Much has been made about the Dual 7"+ cd set that Fabulous Diamonds released a few years back through Nervous Jerk, a small Australian imprint which had the good fortune of also releasing an Animal Collective single. Dual did make an appearance here at Aquarius, although it arrived rather mysteriously (perhaps from the band, perhaps not) and vanished after just a single play of the disc on a busy Saturday afternoon. Yes, that's always a good sign when we don't have to ballyhoo the merits of a record, and the strength of the tunes speak for themselves. Woozy hypnosis from organ, sax, drums, monotone female vocals, and lots of delay patterning is what we can remember from back in 2007. The arrival of Fabulous Diamonds' II (whoops, somehow we missed their self-titled Siltbreeze LP in '08) jogged that memory to the forefront of our collective mind, and we're happy that at least we got hear those early tracks at least once. BUT, damn if Fabulous Diamonds haven't made a stellar album here with II.
This Melbourne duo - Nisa Venerosa (drums, voice) and Jarrod Zlatic (organ, effects) - channels a quasi-mystical hybrid of post-Terry Riley time-lag accumulation and the proto-electronica riffs of the Silver Apples through deliriously simple means. Venerosa lays down a slinky percussive groove without much in the way of variation what so ever, much like finest of motorik krautrock drummers (e.g. Jaki Liebezeit, Zappi Diermaier, etc.), and pairs it with Zlatic's spellbinding layers of interwoven phases, loops and moire patterns snatched from his arpeggiating mantras on organ and synthesizer. Venerosa's stoned lullabies are well suited in their simplicity and echoplex ooze to the Diamonds' hypnotic arrangements. On this album, three short tracks about three and half minutes each are bracketed by two lengthy hypno-zoner jams. Those untitled shorts are great on their own, with curiously catchy phrases of repetitive pop minimalism, but Fabulous Diamonds are clearly at their best when sprawling their rhythms and sounds over longer durations, when Zlatic's organs, electronics, and loops have plenty of time for a lunar trajectory around the dark side and back. Anyone with a passing fancy for the likes of Stereolab, Can, Pocahaunted, Aavikko, Shogun Kunitoki, and of course The Silver Apples would be well served with these Fabulous Diamonds. Excellent!
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Remixes can be pretty darn hit-or-miss. Among other things, they can breathe life into lackluster songs, or obscure the originals way far beyond any recognition, or fuse two sonic worlds into something new, magical and completely faithful to both artists. Not quite sure yet where these Danse Macabre remixes fall. On the first few listens, I was struck with the sense that most of the remix artists here seem to have very little affinity to the band - diluting the punch and catchiness of these Nebraskans' songs into just so-so, slick house and techno tracks. I mean, the original Danse Macabre songs are entirely capable of packing a dancefloor on their own, thank you very much! Participants includes Paul Oakenfold, Junior Sanchez, Ursula 1000, Tommie Sunshine, and Photek.
Swathed in stealthy Designer's Republic packaging, Michael Fakesch's "Marion" is the first solo album from half of the German electronica duo, Funkstorung. As with most Funkstorung related projects, Fakesch's sound is superficially identical to that of Autechre. Yet, upon closer investigation, "Marion" veers ever so slightly from the archetypal Autechre sound with a bleaker take on the streaming pulse of melodic "electrons" and a more spastic fracturing of the electro breakbeat.
Spectrum Spools has been killing it lately with a string of amazing unearthed cosmic electronic artifacts. We raved about the recent Robert Turman Flux reissue from 1981 and now they dig deeper back to 1975 for this little known work of Italian kosmiche from Franco Falsini. We know of Falsini through the amazing seventies space prog synth outfit, Sensations' Fix (please someone reissue their records!!!), but this solo outing originally recorded as a soundtrack for an obscure film was completely unknown to us.
Made through a strange bio-electronic process that had us thinking of Masaki Batoh's recent Brain Pulse Music Machine record, Falsini recorded this album while having his brain activity monitored by a mechanism from the Bio-Electronic Meditation Society. Whenever his brain would produce Alpha/Theta waves, he would commit his music to tape. Alpha waves are generally created when defocusing one's attention, creating an alert relaxation found with meditation. Theta waves are produced with deeper meditation and often in periods of REM dream sleep. Composed in three suites, Cold Nose is a spiralling composition of EMS and Moog washes and floating guitar lines that remind us of krautrock legends Michael Rother and Manuel Gottsching, but with a distinct spaced-out Italian prog feel, especially when Falsini breaks out into stratospheric guitar leads over the organically pulsating synth treatments. Gorgeously cinematic, with constantly shifting and shimmering progressions. Beautifully remastered, anyone into the long form take on vintage psychedelic new age music should snag this while they can. If you dug the spacier psych moments of Italian progsters, Picchio Dal Pozzo, then this will be right up your alley!
If you've been itchin' for something house-y for your warm summer nights, look no further than this, the third album from Tomoyuki Tanaka aka Fantastic Plastic Machine. Reaching back to the 70s for some soul and house moves embellished with some Brazillian accents and flute flourishes. A comment on the music straight from the horse's mouth, "Comparing my music to a girl, I used to
Hipster dance jams from the Johnny Jewel hit factory.
More sultry late night space disco jams from Italians Do It Better. You might remember them forom their tracks on the After Dark comp.
We all agree here at AQ that this is a really amazing disc. We also all agree that it's tough to describe! Which is maybe why we didn't manage to review it right when it first appeared a few months back. But now we'll try, since we like it so much and want you know about it. Simply put (which is impossible), Farmacia from Argentina straddle the line between minimal dance music and rhythmic noise. Crucial Sky In The Land Of Premonitions At Lorenzo's Weekend (there, doesn't that title tell you all you need to know? no? uh, yeah, you're right) is the work of a trio who are making their OWN original music first and foremost, not something we hear everyday. There's an experimental, home-brewed, kit-bashed approach here that possesses some of the charming weirdness of Argentine AQ faves Reynols without sounding like them... much more user-friendly, these guys! It's a sort of playful industrial/electro music, part Throbbing Gristle, part Aphex Twin, part Mouse On Mars, part Ratatat. One track even reminds us of Itavayla, or Trans Am. There's bopping abstract noises, wordless vocals, distortion and drone and disco-friendly beats. Surprisingly beautiful, beautifully surprising. The three members are credited with the use of plenty of analog synths, samplers, computers... an array of ethnic flutes... eggs, noises, and "atmospheric crucial voices"... y'know, the usual stuff. And the results are, as we said, tough to describe. But we figure it's got a wide appeal, to fans of Kraftwerk and Cluster back in the '70s... to fans of Lindstrom yesterday. Totally recommended.
