Dntel's "Something Always Goes Wrong" had a noble beginning back in 1994 when it was slated to be released on some Japanese boutique techno label as a concept record about "our hero and his arduous journey." (?) The presence of swords, damsels, and an evil king keep this concept album outside of the realm of Sci-Fi -- the genre of choice for techno boffins doing concept albums. This is a blantantly romantic piece of electronic abstraction which nuzzles itself right in between early '90s legends of electronica in Reload, Biosphere, and chill-out king, The Orb. The outsider electronica label Phthalo resurrected this album and added two remixes (from Seq and Languis respectively) and two new tracks. Fans of Boards of Canada who haven't heard much of Reload or Biosphere should certainly check Dntel out. Easily the most accessible record to emerge from the damaged minds of Phthalo!
Most folks know Jimmy Tamborello as one half of electro poppers The Postal Service, with Ben Gibbard from Death Cab For Cutie, others might remember his electropop outfit Figurine, and a few folks might even recall an emo rock band called Strictly Ballroom, that also featured Mr. Tamborello, but we were first introduced to him via his experimental electronic outfit Dntel, who released a handful of records on the Pthalo label back in the late nineties.
This triple disc collection gathers up two of the long out of print Pthalo releases, as well as a whole other disc of song sketches and unreleased tracks.
Something Always Goes Wrong was originally slated to be released on some Japanese boutique techno label in 1994 as a concept record about "our hero and his arduous journey." (?) The presence of swords, damsels, and an evil king kept this concept album outside of the realm of Sci-Fi - the genre of choice for techno boffins doing concept albums. Something... was a blatantly romantic piece of electronic abstraction which nuzzled itself right in between early '90s legends of electronica in Reload, Biosphere, and chill-out king, The Orb. Lots of processed skitter, stuttering big beats, and warm washes of dreamlike sound. Hard not to also hear plenty of Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin, as well as hints of what Tamborello would be doing later with the Postal Service, although this stuff is obviously more homebrewed and a bit more low fidelity, which is in no way a bad thing. The original release tacked on two remixes, both present here, as well as two totally unreleased tracks exclusive to this collection.
When it was first released, back in 1998, we described Early Works For Me If It Works For You as "one of the catchiest IDM-based electronica records in the last long while, bringing pop hooks full of tinkling little melodies to the digital swoop and skitter of deconstructed Amen breaks, spasmodic algorithms, and powerbooking electrocrunch." We also recommended it to fans of Lesser, Reload and Aphex Twin and it still pretty much holds true. This stuff still sounds vibrant and crucial, and only a little bit dated, but not at all in a bad way, in fact, we've really missed this era of electronic music, and this is totally hitting the spot.
The bonus disc here, Early Works For Me If It Works For You II, as mentioned above, is a collection of sketches and unfinished works, and is way more raw than the other two discs, but that doesn't mean it's not super cool, skittery and bloopy, woozy melodies, drifty and droney, plenty of glitch and crunch, but also some acoustic guitar (definitely foreshadowing the Postal Service again), processed vox, intense drones, dreamy washed out synth drifts, all of it very warm and muted and sun dappled and dreamy, gorgeous stuff, even in their unfinished state.
Fans of that era, of Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, who somehow missed out on Dntel, will be in for a surprise, and folks who love the Postal Service, might be excited to hear what came before. Us, we're just digging these sounds, this retro, stuttery, swoonsome, electronic dream pop, amazed that it still sounds so goddamn good. Killer packaging too, a massive 8 panel digipak, full color on black, with some fancy reflective spot varnish filigree.
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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.
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A full length to satiate those who loved his double 10" from last year. Doctor Rockit makes instrumental electro-influenced songs out of the kinds of sounds (bleeps and pings, cheese-grating, baby-cooing, Fred & Ernie, static) that others would only think to use as embellishment to something more standard. Original, delightful and exciting.
