THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A fancy split 7" picture disc featuring the soft and lovely sounds of these two solo projects from Jimmy Tamborello and Arne Van Petegem respectively. You may also be familiar with their other sonic endeavours: Tamborello in the band Figurine and Van Petegem as Tin Foil Star. The two tracks are nicely matched - airy, glistening, melodic and a wee bit wistful. Aq fave Dntel delivers another lush, bittersweet melding of the softest indie pop and the shuffling laptop. It's graced with some lullaby boy/girl vocals (the female ones come courtesy of his Figurine bandmate Meredith). The Styrofoam track is a more abstract but no less pleasing affair with its chiming broken music box melodies and fragmented, effected vocals surfacing throughout. Short and sweet.
Now here is indeed a deliberately odd release... from the French/Japanese label that last brought us that Tabata und Guilty Connector collaboration comes an even more absurd team-up, a three-way remix-and-mismatch conjunction of the following international audio fiends: Chris Dodge (guitarist from the goofy American "fastcore" band Spazz), Solmania (Japanese noisician who builds his own mutant guitars), and the UK's DJ Speedranch (of Phantomsmasher and Speedranch & Jansky Noise). Three artists, from three continents (or islands near continents), all sharing a "what the heck, let's make some noise!" aesthetic.
Chris Dodge's dozen tracks are a blend of punk/metal and electronically-assisted, noisy chaos. Something along the lines of Melt Banana comes to mind. Then, Solmania's 11-minute "Ice Cream" is a crunkly, lurching, seasick soundscape of dirge, distortion and feedback. Lastly, Speedranch wraps things up with three tracks of distorted beat mayhem whose source material derives from both Chris Dodge's stuff earlier on the disc, and the Solmania album Trembling Tongues. Chaotic and crazed as you might imagine, Speedranch samples various spoken non-sequiturs and sci-fi fx into something along the lines of what we used to call "industrial" music before the rise of the DJ.
For some (the more serious-minded?), the more textural Solmania track will be the stand-out, for others who love low-attention-span-spazz the Dodge and Speedranch constructions will be the real ear-ticklers. A pleasantly maddening experience for fans of all forms of severe noise-fuckery.
This is a split release between two Jagjaguwar Records artists that features all new songs, however it was released by the Spanish label Acuarela Records. Canadian indie fave Julie Doiron offers up some incredibly intimate home recordings that alone are worth the price of admission. She gently strums her acoustic guitar and sings/murmurs five delicate, heartbaring songs. Doiron's companion on this cd is the Austin, TX based band Okkervil River with four songs of their own. Their vocals are of the plaintive, untethered kind that brings to mind Jeff Mangum or John Darnielle. They're backed by some fine rootsy banjo, violin, and guitar. Nice!
MPEG Stream: JULIE DOIRON "The Sweetest Eyes (When You Laugh)" [/audio/doironsweetest.m3u]
This is a double shot of splattery, spastic short attention span / ADD drill and bass / mash up mania from two of the noisiest around. Donna Summer (A DJ at WFMU by day) delivers a hard and heavy 6 tracks of junglized plunderphonia, incorporating cock rock, drum and bass and everything in between. Ove Naxx from Japan, ups the ante, setting his Pro Tools to stun, spitting out shards of jagged beats and samples sliced so thin you can see right through them. Brutal and pummeling, funny and not all that funky, these guys will tear you a new one while clearing the dancefloor in seconds flat!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
First in a super limited series of lp-only releases from everyone's favorite Japanese doom-drone-psych-rock overachievers Boris! For this limited double lp, they've teamed up with Boston's Doomriders, which just so happens to feature members of Converge, Old Man Gloom, There Were Wires and more...
These records capture live shows recorded back in 2006 when the two bands toured together.�
The Doomriders for those who don't know, are a straight up Motorheady rock and roll band, they even start their set with a bellowing roar: "We are the Doomriders from Boston, and WE PLAY ROCK AND ROLL!!!" And they do, pounding and simple, not thrashing or blasting just riff heavy big drum blasts of kick ass RAWK. The perfect sonic match up for the more rock side of Boris.�
The first track, though, on one of Boris' two lp sides had us fooled, a massive churning droned out low end sludge, the heaviest thing we've heard from them since Flood (not counting the Altar collab with SUNN) but after that it's back to the full blown, in the red, ultra distorted pedal to the metal blasting Pink-style wild psychedelic garage rock stomp that have become their modern sound. And it sounds great. Super saturated production, amazing sound, loud Loud LOUD!!! Obviously essential for all you Boris freeks...
And of course super elaborate packaging as always. Deluxe metallic gold gatefold, super thick stock, killer Screaming For Vengeance Judas Priest homage artwork, clear yellow vinyl...
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, half red, half yellow, the copies we have are yellow, and this is ALREADY SOLD OUT and selling for crazy $$$ on eBay. We tried to get 100 copies, and got less than half that. Needless to say these will be gone before you know it. ONE PER CUSTOMER.�
Dr. D is a New York DJ best known to us for mashing up obscure '60 psych with current, crunken hiphop hitz. This limited edition cd-r mix, however, is pretty much all '60s and '70s grooves as far as we know -- no hiphop anyway. And it's got our number, 'cause so much of what he's spinning is that Turkish psych stuff we love, mixed in with some old and new Afrofunk a la Ethiopiques and Tinariwen, along with some further exotic flavors that fit. Some names we know/tracks we recognize: Selda, Bunalim, Edip Akbayram, Les Mogol, Erkin Koray, Baris Manco... and of course there's a bunch more we don't, all of it pretty cool though. It's a bit like that Trap Door mix, in a romantic mood. Plus this is a true turntablist mix, featuring 31 short selections (mostly 1-2 minute edits), flowing quite nicely, occasionally enhanced with some scratchy-scratch whip-whip-whap. The discs we have are from the first numbered 250 copy edition, in screenprinted cardboard sleeves.
This all time beloved AQ tresure, out of print for ages, finally gets reissued, in time to give as a gift, to ANYONE you know who might not have this, because everyone should own these records. Some of the most breathtakingly lovely folk music EVER. Now with new artwork, and with the addition of the recent Nick Drake documentary A Skin Too Few. To make room for the dvd, they bumped the odds and sods collection Time Of No Reply, but is not such a loss, as much of that stuff has surfaced in one form or another in the recent spate of collections gathering up anything and everything Drake ever recorded.
But here, in addition ot the movie, you get everything you need, all three classic albums: Pink Moon, Bryter Layter and Five Leaves Left. Breatless, intimate, heartfelt, tragic, lovely, dreamy, wistful, heart breaking, personal, intense and mysterious folk music that sounds as otherworldly as it does timeless.