In theory, this DVD produced by Austrian electronic experimentalists Farmer's Manual consists of "every locatable live recording and more dating from 1995 until 2003." The press release goes on to describe that these performances were "about algorithms and their artifacts. Clicks and textural discontinuities were rampant. The demeanor of the performers was stoic: that of accountants working a spreadsheet program rather than artists expressing themselves. Despite the apparent detachment of the performers, the musical pace was extremely rapid, both in terms of events per second and the speed of textural change." Despite the claim of a total running time of whopping 03:21:38:03 (d:h:m:s), all that could be extracted from computers-as-DVD-players we rely on here at Aquarius was 17 minutes of footage of 3 guys aimlessly breaking through a cheaply constructed wall. But maybe it's just as well we didn't find three whole days of that! Caveat emptor.
Sometimes some good old fashioned 'rock math' is the best way to start a review... Imagine Rhode Island spazz-rock duo Lightning Bolt, via Japanese hyper-prog heavies Ruins, mix in a little Hella, maybe some Crom-Tech and some Flying Luttenbachers, and then filter it all through the cartoon music of Carl Stalling, but don't stop there, this drums/keyboard duo also lace their sprawling drum-synth duels with stretches of gorgeously creepy Carpenter-ish synth soundtrackery, and bizarre samples, sometimes locking into churning sprawls of krautish hypno-rock, and other times exploding into shards of what almost sounds like Venetian Snares style drill & bass. Thankfully, there's more to Fat32 than pointless ADD mathiness, with the songs displaying a surprising knack for melody and groove, and cleverly hiding proper songs amidst all the genre stutter and controlled chaos. That said, this is still the sort of head spinning, ultra acrobatic musicianship that makes Fat32 sound right at home on Web Of Mimicry, alongside outfits like Secret Chiefs 3, Estradasphere and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, although sonically these guys do tend more toward the metal/punk side of the spectrum. Just check out the sample below for "Hard Drive", which might be the best of the bunch, a dizzying, super hypnotic blast of hyper rhythmic metallic pound, the Lightning Bolt vibe in full effect, but the keyboard gives Fat32 a much more expansive sonic palette, letting the keys somehow supply both the buzzing synth riffage, as well as blasts of 8-bit video game squiggles, all sort of effects and constantly morphing tangled melodies, the sound shifting frenetically from looped metallic mesmer to pounding chugging heaviness and back again. Then there's the epic 17 minute closer, which displays the group's Naked City like mastery of genre hopping, and the same sort of desire to cram it all into one song, and they pull it off, with most of the track pounding mathily, but they pepper it with squalls of psychedelic shimmer, bloopy video game goofiness, Pantera vocal samples (!), lumbering downtuned doominess, cheesy organ grinding polka, wide open stretches of abstract free noise drift, droned out textures and layers, super angular math-punk and plenty more. Fans of any or all of the above mentioned bands will dig for sure...
"The definitive and official DJ mix-cd by Fatboy Slim, packed with 19 slammin', hands-in-the-air party anthems..." says the sticker affixed to this documentation of the last night of the famous Big Beat Boutique club. Good for dancing, but armchair listeners' interest will dwindle quickly. A bit antiseptic and predictable. In fact, if it's party music you want, the locally-produced Future Primitive discs, especially Z-Trip and Radar's live set, have much more integrity, wit and originality. But each to her own!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Very nice tweaked electronica with lots of processed strings (which are not cheesy) that end up sounding like Matmos or something from Skam.
Legendary krautrock band Faust's 30th anniversary is being celebrated with not free pinball and fireworks, but remixes... The remix cd ep that preceeded this was ok, if unneccessary. Here's the full remix album, with one of that Soft Cell guy's mixes from the ep, plus mixes from other mostly Euro electronica folks (Kreidler, Howie B., Surgeon, Funkstorung among them). Dead Voices On
Ok, just in case introductions are in order: Faust is the classic Krautrock band from the '70s who resurrected themselves in the '90s, demonstrating that they still knew a thing or two about making weird and avant-garde psychedelic rock music. Dalek, meanwhile, is a genre defying, indie-rock-scene-crashing rapper from New York whose album on Ipecac two years back was a big hit 'round these parts and elsewhere. The Dalek / Faust connection first became public when a Dalek cut was included on Faust's Klangbad: First Steps compilation. We then heard rumors that the two were gonna do something together...at last, here is the fruit of that unholy union! Krautrock and rap, that's a first I guess. (Krautrap? ugh.) But it makes sense in light of Dalek's allegiance to dub and electronica and Faust's interest in the same... So, how did this collab turn out? Sounds more like a Dalek record than a Faust one overall. Dark, scary soundscapes stretch out over the first track -- percussive miasma, with somewhere in there latter-day Faust guitarist Stephen Wray Lobdell (Davis Redford Triad) generating clouds of blue-black -- before Dalek starts dropping rhymes on track two, "Hungry For Now". Beats ricochet dangerously as Dalek does the urban griot routine over the grinding of the Faust factory. It's kinda in the same illbient, claustrophobic dub-sphere as Spectre and the WordSound crew, or Techno-Animal, with whom Dalek previously has worked. Faust are certainly capable of generating some heavy duty darkness -- as they have gotten older, they seem to have delved more into the Industrial-Ambient sounds their old albums perhaps presaged. You'll find no references to the surreal pop element of Faust's '70s sound here, just some hardcore hip hop in a nightmare void.
We had no idea that Thomas Fehlmann had been making music for more than 30 years, beginning with his time in the band Palais Schaumburg moving on to his work in Detroit/Berlin techno group 3MB (with Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald), finally playing in the Orb to this day, as well as tons of solo records, quite impressive for sure, but this one, this is something else, selections from a score Fehlmann did for a film called 24H Berlin, which is the longest documentary film in history, a full 24 hours long, the filmmakers employed 80 cameras, and followed various Berliners over a 24 hour period, documenting a day in the life in Berlin. It's hard to even fathom trying to compose 24 hours of music, thankfully, Fehlmann shared those duties with another composer, so he probably needed to only come up with 12 hours worth of music, but still, incredible.