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Doctor Rockit a.k.a. Matthew Herbert releases his first full length in about 3 years. Like fellow electronic funsters Muziq, Luke Vibert, and the Aphex Twin, Doctor Rockit displays impressive ear for honest-to-gosh melodies, pure lightheartedness and lots of groove. And very much like AQ-faves Matmos, the Doctor makes genius use of simple everyday sounds sampled and looped to great percussive effect. Here we have samples of his dad's old Mini (before crashing it), running water, French cafes, etc. A delightful record. UK import.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Oh how we wanted to hate this band. The hype. The blogs. The cheeky name. The fact that they were signed to a huge record deal based on two MySpace tracks. We're sure there are more reasons, but for now that's plenty. The glut of total dancey electronic bullshit, overhyped blog-house, it's killing us. Not to sound like old men, but remember when bands played instruments and wrote songs, and spend months, maybe years working on albums, recorded in studios? Yeah, we don't either actually.
But fuck it, we wanted to hate it, but it would be foolish not to just accept the fact that this record rules. We can't stop listening to it. The opener is a dancefloor destroying banger. Huge fuzzy synths, lots of squelch and grind and buzz, tearing a page straight out of Justice's playbook and scribbling all over it with dayglo crayons. But that's the only track on the record that sounds like that. The rest of the disc is all over the map, angular dancepunk, total cotton candy synth pop, and in fact, most of the disc is much more song-y, verses choruses, crunchy guitars pounding drums, wild howled vocals, and HOOKS everywhere. But fear not synthies, there is still plenty of electronic weirdness and synth overload, but that stuff is deftly woven into actual songs.
The second track is a killer as well, super grindy guitars, funky propulsive drumming, howled vocals, super proggy arrangements, swirling synths, dense and heavy, but still funky and groovy. The next track veers back a bit toward the vibe of the opener, but this time it's all vocodered Kraftwerk worship, peppered with sweeping synth buzz and funky cowbell, and a pretty irresistible hook.
Our favorite right now (although it changes every time we listen to it) is probably "Dawn Of The Dead", a total eighties pop jam. Sounding like it came straight out of a John Hughes movie, soaring and bubblegummy, big guitars lush harmonies, it dangerously close to being cheesy, but it's so fucking awesome.
Later there are some surfy carnival organ jams, more eighties technopop, some unabashed total Daft Punk worship, some angular jangle guitar artpunk, flecked with skittery drum machines, and a massive hook filled chorus, the record is almost so scattered that it threatens to be a total mess, but somehow, the songs all sort of fit together, forming some dizzying sugar rush of technicolor techno flecked pop punk synth fuzz bliss.
We're gonna go blog about it. Right now (ummm, not really, just kidding, we SWEAR...). Though I guess this comes close.
A bedroom electronica record that combines warm, pastoral interweaving guitars with sweet fingerpicking on acoustic guitar mixed with gentle clicks and whirrs, melodic and soothing yet just glitchy and quietly manic enough to add some texture and grit to the organic lushness. Emotional, melancholy chord changes. Like Papa M or Sonna meets Mouse on Mars and Oval. Yep, it's that pretty!
MPEG Download: "derail in dream" [/audio/dofderail.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "derail in dream" [/audio/dofderail.m3u]
Holy Shit! This release is just as amazing as we had expected, maybe even more so, and how could it not be? An incredible mixture of modular synth, tape manipulations, field recordings and traditional Persian string instruments of Tar and Sehtar. Originally released on Folkways in 1985, this rare avant-garde release gets a deluxe reissue by the mythical vinyl conjurers of Dead-Cert (whose previous resurrections of works by Suzanne Ciani, and Bruno Spoerri & Betha Sarasin were equally awesome). The combination of instruments bridge worlds of spirituality and science that hitherto had been unheard of in Middle Eastern music and the results are quite mesmerizing. By allowing the basic elements of the instruments' musical nature to determine the composition, instead of applying a pre-written organisation upon them, Dolat-Shahi uses the repetitive motif of strings as a progressive invitation into a world of hypnotic textures and otherworldly moods, employing robotic modulations, musique concrete and sounds of oceans and birds into a unified field of neo-tantric drones and blissful primitive exotica. Housed in an oversized sleeve with wrap around print to look like the original Folkways sleeve and includes the original liner notes, Fan-Fuck-Ing-Tastic!!
This long out of print lp, now available on cd, thanks to our pals at Fonal Records in Finland. Here's our review from when we first reviewed the vinyl way back in the beginning of 2011...
Hard to believe, but this is the very first release from Dolphins Into The Future that we've managed to get enough of to review and list. That's after about a bajillion cd-r's and tapes and limited lps...