In a super nice box, with a new 100 page book. Absolutely essential.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Never reviewed this, just have a couple copies. Draugsang are Norwegian, Morker are Swedish, they did this split record of Black Metal fury back in 2006. Limited to 500 copies then, likely out of print now. Calling all Vikings!
If you like to read about music as well as listen to it (we should assume you do, since you're reading our list), especially those of you who find yourselves missing the excellent-but-now-discontinued Broken Face 'zine, may we suggest the equally massive and indie-acid-folk-psych obsessed Dream Magazine from right here in California? The fifth issue is now upon us, 128 pages packed with tons of interviews and reviews (in eyeball straining tiny type). Artists featured include Ghost, Elf Power, Kemialliset Ystavat, Marissa Nadler, Tom Rapp, Sun City Girls (lots of good stuff in that interview!), John "Blind Man's Penis" Trubee, Donovan Quinn of Verdure/Skygreen Leopards, Robert Wyatt, Mushroom, Bipolaroid, Ed Hardy of Eclipse Records, and even Mats Gustafsson (not the saxophonist, but the former editor/publisher of the Broken Face!). And more. Whew. Plus, it comes with its own soundtrack: a cd compilation that's got unreleased tracks by Jack Rose, Piano Magic, Verdure, Volcano The Bear, and others...
The way we used to eagerly await issues of the Broken Face magazine (RIP) we now await issues of the similiarly-focussed Dream Magazine (for whom former BF editor Mats Gustafsson often writes). Here's the new issue, filled to the brim as usual with interviews and reviews devoted to the fringes of indie/folk/drone/psych music-making (112 pages worth). Featured this time 'round: Current 93, My Cat Is An Alien, Steve Roden, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Michael Gira, Six Organs Of Admittance, Jonathan Richman, Windy & Carl, Lichens, Whysp, Nick Castro, Brad Rose, Bridget St. John, Eric Matthews, Adrian Crowley, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, and more more more. While Dream Magazine won't likely win any awards for beautiful lay-out or graphic design, you can't argue that it's not crammed with content. And as usual, this ish comes with a cd packed with *unreleased* tracks by many of the folks in the magazine and then some, including Black Forest/Black Sea, Vibracathedral Orchestra, My Cat Is An Alien, Steve Roden, Windy & Carl, and Bridget St. John doing a Devendra Banhart cover!
The latest issue of indie/folk/drone/psych tome, Dream magazine, helping to fill the void left by the loss of the late great Broken Face.
This time in the magazine: Loren Connors, P.G. Six, Yellow6, Antony Milton, Josephine Foster, Beequeen, Ivor Cutler, Henry Flynt, Larkin Grimm, Sharron Kraus, Tor Lundvall, Linda Perhacs, Mayo Thompson and of course a massive amount of record reviews.
And as always, it comes with a cd as well, jam packed with rare and unreleased tracks from Function, Adrian Crowley, Mike Tamburo, Sharron Kraus, Keenan Lawler, Lumeny, The Kitchen Cynics, Farina, The Moon Upstairs, Absalom, Yellow6, St. Mary's, The Left Outsides, Crashing Dreams, Freiband and Tor Lundvall.
Massive slow motion funereal doom metal matchup between two relative unknowns, Drear and Great American Desert. Both traffic in that sort of slow motion doom drenched sludge we can never seem to get enough of. Huge downtuned riffs, simple spaced out drum pound and thick swaths of black fuzz. Doomlords into the usual suspects, Moss, Esoteric, Corrupted, Noothgrush, Catacombs, Eyehategod, Monarch, Stumm, Dot [.], Winter, Disembowelment, Skepticism, Thergothon, will pretty much HAVE to own this.
Drear are up first, and just happen to feature one member from AQ faves Contra Ignem Fatuum (aka Circumscriber), their brand of UK black doom definitely falls somewhere right between Esoteric and Moss, three massive lengthy epics, dense and fuzzed out, but sort of dreamy and melancholic at the same time. The vocals are harsh and hellish, but they are draped over fuzzy soft focus buzzscapes, dreary, dreamlike and shimmery, the whole thing anchored by a simple Godflesh at 16rpm drum machine plod.
Drear are teamed up with Oklahoma based Great American Desert, who have a whole different take on funeral doom. The sound is less massive and more minimal. Distorted guitars spin a murky muddy web in the background, the drums a simple spare framework, but the vocals, holy shit the vocals, some sort of super processed, demonic alien mechanical growl, metallic and distorted, like dragging huge pieces of metal across sharp rocks, recording them onto a metal cylinder and playing them back through a wall of tweeters run through a pitchshifter and a battery of distortion pedals. Occasionally the background is a weird lo-fi clean guitar tangled up with some low end rumble for some minimal doom metal Low action. But always with those vocals!
Both bands are amazing and fucked in their own unique way, so needless to say this is some essential low end for the doom obsessed among you...
Not a collaboration but a split between Chicago's experimental guitarist Kevin Drumm and Vienna's powerbook cruncher Pita. As far as the Kevin Drumm side, this is the most accomplished piece that this Jim O'Rourke protege has released so far. Behind a muffled yet spartan clatter of metallic objects, Drumm situates a simple melancholic melody (perhaps a french horn, but more likely just a
Yep, another Ducktails joint, and it's a goodie. Maybe our favorite mode of sonic Ducktalia, the sort of faux eighties outer space new age drift. These days nobody does it better. Bleary eyed, sparkly, glimmery, glistening, crystalline, otherworldly new-age-wave, bloops and bleeps and softly effected melodies, all woozy and warbly and oh so dreamy.
Julian Lynch is the garage bliss pop new kid on the block, but what we've heard so far has been pretty awesome, and these two jams demonstrate just why folks are suddenly all aflutter about this guy. The first track is a warped minimal soundscape, breathless vocal drones draped over detuned twang, which eventually builds to a sort of stumbly wah wah garage pop dirge. The second track sounds like a warped Beach Boys 45 spinning at 16 rpm, fuzzy and washed out, more of that twisted and looped wah guitar, some almost-funky bass, and some surprisingly lush harmonies that brighten up the murk just a bit.
Comes with a dvd-r, featuring a bunch of videos too...
The Not Not Fun label's Bored Fortress subscription split 7" series has been going on for a few years now, and is always killer, featuring a who's who of hip underground weirdo rock combos, not to mention some seriously fantastic packaging, and for whatever reason, this year, a handful of the previously subscription only singles have been made available to non subscribers, but not for long, as these babies are crazy limited.