And the sounds here are of course gorgeous, that Kompakt sound we love so much, a lush mix of old school techno, modern Berlin dub, and washed out dreamlike pop ambience, if you didn't know this was a soundtrack, you might just assume this was a regular Fehlmann release, which for listening purposes it might as well be. After some cool, late night skitter and thump, the record blossoms into some truly lovely dronemusic, prismatic and crystalline, before slipping back into some clipped stuttery dub and we're off.
The whole record is very warm, and soothing, dreamy, melodic, from the hushed pulse of "Speeding", definitely evocative of late night drives, to the almost Kraftwerk sounding "In The Wind II", lilting and lovely, but underpinned by a busy bit of warbly bass, to the hazy ethereal blurscape of "Von Oben", that eventually transforms into some minimal ambient techno, to the lush and warmly melodic closer "Schieben", which musically sounds like a time lapse photo of a city growing dark as the sun slips beneath the horizon, reminds us of Tim Hecker or Fennesz, so gorgeous.
The songs are balanced pretty evenly between beats and ambience, the two elements constantly blurring into one another, the result being a lush, easy flowing, drifting, dolorous electronic dreamscape.
One of the strongest forces and brightest minds in the German electronic scene of the last few decades, Thomas Fehlman has always had two different and distinct musical sides. There is his love of Detroit born raw hard techno, and then there is his endless fascination with more spaced out and ambient sounds influenced by the likes of Fripp, Eno and Tangerine Dream. Honigpumpe is for sure a result of the latter. Dreamy and blissed out electronica with beats that aren't as much for the dancefloor as they are for the living room or the couch or the bed. We've been putting this on every time we have to do unglamorous tasks like laundry and the dishes and with this on time seems to move a little faster and so do we. As a full fledged member of The Orb and his constant producing and live dj sets, Fehlmann shows no signs of slowing down and that's a very good thing. We want more!
Now available domestically with new artwork via Los Angeles based Emperor Norton: the long awaited debut long player from Chicago DJ / remixer extraordinaire Felix Stallings aka Felix Da Housecat. "Kittenz And Thee Glitz" shuffles through a hearty mix of
Felix K hails from the drum 'n' bass scene in Berlin, where he has steadily deconstructed the formalism of the genre with more and more extreme variations of abstraction while maintaining those ominous atmospheres of dub devastation. So, yes Blackest Ever Black is a perfect home for such avant dubstep excursions alongside Raime, Vatican Shadow, and Black Rain.
The slow burning title track is a side-long 17 minutes, building from a pall of near silence through a hauntologically inclined sequence of goth synths all swaddled in a heavy atmosphere of rumbled low-end and gloomy shadow, hinting at something that could have been a bassbin rattle tempered to hyper-minimalist echo, all of which casts the same spell as the most recent Haxan Cloak productions. "Silent Money" is one two B-side tracks, standing out as downer electronica track of optiganally inclined rhythms, airlock hiss, desolate ambient notes, and hyperdubbed out vocals that cascade through piles and piles of reverb. The voodoo hand-drum rhythms of "Fundamentals" and smoldering dub of blackened noise amounts to something that would be very easy to mistaken for some Demdike Stare track lost on the cutting room floor.
A couple of lists back, we highlighted the Editions Mego disc UL8 by minimal techno artist Mark Fell. It was one of two solo albums from snd member Fell that were recently released more or less simultaneously. So here's the other one, via the Raster-Noton label quite appropriately, and it's another intense, experimental exercise in the controlled chaos of (ir)rhythmic variations. 17 tracks, 64 minutes of glitched out, Geiger-countery goodness. If you liked the complex, computery patterns of UL8, you'll like this too! Repetitive, seizure-threatening stuff here, a seemingly endless array of stunning, stuttering clicks, claps, ticks and kicks... it's like the distorted, digitally bent creakings of teetering, tweaked electronic architecture built by Fell from precise blueprints for perverse purposes. His constructions are varied enough, exploring both skittering texture and shuffling groove, to hold earphone interest for the duration. At times it sounds kinda like club music composed by Conlon Nancarrow for synth and typewriter. Any fan of Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, etc. ought to investigate this and UL8 too if you haven't already.
Some will be curious about this simply on account of how it's an Editions Mego release, by Mark Fell who is one half of snd, the UK glitch-house duo that used to record for Mille Plateaux. For us, it was more that the bright orange digipak cover with shiny metallic silver artwork caught our eye, and then we read the text on the back that includes such sentences as "Using 32 operator frequency modulation synthesis configured in 16 pairs of operator and modulator, panned at equal positions around the circumference of a circle using high order ambisonics." And: "With 2, 4, and 8 channel rectangular waveshapes with variable pulse width subject to frequency modulation from synchronised sine functions with variable phase offsets." Intriguing, no?
What it it all boils down to is minimal techno electronics: clinical, precise, and purely rhythmic. Only the relatively blissed-out final track, "Death Of A Loved One", brings in much melodic coloration at all. Otherwise, Fell's music sounds a bit like a malfunctioning Geiger counter (especially the five track opening sequence "The Occultation of 3C 273"), with some pieces (the seven part "Vortex Studies") shuffling in buzzing, fizzing, distorted textures as well, and others (the "Acids In The Style Of Rian Treanor" series) incorporating sizzling synth squiggle. It's all very mesmeric (to some, maybe maddening to others), often energetically urgent, a dense, complex, pitter patter patterning of clicks, claps, and kicks, ratcheting up and down, constructed with conceptual, architectural logic... Definitely for fans of Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Senking, Mika Vanio, and Kazunao Nagata (Zero Gravity).
Fell also has another new, simultaneously released cd out on Raster-Noton, we'll have to get that one reviewed soon too!
