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We first heard UK duo The Ragga Twins on the amazing Rumble In The Jungle compilation which we made our Record Of The Week back in early 2007. One of the first bands, in the early '90s, to combine the grooves and the toasting of reggae and dancehall with hip hop breakbeats, and essentially creating jungle, which as any avid reader of the aQ list knows, we absolutely LOVE.
The Ragga Twins began life right in the midst of the blossoming rave scene which makes it a bit surprising that folks got so it. But get into it they did. Along with a handful of other underground groups, the Ragga Twins helped launch a British music movement that continues to this day, as Jungle would spawn drum and bass, which would mutate into garage, techstep, 2step, and eventually grime and dubstep. Even at its very genesis, this stuff was practically perfect, funky, and loose, groovy and aggressive, totally irresistible, big beats, loping hip hop rhythms, sped up breakbeats, the music skeletal, simple loops, all about the vocals, a rapid fire dancehall toasting, delivered in a raw bark, while the beat pounded away beneath. Some of the tracks definitely display some of the surrounding rave culture, fuzzy synths, sweeping strings, bits of techno, but for the most part, this stuff is fierce and funky dancehall jungle, the sort of stuff that The Bug is giving a modern spin.
Take "Ragga Trip" with its seventies cop show groove, and squelchy synths, the toasting is incredible, rough and raw, and impossibly catchy. Or "Illegal Gunshot", with it's playful marimba melody, and skittery beat. And again, incredible vocals. Then "Spliffhead", with a reggae croon that ends up making it sound almost like Bad Brains at their most reggae. "Rudeboy" wraps techno synths and wailing sirens around a rolling breakbeat, the toasting and crooned vocals, and reggae guitar reeling it back in and keeping it from getting too ravey, while "Juggling" totally evokes eighties hip hop (especially Black Sheep) but it could just be THAT breakbeat. The second disc features older tracks, including a couple from the pre-Ragga Twins Deman Rockers, the older tracks are a bit ravier, or a bit more reggae sounding, but even then, the tracks are still pretty kick ass.
Definitely essential listening for folks into jungle and drum and bass, who loved that Rumble In The Jungle comp, and who dig all that Bug stuff, this is where it all started!
Like all Soul Jazz stuff, gorgeous packaging, tons of vintage photos and of course extensive liner notes.
This duo of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, aka Raime, have conjured up this strange and mysterious slab of dark brooding black energy, equal parts minimal electronica, bleak black ambience, abstract techno and avant sound design. Right off the bat, we were reminded of last week's Record Of The Week, Roly Porter's Aftertime, as well as the grim, sinister electronic soundscapes of Ben Frost, not to mention recent techno favorites from Shed, Terence Dixon and Stefan Goldmann. In fact, in some ways, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line is like a bizarre hybrid of all of those. Casting doomic plod as stripped down electronic skitter, reminding us of Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore, creating heaving slabs of rumbling crumbling blackened heaviness, that sound like Wolf Eyes score for an orchestra, transforming mutant strains of dub and jungle into creeping expanses of sinister stutter, and stretching dubstep bass warble into droned out layers, and wrapping them around haunting sprawls of cinematic menace.
The record almost plays out like a soundtrack or score, the various pieces blurring into one another, the most disparate, still sonically linked, from the opening rumbles, like some blackened hellish noise-drone, drifting beneath distant keening melodies, laced with shards of grinding glitch, all underpinned by ominous minor key melodies, gradually dissipating, leaving a sprawl of looped skitter, beneath a cloud of ominous chordal thrum the vibe dark and doomy, subtly rhythmic, a little bit dubby, the drumming splintering into near industrial crunch, with the background sounds never ceasing their woozy drift. That drift transforming into the aforementioned Bohren-like creep, minimal and cinematic, which over the course of the next two tracks, begins to slip back into something much more techno, almost jungle sounding, but somehow remains restrained, the rhythmic heft more implied, a muted pulse and stutter behinds warm swirls of melody and dark fragments of caustic crunch.