Ducktails offer up another slab of wistful, summery lo-fi jangle and strum, all minimal drum machine and hazy melody, which shifts gear midway through and becomes something a wee bit darker than we're used to from DT, a slightly minor key lope, all distorted beats, fuzzy bass, laid beneath more spidery guitar jangle fuzz.
Rangers counter with some total lo-fi eighties retro pop, Simple Minds guitars drifting over bloopy basslines, tinkling chiming melodies, everything wreathed in a hazy dubbed-too-many-times-VHS-tape murkiness, the song gradually growing sweeter and more poppy, until it almost sounds like the music behind the credits of some lost eighties sitcom. A weirdly good match for the Ducktails jam.
Also, we have another Bored Fortress title, besides the ones we're listing now, the Infinite Body / No Age split 7", VERY few copies of that one, not enough to list, just ask if you want one and IF we still have some left, it could be yours!
The return of TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA!!!
A few lists back we listed two discs of mysterious blackened post rock ambient epic weirdness, one from a band called Skultroll, the other from a group called Ice Bound Majesty, both offering up tangled sounds not easily to pin down. The hypno krautrock of Circle, the dirgey black doom of Bunkur, mixed with epic space prog, damaged drones, and whatever the fuck else those weirdos could cram in.
So as we continue to fly through copies of both, it seemed like maybe it was time to dig deeper into this bizarre black scene of freaky fucked up musical madness, dubbed by these outfits True Sheffield Black Psychedelia, and needless to say, it is indeed black, most definitely psychedelic and oddly enough, also from Sheffield!
So this time around we picked up a split, two more mysterious Sheffield combos, Dukkha, and the appetizingly named Black Vomit.
The odd tracks are Black Vomit, three long ones, culminating with a nearly 20 minute closer. But what the heck does Black Vomit sound like? Not as black as you might think. The opening track is a gorgeous drum heavy krautjam, the drums plugging along, with little double kick drum flourishes, relentless and motorik, as a huge warm washed out black cloud of swirling fuzz and hissy shimmer drifts in, a bit like Tim Hecker, dense and layered and constantly shifting, thickening as the song progresses, shot through with streaks of feedback and speaker rattling low end pulses, little flurries of effects and grinding industrial whir, sounds like a dronemetal Necks or a way more blessed out and dreamy Pharaoh Overlord. The second Black Vomit track, clocking in at nearly eleven minutes, is a much blacker beats, the middle portion a chaotic psychedronemetal freakout, the drums a blurry blast, the guitars tangled and angular, all wrapped up in a throbbing low end buzz, eventually mellowing out and stretching out into a hissy buzz drenched static drone, beneath which the sounds of frogs and crickets, bits of TV or radio broadcasts, a drifting barely there bit of simple guitar strum, super intense and creepy and cinematic. The final track, The Black Vomit's closer, a bruising 19 minute jam is a long form ambient sprawl, beginning with some epic tribal drumming, some industrial clatter, and thick corrosive drones, before the drums drop out leaving just the low end to drift and throb, swell and shift, a gorgeous dreamy thrum, until the drums kick back in near the end, finishing off with a flurry of mathy chaos, the drones and buzz building in tandem, a corrosive final moments prog psych blowout.
Then there's Dukkha, who sound like Black Vomit's kissing cousins. Their opener is nearly 23 minutes long, and is a loping post rock dirge, the drums a simple pound, the bass looping and loping in the background, the guitar in thick sheets buzzing dronelike, and occasionally locking into weirdly groovy stoner jams and then unwinding again into static sheets, the vocals a demonic distant wail, the riffs surfacing and locking into endless loops and super hypnotic hypno metal jams, like a crusty black metal Gore. The second track sounds like the first one, with the drums pulled out, the whole thing dipped in a bucket of busted effects pedals, and dumped over a wall of feeding back amplifiers. Maybe the 'dub' version of the first track, a Dense cloud of fucked up electronics, jagged melodic fragments, freaked out FX, and massive groaning walls of crumbling ultra distorted slow motion riffing.
Fucking awesome. Black enough for the true grim kvlt, but rhythmic enough to appeal to folks who dig Circle, This Heat, Aluk Todolo and the like and who aren't averse to something equally rhythmic, but way more blackened and brutal.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Three excellent pieces from three excellent sound artists that Die Stadt lumped onto one CD, with no real thematic connection to speak of. John Duncan's piece is a recording of the jawdropping live set he did at The Compound here in San Francisco in 2006. The hissing shortwave and noxious datastreams which have been signature source materials for Duncan continue here, with Duncan displaying a considerable amount of restraint in the slippery juxtaposition of softened white noise, periodic accelerations and crescendos, and subharmonic rumblings. This climaxes with a tempestuous 8 second blast of hurricane-shock noise. Kontakt Der Junglinge (aka Thomas Koner & Asmus Tietchens) also present a live piece, but then again haven't all of their recordings been live presentations? This one from the Mutek Festival in 2003 is an isolationist gem of shadowy ambience and deep deep drones (the Koner half of the equation) with electronically treated recordings of clanking machines (the Tietchens half of the equation). Hausswolff seems to have revisited the source material from his There Are No Crows Flying Around The Hancock Building installation / cd document, with a loop of an electronically treated screeching birds (not a crow, mind you... there's a red-tail hawk and the chirp of what could just be a blackbird), monotonously sitting on top of gradient build of amassed gray noise.
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!
Darkness hath descended upon aQ HQ for here we have found ourselves ensnared by a truly abyssal double helping of murky space-themed black metal hurled shrieking from the The Lightless Void. One who has (dis)graced our ears already several times before in the form of one man local BM despair merchant / overlord of Acephale Winter Productions, Dunnock (although joined here by a co-conspirator on electric viola!), and one an entirely new prospect to us: the bleak cosmic terrornaught that is Australia's Intergalactic Holocaust. Dunnock contributes two tracks of in-the-red plodding black metal (along with two dark ambient tracks - one of which even reminds us of some nightmarish reinterpretation of the intro to the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme!), the sort of sound that lurches onto the listener's back, dragging them closer to the dirt with every measure. Lamenting synth pads and barely audible muttered samples drift over the dirge, hazy and surreal. Thematically the tracks both deal with the USA/Soviet Cold War space race - "Jan 28th" regarding the Challenger disaster, and "Kudryavka" the death of Russia's space dog Laika. Intergalactic Holocaust's contributions are comparatively a bit easier on the ear, but no easier on the psyche! Less blown out than Dunnock, and instead murky and expansive - the effect of IH's sound is more ominous, engulfing and maybe a touch Lovecraftian: The drums a forgotten thud in the distance, the guitars seeming to writhe in slow motion like an oily leviathan, the synths and vocals oozing over everything like Burzum gone interstellar. A nightmarish gauntlet through pitch black oxygenless infinity from both artists, and proof perhaps that in space at least some screaming can be heard!