Dolphins Into The Future operate in the same orbit as James Ferraro and Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Explorers and High Wolf, and all the other similarly sonic minded floorcore combos, crafting druggy lysergic soundscapes made up of primitive synths, and analog loops, tape manipulation and malfunctioning samplers, and while each of those bands definitely has their own method, and methodology, Dolphins mainman (and only man) Lieven Martens seems to take his moniker seriously, not only incorporating the sounds of dolphins and the surf and seagulls, but also creating a sound that evokes undersea life, as much as we can imagine it. On the surface, it's a synthy new agey drift, all warm whirling soft focus melodies, steel drum like tones, washed out synth swirl, tranquil melodies and dreamlike drift, like an updated slightly more avant version of those old meditation tapes you might find in a new age bookstore, which, we would imagine is precisely what Martens and his sonic compatriots are going for. That said, for every bit of super simple new age shimmer, there's a bit of crumbing, weirdly looped crunch, or warped woozy almost Oval like swoon, all the sounds, on this record at least, held together by the sound of life on the shore, or on the deck of a boat, these slowly unfurling new age-scapes, are lush and laid back, minimal and mysteriously lovely, and the perfect soundtrack to bright sun, blue water and not a care in the world...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Wolfgang Voigt's continuous output of techno runs the spectrum from body-hammerin' trance loaded with pop hooks to beautifully hypnotic droning laced with dubby spectral decay. Dom is one of his more club friendly monikers, with four pretty catchy acid-trance numbers (three of which are extensive variations on the same track) recalling his earlier Love Inc corkers.
Finally available again!!!
No. This is not the disco diva Donna Summer. Far from it, this Donna Summer is the moniker for Brooklyn plunderphonician Jason Forrest, who has obliterated a variety of genres into an abrasive collage of jagged samples in much the same way that Wobbly did to hip hop on his epic "Wild Why" album. Prog rock, electroclash, '80s top 40 schlock, free jazz, hip-hop, metal, and much more has been run through a blender of arrhythmic drill 'n' bass breaks and digital disfiguration. With its spasmodic speed of clipped samples, "This Needs To Be Your Style" accelerates the need for attention deficit disorder that Kid 606 requires of his audience, as he is constantly switching up all of the samples just outside of any ability to recognize where the sample comes from. Thus, this album can be very difficult to listen to; however, once you can get through track 4 or so, the tracks become far more listenable. It's unclear whether this is due to Forrest actually making the tracks less irritating, or due to the logic of his constructions finally becoming apparant. Certainly worthwhile mash-ups for the very patient or the very caffeinated.
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!
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Joining the meth-damaged contingent on Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label alongside Venetian Snares and Hellfish & Producer, Doormouse offers a non-stop assault of digital hardcore mutations of Amen breaks smashed into those enormous 909 blastbeats common in Alec Empire's more punishing recordings. Top off the rhythmic shrapnel with an obliteration of George Michael's "Faith," dialogue from porn audition tapes, slashed-up NuMetal guitar riffs, horror film samples, and crude misogynist joke, and you've got the makings for an album of easy listening for kids with serious cases of attention deficit disorder.
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Massive mashup meeting of two of electronica's noisiest motherfuckers. Doormouse gives it to us good and hard, with a sidelong blast of sliced and diced amen breaks, spastic drill and bass, showers of rhthmic shards and goofy samples. On the flip, Venetian Snares offers up a thick noisy blast of 4-on-the-floor gabber, and then gives the Doormouse side a similarly gabber makeover. Good noisy stuff!
This past week was the 30th anniversary of the launch of NASA's unmanned explorer Voyager 1, and if you've ever wondered what the soundtrack would be like to floating ever further inexorably into the vastness of uncharted space, well, Dopplereffekt's Calabi Yau Space might be an imaginative approximation of the music of the spheres heard by such a void-travelling spacecraft. With this album of cosmic synth drones and muted electro beats, the mysterious entity known as Dopplereffekt (an artist related to Drexciya and numerous other equally spaced-out and deliberately anonymous projekts) now makes its debut on the Aphex Twin's Rephlex label. Featuring quasi-scientific, almost Vovoid-ian track titles like "Hyperelliptic Surfaces" and "Holomorpic n-0 Form", this atmospheric album presents an array of hypnotic, pulsing transmissions, seemingly pinging off the satellite dish looking thing on the cover, filtering down through the vector-graphics Tron-world innards of Dopplereffekt's komputorbrain. Rooted in classic Detroit techno/electro, Dopplereffekt continue to push into another dimension of ambient deep space drift, hoping perhaps for alien contact. Fans of Kraftwerk, Aphex, and John Carpenter soundtracks should make contact as well.