Local DJ / turntablist / sonic collagist / audio alchemist DJ Female Convict Scorpion (aka Josh Pollock of aQ beloved local psychedelic space rockers 3 Leafs) returns with another twisted slab of mutant fuzz funk, outsider psychedelia, tripped out cosmic prog, and whatever else he has in his record bag, but as always employed in such a way that the original track blur into one twisted single sonic miasma, from which Pollock pulls some seriously twisted musical madness. This time, the framework is Bill Cosby's iconic Talks To Kids About Drugs record, with DJ Female Convict Scorpion, actually showing the kids what being on drugs sounds like, and even to those of us here who don't partake, it sounds pretty goddamn god. Warped and wild, a super psychedelic dance party that sounds a bit like a more lo-fi Andy Votel, with much of this sounding like it could be some obscure Finders Keepers mix/comp. The opener begins with Cosby explaining the purpose of the record, to talk to kids about drugs, and then DJFCS takes over, with a blast of grinding distorted psychedelic skree, bellowed slowed down monster vox, wild tangles of psych guitar freakout, before settling into a serious groove, wreathed in sci-fi FX squiggles, and woozy sonic swells, a swirl of Jeck-like turntable manipulations, some funky wah guitar, deep ominous drones, fluttering flutes, fragments of sixties pop songs, vocal harmonies surfacing then fading away, seriously trippy for sure.
And the rest of the record follows suit, with each track incorporating the original, whether as an intro, or slowing it down, so those wise words of wisdom, become a scary demonic invocation, and what follows, is all over the map, one track slips into a sprawl of record crackle and distant shimmer, over which is laid some seventies acid folk vocals, hand claps, and strange alien sound effects, the result is a stunning stretch of alien seventies freak folk (listen close and you'll even hear the Star Trek warning klaxon!), another starts off slow and contemplative, before exploding into some seriously heavy psych rock crunch, made even more freaky when the track begins to skip and locks into a woozy loop, over which DJFCS adds all sorts of warped sound effects, bleating trumpets, the looped bassline transformed into a throbbing droned out thrum, and yet another dissolves into a cloud of swirling druggy murk, before an old spiritual surfaces through the swirl, again the juxtaposition so deftly engineered, that the resulting combination is strangely moving and haunting.
And there's so so much more. Like all DJ Female Convict Scorpion mixes, there's much to discover, sonic subtleties that only surface on repeated listens, and even music nerds like us find ourselves constantly trumped by the sources, crazy obscure, we're barely able to pick out any of them, which has a lot to do of course with DJFCS's mastery of weaving all of these disparate sounds and sonic fragments into one, dizzying, seriously psychedelic whole!
The return of one of our favorite DJ's, and it's not that he's a friend of ours, or the fact that he plays guitar in local space rock heroes 3 Leafs, or that he also plays guitar in badass Sabbath cover band Bobb Saggeth, no, it's because his DJ Female Convict Scorpion mixes are twisted and genius, utilizing a crazy cool record collection, rife with tons of crazy cool records, and a deft hand at mixing bits of those records into something wholly new and impossibly original, imagine the bullshit mashups that were all the rave for a while, adding the vocals from some popular song to the music of another, now imagine that sort of operation performed by a perfectionist mad sonic scientist, with no regard for genre, willing to take two ridiculously obtuse and utterly mismatched sounds, and weaving them seamlessly into one. Every release has us not only marveling, and wondering how the fuck he does what he does, but it also has us desperately trying to identify the various sounds, and samples, until, eventually, we just give up, and lose ourselves in the DJFCS's world of sound.
This new one had us hoping for lots of metal, just based on the title alone, but instead, it's another dizzying sonic collage, the opener a stone cold stunner, pairing soulful vocals to tinkling chimes, and burbling liquid, the result tense and moving and experimental, but also moody and emotional, eventually the sounds all blur and smear into streaks of pitch shifted jazziness, joined by a simple groovy beat, and shards of tangled noisiness, another vocal surfacing near the end, a strange mix, some sort of old timey traditional, but when paired with the beat, and the psychedelic swirl, it's pretty fantastic.
After that, it's total switch up, into some rock steady, that ends up featuring some David Lee Roth vocals, and it's a weirdly sweet mix, before devolving into a wild chaos of drum damage and DLR's wild howling, all wrapped in clouds of glitchy, spaced out electronics. Then there's some slowed down "Billie Jean", doused in residual electro-space squiggle and wild psychedelic guitar shred, some swirling psych-soul, lovely female vocals, over a bed of kosmische smolder, and some seventies acid folk, and so it goes, vocal lines lifted from old folk songs, paired with swirling psychedelic synths, fractured beats draped over hurts of metallic guitar chug, soulful croon drifting atop lush layered beds of softly undulating drones, fluttering flutes and field recordings, backwards FX and tribal drumming, mutating into super creepy cinematic doom, and finally some eighties electro beats pulsing beneath orchestral swells, theremin like trills, and more trad-folk / world music vox, laced with strange bits of industrial clank and clatter, before eventually, and finally winding down.
Like all the past DJFCS jams, this too comes HIGHLY recommended.
Latest mix from this aQ beloved audio alchemist, who when he's not whipping up these murky mixes and strange sonic concoctions is playing guitar in local druggy space rockers 3 Leafs, or touring with Acid Mothers Gong or performing in a play, or even lending his voice to some video game.
But in his guise of DJ Female Convict Scorpion (yep, named for that Japanese series of women in prison flicks), his main concern is taking cool records, and melting them down into something totally new, a blurred otherworldly soundscape melding obscure jazz to lost krautrock, twisted grooves to mysterious ambience, shimmery washed out drifts wrapped around spaced out riffs and everything wreathed in old record crackle and pop. This is the sort of dark and downer DJ we want spinning records when we go out. But then listening to this stuff we imagine going out to some dark, dank, stone-walled cave-like dive, populated with all manner of shadow figures, everything lit by candlelight and firelight, the threat of violence heavy in the air...
This latest mix was presented to us as 'perfect for aQ' and then with the added descriptor 'the most evil and dark mix yet', indeed. Right down to the cover, an upside down, upside down cross (meaning rightside up) superimposed on a proper pentagram, the evil version rotated 180 degrees. And sonically, right out of the gate, some sort of black mass incantation, draped over a murky muted krautrock rhythm, laced with squalls of church organ, swirls of whipping wind, until finally, the beat kicks in, and we're off, wild psychedelic drumming, sampled fist fights, swoonsome woozy basslines, shimmery strings, strange effects and backwards loops, the various records shifting pitch, making everything warbly and trippy, and that's just the first track!