Here's a split release we couldn't have anticipated, but certainly are enjoying: a pairing of NY math-metallers Dysrhythmia and sleepy British soundscapers Rothko (longtime faves of ours). Really it's not so strange, both bands are instrumental and fall into the "post rock" category thereby. Quite a contrast though, how they go about things. On Dysrhythmia's half, they offer up "Earthquake", a quarter-hour EPIC of soft-loud dynamic math rock, that percolates through wound-up metallic frenzies and moody stretches of heavy-duty ambience both. Pretty amazing. Imagine a mix of Isis and Crom-tech, or Don Cab playing Mogwai. Then Rothko lets you catch your breath and relax with their two rather more ambient-sounding tracks, adding much more low-end hum and drone to the proceedings... beautiful stuff. An unexpected split this, but satisfying start to finish, showcasing both the technical and the textural (Dysrhythmia more the former, Rothko very much the latter). FYI, Dysrhythmia's song is a reworking of one from an early, self-released album of theirs (before they signed to Relapse).
Neo-thrash attack! Two of our faves among new breed of, uh, hipster-approved metal acts, Early Man (with a cut called "Tormentor Of The Unseen") and Toronto's even heavier Rammer (doing two tracks, "Street Trash" and "A New Imperium"). Vicious stuff, seven thrashing inches to spin again and again as you pound cans of PBR and hook the devil horn hand gesture skywards. Seriously.
On see-thru orange vinyl. Limited to 1000 copies.
It's been an Earth kinda year so far, eh? Once considered a going-beyond-the-Melvins joke, notable mainly for the early involvement of one Kurt Cobain, Earth's status has grown and grown over the years. They've got to be much more popular now than when their first few Sub Pop albums came out in the early '90s. Back then, only a few folks -- that'd probably be me, you, and those guys who later formed SUNNO))) -- were into Earth, and understood the immense genius of their slo-motion, drone-heavy ambient doom riffage. Now, we sell more copies of Earth 2 every week than Aquarius probably sold the year it came out (well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but we do sell a heck of a lot of Earth 2, considering). And SUNNO))), Boris and all the rest of 'em owe a lot to Earth's Dylan Carlson and his various cohorts.
So far, 2004-2005 has seen the release of two new (though, live) Earth albums and a 7". And now this. You know you've made it when the remix album comes out! Handpicked by Carlson himself, the remixers here are an interesting lot: Mogwai, Russell Haswell, Jim O'Rourke, Autechre, Justin Broadrick, and surprise surprise SUNNO)))! Now, on one hand that's an exciting line-up, sure, while on the other, it'd might be even more interesting to hear those blokes remix something like Brittany Spears, right? For subversion's sake anyway. But they're all Earth fans, and Earth is fans of them, and we're pretty sure Earth fans are gonna like what they've done here. And even if you think that the presence of SUNNO))) is a little...redundant, or that Jim O'Rourke, cool as he is, need never trouble himself with yet another remix, overall no complaints! We like how Mogwai has introduced what sound like avant-classical violin into "Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine", we found Russell Haswell's Merzbow-ization of the almost Champs-y "Tibetan Quaaludes" enjoyable, and SUNNO)))'s sixteen-minute "Rule The Divine (Mysteria Caelestis Mugivi)" sounds the most Earth-like of all these remixes, which might be to be expected, dontcha think?
Interestingly, no one remixed anything from the first Earth album Extra-Capsular Extraction, while two mixes are from the same Earth 2 track, and three of the remixers (Haswell, O'Rourke, and Broadrick) picked songs from the out of print Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions. Autechre went even further afield and chose a song from Earth's fourth and last (also out of print) studio album, Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons. Hmmm. While I would have liked to hear something from Extra-Capsular, perhaps the presence of all those Phase 3 derived tracks will convince Sub Pop to reissue that album!
Some of the remixes, like Haswell's, feature obvious fuckery, whereas others, like Broadrick's more trebley, buzzier "Harvey" almost need to be played back-to-back with the original to tell which is the remix and which is the real Earth. Though, that "Harvey" sounds like it could also easily be a track by Broadrick's awesome new Jesu project as well! All in all, SUNNO))) excepted, this is generally a bit less riffy and "doomy" than the Earth originals, concentrating instead on Earth's drone-washed trance elements. Almost makes sense that the cd booklet art looks kinda looks like a Pop Ambient cd! Now, it doesn't usually take much of a recommendation from us to convince AQ customers to buy anything Earth-related, but we did like this, a lot!
Originally released as a super limited colored vinyl 12", for sale only on a 2003 European tour (and limited to, depending on who you ask, either 330, or 660 copies) this amazing and amazingly limited record finally gets a proper release on cd. Which is also great considering the label that released the 12" apparently never paid the bands ANY money and actually ditched said European tour taking lots of the bands' money with them. Hopefully this will help set things right on that front, and at the same time it's a chance for those of you who missed out on the vinyl to finally check this out. KK Null, guitarist for Japanese sludge metal outfit Zeni Geva offers up a lengthy free noise exploration, guitars and electronics, abstract space-y weirdness, that gradually builds and builds into full on squalls of guitarnoise and ultra distorted electronic freakout. The cd also includes a twenty minute bonus track from Null, a sort of part two addendum to his original 12" track, and it's appropriately enough another extensive blooping swooshing analog space-out psych-free-noise epic, equal parts Merzbow and Space Machine (Masonna's space-y analog analog synth project). The Earth tracks is a single twenty minute long track recorded live at the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle in 2003 and was one of the first (if not THE first) recordings to introduce the new sound of Earth, owed in no small part to the addition of Adrienne Davies on drums. A lot less sludgey and droney than old Earth, and a lot more hypnotic and melodic that later Earth, a very minimal post rock almost, with slow motion distorted arpeggiated melodies and woozy droned out riffs, all sort of pulsing and throbbing supported by simple shuffling, drumming and lots and lots of space. As hypnotic as ever, but definitely more rocking, and certainly the first hint of Earth's slow directional sonic shift.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Definitely don't need to say too much about this one. SUPER LIMITED obviously, this split single, Earth on one side, Neurosis offshoot Tribes Of Neurot on the other, was originally released as a give away to all who attended the San Francisco New Years Eve Earth / Neurosis show only. However, we (thankfully, surprisingly) managed to get a bunch, but considering the above, these will be gone in a flash.