Released back in 1994 around the same time as Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol 2, Dots is an album that Uwe Schmidt (aka Atom Heart, Senor Coconut) composed as a sort of futuristic elevator music. Its rounded, digitally pure tones playfully sparkle along a datastream of placid post-techno structures. In a lot of ways, Dots foreshadowed the much-ballyhooed Pop Ambient series from Kompakt, sharing a pixel-point synthesis pleasant daydreaming music. This marks the second in a reissue series of the earliest recordings from his Rather Interesting back catalogue. In addition to Dots, Schmidt also included a nearly forgotten set of recordings called BGD (shortened from Background Design), which shares more with the ambient works of his contemporaries on the Fax label at that time. Limited to 900 copies and actually signed by Atom Heart himself.
Another bafflingly brilliant batch of tapes from UK tape label The Tapeworm, and while we often find ourselves at a bit of a loss to describe whatever sonic oddity they've unearthed or discovered or dug up or conjured from the ether, not sure we've ever encountered one like this before. With very little info to go on, what we can surmise from the description we read, is that this might be some sort of home-recorded ritual, perpetrated by a teenager (Andrew Lagowski?), with his parents in the other room, taking leave from whatever rock band he was playing in at the time, to create, well, THIS, a strange bit of sinister collaged ambience, wild squiggles of feedback, what sounds like running water, manipulated tapes, stumbling percussion, what almost sounds like field recordings, owl calls or something like owl calls, detuned guitar melodies, shards and fragments of sound, all blurred and smeared and tangled into a sci-fi lo-fi soundscape, jumbled, textural and weirdly rhythmic, a definite kitchen sink approach, or maybe toolshed approach would be more accurate, a strange selection of noise making devices including various effects and fuzzboxes, a reel to reel tape player not to mention a drill and a space (perhaps wielded by the artist's brother), and while there is a sense of randomness and chaos, much of this is quite listenable, and for sure is beholden to (whether intentional or not) Nurse With Wound, Hafler Trio, and other unconventional sonic experimentalists. Two distinctly different mixes/versions, edited and reworked earlier this year. Pretty excellent stuff.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! With cover art by Savage Pencil.
King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers does the drone-breakbeat-trance thing pretty well.
As you well know, we're really into that special Scandinavian subgenre of electronica known as skweee. In part, 'cause we were already into a lot of the sounds that inspired skweee, such as '80s electro, video game music, and funky old school hiphop. So, we were excited to see this disc recently repressed/reissued, Detroit electro act Drexciya's first full-length compact disc, originally released by German label Tresor in 1999. Also excited, 'cause we completely missed out on listing it back then, somehow! The rather idiosyncratic Drexciya can definitely be considered as precursors to the skweee phenomenon (skweee-cursors?). And indeed also as important, if eccentric, artists in the Detroit techno pantheon.
There's 21 tracks on this basically instrumental disc, most of 'em bearing some bizarre title that relates somehow to Drexciya's strange, sub-aquatic sci-fi concepts (the comic bookish artwork features squid shaped spaceships, and spacemen (spacefish?) that look a lot like Lovecraft's Deep Ones, or the Creature From The Black Lagoon, but in spacesuits. Sonically, these tracks range from the droning chant and mysterious voices heard in the introductory incantation "Temple Of Dos De Agua" to moody 4/4 techno atmospheres to synthesized future funk ("Funk Release Valve") to textural rhythmscapes to body-jerking fusion grooves ("Jazzy Fluids")... there's melodic keyboard soloing over jittery beats... squelching bass and lush synths... And dig the Kraftwerkian echoes on "Polymono Plexusgel" (and elsewhere). Pre-skweee or whatever, it's all awesome. This Drexciya disc is a bit of a classic, as far as catchy cosmic electro with fishy sci-fi fantasy elements, Detroit style, goes. And the connection with fellow Detroit space-travellers Dopplereffekt should be obvious. Check it!