And it only gets better from there, long stretches of shimmery star field effects, some super cool rhythms, lots of slinky slithery grooves, bleating horns, field recordings, soulful vox, plenty of low slung slo-mo grooves, some killer mash ups of blackened creep and sweet soul, but also some full on horror movie soundtrack music, and so it goes slipping easily from bass heavy thrum to blissed out ethereal drift, psychedelic spaced out chaos to brooding cinematic swirl, all seemingly underpinned by a haunting sinister vibe, sometimes it's thick undulating bass buzz, othertimes it's less the sound and more just the arrangement, DJ FCS deftly conjuring up some serious audial evil. Awesome.
Record number three, and the first actual lp release, from this local turntablist / mixologist / soundsculptor, who some of you may know as a member of various local rock units Three Leafs, Citay, the Auricle and others but as DJ Female Convict Scorpion, this mystery man weaves a sprawling web of sound, that is probably more aQ worthy than most DJ's we can think of, krautrock, to funk, to soundtrack, to psych rock, to space rock to drone, manipulated lps, but also effects and various insturments, a dizzying sonic overload, skittery rhythms, soulful horns, mysterious disembodied voices, lots of turntable warble, dragged vinyl rumble, spaced out reverby shimmer, pusling new age drift, skeletal grooves wrapped around glistening barely there melodies, warped old jazz records, plenty of crackle and pop, backwards beats, field recordings, haunting cinematic ambience gives way to electronic squiggle which in turn gives way to clattery free rock stumble, subsumed by a thick swell of speaker rattling low end rumble, detuned guitar, purloined preacher ranting, big pounding drums, free jazz skronk.
Fluttery flutes flit over a field of hum and shimmer, pepperd with electronic glitches and distorted intercepted boradcasts, mournful folk draped over, thick crunch and thrum, slowly melting into a sprawl of hushed blackened buzz, which dissipates leaving a funky drummer groove, which finally peters out into a barren expanse of twisted squelch and distant twang, more displaced voices, wrapped in an undulating slab of distorted bass throb, a twisted woozy rhythm, that drones on and on beneath swirling FX, Eastern percussive skitter, warbly horns, a washed out laid back coda to a long strange sonic trip.
Cool packaging too, each lp housed in it's own hand made duct taped sleeve, created from recycled zombie movie soundtracks!
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The latest tripped out DJ mix from DJ Female Convict Scorpion aka Josh Pollack from local psychedelic space rockers 3 Leafs, and like the three before it, on Wizards (named for the genius Ralph Bakshi movie, and featuring a drawing of the movie poster done by a young Josh way back when), Pollack once again displays not just a knack for digging up insanely obscure jams, but for weaving disparate sounds together into utterly unrecognizable but totally mesmerizing sonic tableaus. Just check out the opener, "5 Terrorists", which drapes some strange buzzing percussive Asian stringed instrument, some fluttering flute, and some echo drenched vocals, over some spaced out progged out jamming, pretty impossible to tell which parts Pollack mixed, and how much of the song was already the song, which again is the magic of these DJFCS mixes, and when that first track gradually switches gears, and disappears in a field of ominous buzz, and seems to transform into a drum heavy krautprog groove, it KILLS.
And so it goes, low slung slithery funk, strange movie samples, spaced out psychedelia, stuttery old school hip hop, DJ Shadow like moodiness, primitive (but effective turntable manipulation, again hard to say which is part of the music and which is Pollack), strange crooning, weird psych folk, draped over thick sinister chordal swell, shimmery dreamlike ambience drifting into fierce driving fuzzfunk, all manner of backward swoops and swirls, moaning strings, disembodied voices, glistening strings, some of the combinations more moving and intense than the originals, lots of a capellas wedded to unlikely instrumental accompaniment, everything wreathed in echo and reverb and loads of warm record crackle, and just some downright bad ass jams and grooves, not to mention the easy listening Sabbath that finishes things off. Essential listening. And most definitely the DJ you want at your wedding, assuming your goal is to alienate or downright freak out 90 percent of the guests. But that other ten percent, including us (we're invited, right?), will be in whatthefuck weirdo music HEAVEN!
Fenn O'Berg is the on-again / off-again collaborative project between Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, and Peter Rehberg, who had made their last splash into the realm of glitched-out electronics back in 2002. All three of these artists have involved themselves in various laptop improvisational ensembles with sporadic success (certainly nothing as wondrous as their individual solo recordings), and the previous two Fenn'O'Berg albums were simply spliced collages of live presentations. In Stereo was recorded in Japan over a couple weeks, entirely in the studio. There's a bit more of a structured sentiment emerging from the perpetual motion of digital effects and obliterated samples, setting it apart from the earlier albums. There's plenty of Rehberg's wracked digitality, splattered through ring-modulated, time-stretched deconstructions and digital cluster bombs of pixilation; there's episodes of those amniotic, post-guitar washes that Fennesz has gracefully produced for years; and Jim O'Rourke ever the chameleon fits his multi-tasking production well within the poles of his collaborators. Amidst the pantheon of digital effects, the trio are not averse to working in analog tones, repetitions, and sweeps. The fourth track on the album (titled "Part I") begins with an interesting set of cylon drones before the trio unleashes a percussive frenzy of glistening piano and tumbling drums that could almost have come from an Alice Coltrane composition. Outside of this expressive outburst, In Stereo for the most part comes across as something of a kosmiche-digital-psychedelic hybrid that might fit between Klaus Schulze and Oval.
NB: The vinyl is out of print on this release (oh so quick!), but we might have one or two copies kicking around. Just ask, you might get lucky!
