT!! (Arghhh. Why lablels just don't press more when they know they can sell them still makes no sense to us...) SO, ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD!! SO ACT FAST!
Here's what we had to say about the cd version a while back:
We barely even have to review this. Just the names of the two artists should be enough. Nortt, whose "Pure Depressive Black Funeral Doom Metal" was a massive favorite around here, and of course Xasthur, who rivals Leviathan as perhaps the most brilliant and important of the modern USBM hordes. Nortt offer up four tracks of miserable drone dirge, with mournful piano over a swirling abyss of black riffs and simple drumming, each chord slowly dissipating into nothingness before the next chord hits. Depressingly gorgeous and wrist slittingly sorrowful. Reminiscent of Corrupted's Llenandose, albeit way more grim and dismal!
Xasthur gives us three tracks, equally depressive, but here, instead of tarpit tempos and drone-like dirges, the depression and misery is communicated through creepy minor key riffing, mournful melodies and what sounds like clean chant-like singing, almost choral, but buried so low in the mix it almost sounds like just another instrument. Xasthur has totally perfected the swaying seasickly black metal waltz, with relentless double kicks, anguished vocals struggling to communicate from beyond, and warm and woozy, arpeggiated guitars. So good.
A split release between like-minded, combat-folk minstrels Novy Svet and Spettro Family on the local imprint Black Horizons. Novy Svet hail from the Death In June / Der Blutharsch aesthetic of an elegant and bleak romanticism bathed in the pomp of militaristic chic and a fast-n-loose use of totalitarian imagery. This track marks the first recorded material from Novy Svet in close to five years. The band's ringleader Jurgen Weber has oft proclaimed his current release as Novy Svet's final statement; and the pronouncement in 2008 looked to be conclusive. But once again, Novy Svet return even if it is a brief exegesis in the form one half of a split seven inch. Here, the band delivers a quiet, dark, and impassioned ballad through an acoustically strummed dark folk laced with polyglot lyrics. Spettro Family delivers more of a cinematic prog-horror with the heavy synth arpeggiations channelled directly from John Carpenter and Goblin. With the single cut at 45 rpm, the tracks from both acts are teasingly short. The cover features a split portrait of Jarboe and Jessica Way of Worm Ouroboros, neither of whom have anything to do with the musical content within. Limited? You bet.
Every once in a while, someone out there is thinking just like us. It's a little scary, sure, but we gotta love it. Of course -WE- think that the buzzing blackwave of French outfit Nuit Noire is the perfect match for the confusional acoustic depressive black metal of Finnish duo Circle Of Ouroborus. But to see it finally happen. It's the metal music nerd version of fantasy baseball, when that team that you made up but could never happen in real life does...
And so it is with our league of fantasy black metal. These two bands have very little in common, except for the fact that they are about as unconventional as black metal can get, so much so that most "true" black metallers probably wouldn't consider either to actually be black metal, or metal at all for that matter, and the fact that both bands completely and utterly rule.
It's a pricey one, this 7", due to high manufacturing costs, and the ever worsening dollar, but this is most definitely a $12 single. We've shelled out $2 for singles in the past and felt ripped off, but once we got our ears on these tracks, money was no object!
Nuit Noire return with their bizarre blackened new wave buzz, a sort of Darkthrone meets Rudimentary Peni, or Immortal covering the Toy Dolls, a killer snarling hook filled blast of whiney vocals, queer guitar melodies, furious blast beats, all swaddled in loads and loads of buzz. Recorded during the same sessions that yielded the AQ fave Infantile Espieglery, these two tracks are blinding blasts of punk rock sped up and painted black, thrashy, and blasting, simple and hypnotic, with stretches of just guitar and drums and some outrageously melodic bits nestled right there amidst the furious fuzz, all peppered with strange squiggly licks and clouds of spacey FX and those perfect wailing about-to-crack vocals. So goddamn good.
And as if that weren't enough, Finland's Circle Of Ouroborus just keep getting better and better and more musical and melodic, which would normally spell doom for most of the bands we love (and we don't mean the good kind of doom), but these guys manage to retain all the fucked up-ness that made them so special, while continuing to forge ahead. A plodding depressive buzz, moody and melancholic, loping rhythms, and super weird Joy Division-esque vocals. Swooping majestic guitar leads and spidery guitar lines sprawling everywhere. They still sound a bit like a black metal Fall, but here they sort of sound like a more lo-fi, slightly less melodic Katatonia, which is of course a very good thing.
Has us chomping at the bit for new records from both bands. But for now, repeated plays of this seven inch will have to hold us over.
Nice thick full color jacket, thick cardstock inner sleeve, printed liner notes / lyric sheet. Not sure how limited, but with stuff like this, it's usually safe to assume VERY VERY!
The return of our favorite masters of faerical blasting punk! Who else could it be but Nuit Noire? We just raved about their most recent disc, the brilliantly titled Fantomatic Plentitude, and were already hankering for more when what should show up, but MORE!
This split 7" matches up Nuit Noire with Italian noisy new wavers His Electro Blue Voice, who end up being a perfect match for the Nuit Noire.