From there on out, the sound unfurls and expands, slipping from Arvo Part like choral majesty, to harrowing tense rhythm flecked drone, to lush orchestral, industrial shimmer, the various pulses and crashes, groans and clatters, gorgeously rendered, the sound design lush and lovely, while also being harsh and weirdly alien, but all blurred and woven into Raime's haunting moody mesmer.
So cool to see Los Angeles duo Rainbow Arabia get a release on an awesome internationally respected label, and also cool that Kompakt seems to be really branching out and releasing an album that takes a serious sonic shift into a new direction for the label. We were immediately smitten with Rainbow Arabia from when we heard their first self released album and ep a few years back. Sadly, we were never able to get them into the store, but we were quite confident they would become a band that lots of people would be hearing about soon enough.
Their first bigtime release, Boys & Diamonds, does a great job of demonstrating how RA borrow from electronica, Bollywood, Congotronics, and so much more into a totally dizzying and seductive sound that is pretty much impossible not to get swept away by. This time out there's a bit more of a moody vibe to their sound which has us imagining Fever Ray remixed by Santo Gold or M.I.A. And the M.I.A. influence is definitely noticeable on much of Rainbow Arabia's output, but on Boys And Diamonds, they've really done an exceptional job of incorporating that influence into a heavy and dreamy blend of sounds and styles. So colorful and catchy, we're going to be blasting this one for months to come! Lp comes with cd of album as well.
A while back we reviewed a mysterious cd-r from a band called Utsuro Bune, the disc was a head caving slab of single-guitar un-overdubbed black psychedelia, a massive glacial doomdrone, but one that bristled with a unique psychedelic energy, positioning itself closer to say Keiji Haino rather than SUNNO))), or as we described it in the review, some strange hybrid of the two. Well it seems that the man behind UB, Matt Kattman, has ditched the UB monicker, and started a new project, this one, The Rainbow Body, still with a similarly drone-y bent, but this time ditching the heaving heaviness for something more spaced out and kosmische, an eight part song suite that finds Kattman's guitar drifting through clouds of blissed out shimmer, encountering the occasional burst of gristled static, and conjuring up the same sort of galactic drift as aQ faves Expo 70, but The Rainbow Body takes that sound even further out, more ghostly and spectral, most of the tracks floating ethereally, the sound so dreamy and tripped out and softly psychedelic, that on first listen we thought it might have all been synth based, the guitars looped and wreathed in effects and transformed into streaks and smears, blurred expanses of chordal shimmer and disembodied melody. But there's more going on there that just drift and shimmer, Kattman laces the tracks with mysterious pulsations, strange tonal shifts, buried rhythms, woozily tangled loops, occasionally slipping into ominous sci-fi drones, but just as often blossoming into prismatic new age glimmer, and while there are some more sinister moments, where the sound grows moody and mildly malevolent, it's all part of the Rainbow Body's cinematic scope, Metatron's Cube playing out like some strange celestial soundtrack, the score to some mysterious planetarium show, it's the sound of a million stars time lapsed into a sky full of fireworks like streaks, a mesmerizing display of cosmic sonic drift and spaced out dreamdrone mesmer.
Packaged in a sweet full color J-card, with a download coupon for a digital version of the whole tape.
The second tape this year from one man guitarscaper The Rainbow Body, aka Matt Kattman, who was also responsible for another aQ fave, the crushing blackened doomdrone of Utsuro Bune. But as we mentioned in our review of the last Rainbow Body tape, Kattman has decided to delve into something much more atmospheric and kosmische, using just his guitar and a handful of effects, creating, lush billowing landscapes of hazy, washed out guitar ambience, and slow shifting layers of longform guitardrone bliss out. An eight part songsuite, with each part bleeding organically into the next, the sound here is alternatingly sun dappled and dreamy, droned out and sinister, the sound at times reminding us of a more spaced out new age-y Roy Montgomery, lush languorous chords, drifting weightless in sprawling expanses of layered shimmer, loops tangled into dreamlike swirls of soft focus melody. Cosmic and celestial, wreathed in reverb and echo, notes and chords caught in swirling clouds of muted buzz and raga like thrum, darkly meditative, and divinely mesmerizing, anyone into psychedelic drone music, kosmische new age drift and minimal guitarscapery will want to get lost in the Rainbow Body's woozy, washed out prismatic soundworld.