Aside from a couple of respectable collaborations and some soundtrack work, Christian Fennesz hasn't released a proper solo album since the album Black Sea, which came out on Touch WAY back in 2008. On Becs, Fennesz returns to the label that introduced him to the world, in Editions Mego; and he pretty much continues along the same path that he set for himself on that last album he recorded for them, the much lauded Endless Summer from 2001. That was a fracturous record of polygonal melodies bathed in a candy-crush fuzz of pixelated, shoegazing blur, always alluding to the sunkissed glow of the California Dream, whatever that may be. Becs may not have the advantage of following up one hell of a single by Fennesz (in the very late '90s, he covered The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones, the latter of which was originally commissioned for tUMULt's Painted Black anthology!), whereby he contextualized his sonic dislocation within the lineage of rock'n'roll and all of its mythologies of dissent, rebellion, sex, and whatnot. Yeah, it's a tough act to follow; but Becs is a wildly adventurous album with a substantial parity when it comes to the risk/reward equation. A heavily flanged, blindingly bright corona of digital treatments surrounds the Fennesz' guitar sound at the album's introduction, with all of the soft melodies buried in twinkling electronics and mirrored refractions. Fennesz follows this with a detuned alarm-call pulse that forms an insistently crawling rhythmic structure blasted with a malleable distortion, which in turn he counterpoints with a gorgeous, cathedral drone of sustained harmonics. An incremental retinal burn of guitar distortion shapes the brilliant track "Liminality" built upon a beautifully bittersweet, slowcore guitar chord whose roots lie in Slint, Codeine, or maybe even the Durutti Column. Sparkling ambient passages beget discordant piano treatments akin to a computer-cracked Angelo Badalamenti which in turn beget more blossoming noise. Fucking brilliant.
Which came first Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz? If one is to merely look at the discographies of the twin kings of digitally tricked out guitar sculpting, the chronological answer is obvious: Christian Fennesz. But in the four years that have transpired between his brilliant album Venice and the 2008 opus Black Sea, Fennesz must have seen a younger protege in Tim Hecker coming up in the rear view mirror with his own dramatic sound for smeared guitar whose beauty is similarly rendered through error. Not only does Black Sea feel like a response to Tim Hecker's work, it also stands as Fennesz' most fully realized album, perhaps even more so than the sunburst explosion of meta-pop on Endless Summer.
Fennesz works best in the cold, with ice, snow, and frost dusting the strings of his guitar and seeping into the circuitry of his computer; and the cold landscape is exactly where he situates himself on Black Sea. Not surprisingly, Touch's Jon Wozencroft perfectly matches a photograph of an abandoned train track set onto a barren wintry landscape, looking a hell of lot like the photographs that Anselm Keifer uses as a background over which he dumps tar, paint, cement, lead, ash, and whatnot into his alchemical paintings.
Black Sea opens with the fizzling crunch of digital errata getting mangled even further by digital means, with Fennesz sculpting a sea swell of a half melody in the distance. Considering the contemplative and cold nature of the rest of the album, this track is a bit discordant; but Fennesz isn't going for the Menche / Merzbow attack, just something of a wake-up call. But gradually, even this first burst of noise quells in a plaintive round of finger picking on the guitar, out of which a beautiful cloud of vaporized drone begins to amass and a subharmonic throb of distortion settles in. These sounds become the template for the rest of the album, all wrapped in gray, muted timbres. When noise bursts through Fennesz' circuits, the attack almost immediately blurs into clustered loops, drones, and sympathetic noises to smooth the edges into a shimmered glisten of remarkable beauty that exhibits a cold, overcast, and gray soundsmear, certainly on par with the sleepytime shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine. After an exceptional collaborative track with Rosy Parlane of lunar landscape ambience riddled with dust before opening into a hymnal melody, Black Sea comes to an end with one of Fennesz' best tracks ever in "Saffron Revolution," with its soaring vapor trail of tone-bent guitar drone and a majestic crescendo of sustained, soft focus distortion. A truly marvellous piece of work.
Experimental electronica (particularly the glitch techno and collage work on the Mille Plateaux label) is getting dangerously close to self parody, with the definitions of very specific electronic music forming ever increasing legions of devoted followers
Fennesz' third album -- the aptly titled "Endless Summer" -- picks up where his ep of Rolling Stones / Beach Boys covers left off with a digital dispersion of "fun in the sun" rock mythologies. While there are no obviously discernable pop culture references, Fennesz builds a sound that really is quite summery from odd duets between disintegrating acoustic guitar strums and the coalescence of digital errata. Thus, this album has the feeling of the classic Beach Boys sound, but very little of that structure. These are NOT Beach Boys covers; but if he said they were, we'd have no basis to call him a liar. Regardless, Fennesz's "Endless Summer" is just fucking great.
Over the past couple of years, it has become apparent that there are two modes of production for the esteemed Austrian electro-glitch artist Christian Fennesz. On one hand, there are the studio driven productions where he focuses on the digital decomposition of various guitar signatures (exemplified within the "Plays" single whose beautiful cover of The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" was originally commissioned for the ill-fated "Painted Black" compilation -- due soon on tUMULt), and on the other, there's the live improvisation techniques he brings to any number of European free-jazz / new music ensembles (i.e. MIMEO, FennO'Berg, Polweschel, Golden Tone, Orchestra 33 1/3, etc.). While his technical prowess and expressive immediacy can be quite graceful on those electro-improv recordings, Fennesz excels in the studio.
"Field Recordings 1995:2002" -- which is NOT a collection of Chris Watson-esque field recordings -- picks up some of the studio driven scraps that had been released on compilations, special projects, and film soundtracks during the past 7 years. Of particular note, "Field Recordings 1995:2002" features all of the cuts from his amazing "Instrument" debut EP released on Mego in 1995. Even before such incredibly powerful programs as SuperCollider and Max/MSP had been as widely available as they are now, Fennesz has always been interested the atomization and disintegration of digital recordings at their most basic level. While all of these tracks from "Instrument" still sound great by today's standards, there is a strong connection with the sampledelica guitar trickery of '90s UK post-rock of Seefeel, Main, and Disco Inferno as hyperactive, time-stretched kaleidoscopes of post-MBV distortion and skittering electronica rhythms. The other tracks include reworkings of the soundtrack composed for "Blue Moon," remixes Fennesz did for Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu, and compilation tracks from "Decay" (Ash International), "RKKCD13" (Reckankreuzungklankewerkzeuge), "Clicks and Cuts 2" (Mille Plateaux) and "Krev X" (Ash International) -- that last contribution being a digitally fuzzed-out cover of America's "A Horse With No Name."
While many 'loose-end' collections run the risk of being full of cast-away tracks from the proper albums, Fennesz' "Field Recording" is as good as any of his previous albums, and shouldn't be missed!