What can we say about Nuit Noire that we haven't said before. A blackened buzz wrapped around spiky crusty new wave-d punk rock. A blackened Rudimentary Peni. The guitars kinetic and buzzy, the drums rapid fire and frenetic, the vocals a wild caterwaul. These two new tracks are awesome. Crusty and catchy, lo-fi and super rocking. The opener is mostly instrumental, an epic extended intro, leading up to what could very well be the NN theme song: "Faerie Punk", ultra catchy and with some of the best lyrics EVER:
Stardust all around the drums
Stardust all around the guitar
Stardust blown away from the high speakers
Stardust everywhere on stage
Faerie punk in the moonlight
Faerie punk in the starlight
Faerie punk far in the night
Faerie punk on stage tonight
Hell yeah! The lyrics just reaffirm what the music is already saying. Wild forest faerie freaked out black new wave crusty punk pop madness.
So who could possible share a split with these guys? His Electro Blue Voice are up to the challenge, and are a pretty good match, their moody bass heavy new wave post punk, perfectly balancing NN's high end howl. Their sound is very 45 Grave, like some band you might have seen play the Scream in LA in 1985. Murky Joy Division riffing, wrapped around lugubrious Cure rhythms, the vocals a throaty gothy croon, the first track playing out lie a more metal Smiths, the second, some sort of dark doleful surf rock, with a Dick Dale riff stretched across and expanse of moody melancholia.
If this split 7" had come out a few years ago, it would've probably seemed like a bit of an odd pairing, but these days SF's (formerly much more no-wave influenced) Numbers and Detroit's (formerly very singularly electro-botic) Adult. are soundin' pretty chummy. Where they've found their common ground is in the raw, retro punky pit. Both songs in this split 7" equation feature snarky female vocals and underlying herky-jerk rhythms. Adult. percolates a dark, itchy "Monologue" and Numbers proclaim at a slower tempo "Me Me" punctuated by choppy guitars. Sure to please fans of both bands.
Now, for a limited time, we have this classic United Dairies recording on cassette!!
Mi-Mort was originally released as a split cassette by Nurse With Wound and Current 93 in 1983; and by some accounts, this marked the very first release by David Tibet as C93. These were the days of Crowleyian tape loops in the background with Tibet ranting his apocalyptic proclamations about the death of Maldoror. While the time period of Current 93's bleak, pyre-ritual abstractions was considerably short (1983-1987), it located Current 93 firmly within the context of industrial culture before Tibet shifted his course radically to a Comus / Wicker Man inspired British folk sensibility. This 18 minute exegesis growls with the drug-induced and Thelemic demons in Tibet's head and still makes for a very terrifying listen. A couple of the tracks from Nurse With Wound's side had made the rounds on various compilations including "Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree," on which a little German girl pleads for her father accompanied by an ever intensifying psychoacoustically challenging high frequency drone (muffled somewhat by the tape compression of this cassette release), and "I Was No Longer His Dominant" is an unsettling meditation of undulating metallic low-end feedback backing a muffled conversations which mysteriously expresses a psychological crack in the narrator. The other two tracks, on the other hand, are exclusive to Mi-Mort, both scraping on pieces of metal in see-saw grinds with suitably intense electronic sirens blaring about. Yup, it's a winner.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Given the subtitle Spitch' Cock One, this first release in the Angry Eelectric Finger series of reworked Nurse With Wound material may or may not have anything in common with a forthcoming release also entitled Angry Eelectric Finger, which might be a triple disc set. Regardless of the ambigous status of any future releases, for this one Nurse With Wound's mad scientist Steven Stapleton solicited Cyclobe, irr. app. (ext), and Jim O'Rourke to rework what we've been told was "an entire album of material." Presumably these are not remixes of older NWW tracks, but something of a parlour game with new material.
Stapleton himself produces the first track, interlocking varispeed warbles of some prepared piano recordings. Eventually, these settle into something of a seasick rhythm that is accompanied by a variety of metallic crashes and slashing cymbals, most of which are being played backwards. In the end, it sounds somewhat like a revisitation of the ideas found on Homotopie for Marie.
Cyclobe, a World Serpent staple comprised of two former Coil members, offer a bunch of ominous synth tones that do better than the recent batch of Coil recordings but don't extend much beyond that.
irr. app. (ext.) is AQ's beloved Matt Waldron, who contributes the best track on the album with an incredibly bleak take on the NWW vision of surrealism. Much like the stunning NWW album Salt Marie Celeste, Waldron's track rumbles with a sustained droning mantra; this time, it's from a muffled funereal bell while broken springs, distant mechanical engines, and washboard scrapes bounce throughout the stereofield as an aggregate of sonic detritus suspended against a black hole of sound.
Jim O'Rourke offers a soft kaleidoscope of DSP-impacted organ drones upon which he sprinkles tiny bells and some of the same mechanical springiness that Waldron also used. Obviously this is a teaser for that supposed upcoming triple disc set which is rumored to also feature Xhol Caravan; but considering the possibility that some of this material may not be there, it's advisable that you consider picking it up. Either way, this is fantastic.
Originally released as a split LP, then later reissued on separate anthologies of each project, this is the cassette version of the classic Nurse With Wound / Organum split from 1986.