The Neurot side is a killer, gorgeous long form drones, thick and serpentine, we hear some Niblock, some Chalk, some Taj Mahal Travellers, gorgeous and thick, dense and dark, one of the best things we've heard from those guys for sure.
Earth counter on their side, with some super stripped down Fahey-doom, sprawling slow motion Appalachia, tuned way down and allowed to spread out like a slow moving black fog. Just guitar mostly as far as we can tell, but pretty dang lovely.
Well worth your $9, especially if you were kicking yourself for missing the show. Pressed on clear yellow vinyl, in a striking, super thick full color sleeve, and as if we needed to tell you again, SUPER LIMITED, so one per customer!!
Gorgeous split lp from these two drone combos, the A side is a single sprawling bit of foggy sonic murk, from local outfit Earthen Sea, whose most recent release, the Ocean Beach tape, channeled the cloudy coastline of SF in slow moving fields of softly psychedelic fug, and ES's sidelong track here explores much of the same, adding some deep low end pulsations to the mix, buried under layers of grey thrum and softly swirling melodies, a gradually unfurling, smoldering landscape of longform tones, and slow shifting layers, moody and muted, ethereal and gauzy, a hazy meditative bit of minimal mesmer, slightly sinister, the lush chordal swells swaddled in shadows, a ghostly overcast creep, that slips into something much more pretty and prismatic for the last few minutes.
Insect Factory, another one man band, changes things up dramatically, opening with a seriously sharp sine wave tone, keening and high pitched, while all around it weird little glitches and bits of fragmented melody bob and weave, tranced out in its own way, that main tone, soon seeming to fragment, and eventually joined by more tones, all tangled and gristly, glitchy and distorted, eventually erupting into what sounds like a wild blown out psychedelic swirl, reminding us of Amps For Christ or Dan Friel, crunchy and caustic and weirdly melodic, and ultimately strangely and inexorably mesmerizing. That abrasiveness is balanced by the much more tranquil and brief coda/closer, which is softly reverbed guitar, drifting in a field of barely there hum and shimmer, a sort of modern Appalachian solo guitar drift, that's really quite lovely, and nicely balances the crunch of the first track.
Fantastic stuff from both groups, and yeah, probably quite limited...
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Got a couple copies of this under-the-radar (our radar anyway) 2012 release, a three way split that's pretty self-explanatory in regards to about why you might want it, bearing the following 3 slogans on the cover: "Electric Rock N' Roll", "It's Outta This World!" and "Jams To Groove Your Soul!".
Cosmic jammers Earthless offer up a 23+ minute live improvisation that takes up all of side A, while side B has Wino's band Premonition 13 doing their stoner thing for over 14 minutes, and then blues rockers Radio Moscow follow that with two relatively brief (in comparison) numbers, around six minutes each. Fans of any/all might wanna consider grabbing this. Includes download, we're told.
Not sure if this is part 4, or just the first in a new multi part epic, hardly matters, what does matter is, this is another glorious expansive collection of meditative psychedelic abstract dronefolk ambience. Every High Mountain Tempel disc we're reviewed thus far has gotten played to death here, and this one doesn't appear to be any different. Well, at least in that respect. In one distinct way it is very different, HMT are not going it alone this time. They've assembled a pretty impressive collection of sonic alchemists and musical conjurers to help with this ritual, Isis Aquarian from the Source Family, Charles Curtis from La Monte Young's Just Alap Raga Ensemble, and two crews from the UK we've never heard of, Earthling Society and Astarism, but even with all those cooks in the kitchen, HMT and friends have managed to weave another dark minimal masterpiece, all hushed barely there guitar shimmer, drifting whispered vocals, delicate crystalline melodies, dense swirls of piano, warm swells of tape hiss, mysterious voices and field recordings, whirring organ, bowed steel strings... so lovely.
If the liner notes are to be believed, two of the tracks feature Earthling Society on their own, and those tracks do sound different, much less free and sprawling, a bit more structured, like seventies UK acid folk, swirling and melodic and quite lovely. The final two tracks find the two groups in full on collaborative mode, and the gears shift to something much more space rocky and Hawkwindy, all blissed out and heart-of-the-sun, until the final track which is a strummy, delicate, moody chill out closer, a sort of dour doom folk drift, that makes a perfect ending.
Super nice packaging, silkscreened oversized 4 panel sleeve, white on black, with the cd-r affixed to the inside. And of course, SUPER LIMITED!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Twelve variations on a blunted hip hop theme. Funkstorung has had the golden touch recently for the remix with superb remixes of Bjork and Wu-Tang, their warbling breaks and delicate re-interpretation on the original melody out-Autechres Autechre (whose remix here is somewhat disappointing). Other standouts are the jazz fusion monolith from Squarepusher, the alien downtempo breakbeats from Trapazoid and Freeform, and Herbaliser's tried and true noirish beats.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another clutch of lo-fi rockabilly R&B grime jams from Dirty Beaches, a handful of tracks recorded at the same time as Badlands, his recent full length, here presented as one half of a split with previously-unknown-to-us Ela Orleans. The Dirty Beaches tracks, do in fact sound like they could have been included on Badlands, although according to Mr. DB himself they just didn't fit the flow of the album, but they work pretty well here, the opener being about the most rocking track we've heard from DB, still swirly and washed out, the vocals a snarly reverby Elvis-y croon, but more propulsive, the rest of the record more moody and murky and slithery, with woozy spidery melodies, the vibe hazy and druggy, like Badlands, a sort of experimental avant take on classic fifties rock and RnB, until the final track, which like the opener is another odd sonic duck, a cool shuffling, skittery psychedelic groove, that sounds downright krautrocky!
Not sure if Ela Orleans is a person or a group, but he/they are a pretty good match for Dirty Beaches, beginning with a brooding bit of echo drenched piano, the sound quickly shifts into a more swirly reverby exotica, a distinctly Ducktails vibe, a sort of dreamy easy listening, but a bit darker and more FX drenched, the vocals dreamy and passionate, feeling a little Animal Collective here and there. As the record progresses, the sound grows wilder and more psychedelic, the sound collaged and blurry and a bit dizzyingly tripped out, while somehow remaining surprisingly catchy.
Both sides of the split sound like lost documents of groups out of time, as if each set of songs was some skewed glance back at an alternate sonic past, the sounds here both modern and timeless. Cool stuff for sure.
Like other releases on Night People, striking one panel, two colored silkscreened jacket/insert, which along with the record is housed in a plastic outer sleeve.