Packaged in a full color J-card and includes a download coupon as well.
After two amazing tape releases, The Rainbow Body returns with this super limited (just 50 copies!) ep, which again, like Metatron's Cube and Return Under Void before it, unfurls a gorgeously gristly landscape of blown out guitar crunch and blurred kosmische psychedelia, opening with a heavy, heaving sprawl of crumbling distortion, wrapped around glistening melodies, like a Tim Hecker jam cranked way up and run through a bank of dying-battery distortion boxes, simultaneously noisy and chaotic and utterly dreamy, especially when there's a super sudden shift, and all the distortion drops away, leaving a keening stretch of muted melodic mesmer, all low end melody and swirling shimmering hiss. The rest of the ep plays out similarly, balanced deftly between full on noise, and bleary blown our dreamdronedrift, sometimes harnessing wild squalls of blackened psychedelia and crafting them into droned out soundscapes, other times, unfurling hazy washed of muted melody and blurry celestial shimmer, and still other times, conjuring up dense swells of thick chordal thrum, wreathed in soaring swirls of cosmic dream psych blur. So gorgeous. And as we mentioned, EXTREMELY LIMITED!!
Fans of dark electronic murkiness, and avant industrial minimal house, or fuck, whatever you want to call the sort of electronic music that creeps and oozes and lurches and lumbers, if you've yet to discover the black sonic joy or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (aka Dom Fernow, he also of about a million other projects, most notably perhaps, Prurient and Cold Cave, and most recently, Vatican Shadow and Christian Cosmos), here's another chance to catch up on some of what you've been missing. Two super limited cassettes, now available again as most likely equally limited 12"s, The Plant With Many Faces finds Fernow pushing his sound into more mysterious directions, the opener the oddball here, falling squarely in seventies soundtrack territory, with pulsing Carpenter like synths, arpeggiated bass pulsations and thick clouds of psychedelic blacknoise, before the sound quickly settles into the more minimal drift of previous releases, soft-focus chordal swells, wrapped in swaths of pixelated washed out thrum, a hazy barely there swirl of abstract sound, near ambience flecked with abject sinister sonic shadows. The flipside continues to sink deeper into whatever subterranean world these sounds emanate from, delivering a noisy industrial hum, slow shifting layers, buried melodies, all smeared into a grey-gaze atmospheric sprawl that sounds like a more desiccated Caretaker, which is precisely how the final track winds down, extending that hissy subterranean ambience, but adding some low end warble, some distant percolations, a buried rhythm that sounds like it's being broadcast from the bottom of the sea, the vibe a sort of sonar symphony of shadows, hauntingly abstract and bleakly ultra minimal, but still stunningly and obliquely beautiful.
Folklore Venom is the perfect companion for The Plant With Many Faces, opening with a heroin house creep, a slo-mo techno swirl that is soon enveloped in a cloud of hiss and softly caustic crunch, that relentless pulse, a motorik constant at the heart of the track's dense drift. The sound quickly shifts to something even more abstract and atmospheric, a sprawl of sonic dread, a high end haze draped over keening far away melodies, a wasted industrial dronescape, rife with strange sonic cascades and underpinned by deep rumbling throbs, blurred into near stasis, the whole thing a dense black thrum, laced with softly psychedelic overtones. The final track is the closest either of these reissues has come to the newer RSE records, weaving a tripped out softly noisy soundscape, constructed from what sounds like manipulated field recordings, bird song, animal calls, the result is at once strangely dreamy, and yet utterly and totally alien.