The Nurse With Wound side is "A Missing Sense" which is a brilliant homage to the ultra-quiet /proto-lowercase composition "Automating Writing" by Robert Ashley, which is a very subtle composition of cut-up vocals and gasps with distant rumblings all of which flutter just at the event horizon at the edge of perceptibility. Stapleton's construction was originally designed as a private tape to which he could drop acid to, as everything in his huge record collection was far too shattering for his lysergic states. "A Missing Sense" like Automatic Writing is very quiet, with small vocalizations and sexualized gasps punctuating the muffled incidental sounds of what could very well be somebody vacuuming their carpet upstairs. Very subtle for sure, but there's plenty of room to take in the absolute strangeness of Stapleton's visionary work.
Here's what we had to say about Organum's "Rasa" which was featured on the now out of print Volume One collection released through Robot Records: The timeless, acoustic drones that make up the music of Organum could have been made for the beginning of the world or for its final breath; yet Jackman has always avoided assigning any specific metaphors to his work. Instead, this is music that attempts to exist purely within its own context, unconcerned with anything beyond its self-defined borders. Grinding motorcycle engines, steel strung instruments, bowed metal, and Japanese flutes are the instruments that continuously reappear throughout Organum. However grim, Industrial, grating, dissonant, or punishing Organum could be with such instrumentations, Jackman always manages to arrange his work to emphasize the dynamic and often beautiful tonalities of those sounds.
One of two new releases on Sige Records, the new imprint run by Aaron Turner of Hydra Head / Isis fame, the other is the formerly on cd House Of Low Culture / Mamiffer split, and this, another Mamiffer split, this time teamed up with mysterious power electronics ambient drone trio Oakeater.
Oakeater, whose Molech lp on Nihilist we dug big time, return again, with their usual UNusually arsenal of noisemaking devices: guitar, voice, percussion, tapes, modular synthesizers, feedback, electric piano and oscillators. Here they take their ritualistic dronescaping even further, ditching their noiserock background/pedigree almost entirely (Oakeater is members of the Coughs and Panicsville), to delve deeeeeeep into dark drifting drones and sprawling expanses of cinematic shift and shimmer. Slow and smoldering, lushly layered, hushed muted whirs and high end chimes, haunting melodies, all very dramatic and soundtracky sounding, before slipping into something else entirely, a long stretch of shimmering cymbals, lots of space, streaks of feedback, a weirdly meditative, subtly rhythmic, metallic dronescape, which is quickly subsumed by SUPER distorted synths, fuzzy and buzzy and blown out, the sort of low tones some dubstepper would KILL for, transforming the track completely into something way more spacey and tripped out.
Mamiffer counters with one of the heaviest, noisiest tracks we've heard from her (aka Faith Coloccia), using just guitars, pianos, tapes and apparently jars, Coloccia weaves together and chaotic but strangely lovely bit of heavy, abstract guitar noise, some strange mix of SUNNO))) and Skullflower, chugging churning looped guitars, swooping backwards production, a thick corrosive buzz, a sort of static riffage, but those stretches of glacial buzz and howl and keen are stretched out into more avant drone directions, loads of overtones, subtle rhythmic shadings, still buzzy and heavy and metallic for sure, but wrangled into something impossibly melodic and meditative and downright pretty. There's hiss and static and crunch and buzz, and on the surface it's noisy and quite chaotic, but Colaccia manages to shape it all into a soft tangled swirl of psychedelic guitar noise, that is easily as entrancing as it is abrasive.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, packaged in super swank, ultra heavy silk screened sleeves.
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Super limited split between these two heavyweights. In this corner, Burst, with their Meshuggah-like stop start riffing, super precise and machinelike, downtuned guitar chugs like pipes to the side of the head, all getting more and more tangled until it's a dizzying metallic swirl. There's also some weird warped melodies, the guitars and vocals doing something bizarre together, making it sound like the record is warped or something. Cool. And in the other corner, Germany's Ocean, not to be confused with THE Ocean, a massive metallic collective, who tone back the metal just a bit this time around and explore some post rock weirdness. Serene stretches of sweet blissed out prettiness, finger picked guitars and angelic female vocals, before a monstrous sledgehammer groove kicks in, all HUGE riff and harsh demonic vocals. Killer!
Packaged in a gorgeous fold out sleeve designed by Seldon Hunt and pressed on blue vinyl. Super limited and we only got a few.
Two sides of home brewed minimalism. Of, aka Loren Chasse (Thuja, Coelacanth, etc) takes a slight detour into a dark mysterious world of disembodied free folk. Some sort of country music, deconstructed, just whisps and afterimages left to drift wraithlike. It's like the skeleton of a banjo, was left to wander aimlessly along some lonely seashore, the sound of the surf a shimmery hiss, the banjo's footsteps a spacious barely there twang. All under a murky grey sky, soft melodies like warm breezes.
Greg Davis counters with a swirl of zinging strings, a complex web melodies, the harps' shimmering strings intertwined and overlapping, all over the distant soft splashing of water. Almost like an orchestra made up entirely of harps, performing playfully in a giant bathtub. With the harps tangled sonics being subtly glitched up and processed, making the end result all the more dense and dreamy.
Do John Dwyer and his Oh Sees comrades ever sleep??!! In the last year it seems like they are either playing a show in town, on tour (by the way they are sooooo on fire live right now!) or putting out records. But hey we ain't complaining cause the less they sleep the more rad music we get. This new split with Paul Cary (we don't know much about him), finds Oh Sees (what happened to the THEE?) sounding more slowed down and slightly stoned, which is a side of the band we do really dig, but don't get to hear that often.