Odds are most folks who would be into this record, won't even make it this far in the review, they'll just grab one. For doomlords and ladies, this really needs no description other than the names of the two bands, Finland's dead and deceased Reverend Bizarre, whose post mortum release schedule rivals Tupac's, and UK masters of downtuned sub-Sabbathian stoner sludge, Electric Wizard. Each band offers up a sidelong track of crushing doom drenched heaviness, each coming from their own distinct direction.
The sound of Electric Wizard is something special, in some ways so derivative, so sonically similar to about a million other bands, but the second it comes on, it could be no one else. A testament to their doom mastery for sure, and this is primo doom, a slowly unravelling main riff, lurching and lumbering, melodic vocals settled way down in the mix, languorous stoned leads over the top, thick swirls of psychedelic organ, and endless spaced out drug drenched jams, Hawkwind meets Monster Magnet meets Sabbath, but slowed way down and dirtied up, culminating in a nearly drumless melting riff outro, the guitars slowing down, the riff crumbling, squalls of psychrock leads, thick whirring organs, the song eventually grinding to a halt after droning on and on and on. Awesome.
Reverend Bizarre counter with their own extended slab of plodding doom genius, spaced out riff, pounding drums, vocals slipping from guttural howl to ominous whisper, but this is RB, so it's bound to get bizarre, and it does, with a chanted midsong ritual, soaring clean almost operatic vocals invoking demons over a woozy melodic lope, before slipping into an almost krautrock like groove, before lo and behold, the song flips and the second half of the track is BACKWARDS!!! Hypnotic and creepy, the sounds whooping and shimmering, the vocals a demonic gurgle over the top, very tripped out and dizzying, a weirdly blackly psychedelic outro from these twisted doomic Finns. Who we would say we miss like crazy since they broke up, but they haven't really stopped releasing records quite yet...
Pressed on what appears to be black vinyl with bits of glitter in it, with a garish seventies horror exploitation cover, a saucy lady cutting up another saucy lady on some black altar, candelabras and skulls, long velvet gloves and capes, knee high leather boots and way too much makeup, but fear not sensitive ones, the exposed crotch (right beneath the grinning skull) is covered by a little pentagram, and the sliced nipple by a little black circle. Phew!!
The French shuffletime electro maven known as Electronicat has his admirers here at AQ, and apparently 'round the world as well, as this obligatory remixes disc goes to show. It's got a completely hip and fairly diverse lineup of remixers: Adult., Dat Politics, the ubiqitous Kid606, dDamage, Felix Kubin, The Hacker, Mike Ladd, Original Hamster, and even Zbigniew Karkowski, amongst others. If you like your beats crunchy and catchy, glammed up with gobs of electro-punk guitar distortion, you should be an Electronicat fan -- and if you're an Electronicat fan, you already know if you would be interested in remixes I suppose. We enjoyed 'em.
These are some crappy two-step "remixes" of Missy Elliott's ever so popular "Get Ur Freak On". Apparently someone wants us to believe that they could shit a Timbaland beat on a 12" and people will buy it. These remixes have got nothing on the spartan "Bounce A Gal" (the Special Remix 7" of Lexxus plopped onto the GUFO rhythm), and the Capleton "Mi Food" single which uses the
More limited vinyl madness, this time in the form of the hotly anticipated vinyl only split between Justin Broadrick's Jesu, and US ambient drifter Eluvium. So the skinny is this, a split release between Temporary Residence Limited and Hydra Head, the copies we got are the TRL version. The TRL version is already out of print, but the folks at TRL let us have a big bunch (only about 50) and even cooler, a handful of them are the mailorder only colored vinyl version. So first 30 or so folks will get colored vinyl, the rest will get black, and please don't ask for colored vinyl, and don't order unless you'll be happy with black, it's first come, first served...
Three new songs from Jesu, and as if we didn't already see Broadrick and Co. heading in this direction, they've almost entirely jettisoned the heaviness, in favor of a blissy new wave-t drift. Really! No massive sludge, no blissed out crunch, in fact, most of this sounds like Jesu doing the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, all drift and croon and no crunch and pummel, but it's really nice, and pretty, and still suitably Jesu-like. Imagine Simple Minds or the Cure but raised on Slowdive and Chapterhouse and Swervedriver and My Bloody Valentine, doing the theme song for Sixteen Candles 2007 (which if our calculations are correct would be more like Thirty Nine Candles). The first song would be a massive hit, sort of melancholy and romantic, dark and dreamy, but still sort of catchy and hopeful, like sunbeams barely making it through grey storm clouds. The final track sounds like it could be from that last scene in Sixteen Candles 2007, the one where the boy and the girl finally make it to the dance after all of the crazy mishaps and misunderstandings and are finally sharing that slow dance... lugubrious and fuzzy, and soft focus and so great actually. It's weird, and a bit unexpected, but as much as we love the glacial crush of past Jesu discs, this new-wave-y drift really suits them..
The flip side features a side long three part epic from Eluvium, aka Matthew Cooper, whose usual stately dreamlike ambience, is here rendered even fuzzier and blurrier. The first part could be some long lost Tim Hecker or Basinski jam, all dense washes of keyboards and crumbling shimmer. The second and third parts feature Coopers doleful minor key piano, more recognizable than on the opener, but still takes those notes and smears them into glacial stretches of glistening murmur. The perfect sonic match up for Jesu's new, less heavy, more drift-y sound.
Back in stock. Might just be your final chance to pick one of these up!!
When we first heard about this record, a split release between some unknown band and ultradoom AQ crushworthy sludgelords Monarch, whose track was an hour long, we wondered how the heck that was fair to the other band. We then discovered that the other band was in fact French grinders Elysium, whose songs average around the one minute mark (one song here clocks in at a whopping 8 seconds) it started to make sense. And what an awesome idea, what a great combo, the two extremes, blazing buzzing hyperspeed grindcore and slow motion sludge. Two great tastes... er, sounds... So here we have 4 tracks from Elysium, total time 5:55, and one track from the mighty Monarch, total time 58:27. Fucking awesome!
So first up Elysium, fast and furious, guitars like squiggles of white hot lightning, the drums like rhythms being fired from a machine gun into your head at point blank range, vocals that screech and gurgle, everything a head spinning blur. Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Nasum, Rotten Sound, you might as well add Elysium to that elite list.�
But they're just the warm up, the appetizer, Monarch's "Amplifire Death March" is why we're here, and they do not disappoint.
So Monarch, for those who don't already know, are one of the slowest, heaviest bands in existence, whose artwork consists of weird Hello Kitty like crosses, skulls and burning churches, as is fronted by a very cute, non-tattooed, non-pierced, spikeless, leatherless, young lady in a sensible skirt and top, who howls like a banshee from the depths of hell and who write in the liner notes "Listen To Judas Priest"? How rad is that? RIDICULOUSLY RAD! And sure we'd be crushed out on Monarch just based on their lugubrious tarpit sonic sludge, we're just like that, but having an adorable frontperson just pushes it over the edge.