You can't go wrong with either, but if dark electronic weirdness, and murky psychedelic ambience is your thing, best grab both before they are gone for good...
Fans of dark electronic murkiness, and avant industrial minimal house, or fuck, whatever you want to call the sort of electronic music that creeps and oozes and lurches and lumbers, if you've yet to discover the black sonic joy or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (aka Dom Fernow, he also of about a million other projects, most notably perhaps, Prurient and Cold Cave, and most recently, Vatican Shadow and Christian Cosmos), here's another chance to catch up on some of what you've been missing. Two super limited cassettes, now available again as most likely equally limited 12"s, The Plant With Many Faces finds Fernow pushing his sound into more mysterious directions, the opener the oddball here, falling squarely in seventies soundtrack territory, with pulsing Carpenter like synths, arpeggiated bass pulsations and thick clouds of psychedelic blacknoise, before the sound quickly settles into the more minimal drift of previous releases, soft-focus chordal swells, wrapped in swaths of pixelated washed out thrum, a hazy barely there swirl of abstract sound, near ambience flecked with abject sinister sonic shadows. The flipside continues to sink deeper into whatever subterranean world these sounds emanate from, delivering a noisy industrial hum, slow shifting layers, buried melodies, all smeared into a grey-gaze atmospheric sprawl that sounds like a more desiccated Caretaker, which is precisely how the final track winds down, extending that hissy subterranean ambience, but adding some low end warble, some distant percolations, a buried rhythm that sounds like it's being broadcast from the bottom of the sea, the vibe a sort of sonar symphony of shadows, hauntingly abstract and bleakly ultra minimal, but still stunningly and obliquely beautiful.
Folklore Venom is the perfect companion for The Plant With Many Faces, opening with a heroin house creep, a slo-mo techno swirl that is soon enveloped in a cloud of hiss and softly caustic crunch, that relentless pulse, a motorik constant at the heart of the track's dense drift. The sound quickly shifts to something even more abstract and atmospheric, a sprawl of sonic dread, a high end haze draped over keening far away melodies, a wasted industrial dronescape, rife with strange sonic cascades and underpinned by deep rumbling throbs, blurred into near stasis, the whole thing a dense black thrum, laced with softly psychedelic overtones. The final track is the closest either of these reissues has come to the newer RSE records, weaving a tripped out softly noisy soundscape, constructed from what sounds like manipulated field recordings, bird song, animal calls, the result is at once strangely dreamy, and yet utterly and totally alien.
You can't go wrong with either, but if dark electronic weirdness, and murky psychedelic ambience is your thing, best grab both before they are gone for good...
This is ostensibly a walk through Jeruselem as recorded by Random Inc. (who was a member of Autopoeises) and then processed/altered/fucked with by himself and a handful of guests including Tim Hecker, Electric Birds, the Rip-Off Artist, Ultra-Red and more. The results are pretty fantastic. I've listened to almost nothing else for the last few nights. This falls somewhere between AQ faves Stefan Mathieu and Oval, sort of gritty, buzzy, and hypnotic dreamscapes, but much darker and more cinematic, partly because of the recorded snippets of life/people/music in Jerusalem, but also because of the musical choices made by the contributors. This is a really dreary, somber, hypnotic, droning affair, with lots of buzz and click and hum and skitter. And the artists gentle touch with the original sound sources results in some totally breathtaking moments. I haven't dug a record this much since Oval's Diskont. Great stuff.