Paul Cary reminds us a bit of The Entrance Band all stripped down and playing on someone's front porch, sort of a rustic bluesy lo-fi folk. But like us you are probably here for (Thee) Oh Sees side of this split which finds them doing two covers, "Hey Buddy" by Iran and "Coma" by Trio. Both tracks were included on the now out of print cd that came with the Zork's Tape Bruise LP release a few months back. And we're stoked that more people will finally get a chance to here these covers as they were two of our favorite tracks from that collection. No matter what incarnation or direction (Thee) Oh Sees take they seem to be able to do no wrong as of late, and we have to say we feel pretty lucky to get to see them play as much as we do!
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Sounds like our buddy, Thee Ohsees mastermind and man about town Jon Dwyer, has fallen in love all over again with the sound of raw garage rock. The last Ohsees album was way more punchy and rocking than previous releases, and now this split finds Dwyer sounding almost as fierce as he did in his Coachwhips days! Yet, he's still managed to find awesome ways to add a little something extra n' arty to that Ohsees sound.
The two Ohsees songs end before you know it but they're so good and infectious that we've just been playing them over and over and over.
Meanwhile, The Intelligence make a great foil for Thee Ohsees as they know a thing or two about how much more rad garage rock sounds when it's doused in reverb, crumbling keyboards and lo-fi vocals. Lars Finberg, the mastermind of The Intelligence (and a former member of the A-Frames) has had a bunch of records on In The Red which makes perfect sense as they have become THE label for bands with true raw garage spirit. Their three songs on this split, including a Vulvettes cover are such perfect blasts of haunting and infectious lo-fi garage rock ass kickery.
Features awesome artwork by Jay Howell and Joe Roberts and is already out of print at the label so you better act fast if you want one of these.
The LAMC series of 7"s features tons of our favorite bands (Fuzz, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), delivering an exclusive track on the A side, while the B side features one of THAT band's favorite new artists. A pretty cool concept for sure and we're reviewing 3 of our favorites in the series.
Number 3 in the series comes from big time aQ faves and local garage pop heroes Thee Oh Sees, their track a crazy catchy, bubblegummy chunk of jangle and strum, garage fuzz dreaminess, a song so good, it's hard to believe this didn't end up on a record proper (it did end up on third Oh Sees singles collection, and was on of our faves!), but it's the perfect single track, in the old tradition of bands putting their best stuff out in a more bite size format. So good!
The up and comer Dwyer and Co. picked for the B side maybe be an unknown commodity to the rest of the world, but for aQ-ers, The Mallard are another favorite, and their track here makes it easy to see why, a dark low fidelity swirl of hazy organ, murky rhythms, swirling guitar shimmer, reverb drenched vox, and buried hooks, all whipped up into a frothy psych-garage murk-pop concoction. If you've yet to discover the joys of the Mallard, this track will definitely make you wanna hear more! Too bad they already broke up, but there are 2 full-lengths to check out.
And as you might imagine, also SUPER LIMITED!!!
This one hardly needs much of a description. SF garage pop darlings Thee Oh Sees teamed up with Aussie gloom poppers Total Control, 4 songs each, all pretty dang great! Thee Oh Sees side is appropriately rambunctious and chaotic, wild and noisy and jangly with plenty of surfy twang, dollops of reverb, John Dwyer's almost cartoonish high pitched echo drenched yelp, super melodic and catchy, and with Thee Oh Sees, you have to know that there's much more going on than what's just on the surface, sure it's sweaty and wild and invokes much shaking and bouncing, but the band are tight as fuck and weave intricate layers and strange harmonies, and the songs are surprisingly complex, slipping from frenzied avalanche of noisy sound to almost fifties sounding reverby shuffles, but just check out the last few minutes of the final track, "Blood In Your Ear", with its swirling falsetto vox and soaring melodies all suspended amidst lush swirls and shimmers, pretty goddamn divine.
Total Control counter with their own brand of gloomy garage pop, another clutch of songs that ranks up their with their best, dirgey, droney, minor key, haunting and moody, peppered with blasts of full on distorto punk garage crunch, culminating in their last track, a gorgeous minimal low slung slither of layered guitar drones, rumbling bassline, laid back weary vox, a darkly depressive broody ballad that explodes in the second half into tense angular soft cacophony, that ends way too soon.
Cool cover art. Includes a download card too.
Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall cover each other on this brand new smokin' seven inch. We really don't need to say anything more. Anyone who's been listening to the current wave of charged, blown out garage pop these days knows that these are two of the most potent forces in the game. Thee Oh Sees are coming off what we think may be one of the best records of the year, Help, and Ty Segall's debut was one of our favorites of '08. So rad to hear them tackle each other's songs. Thee Oh Sees do "The Drag" with a deep-in-the-void reverb filled flair that suits the song so well. Ty does "Maria Stacks" from The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In, a song which might just be Andee's favorite Oh Sees jam, not just cuz it's hooky and catchy, but it also immortalizes AQ pal and amazing artist/zine-maker Maria Forde. Ty finds a way to make the song a bit more lo-fi and fucked up sounding while still holding on to the great melody that makes the original stick like it does. Pretty much a no-brainer, best grab one of these while you can!