Originally released in 1997, now finally available again, the debut full length from Viennese experimentalist guitarist Christian Fennesz. Long before the fuzzed out blurry sounds of folks like Tim Hecker and other DIY dronesters were everywhere, and the technology for processing sound was super readily available, Fennesz was a laptop alchemist, a guitar deconstructionist, transforming his axe into a strange sound making device, capable or producing the most gorgeous and alien of sounds.
Hotel Parallel is a lot different than later Fennesz releases. Where those were soft focus and sun baked, glistening and shimmering, Hotel Parallel is much darker, more abrasive, harder edged, the sounds much more intense and brutal, but without losing any of their beautiful mystery.�
Listening to this again now, it's kind of mind blowing to believe the sounds here are all guitar. From dense swirls of speaker clogging hiss, to glimmering Niblockian stretches of static high end blur, to tangled swirls of glitch and swoop, backwards fffffft and gnarled melody, to grinding low end chunks of sound, angular and abrasive, to barely there billows of whispery low end, streaked with muted melody, to epic My Bloody Valentine like cacophonies of distorted pop ambient almost house music to super minimal Chain Reaction throb and pulse. Some of these tracks sound like the recent Field record, or some of the more abstract Kompakt stuff, but this was 10 YEARS AGO! AND IS ALL GUITAR! How the fuck do all of these sounds come out of a guitar? Who the hell cares? An absolutely gorgeous breathtaking epochal work of guitar experimentation, that few have rivaled in the decade since...
This reissue is super swank, six panel digipak, printed in green on white with subtle spot varnish, it includes some extra stuff too, a bonus track from a long out of print 7" (limited to 100 copies) from 1996, a super beautiful droney blurry murkscape, and an absolutely breathtaking video, perfectly reflecting the sound of Fennesz visually, all glitchy and grainy and so gorgeous...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
4 short compositions on an adorable little 3" compact disc by this brilliant electronica / guitarist from Vienna. Shards of processed guitar noise filtered into the tropes of musique concrete that end up sounding like a more active Achim Wollschied. Further on the composition, Fennesz allows the delicate strum of the guitar to infiltrate the barrage of noise, giving nods to John Fahey, but in a much more interesting way than the recent interpretations of Fahey by the Chicago post-rockers.
Austrian electronic glitch-guitar superstar Christian Fennesz does his thing in Australia, and this live limited edition cd (not cd-r, unlike other similarly plainly-packaged releases on Touch) is the documentation. "Live at Revolver" picks up where Fennesz' masterful "+47É 56' 37"" left off with rich buzzing tonalities forming melancholic almost-melodies topped with sporadic events of domestic clatter. A requiem for a microwave oven, perhaps? Nonetheless this may be for fans only, as it's not quite 17 minutes long! Still, this is recommended, as those 16 minutes and 34 seconds are quite good.
Live record from everybody's favorite laptopping guitarist (or guitar playing laptopper) Christian Fennesz, released on the new (to us at least) Japanese label Headz, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Touch's Jon Wozencroft. A little over 40 minutes of gorgeous, squelching, hazy shimmer. The disc starts off with a burst of scratchy barbed wire static, before the submerged melodies and summery warmth slowly rise to the surface. As the disc progresses Fennesz's guitar surfaces more and more, as lazily strummed acoustic guitars dodge digital crunch, and fingerpicked notes are captured and sent careening wildly through the thick wash of digital whir, crackly sputter, and gritty fuzz. Moments of melodic tranquility bob weightlessly on a sea of crackling glitches and resonant flickers of crumbling distortion, as the melodies struggle to stay afloat. So completely lovely and at the same time so ferocious and harsh, a dichotomy of sound that seems to define the glorious sonic explorations of Fennesz.
Strange that we've never written anything about this album, the second album from Vienna's guitar 'n' laptop rock star Christian Fennesz. Originally released on Mego back in 1999, this album has gone through several pressings, fortunately always preserving the same core tracklisting, although the art has shrunk down to a digipack for the 2008 edition on Touch. The two albums that came after this album - Endless Summer and Venice - may stand as his perfect albums, one obviously summery and the other decidedly wintery; if anything, this is his shoegaze record, as he deftly wrangles with hurricane-strength distortion and tempers that with a post-MBV blur of narcotic auditory bliss. Throughout, Fennesz merely alludes to melody buried beneath all of the fuzzy drones and tempestuous noise, with pixel pointed interludes indicative of the signature Mego inflorescence for digital errata that he and Pita helped define. This is clearly the album that was the major inspiration for Tim Hecker and his digiscapes of guitar drones and 8-bit noise; but this album also bridges back to earlier pioneers of electronic adventurousness such as Main (especially Motion Pool) and The Hafler Trio (like Intoutof). If you've not checked this out, there's no better time than the present.
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The Austrian avant-guitarist offers four tracks of beautiful guitarscapes tricked out through his signature glitched-n-blurred processing. Hardly cold for a slab of digitalia, the opening track "Liminal" is one of Fennesz' more structured numbers, built from a simple chord progression on his acoustic guitar, that then stomps on a Mogwai-ish distortion box for at least one burst of incendiary soft-loud-soft dynamics. All of the sounds prickle, squish, and splutter amidst a swarming sea of digitized pixels that reassemble themselves as echoes and ghosts of Fennesz' original guitar playing. "July" darkens the hue quite a bit with a warbling bass that looks back to the post-rock explorations of Rothko or Labradford. "Shift" is one of Fennesz' finer drone-centric moments that builds a hallowed melody out of a cavernous wash of sun bleached tones, and the title track is a collaborative effort with Steven Hess on drums, resulting in a slowcore tune fleshed with all of Fennesz' digital ephemera.
FYI, there is a compact disc scheduled for release in September 2011, for those not so keen on the vinyl format. Oh yeah, this has been cut at 45rpm, so you know that we'll be playing this at 33 as well!
The master returns. To teach the young ones a thing or two about the guitar. And about turning that guitar into something wholly other.
It's been a while since we've heard from Christian Fennesz, but thankfully, very little has changed, he can still take a guitar and a laptop and create a dense world of dreamlike shimmer, with a deftness that puts most other soundmakers to shame. So here's a brief two song taste of what Fennesz has been up to lately. And if this single is any indication, the upcoming full length is going to be the drone-y dreamy disc of the year!