Stephan Meissner is a mainstay of the Mille Plateaux clicks 'n cuts crew via his work in Autopoesies and his solo projects Random Industries and Random Inc. "Jerusalem" is his latest work, the resulti of four years of gathering and editting sound material, specifically related to the complex and often volatile relationship between Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem. Meissner's
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Random Industries is the work of Sebastian Meissner (ex-Autopoieses). For "Selected Random Works," Meissner has constructed 99 very short digitally sharp pieces - mostly of crystalline glitches and stochastic / erratic rhythms, but others have incidental melodies that inconsequentially pass through soap operas. As you can probably guess, the idea is to set your cd player to random and let the machine construct new patterns each time you hear it. There are some post-digital / post-structuralist ideas mentioned in the liner notes about creating non-linear space and the subversion of interactivity through indeterminancy... all fine ideas, but ones that can not possibly be found on this disc. First of all, the random function of the cd player will simply collate the 99 pieces into different patterns... not reconstruct the fluidity of time. A cd player is not a time machine, no matter how many drugs you take. Second, all of the 99 pieces have a very similar timbre (quite charming and glistening), making it impossible to not listen to it as mere fragments of a larger whole. Pay no attention to the theoretical silliness, as this is a fine collection of powerbook glitch fuckery.
Post-punk technician and multi-instrumentalist Eric Random hailed from Manchester in the late '70s, having collaborated with Pete Shelley in The Tiller Boys (an experimental electronic project more akin to Shelley's Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners output); but Random's most enduring relationship was with Cabaret Voltaire, whose development from DIY horror-electronics into sensual proto-electronica and disjointed-funk pulled a number of artists in their influential wake, including the likes of Hula, Clock DVA, and Eric Random's various projects. The Bedlamites began in the early '80s, with Time Splice being the band's second album recorded and produced by Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire in 1984, getting released on Double Vision that same year. The album veered in a number of directions including post-punk dub explorations, sitar-driven dervishes for electronic headiness, and subversive disco-pop laced with antiestablishment samples amidst the cybotron rhythm box workouts. The bulk of the album is instrumental, through Random has employed the talents of vocalist Lynne Walton, who adopted the ballsy stage name Stagger Lynne as a female counterpart to the murder ballad anti-hero Stagger Lee. Her icy, minimal wave vocals hold a commanding presence amidst the complex step-sequences and punchy, industrial-pop intervals; and had she been used more in the context of the band, she might be remembered alongside Danielle Dax and Anne Clark as an exemplary eccentric of British female pop singers. Perhaps Walton stepped outside the limelight due to the Bedlamites stepping into the role of being Nico's touring / backing ensemble from 1982-1988 right up to her untimely death. A very interesting footnote to one of the better reissues from the whole minimal wave rejuvenation. The Mad As Mankind single (also produced for Double Vision in 1984 by R.H. Kirk) is included as the bonus to the fully remastered Time Splice album.
What do sandpaper and spraypaint bring to mind? Abrasiveness? Graffiti? Woodwork? Well, this is definitely not the case with Randomnumber. Those particular materials are what adorns this cd. Squares of sandpaper of varied grit are the insert and traycard.
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Skweee!!! See our Museum of Future Sound review for more explanation...
Ah, Finland! You never cease to amaze us with the wealth of intruding sounds that emerge from your arctic landscape; and you've once again provided us with somebody new to get excited about. While our obsession with Finnish music has been typically centered on the liminal psychedelia of Circle, Kemiallyset Ystavat, Avarus, and all things Fonal, we've also been quite taken by the frigid electronica that Pan Sonic has been making for many years now. Antti Rannisto comes from the same mold as Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio in sculpting a compelling post-techno electric field of phase-shifting throbs and sine-wave tones with impeccable precision. In many ways, Aaniesineita mirrors what Vainio did on his solo records Metri and Tulkinta. There really is not very much to Rannisto's work, often just a hyper-repetitive 4/4 pulse with subtle shifts of panning, EQ envelope manipulation, and phase shifting of tonal elements. According to Rannisto, it's all about rotation. That pretty much says it all.