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Previously only on 10" vinyl via Neurot, now finally available to compact disc users! David Tibet is an obsessive man, amassing a huge collection of books, records, paintings, and ephemera from his favorite artists, religious leaders, and cultural icons; and he often incorporates bits and pieces from that collection into the apocalyptic hymns of his band Current 93. A couple years ago, Tibet found himself awestruck by Om's first album Variations On A Theme and approached the stoned-metal mesmerists about working together. Through their correspondence, Om's bassist Al Cisneros found himself a contributor to the Current 93 opus Black Ships Ate The Sky, and then the two projects decided to produce this split release. What you get from Om is exactly what you would expect: heavy-as-fuck bass lines, lumbering drum propulsion, and tranced-out vocal incantations very much along the psychedelic vein of Sabbath and the druggy side of Hawkwind. Normally Tibet outsources the guitar work on his Current 93 records to the likes of Ben Chasny, Michael Cashmore, or Tony Wakeford, but here he's picked up the guitar, the bass, and a ton of distortion to match what Om does on the other side. He proves that he too can muster a heavy doom-drone riff laced with caustic waves of distortion and feedback. Of course, his revelatory vocals emerge from the cyclical riffs as does a caterwaul of droning bagpipes.
David Tibet is an obsessive man, amassing a huge collection of books, records, paintings, and ephemera from his favorite artists, religious leaders, and cultural icons; and he often incorporates bits and pieces from that collection into the apocalyptic hymns of his band Current 93. A couple years ago, Tibet found himself awestruck by Om's first album Variations On A Theme and approached the stoned-metal mesmerists about working together. Through their correspondence, Om's bassist Al Cisneros found himself a contributor to the Current 93 opus Black Ships Ate The Sky, and then the two projects decided to produce this split 10". What you get from Om is exactly what you would expect: heavy-as-fuck bass lines, lumbering drum propulsion, and tranced-out vocal incantations very much along the psychedelic vein of Sabbath and the druggy side of Hawkwind. Normally Tibet sources out the guitar work on his Current 93 records to the likes of Ben Chasny, Michael Cashmore, or Tony Wakeford, but here he's picked up the guitar, the bass, and a ton of distortion to match what Om does on the other side. He proves that he too can muster a heavy doom-drone riff laced with caustic waves of distortion and feedback. Of course, his revelatory vocals emerge from the cyclical riffs as does a caterwaul of droning bagpipes. There have been a couple of different pressings of this single; and what we have is the domestic, blue translucent vinyl version.
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FINALLY THE REPRESS IS HERE! These split singles went out of print in a flash soon after we first reviewed 'em on list 244. But more were promised, and now at last they're here, for now...
Most of you have already smashed the add to cart button to bits before even getting to reading the review, so we'll keep this brief. A monumental match up of modern psychedelic masters from the NorCal locale. On one side is the mighty post-Sleep behemoth known as Om, a bass and drums duo who churn out extended sludge mantras, and on this track it's no different. A super fuzzed out doomy plod and groove. When we first threw this one, we accidentally had it on 45 and it sounded pretty dang killer and super blown out and weird, until the vocals came in and went all doom chipmunk on us. But at 33 it was even slower and heavier and dirgier just the way it was meant to be. Note: the track on this 7" is the bonus track from the Japanese version of Conference Of The Birds that we listed recently, so a few of you may already have this song! On the other side we have Ben Chasny and his Six Organs Of Admittance, who seem to be upping their own personal dirge quotient in order to compete with the sheer heaviness of Om. There is still some lilting folk, but it's buried beneath wild squalls of psych guitar freakout that sounds VERY Japanese (High Rise, Mainliner, Fushitsusha).
Definitely essential.
Record number three from the duo known simply as On, made up of composer / producer Sylvain Chauveau and percussionist Steven Hess, a member of both Pan American and Haptic, all favorites around here, so it's no surprise that we dig On as well. And their recording technique has always been pretty cool, capturing various improvisations, song fragments, completed songs, various textures and sound experiments, and the handing the whole thing over to another musician to shape into whatever sort of record he or she imagined. Deathprod was the guest arranger/producer/assembler on the last album, and this time around, it's none other than long time aQ fave, experimental guitarist and soundscaper Christian Fennesz, and Fennesz definitely works his magic, assembling the various parts into sweeping smoldering minimal epics, gorgeous dronescapes and wide swaths of glimmering ambience. The record opens with a cloud of layered feedback, all high end skree, before gradually dissipating into something more delicate and tranquil, hushed chiming melodies, and crystalline overtones, give way to a much more soothing stretch of throb and thrum, wreathed in gentle static and subtle glitch, dark tones glide and shift, drifting through clouds of cymbal shimmer, fields of click and skitter, but all smeared into a slowly unwinding spiral of smoldering lysergic swells.
The record switches gears part way through, and becomes much more woozy and soft focus, muted tones, a warm washed out haze, and finally some stripped down skeletal drumming, the vibe almost krautrocky, simple and spare and propulsive, the background ever swirling and whirling, a softly lopped melody drifting in and out of earshot, the whole thing mesmerizing and hypnotic, before the drums eventually fade out, leaving a bleary landscape of slowly melting tones, and gently collapsing melodies, a hushed abstract, dreambliss outro.