But for now, we'll take these two, and just play them over and over. The A side finds the guitar completely transformed into muted smears, the overall sound a shifting sea of corrosive crumbling distortion, but rendered in breathless whispers and washed out hues. The metallic thrum is spread out into soft shimmers, a murk that would almost sound industrial if it wasn't so pretty.
The flipside is more guitar oriented, a steel string acoustic, the melodies branching out in simple softly strummed strands, a skeletal framework for swirls of soft hiss and chunks of fragmented melody drifting by like leaves on a forest stream. The sound is like some simple folk music, broadcast via a staticky short wave radio, but beneath the guitar, and the dreamy hiss, are lush, stately swells melodic and cinematic, that infuse the track with a dark, but sweetly sorrowful elegiac quality. Gorgeous.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Mego has been really getting into these cute litte 3" cds... They have a similar fetish object quality as the ultra limited and therefore highly collectible Drone Records series, but for the more digitally minded. This collaborative release between Rosy Parlane (former partner with Dean Roberts in Thela) and the swashbuckling Christian Fennesz is a fluid stream of digital pops and timestretched glitches. At first their duet fades from the glitch worship towards something resembling fragments of an Arvo Part vocal chorale, but returns to the rhythmic hard disc edits recalling Oval's "Systemische."
While not a proper new Fennesz 'album' per se, Aun is in fact a soundtrack to a new film by Austrian director Edgar Honetschlager, incorporating a few collaborative pieces previously released on the album Cendre, which found Christian Fennesz teamed up with pianist Ryuchi Sakamoto. Surprisingly, those tracks, already pretty cinematic, fit perfectly amidst Fennesz' original music for Honetschlager's film. And while we've yet to see the film, the music on its own is lovely, and hauntingly contemplative, especially the tracks with Sakamoto, the pointillist piano lending the music a certain gravitas, moody and melancholy. While the rest of the tracks find Fennesz weaving lush tapestries of deep glowing drones and warm whirring ambience, opening track "Kae" is dense and thick, a lush gauzy melodic stasis rife with buried melodies, the sort of sound that evokes those time lapse nature films, plants breaking through the soil, blossoming, then withering and dying. Poignant and moving, quite a feat for a track that barely cracks two minutes. Later on the soundtrack, Fennesz returns to the guitar, letting gentle strums and delicately picked notes become gently obliterated by clouds of digital errata, transforming the sound into a glitchy dreamfolk drift, those bits of glitchguitar ambience surrounded by thick slabs of deep dense digital dronemusic, tracks like "Euclides" imbuing what would otherwise be an ethereal shimmer, with an almost black hole density, while other tracks display a knack for melding airy ambience with gristled laptop buzz, the results sometimes spare and ghostly, other times bleak and blackened, but always haunting and lovely. In some ways, the sounds are almost too perfect as a soundtrack, the sort of abstract minimal ambience that seems to underpin most movies these days, but close listening reveals that this is more than rote ambience, instead, each track here is a dense multilayered mini-symphony, that even sans visuals, offers much to discover on repeated listens, and seems to blossom before the listener's ears, the sound rich with the promise of endless sonic discovery.
This is pretty much an aQ dream team, guitarist / lap top technician / abstract dronehaze alchemist Christian Fennesz, teamed up with Tony Buck, drummer for outsider minimal jazz legends the Necks, and David Daniell, guitarist for the late great slowcore combo San Augustin, all gathered up for a night of abstract improv noise making.
The session begins with a slow building minimal post rock meander, and over the course of about 8 minutes, the sound grows from spidery and shimmery, a sort of washed out melodic drift, all sun dappled and gauzy, to full on ferocious free form psychedelic freakout, an explosive squall of woozy guitar chords underpinning wild clouds of octopoidal drum damage, Buck letting loose, no Necks-like restraint here, the climax of the track like a free jazz Godspeed / White Heaven hybrid, while weirdly, beneath the skree and crunch, the guitars still moan mournfully, giving the jam, even at its noisiest a strange sort of instrumental pathos.
The second number begins with a shimmer of cymbals, some swirling looped guitar, flurries of muted percussion, a heaving hazy whirl of abstract drone, which about halfway through seems to suddenly expand into a slow motion supernova of smoldering sound, building to a blast of Nadja-like shoegaze dronedoomdrift, before fading back into a reverbed echo of the chaos that came before.
Buck then creates a drum drone using just a snare roll and some cymbal sizzle, while Daniell and Fennesz add their own shadowy minimalism, the washed out ambience the most Fennesz sounding of the bunch, as if all of the sounds created were winding their way through his guitar, then his laptop and out through the speakers, the cymbals getting more and more busy, sounding like rainfall, another sonic climax, but this one a more subdued subtle bit of cymbal driven swell, starkly dramatic and so lovely. Finally, the trio finish these off with another bit of softly chaotic clatter, the scattered bits of percussion and jagged shards of guitars, slowly coalescing into something rhythmic and driving, building to a gloriously effulgent climax, a blinding spray of prismatic sound, a high end ur-drone, that fades gradually again, allowing the set to settle to the ground, in a soft fog of hiss and sizzle, rumble and whir. Fucking fantastic.
The bad news is, the vinyl version of this is somehow already out of print, so we only have 4 or 5 copies, and that's IT. But, we WILL have the cd version next week, got some of those coming from the label (everyone else is out!), so if you want that, just ask...
With just the mention of Jim O'Rourke, this will sell itself. But for those of you out there who have been taken in by his recent pop aesthetics, we should state the warning that this is not a pop album. Collaborating with powerbook geniuses Christian Fennesz and Pita Rehberg (both from the venerable Mego collective), O'Rourke sheds the pop schtick for a streaming barrage of digital splices which are predominantly needling synthetic tones and random clicks, but sporadically reference a rhythm or a melody before being mutilated into the digital cacophony.
The second production from the Fenn O' Berg laptop trio of Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, and Peter "Pita" Rehberg adds just a bit more structure to the previous collaboration, but falls in line with the increasing number of Max / MSP improvisations that have been coming out as of late. The general feel for the album retains some of the digitally deconstructed dreaminess found on some of the Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers recordings, but with the additional collaged pitter patter of digital squiggles and clicks. Where Fenn O'Berg succeeds is in their sporadic use of fuzzy rhythms, post-acid melodies, and antiquated samples from carnival music and melodramatic film scores. All of these, of course, get the pixel treatment.