Yet another amazing archival release from Medical Records, this one from short lived electro pop / new wave combo Drinking Electricity, who existed for just a couple years at the beginning of the eighties, only releasing a single album and a handful of singles, all of which are collected here. And while the sound is fantastically of its time, it's also so prescient in its foreshadowing of a sound that would resurface in recent years, so much so, that it would be easy to believe this stuff was some new band, mining music's rich minimal wave past. Taut rhythms, angular guitars, sci-fi synths, the sexy but cold and clinical vocals of Anne-Marie Heighway, chugging guitars, spidery melodies, alien effects... Check out "Breakout", which any current retro-wave band would kill for, sinewy and robotic, but laced with strange spacey swirls and some seriously kick ass post punk guitar crunch. Or the group's 'hit' "Discord Dance" with its propulsive rhythm, strange dueling boy/girl vocals, squelchy synths, strangely catchy, but again cold and robotic, minus the strange sing songy vocal refrain. Crazy catchy for sure, think a more stripped down cybernetic / post punk take on Berlin, or Haysi Fantaysee, definitely shades of Gang Of Four, Fad Gadget too, not to mention all the bands trying for something similar now. Hell, Crystal Castles even covered a Drinking Electricity song! But the songs and sound here are pretty unique, even the most spare skittery sprawl of minimal wave is infused with some serious post punk crunch and vice versa.
The record is brimming with spiraling guitars, percolating electronics, lazer gun squiggles, faux horn blurts, playful melodies, quirky vox, hooks galore, some tracks super poppy, others totally tripped out and druggily out there, both of those sides meshing in most cases to create the strange post punk electro pop that DE specialize in, and few since have been able to pull off.
Fantastically packaged, in a super heavy full color gatefold sleeve, with a full color printed insert, loads of rare photos and liner notes, pressed on super thick colored 180 gram vinyl (one record red, the other yellow), and LIMITED TO 650 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Another list, another batch of mysterious cassette sounds from Root Strata, check out the Father tape elsewhere on this week's list, which arrived alongside this, a clinically titled new release from a group/person called Driphouse, who like Father, we know next to nothing about, other than Root 91 is created from piano, harpsichord and synths, all woven into strangely cosmic sonic experiments, that range from swirling, electronic synthdrones that sounds almost like some crazy soundtrack to an alternate universe's planetarium show, to bizarre robotic electro, cobbled together from short bursts of static, bits of glitch and squelch, all wrapped around plink plonk piano melodies. There's also bleepy Radiophonic Workshop style analog electronic bloopscapes, minimal cinematic synthwave rife with shades of John Carpenter, but deconstructed into something much more abstract, super intense blasts of fuzzy shoegaze new age shimmer, this too peppered with starburst effects and sci-fi squiggles, haunting almost soundtracky sprawls of glitchy synth drones and processed minor key melodies, and some seriously creepy sing songy electro wrapped harpsichord, draped over softly swirling string like shimmer, and sounding a bit like the soundtrack to the unsung Halloween III. Cool, strange stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Housed in a super striking, embossed/debossed J-card, the cassette also strikingly printed white on white.
At the risk of quite possibly making our lengthy and floridly descriptive, effusive and over the top reviews totally obsolete, we can pretty much sell this one with one sentence. Grind metal, death metal, spastic drill and bass AND a marching band drum corps. And that's not even really a sentence!