Which makes the darkness of the next track that much more dramatic, churning buzzing muted riffage, looped and layered, wrapped in a cloud of delicate cymbal sizzle, subtly rhythmic, locked in an awesome groove, WAY too short at a little over 4 minutes, but that leads right into the epic 20 minute closer, mirroring the opening track, with another field of hushed and muted feedback, tangled buried melodies, the various bits of guitar, and barely there percussion woven into a slowly shifting gradually mutating dreamscape, sounding more and more like a proper Fennesz record, prismatic, kaleidoscopic, warm and lustrous, lush and fantastically abstract, very reminiscent of Oval, that sort of looped glitchery, but here, it's much more organic, much more soothing and entrancing, totally captivating and utterly lovely.
Although this cd is credited to the individual talents of three artists -- Colophon aka Jefre Cantu of Tarentel, the guitar and synthesizer duo 1 Mile North and The Wind-Up Bird aka multi-instrumentalist Joe Grimm -- you really can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Indeed, Conduction. Convection. Radiation. as a whole is a cohesive, near-seamless work. Very spacious, drifting and atmospheric, the first three tracks are by 1 Mile North, and the following three are by Colophon. Gauzy drones cloud the skies with occasional austere guitar melodies coming in and out of focus. The latter four tracks are by The Wind-Up Bird and they're crafted from delicate elements such as violin strings that softly wheeze, and piano keys that sound as if they're being struck as if by random raindrops. Beautiful and haunting.
This vinyl-only split 12" from Oneida and Plastic Crimewave Sound is pretty darn rulin'. Recorded during their Thank Your Parents session, Oneida's "Psychedelic Maze" is an eerie and homespun late-night jam which sparsely used ukuleles, hexoleles, a lute and homemade drums to conjure a sorta hokey but amazing self-conscious folk sound that's almost more Sun City Girls-ish than Oneida-y. PCS's side is a fuzz-soaked drone-rock opus. "End of Cloud" utilizes some production tricks, motorik drumming and various waves and blasts that creates a pulsing frenzy to which a very stoned person could "meditate".
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These two tapes, housed in a soft-plastic case a la RRRecords, offer documentation of four live, and very nice electronic sets from one evening at the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn, featuring the 2009 darling of outro-electronics Oneohtrix Point Never, the ever impressive Keith Fullerton Whitman, No Fun Acid (aka Carlos Giffoni in his 'acid' guise), and Prehistoric Blackout (aka Taylor Richardson of Infinity Window).
Oneohtrix Point Never begins his set with a lugubrious plodding synth melody before nestling into those stratospheric arcs of Juno-synth tones found on his recent Russian Mind LP. Keith Fullerton Whitman kicks out squiggles and step-patterned melodic phrases via a C64 emulator on his iPhone (no shit!) which gradually explode into a kaleidoscopic supernova after lifting out of a thick set of modulated tones 'n' drones. Giffoni has been talking up his love of acid techno with No Fun Acid being the project to act upon that infatuation. He sets down a simple breakbeat and begins a set that would make Phuture proud, in a pretty straight forward, but wholly effective techno workout. Prehistoric Blackout offers a four-note synth melody that drifts with counterpointed arpeggiations, tremolo lazer beams of sound, and tripped out, looping electronics. It should be noted that this is a room recording, and not a board mix. But as a result, there is some very amusing banter that Whitman provides at the end of his set with two enthusiastic women describing his set as a being akin to achieving multiple orgasms. Ahem. Throughout most of the sets, the audience politely stays quiet with the exception for the beginning of the Prehistoric Blackout set. Super limited, we've got less than a dozen of these.
Issue #4 of this Seattle zine has arrived! You simply seldom see this sort of lovingly handmade, cut'n'paste publication these days! Features include stories about Grouper and Blue Cheer, animal facts, assorted other writings, comics, collage, drawings, and reviews of gigs and... beer! The 52-page zine comes in a plastic sleeve which also corrals a handful of odds'n'ends -- some screenprinted stickers and a cd-r of educational, spoken word and children's LP obscurities. Limited to 450 copies!
What's this? Another collection of remixes from Yoko Ono already?! You're darn tootin' right! But whereas Yes I Am A Witch (released February 2007) enlisted the very varied and very 'now' cool cats (i.e, Peaches, Antony and the Johnsons, Flaming Lips, Le Tigre, Polyphonic Spree, and Cat Power) to do new remixes and reworkings of Ono's music, Open Your Box (released April 2007) compiles her previously released dancefloor smash remix 12"s. In case you're unacquainted, these remixes are far more NYC house, techno and disco scene oriented (a scene that has celebrated and embraced Ono and her music over the years), and feature the likes of Orange Factory, Basement Jaxx, Danny Tenaglia, Felix Da Housecat, DJ Dan and Pet Shop Boys. Sure some of them are pretty dated, but it's terrific to have and hear all of these tracks together. Throughout the two releases, much love and reverence and fun flow freely, and in the case of Open Your Box also much giddy clubland nostalgia. Yes.
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Brand new split from these two black metal outfits. There's the intercontinental trio Ophidian Forest, who have gotten much love on the aQ list in the past, one third of which is in fact the man behind eco-terrorist drums-and-dulcimer black metal one man band Botanist, who are teamed up with a San Jose one man band called Haeresiarchs Of Dis, who we've yet to review on the our list, but who some aQ metalheads have dug for a while.