This single has been making DJs of all stripes cream their pants since it was released earlier this year. "House of Jealous Lovers" (as well as its Morgan Geist remix version, also on this DFA 12") has been showing up at house nights, electro clubs, and post-punk DJ sets by hipster british video artists. It's the kind of song that is equally irrisitable to art punkers, San Francisco disco divas, discriminating indie kids and Brooklyn fashion victims. No, that's absolutely not a criticism-- it's an illustration of how, like their best funk-punk predecessors, the Rapture bridge the gap between rock and dance music undergrounds. Basically, this single kicks all kinds of asses all over the dance floor, whether it be located in a sweaty club or in your bedroom.
Six song ep from these NYC scene up-n-comers. Disco punk!
Ras G is a member of the LA based Flying Lotus crew, having contributed jams to FL's records, as well as releasing a ton of limited releases on his own label. So we were interested to hear this...
Trafficking in a J Dilla instrumental hip hop style, Ras G has crafted what is essentially his own Donuts, an instrumental beats and breaks record, most of the tracks hovering at about the one or two minute mark, and while the obvious hip hop headz probably already dig this stuff, or soon will, it seems to us like everyone who's been going nuts for stuff like Clams Casino, How To Dress Well, Balam Acab, Shlohmo and that sort of post-witch house slo-mo-soul might dig this too. Although it's definitely a bit more ADD than the usual WH blissed out atmospheric sprawl. But within these brief blasts, there's so much shit going on, video game sounds, clipped and looped vocal samples, dubbed out rhythms, so many cool unlikely samples, funky horns, lots of record crackle and warped and warbly melodies, he also seems to be strangely obsessed with that horn, the one that you always hear at sporting events (and was recently featured in a Drake / Eminem radio hit), all arranged meticulously into micro soul classics, bumpin' hip hop could have been hits, and throughout, there are some seriously sick beats, the vibe sorta groovy and laid back, like some old dusty record, discovered while crate digging in some alternate universe, and played back on some strange contraption that spins lps in your chopped and lowered ride. So rad!
You might guess from the band name, the pink record cover, and the fact that it's on the Blackest Ever Black label, that this would be some sort of dark post industrial minimal techno, or avant hauntological house music, but in fact this is full length number two from NYC metalpunks Raspberry Bulbs, featuring He Who Crushes Teeth from aQ faves Bone Awl, and really, while Raspberry Bulbs is often touted as whole different sort of sonic beast, their sound is definitely cut from the same cloth as the raw black buzz and pound of Bone Awl. If anything, it's the sound of Bone Awl given a punk rock makeover, injected with a healthy does of poppiness too. Simple and stripped down, thick buzzy basslines, crunchy distorto guitars, practice space sounding drum pound, and some heavily effected vocal bellows, all wound up into a tense sort of post punk that is really not that far removed from more polished / popular groups like Iceage, Holograms or Lust For Youth. Albeit way more fucked up and fractured, noisy, chaotic, urgent and intense.
Even with that black metal lineage, and the basic sonic similarities, it's still curious that Raspberry Bulbs appeal so much to metalheads, these guys would be way more at home on a bill with the above bands than any proper black metal outfits, and we're guessing anyone into those groups, or Grave Babies, Rank/Xerox and the like, heck even Interpol or Cold Cave, will flip for these guys too. Fuzzed out noise-rock garage-gloom post-punk that swaggers and slithers, pounds and howls, revealing its surprisingly catchy side throughout, hooks surfacing from the din and lodging firmly, the brooding buzz punctuated by spidery leads and some surprisingly melodic moments. Even the yowly echo drenched vocals end up sounding more punk rock howl than black metal vokill, turning the whole thing into a strange blackened post punk pop that we're digging a whole lot.