So yes, this rules, and is suitably funereal, appropriately slow and somber, so slow in fact it makes Khanate sound like speed metal. Okay, maybe that's stretching� it a bit, but this is some seriously slow motion shit. The riffs stretch out for ages, the drum hits are MILES apart, the vocals a screech / howl / moan, a mouthful of dirt and broken glass, a voice so harsh and hatefilled it seems impossible that it could come from Monarch's diminutive sensibly dressed leader. There are huge stretches of near ambience where it's just the hum of the amplifier, some soft lilting chords, a pounding single drum rhythm, vocals screeched across wide expanses of space, draped across fading riffs like flayed skin before the next chunk of sludge drops.�It's almost as if some leather winged demon was flying above, soaring through the black night sky, hurling huge hundred ton chunks of sludge at the ground every few seconds, or few minutes, where they splinter into a million pieces, filling our ears with shards of searing sludge. A pounding ultra-dirge, a tempo well below 16rpm, the sort of creepy crawl that were it to slow down any more would be just a single tone, albeit a crushing pummeling one. So heavy, and so slow it's almost stops being sludge and simply becomes some abstract heaviness. By now you should know what we're getting at. This is doom, ultramegadoom, doom with a page full of 'o's, wallowing in the same murk as Moss, Rigor Sardonicous, Stumm, Catacombs, Esoteric, and all who bow before the power of dooooooooom.
This is a split release between TEN labels (count 'em:�Shifty / Amanita / (((Parade))) / 213 / Throne / Amertume-Corruption #2 / Fidelio / Murder / Wee Wee / Solitude) which is kinda cool, but also kinda dumb, as each label only gets a handful of copies and therefore it goes out of print before you know it. We got 50 copies originally and those disappeared in a flash, and only now finally managed to get a handful more from one of the labels' secret stash! Probably the last copies ever.
Last year, in our never ending quest for the weirdest black metal ever, we discovered the mysterious and perplexing Emit. And while technically they may in fact be black metal, realistically, they are more of some sort of ambient, ethereal, damaged drone outfit, spewing a deconstructed, abstract whatthefuck crash, clang and creep. Definitely black, but more in mood than sound. Either way, we were totally taken and were super psyched to discover a new record from these freaks, a split with Vrolok, more on them later. On their half of this split, Emit start off the proceedings with all vocals, the first track a soft shimmery swirl of ghostly reverbed vocals, floating and drifting, the second track is more vocals, this time some sort of monkish chant, low and liturgical, over a whirring distant drone. It's only by track three, that any sort of 'metal' becomes evident, but even then, it's metal of the most abstract fucked up kind. A buzzing blasting burst of lo-fi blackness, that starts of blazing but as it forges forward it falls apart more and more, each separate element becoming more distorted and more twisted and tweaked, until it's like listening to Darkthrone on a transistor radio through an endless series of funhouse mirrors. Woah! The rest of the tracks delve deeply into a dark realm of medieval ambient drones, a sort of more damaged Abruptum, with haunting atonal detuned guitars, and creepy tiny monster vocals, occasional bursts of super distorted black buzz and sonic shrapnel, but for the most part, a dizzying onslaught of chaotic creepiness and bizarre blackness.
Vrolok while not nearly as weird as Emit, are definitely a bit more overtly black metal, but are the perfect match for Emit with their furious and fucked up black buzz. From the tumultuous blast of blazing lo-fi blackness of the first track "Hellchoir (Pestilence 1440)", a snarling, squirming riff, tangled up with lightspeed blast beats and buried under all sorts of suffocating sonic sludge, to the weird martial soundscape of "Black Chemical Waltz", a super blown out simple drum beat, amidst swirls of subsonic drones and buzzing weirdness peppered with creepy distorted snatches of found sound and bits of conversation, to the epic blackness of "Inverse Devotion" sounding like a glorious collision between Xasthur and Immortal, albeit recorded on a busted 4-track, to the epic closer "Between The Astral Shades", which starts off as a shimmering creeped out ambient soundscape, turns into what sounds like Bathory recorded in a high school gymnasium, and finally morphs into an ultra distorted seasick black dirge, replete with anguished howls and washed out black drone guitars, the whole thing blurring into a glorious blackened dronedrenched waltz.
More absolutely essential bizarre blackness for sure!
Another killer tape of weird black metal buzz. This time it's Australia's Empire Of Hate and US black metal horde Morthond (not to be confused with the Cold Meat Industry Morthond).
Empire Of Hate whip up a black storm of relentlessly buzzing guitars, stumbling blasting drums, and some truly tortured vocals. Harsh glass gargling howls that dip into death metal gargles as well as the occasional hysterical shriek. The production is perfectly murky, a depressive suffocating crush, perfectly suited to the hellish buzz and inhuman howls.
Morthond counter with their own brutal black burst, channelling the raw trancelike sound of early Burzum and classic Darkthrone. Some mournful keyboards and whispering winter winds lead us into their wintry world. Mournful melodies give way to murky black buzz, galloping drums, everything drenched in reverb, a furious classic blast of vintage Norwegian style blackness. So good.
Awesome high school binder cover art, with a scary tree and a rabid dog or wolf and a dead body that kind of looks looks like a magic marker version of Munch's The Scream...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh man, have we been waiting for this. Been ages since we heard from the mighty Enbilulugugal, and who better to share a split with those blacknoize freaks, than redneck black metallers Blood Cult?
So yeah, Blood Cult first, who we've raved about in the past, from Illinois, with a singer who moonlights as a country singer, who are seriously twisted and whose sound is like classic Scandinavian black metal, run through the raw primitive scum of Von, and then peppered with all sorts of weirdness, samples, clean guitars, catchy melodies, strange falsetto vocals, and whatever weird shit they can cram into a song.
Their half of the split starts off with some strange movie samples, than then explodes into what sounds like some furious grindcore before the band inject some strange spidery post rocky guitars, some haunting childlike vocals, and then more samples. But then the next track drops and it's as serious as all get out, dark and buzzy, with an incredible main hook, the riff churning, the drums blasting, but it's Blood Cult, so there's some weird twangy breakdown in the middle, that sounds a bit like the Butthole Surfers! The track after that is all strange keyboards and tribal drumming, mysterious vocals, the sound almost new wave, and a bit surfy. Later on they totally steal a Fleetwood Mac riff and blacken it all up. What the fuck? These guys are so amazing. Anyone who slept on We Who Walk Behind The Rows, the last BC full length needs to get into these guys. So fucked up and bizarre and heavy and genius. In fact, what the heck, we'll relist that record so check elsewhere on this list and if you don't own it already, do the right thing! You won't regret it.