The split, titled Darkest Origins, is in fact, just that, early material by both bands, unreleased until now, which as you might have guessed means more raw and lo-fi, which is just fine with us. Ophidian Forest are up first, and while the production is a bit more rough, their sound seemed to be already essentially fully formed, classic almost traditional black metal, shot through with some weird woozy melodies, the occasional almost carnivalesque keyboard, the vocals so raw and raspy, they sound like blast of staticky hiss, the overall sound washed out and a bit blurry, but in a way that really suits the sound, giving everything a tranced out vibe. OF dip often into a sound more midtempo and atmospheric, especially on the final track, which has a melody in the background that almost sounds like a Christmas carol, but when wedded to the shriek and blast, the buzz and howl, it pushes the sound toward something approaching almost choral, take the drums and vokills away and we'd have some seriously blissed out gauzy ambience, but fused to the black buzz, it becomes something pretty cool and weird.
From what we'd heard of Haeresiarchs of Dis in the past, his sound was a furious unrelenting, almost dizzying onslaught of lightning fast black buzz, furious and frantic and frenetic, a relentless blasting fury, shot through with all manner of warped melody, and constantly shifting texture, super dynamic, peppered with swaths of swirling synth, and some seriously insane vokills. And all of that is definitely evident here, although again, in a slightly more lo-fi version, with HoD slowing things down now and again, for some serious chugging, and more punkish pound, the vocals augmented by strange samples, the whole thing laced with some surprisingly melodic classic metal sounding melodies, not to mention the occasional bit of piano driven atmospheric ambience, or psychedelic swirl, or creepy static drenched Caretaker like drift, but all of that weirdness if woven into the overall blackened buzz.
Raver Techno DJs like their psych music too! That's the idea with this disc, wherein two edgy Scottish DJs who spin as Optimo (JG Wilkes and JD Twitch are their names), present a mix of spaced-out grooves from the past and present, some danceable, some towards the "chill-out" side of things. Everything from old school freak rock like Silver Apples' "Oscillations" and Hawkwind's "Hash Cake '77" to club trax like "Acid Thunder (Fast Eddie Mix)" and a Carl Craig remix of Throbbing Gristle... It's pretty varied, actually, mashing the Chambers Brothers' psychedelic R&B anthem "Time Has Come Today" right next to "Johnny Cash" by Scottish indie-rockers the Sons & Daughters, for instance. However, bewarned a lot of this is pretty house-y and electro-y, maybe not for someone normally shies away from dance music (though who knows, maybe you'll find you like some of it -- and it could cross-over the other way too). It's not clear to us what makes a bunch of this so "psychedelic" after all.
But then we thought of this: Nanjo Asahito, bassist for Japanese garage psych acts High Rise and Mainliner, told us once that, for breakfast, he preferred sausage to bacon because sausage was "more psychedelic"... we think what he meant (aside from a joke) is that sausage is mix of things, and that a mix is always more psychedelic... well there you go. Ingredients in Psyche Out's sausage include, besides the aforementioned: Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Vapourspace, The Stranglers, Acid Test, The Temptations, Sinnamon, Herbie Hancock, Simple Minds, Systeme Imaginique, Dinosaur, Dorau/Kohncke, Sweet Exorcist, Mr. Fingers, Chris and Cosey, Damien Donato, Koenig Cylinders, Hole In One, The Step, and Skatt Bros.
Now this is the kind of DJ mix cd we like! Optimo (a pair of Glaswegian DJs, though only one of 'em is responsible for this release) have already proved, with mixes like last year's Psyche Out, that they can throw down some proto-industrial or psychedelic rock tracks into a seamless set of mainly modern electronic dance stuff and make it work just fine, perking our ears up for sure. On this disc, Optimo start off with some vintage Throbbing Gristle from TG's 1979 debut LP, then skipping years (but not changing gears, that much) follow it with a recent cut by Kompakt artist Grungerman (aka Wolfgang Voigt). And so it goes. An eclectic, eccentric mix indeed. Other artists on here include: Suicide, Herbert, Black Dice, Marc Houle, Like A Tim, Godsy, Databrain, Leny Dee & Nicolai Vorkapich, 6K, Shane Berry, and Eventell and Metaboman. And Finland is represented by both Pan Sonic and Philius. At about the halfway point, Optimo even manage to include something by Japanese psych-heavies Boris! "My Machine" off of Pink, which though fuzzed-out and beat-less, somehow segues smoothly betwixt the much more dance-friendly tracks found to either end of it. Maybe the only unintentional glitch in the program is the track by Thomas Brinkmann -- though y'know we love him, his "Momomexico" included here is a bit of a party-pooper, unless a voice intoning "Mexico... Mexico... Mexico..." is your idea of a dancefloor filler. But once past that repetitious voice bit, it's a good 'un. And really, the idea isn't really that you're gonna put this on to dance to, is it? That's the question with a lot of electronic "dance" music we sell I suppose. Maybe drive, work out, jog, something like that though.
And as techno-y and house-y as a lot of this is, there's a healthy amount of grinding droning experimental bzzzz everywhere on here too. We imagine that at an Optimo night in Glasgow, there's probably people dancing, but just as many sitting there nodding their heads, spacing out. If you're like us, you might pick this up 'cause of the names you know and as a result get introduced to some cool stuff you wouldn't otherwise have heard. Recommended.