Drumcorps is the work of one Aaron Spectre, who not only shares a first name with the man behind Venetian Snares, he also shares a similar penchant for ultra twisted and impossibly convoluted and mind blowing rhythms. But where Venetian Snares builds elaborate rhythmic tangles out of beats, beats and more beats, Spectre, while a consummate beat maker himself, as Drumcorps, he concerns himself as much with riffs as beats. At its very heart, this is a metal record after all. A snarling, grinding crush of acidic metallic riffs and huge downtuned chunks of chugging death metal grind, with howled throat shredding vocals, buzzing squalls of metallic guitar freakout and pounding blasting drums. But as each track develops, you begin to notice something a little strange about this 'metal.' Every once in a while, here and there, the drums will skitter and splinter into little bursts of ultra complex splatter. Or vocals will get twisted and chopped up into a wildly stuttering rhythm, blast beats will get faster and faster until they're nothing but a buzzy blur. Riffs splinter into jagged digital shards which are then tossed about wildly over a skittering expanse of junglistic beats. This isn't just metal, and it's definitely not electronica. It's like some sort of fucked up avant post metal grind laid over super dense hyper programmed drill and bass. Like Pig Destroyer jamming with Shitmat, or Dillinger Escape Plan with Venetian Snares on drums! In fact a quick listen to track three, the aptly titled "Pig Destroyer Destroyer" lays it all out for you. Beginning with a killer drum corps snare workout, that builds into a mesmerizing chopped and looped vocal guitar grind, eventually building into a full on blast of metallic fury, but all tangled up with sputtering, hiccuping strands of head spinning drill and bass.
The amazing thing is, that Drumcorps doesn't sound like some sort of DJ mash up, where some clever fella with a wicked record collection just assembled and sequenced. No, these are real songs, with melodies, atmosphere, riffs, parts, choruses, it seems impossible that Spectre composed and performed a whole metal record only to electronically fuck it up, but if these are all purloined riffs, which at least some of them must be, then it had all the metalheads around here completely fooled. And LOVING it.
But it's not all just furious jungle metal weirdness (although most of it most definitely is!). A few tracks are droning ambient soundscapes, with huge cavernous rumbles washing over brittle complicated snare drums, others are almost funky jungle jams peppered with crunchy clipped riffs, and still others are moody midtempo jams, assembled from slowed down pitchshifted vocals and crumbling distorted guitars, sheets of feedback, and awesome Maiden-ish dual guitar leads. This is another one of those times we almost wish there were actual bands that sounded like this, as opposed to being the mad idea of a single twisted individual, crafting his dream band from a drum machine and his favorite metal records, an impossible metal / drum and bass hybrid. But who cares really, when it sounds this fucking amazing. Fans of past record of the week Drummachinegun should definitely check this out, as should folks into DHR, Venetian Snares, Shitmat and that sort of sputtering spastic drill and buzz (especially if they've got a soft spot for metal). But c'mon, this is a METAL record, so metalheads should absolutely take a chance, and give this a try, but should be well prepared to have their whole world turned upside down.
With an album title that sounds like it could be the name of the next Immortal record, this new release from Chicago guitar experimentalist Kevin Drumm takes the inspired-by-black-metal aesthetic of his recent Mego-label cd "Sheer Hellish Miasma" even further (what's he been doing, hanging out with Weasel Walter?). In fact, he teams up here with an actual Norwegian! Lasse Marhaug of noisy electronica act Jazzkammer joins Drumm for this live-in-Oslo session, his laptop computer vs. Drumm's guitar and analog synth. Their collaboration/clash results in some dark and droney sounds that are semi-appropriate to the apparent black metal concept, being generally quiet and creepy rather than massive or mayhemic. The guitar, when you can tell it's a guitar, is more Derek Bailey than Burzum. And the arctic winds evoked on here hiss rather than howl. But, there's no mistaking the simulation of the sinister crackling of burning churches, and perhaps even the twittering of malicious goblins in dark forests, via Drumm and Marhaug's electronics. So, of course, we love this. Leaving aside the black metal business, this is atmospheric ambient glitch drone improv at its best -- and most eeveeiil.
Spare, hovering, electronic tinkering ranging from the cyclic dissonance of Oval to eerie washes, punctuated by accelerating rhythms.
The French electronica label Bip-Hop should at least be commended for taking the risk of releasing so many albums from relatively unknown artists. Tennis, Bovine Life, and now Andrew Duke are a few of their curatorial selections of experimental techno and have all been interesting counterpoints to high-prolife labels like Mille Plateaux, Scape, and Raster. Andrew Duke is a Canadian artist working mostly with bricolages of static rhythmic structures and fluctuating darkened ambience that's not too far from the aquatic electro sounds of Drexciya and also displays plenty of influence from Coil, Pan Sonic, and Thomas Jirku.