But Blood Cult are only fucked up and demented sounding when they're NOT up against Enbilulugugal, who are indeed, one of the most freaky and damaged sounding black metal bands EVER. Think Faxed Head if they were black metal, and you might be getting close. Most of what they do is only barely black metal, instead it's like noise, and Butthole Surfers, and fucked up punk rock, and blacknoize, and D-beat and grindcore all tangled up into one seriously confusional chunk of blackened noise drenched whatthefuck.
Guitars buzz maniacally, shrieking hysterical vocals draped over everything, tons of sample and film clips, wild chaotic drumming, their sound slipping from punkish ultra raw pound to, chunky eighties style metal, to freaked out grind, to total damaged noise. Lo-fi, and accidentally experimental, the vocals totally remind us of Dr. Rockzo, the rock and roll clown from Metalocalypse, which is a VERY good thing. We always talk about how we're constantly on the search for the most retarded, fucked up, demented and bizarre black metal, but bands like Enbilulugugal (are there bands like Enbilulugugal) pretty much ruin the curve.
As always awesome high school rock binder, seventies van black metal cover art, and as always, we say YOU NEED THIS.
Latest from Encomiast, a long time aQ fave, whose expansive mysterious dark drones have never failed to blow us away, but this is not just a new album, it's a sprawling double disc concept record split between two separate groups, and recorded in one of the most haunted buildings in Colorado. The story behind this record revolves around the Belvedere Theater in Central City, Colorado, a group of musicians repeatedly visited with the idea of capturing EVP (aka electromagnetic voice phenomena), where else but an extremely haunted old theater would one be able to capture the voices of the dead, but alas, no such sounds were discovered or captured, BUT, the musicians did manage to record, and those recordings were reworked into the two discs found here. The first is by Encomiast, the second is by a group called The Copper Thieves, which is Encomiast along with members of Mandible Chatter. Both discs conjure up the dark spirit of that theater, each in its own way.
The Encomiast disc is downright frightening, all creaking moaning low end, deep ominous rumbles, all manner of tiny sounds drifting up out of the inky blackness, cold and sinister, abstract and ephemeral, the sounds of the theater's busted up old grand piano, smeared into blurred atonal clouds of clustered notes, the overtones drifting like lost specters, voices moan and bellow, the natural room sound as much an instrument as anything else, these deep dark drones totally evoke the spirit of that haunted space, headphone required, to truly get lost, and submerge yourself in these seemingly bottomless sounds.
The Copper Thieves disc is not nearly as minimal, but just as ominous and haunting, the piano again plays a big part, but the notes are distorted and blurred into a massive warm wall of softly crumbling sound, which gives way to a strange haunted house of thumps and creaks and glitches and disembodied voices, groaning layers of low end thrum, soft filed of overtones overlap chiming bells, pounded notes on the piano drift up from below like monstrous growls, the disc finishing of with long tones, that seem to glow, warm and almost sun dappled, as if capturing shafts of light, drawing delicate lines on the dusty floor, and illuminating the snowflake like motes drifting in the still air.
Both discs are fantastic, darkly evocative, and gorgeously droney, for fans of Lustmord, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Troum, Organum and other droning denizens of the dark...
LIMITED TO ONLY 200 COPIES, a double cd-r housed in a textured cardboard box, hand stamped on the outside with two printed inserts featuring liner notes and photos.
More post-punk / minimal-wave obscurities by way of Dark Entries. Both of these bands were Danish outfits dating back to the early '80s, and don't seem to share much beyond their Danish good looks and the fact that both of these recordings had been released by the small Replik Muzick imprint. End Of Your Garden is more in keeping with the minimal wave vibe that Dark Entries has been promoting, through a skeletal arrangements for cheap electronics, drum machines, violin, guitar, bass, and vocals that all come together like Siglo XX trying to work out Young Marble Giants covers. The vocals alternate between monotone male vocals from Benny Woitowitz and Jan Laursen with a guest spot on female vocals by the breathy Angie White on the downbeat yet slinky "Don't Walk Away In Silence." The other tracks are considerably more up-tempo and urgent in their delivery.
The first cut from Da Ma Vaere Belgiere is a deadringer for what Interpol had been producing at the beginning of their career with this impassioned, darkly tainted post-punk with death disco rhythms, galloping basslines, and spiky guitars. Again, Siglo XX (alongside Crispy Ambulance) pops up as a reference through the monotone vocals and the downcast mood set throughout the rest of the tracks, and a less obscure citation is made on their final track which lifts Robert Smith's riff from "M" of Seventeen Seconds. Not a bad thing at all!
All of the material had been released as 7" singles back in the early '80s and now has been lovingly remastered and repackaged by Dark Entries. Recommended as with everything on the label!
Brand new vinyl only, ultra heavy match up between NY's low end doom metal titans Unearthly trance, and Canadian powerviolence grind duo The Endless Blockade. Unearthly Trance go first, and fill up a whole side at 33 rpm, of their roiling doomic dirgery, thick downtuned riffage, bellowed howls, the sound epic and majestic and blackened, like a crustier version of Mastodon or Neurosis, that same sort of mighty bludgeon, but here sprawled into something way more abstract, with the track drifting fro, churning crush to loose doomy drift, with creepy tangled minor key melodies, a gorgeous and haunting, repeating motif, ominously intoned vocals, it sounds like the track will eventually erupt into more heaviness, but instead it goes the opposite direction, or at least explores a different kind of heaviness, breaking down into a long stretch of ambient dronemusic, a shadow of that original riff/motif remains, ghostlike, the track shimmering and slithering and evolving into a sort of ultra doom dirge, spacious and spare, a spaced out plod, that gradually grows more and more abstract before dissipating completely.
On the flip, Endless Blockade temper their usually furious flurries with some lumbering riffage and almost doomy drift, beginning with a dense cloud of glitched out electronics and feedback drenched shrieked vocals, before exploding into a face melting wall of blasting powerviolence crush. Flurries of frenzied drumblast, insane insectoid riffage, dueling grunted/howled vox, a furious grind wrapped in thick swaths of swirling noise, occasionally slipping into something a bit more dirgey or doomy, but eventually erupting back into some seriously aggro pummel. Their side finishes off with a dense and intense abstract noise squall, all grinding and crumbling in-the-red buzz and skree, tangled vocal freakouts, and then finally a strangely pretty field recorded ambient outro.