Formed in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Orchestre Ethiopia took on the task of bringing traditional Ethiopian folk sounds back into the limelight at a time when modern music ensembles were at the height of their popularity. However, rather than simply performing traditional songs for a wider (and eventually international) audience, the Orchestre's sound was unique as it took elements of a number of different folk traditions and mixed them up into a joyous, celebratory blend of Ethiopian cultures. The group itself was as diverse as its musical inclinations: it was initially assembled and led by a series of Americans including an ethnomusicologist and a Peace Corps worker (although it found a native leader in 1966 when Tesfaye Lemma took over leadership) and its membership included singers, dancers and musicians from a diverse array of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The result is a sound that falls squarely between the two styles that the Ethiopiques series has done such a remarkable job of documenting: Orchestre Ethiopia weren't a traditional folk group, nor were they a modern groove ensemble. Instead, they played an inspired pastiche of traditional sounds in a very modern way, never committing to one particular sound or groove.
Although Orchestre Ethiopia released two LPs between 1969 and the group's disintegration in 1975, the majority of the tracks included on this disc are previously unreleased archival material - a fact which is reflected in the less than stellar fidelity of the recordings. However, the lack of polish adds a wooly, mysterious air to the music, and further emphasizes the group's outsider status. For all of the reasons above, this latest installment of the mighty Ethiopiques series has quickly become a favorite of the aQ staff, and it includes the extensive liner notes, personal essays, and archival photographs that one would come to expect from the fine folks at Buda Musique. Whether this is the first Ethiopiques cd you pick up or the 23rd, the fact of the matter remains: this is a brilliant, gorgeous and haunting collection of music from the golden age of one of the world's most culturally rich regions. Essential!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Another fantastic African artifact, this one, the first in a six part series, and as the title suggests, these tracks were recorded in 1970 as part of the First Biennale Of Arts And Culture For The Young. Orchestra Regional De Mopti, was a state funded group, who performed nationwide, in festivals and competitions, their sound incredible, lush and celebratory, looped guitar figures, fluttering flutes, lots of horns, wild drumming, call and response vocals, the music infused with emotion and passion, the sound trancelike, droning and hypnotic, many of the songs lock into super mesmeric grooves, the guitars tangled and gorgeously gnarled, minor key and slightly melancholy, but simultaneously exuberant and effusive, the vocals skipping wildly over the darkly meditative music underneath, while those songs are dark and dour, unwinding and unfurling like lost ballads, others are upbeat and bouncy, danceable even. The band really are incredible, it's hard to pick out just one element, the guitars slip from wild and spidery, to jangly and major key, to woozy and understated, the horn section almost sounds like a marching band, but their playing is so soulful, funky and groovy, and the vocals, slipping from chantlike murmur to mysterious hushed croon, to wild and nimble tongue twisting wail, these sounds, and these musicians are just beautiful and moving and so passionate. Definitely one of our new Mississippi faves, and already dying to hear more. Anyone into Ethiopiques, Sublime Frequencies and the like will dig this big time!
The return of the Brooklyn based boy-girl, bass and drums duo Orphan, with another slab of thick fuzzed out riffing and thunderous drum damage, here matched up with the until now unknown to us Dope Body who somehow sound like an impossible hybrid of Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, Man Is The Bastard, and Konono No.1! More on those guys in a sec. First up, ORPHAN.
Like on past records, these two bash and pound, the bass blown out and distorted the riffs massive and fuzzy, the drums pounding and crashing, with a sound that lurks somewhere between Bleach era Nirvana and Unsane, a sort of pop flecked low end noise rock, that KILLS. And everything we love about Orphan is in full effect here, AND they do a cover, that suddenly reveals another band we would never have thought to compare them to but makes perfect sense, UNWOUND! They definitely have that same sort of nineties noise rock sound, and they prove it by making Unwound's "Dragnalus" their very own, a bit sludgier and downtuned than the original, but with all the same energy. Which is exactly what infuses the other songs here, the sound is proggy, mathy, sludgey, metallic, heavy, noisy, poppy, bombastic, sweaty and frantic and seriously fun. But also a bit dark and menacing at the same time.
The real discovery for us here, though, is Dope Body, who we know very little about, but the first track sounds like a noise rock Konono No.1, which pretty much sealed the deal in seconds, chiming guitar harmonics, wild tribal drumming, yelped vox, crunchy and distorted and rhythmic and fucking awesome, quickly becoming something more like a Deerhoof meets Melt Banana sort of thing, which again, is perfectly fine with us! The sound is super varied and weird as all get out and all over the map, super mathy and bizarre, like Man Is The Bastard one second, howled vox and fuzz bass and Neanderthal pound, frantic and frenzied Lightning Bolt the next, freaked out math prog held down by some super chaotic drumming, and then still later, a sort of home brewed industrial, fractured and fucked up, twisted and cracked, the sound flitting between those various sounds, often mashing 2 or more into a whole new weirdo sound. But whatever it is, we LOVE it.
Gorgeously packaged of course. Thick silkscreened jacket, each one hand numbered, and limited to 500 copies, with a nice, printed heavy paper insert as well.