We could easily imagine the odd school children in the film The Wicker Man as being the tailor-made audience/participants for this 1969 educational record from the BBC Drama Workshop, the educational arm of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. These recordings were designed for creative movement and improvisation exercises for young school children, though it would be surprising to see a record for kids quite like this today.
With poetry written and recited by Robert Duncan and electronic music by David Cain, this is one of those Arcadian British recordings that are so often referenced audibly and visually by the hauntological Ghost Box label and the filmstrip nostalgia of Boards of Canada. Duncan's classically-trained oration evokes a romantic yet visceral natural imagery of slightly sinister undertones, while Cain's score is both alien and lilting, its robotic sing-song melodies sometimes wistful yet bracingly warped. For this recording a piece was done for each month and each season with the final track an instrumental culmination of all the musical themes simply called "The Year". Though we can see children of the time easily getting into the odd melodies to convey visual pantomimes of leaves and wind, we can only assume that some of the spoken imagery must have gone over their heads. "Falling leaves like Severed Hands", in "October" for instance; or descriptions of nightfall where the night is characterized as a predator and the day "as a fallow deer is bled"; or the lurid connotations of the poem, "March" where Duncan speaks of the Earth as a woman, and in a series of harvest ritual descriptions, to be woken, washed, dressed and then taken????
But what is admirable about the educational side of this recording is that it doesn't talk down to children or Disney-fy nature with anthropomorphic happy/sad emotions, but rather it emphasizes a more complex set of emotional tropes to act out like awakening, longing, fearfulness, loneliness, and indifference that points to a more mature and frank attitude toward the cycle of nature and the passing of time. Though we're not sure what kids today would make of its strange antiquated quaintness, for adults its perhaps a nostalgic trip back to a bygone era where there was government funded organizations that were allowed to produce such cool shit for kids, or at the very least plenty of cool interlude fodder here for DJs and mixtapes.
Kyle Bobby Dunn seems like quite a character. Photos of the Canadian ambient composer could easily stand in as an earnest dating profile image / avatar, imbued with a boyish charm and scholarly airs; yet whatever public image of poignant sincerity he seems to be cultivating is thrown completely out the window when it comes to the id-authored track titles like "Movement For The Completely Fucked," "Meadowfuck (Waltz Of The Nobodies)," and "An Excrement Suite." Given the fact that these tracks hold the exact same aesthetic scope of bleary ambience as the more sensible, allegorically charged titles like "Where Circles Never Become Circles" or "Canticle Of Votier's Flats," Dunn is obviously wanting his audience to ask the ever important question: "what the fuck?" It all may be calculated to expose the dorky / wonky bits of his personality, so that people don't assume he's just a dorky / wonky composer, but a fully-formed human being with thoughts, dreams, and ideas - some of which may be profoundly ridiculous. The sounds from "And The Infinite Sadness" are beautiful impressionist swells of tonal colors, billowing orchestrations, and elegant melancholy. Some of the tracks expose their instrumentation of guitars or horns or chamber ensembles, all of which are blurred within a luminous and richly shoegazing wash of sustained reverb and stately melodic / harmonic progressions. His work often gets compared to Stars Of The Lid; and yeah, And The Infinite Sadness is that good, perhaps his best release to date!
We managed to get a small handful of these from a distributor, they're priced super cheap, as the label has since folded, so these are the very last copies we'll ever be able to get, and we have just EIGHT of these...
We tried to find out more about this record, but all we could find online was a bunch of crazy super academic babble that talked about the roots of the Esperanto language, the texts of Borges and Calvino, the art of Dubuffet, heavy metalinguistics, and other stuff that really shed no light at all. But yeah, while this is definitely coming to us from the world of academic sound, the actual SOUND is quite pleasing, the opener is a dark droney, softly rhythmic psychedelic landscape of layered tones, and soft sonic pulsations, swirling effects, and muted glitches, over which a voice in French recites the lyrics, the result a sort of abstract minimal Chain Reaction sort of Portishead, that same rainswept moonlit city downtempo moodiness, the second track sounds a bit more like recent outings by Byetone or Alva Noto, that sort of machinelike electro, but a bit more organic, lots of cinematic tension, cold dark grooves that are surprisingly hypnotic. And so it goes, a series of strangely abstract, and slightly academic groovescapes, a few super abstract, a couple sort of noisy, but for the most part, darkly hypnotic, lushly textured, sonically dense and lushly layered, strangely sultry and weirdly mysterious, a fantastic surprise, that just might be the perfect late night avant academic chill out disc we've ever heard.