Ever since they first hit the scene almost six years ago, Ratatat have consistently brought such a fun and refreshing sound to the table. Using guitars and electronics to make crunchy and catchy instrumental jams with nods to their love of hip-hop production and electronic dance music, yet all delivered in a very stripped down DIY fashion. Their forth album finds these Brooklyn boys sounding as great as ever, which makes sense, as much of this material was culled from the same sessions that produced their last record. It's cool how these guys have somehow created such a unique and instantly recognizable sound, as the moment you hear one of these songs you know without a doubt that it's Ratatat. The way they bring a left-of-center vibe to totally catchy almost top 40/hip-hop sounding beats, transforming them into the perfect jams to just blast crazy loud in the summertime. LP4 again shows off Ratatat's special ability to conjure totally catchy beats and melodies that flow with so much color and warmth. We love it.
The cover makes this look like it's gonna be some kinda indie-boys making rawk, sorta Strokes-y or maybe Champsy or something like that. But actually it's fairly mellow electronic music. Yawn.
Raudive's A System Of Objects plays like some lost musique concrete classic, albeit modernized in such a way, that it sounds like it could just as easily be some weirdo noisemaker with a new limited lp on Pan. It's tough one to describe, and as frustrating as that is, it also generally means the music in question is truly unique. And holy shit is this stuff unique. Imagine a latticework of ping-ponging rhythms, built from squelchy synths, echo drenched percussion, garbled voices, various samples, conversations, birdsong, then stir in some Logan's Run style sci-fi bloops and bleeps, all underpinned by softly swirling shimmers, and often driven by pulsing kraut-house rhythms, and you'd only be getting sort of close, but if that sounds at all good to you, how this actually sounds is probably even cooler. It's no accident that this is on the same label that also gave us the warped avant techno of Stefan Goldmann, as well as multiple records of LIVE 'electronica' from Elektro Guzzi. Raudive, aka Oliver Ho, also exists in some strange sonic nether region, the music ostensible techno, or house, or at least electronica, but constructed from unlikely elements, and often shaped into something that most definitely doesn't conform to typical dance music. Check out "Ruins" which sounds like a warped housier avant garde take on Yello's "Oh Yeah", or the horn flecked groovy almost Latin sounding "Visitor", which is laced with what sounds like Japanese voices, and lazer blast blurts. There's the free jazz / fragmented techno weirdness of "Furniture", the sci-fi future-dub of "Carcass", and the spaced out 20th century alien classical weirdness of "Blood And Hair", and the woozy electro of "Summoning". Some of the tracks sound like they could be on Kompakt, others sound like they could be on Hyperdub, but in both cases, that sound is warped and weird, and transformed into something that couldn't possibly end up on either, whether it's clouds of swirling chirping high end skitter, or strange female robotic voices, gristly tarpit rhythms, or prepared piano and sloooooowed down vocals, every track here is a serious chunk of avant electronic weirdness, seemingly designed for some druggy alternate universe dancefloor. So cool!
Hefty Records has been one of the most consistently underwhelming record labels that has emerged in the last five years or so; yet, money won't ever be an issue for proprietor John Hughes III as he is the son of the director John Hughes. So, there will always be a steady supply of Savath + Savalas, Slicker, and other generic post-rock / hip-hop hybrid albums residing in the bargain bins until all of the royalties dry up from "The Breakfast Club" and "Pretty In Pink" (not a likely proposition). Thus it seemed odd that the US debut from Shitkatapult / Kompakt pseudo-superstar T. Raumschmiere would land on Hefty. Mostly known for generating an ironic electro-punk swagger culled from the '70s glam rock of Gary Glitter, T. Raumschmiere (aka Marco Haas) has garnered some incredible press including the media bite on salesticker of "Anti" stating, "If the new rock has no guitars, then this is its Elvis Presley." Well, such claims may be justified for albums such as their brazenly crunchy "The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle," but they are far from the truth in describing "Anti." This album finds Haas producing the spartan, swing techno-grooves that Wolfgang Voigt had been composing a couple of years back before going into hibernation after the Gas album "Pop." Sure, the beats have a lusty hip-sway reminiscent of the best libidinal rock 'n' roll, but the rest of the production isn't exactly over the top. Rather, Haas creates quiet, somewhat gritty atmospheres around those rhythms with minor-key drones and sputtering mechanizations. If you're looking for a follow-up to the Gas album "Konigsforst," this will do very well for you, but if you're looking for that electro-punk thing, you're better off with Electronicat or Gold Chains "Straight From Your Radio."