I'm not sure why I like this so much, but I DO!!... Duran Duran Duran exist in the same plane as Kid606 or Shitmat in some capacity. Taking instantly recognizable songs and ripping them to shreds. Then re-assembling them using super distorted gabber beats and glitched out electronic buzz. This is super crazed digital beat freak break-core constructed from fragments of Yaz and Slayer and various other chunks of popular music detritus. This is the aural version of mainlining coke, or like sticking pop rocks in your ear. Dense and relentless and not at all very dancable, although we all found ourselves at least tapping or bouncing to the imposible beats. Fans of the Kid, Pluxus, Lybithith, Shitmat, and the like will eat this up! Features some truly provocative cover art featuring two nude oil painted men, um...er... frolicking.
This is the very first we've heard from the oddly monikered DVVLLXNS (pronounced "Vallens", we think), which in fact is the new project from Jon Porras, one half of doomdrone duo Barn Owl. Originally releases as a download, LXTVNY is only now getting a proper release. As we mentioned in our recent review of Porras' latest solo album Orilla Oscura, as much as the various Barn Owl related projects and records push past Barn Owl's twang flecked ambient drone sound, they all still share a similar sound and vibe, something that Porras was aware of when he conceived off DVVLLXNS, which still shares the same vibe, it's dark and psychedelic, it's most definitely a whole different beast. When we first got these in, we joked about the very witch house-y logo that adorns the cover, but once we threw it on, we realized that maybe that cover is sort of appropriate, cuz the sound on LXTVNY is actually kind of witch housey to these ears, murky and swirling and psychedelic, lots of processed voices, programed beats, the opener is all skittery drum machines, and ethereal vocals molded into psychedelic swirls, stuttering loops, the result is sort of dance-y, but more sort of hazy and rhythmic, certainly super shoegazey, the whole thing ethereal and ghostly and fantastically washed out and shimmery. The second track adds some dubbiness to the equation, the beats fading in and then out, over which soft swirling shimmering swells drift dreamily, before the rhythm resurfaces and the song is transformed into a weird sort of witch-kraut groove, again crafted from more distorted voices and a pulsing beat, before splintering into an abstract drift of echo drenched sonic fragments.
The flipside starts out all haunting and dramatic, a blurred slo-mo chamber music almost, super minimal and Caretaker-y, a buried heatbeat like pulse beneath the soft psychedelic swirls, before an oscillating synth melody swoops in, the sound blurring into some super minimal Kompakt style Pop Ambience, and then finally, the record finishes off with a woozy cascade of arpeggiated synths, wreathed in tinkling music box melodies and a thick ominous low end drone, the sound super cinematic and sinister, when the beat comes in, it's less a beat, and more a sort of rhythmic filigree, swooping hard from speaker to speaker, wreathed in gauzy hiss, leaving a crackling contrail draped over the percolating synths beneath, fans of all that Carpenter / Goblin worship, will dig this track especially.
As much as we love the sound of Barn Owl, and Porras' various side projects, we're digging this new direction a LOT, and we probably say this every time, but this might be our favorite Porras recording yet!
One of six new tapes from the always awesome Holodeck label out of Austin, Texas is a double album of intrepid dancefloor excursions divided into day and night moods. Dylan Cameron is the engineering mastermind behind most releases of the Austin underground, including Troller and Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as most of the Holodeck catalog, but on Samsara, he brilliantly displays a knack for crafting rhythm and nuance. The A side, Causes, is all big four-on-the-floor house music jams full of bubbling acid synth textures and diva-ish vocal samples hearkening back to the Hacienda sound from the mid-to late-eighties with a more refined modern sense of compositional detail that one might find on Kompakt or Hot Flush.
The B side, Conditions, is a suite of more late night, two-step grooves that have a more ambient dub-step feel. The vocal samples are more filtered and hazy. The mood more pensive and dark, like an uptempo Burial, but a nice coming down counterpoint to the more high-energy A side. Also features a remix of an unreleased Troller song. Limited!