Play this cd loud! Yeah I know, you hear that all the time, but I really mean it! Monster Truck Driver is a mighty good time. It's the electronic equivalent of Big Foot and Quadzilla thundering into your living room or car or headphones... well, maybe not quite! But really isn't T. Raumschmiere's name even rally announcer-ready?! Just a scant four tracks: a "Monster Truck Driver" edit and a Dabrye's Big Truck Remix of the same, as well as a vocal version edit (with spitty, snarky effected vocals courtesy of Miss Kittin) and an uncut instrumental version of "The Game Is Not Over". The latter really reminded me of "Doctorin' The Tardis" by The Timelords. Fun! Each one is a wonderfully heaving, churning and belching thick-necked thumper. But you also get a video of the title track to boot! And - as far as we know - not a single vehicle was harmed.
T. Raumschmiere's Radio Blackout album was one of the best big stompin' glam-techno assaults of the year, and here we have that album's single numba two (after Monstertruckdriver from before the album's release). The draw here is the two remixes by The Bug (Kevin Martin), in his crunchy "dancehell" stylee, one featuring toasting by Ras Bogle. Plus there's a video clip fer yer computer.
After the subtle excursion into heroin house on his "Anti" album for Hefty, T. Raumschmiere returns to his bread and butter with "Radio Blackout" an album of shuffletime techno. Alongside Electronicat and the "Schaffelfieber" compilations on Kompakt, Raumschmiere encapsulates the single minded stupidity of testosterone with a comical b-movie approach to techno that revists the flamboyance of Gary Glitter, The Sweet, and T. Rex. Throughout "Radio Blackout," there are a handful of megawatt stompers that crank out the corroded synth lines emulating fist-pumpin' anthemic guitar licks and shuffling post-glam-rock rhythms. As triumphant and huge as the cuts 'The Game Is Not Over' (which features Miss Kitten barking out the vocals to the 200 mile per hour rhythms) and 'Monstertruckdriver' are, it's easy to overlook how good the rest of the album is. Not content to issue a collection of singles or single worthy material, T. Raumschmiere really did attempt to locate his crunching numbers against low-slung grooves and crackled breakbeats to craft an album. These slower numbers don't appear as the ambient filler, but as the necessary breathing room required before rocketing through more of those tremendous carcrash rhythms. A great album!
While the recent output of T. Raumschmiere exploded with megawatt dancefloor stomps bridging the glizty grooves of '70s glam rock and the insistency of Berlin techno, Random Noize Sessions Vol. 1 is a far moodier affair. This collection of unreleased and live tracks dating back to 1999 oozes with minor-key atmospheres wrapped around subdued rhythms from the Berlin techno template. Marco Haas (the man behind the T. Raumschmiere persona) locates numerous interludes of darkened Pop Ambience throughout the rhythmic tracks; but the rhythms are his bread and butter. This is especially true on the more oblique "GrobMotorOmsk" which is not terribly discreet in its references to the NZ electron loop misanthrope Omit. Just as Haas was pretty obvious in his electro-punk numbers citing Gary Glitter and the Sweet, why not draw from one of the under-recognized masters of modern day electronica?
With that bouncing monotous march and those big dum-dum glam-rock riffs, T. Raumschmiere cranks through six tracks of shuffletime techno as heard in Electronicat and the last Gold Chain's EP. A couple of these tracks venture more into Love Parade rave territory, but still have enough of enough of an electro-strut in them that you have to wonder when some mash-up smart-ass is going make a shuffle mix with this stuff backing Gary Glitter, Sweet, and T-Rex. Four of the tracks had previously appeared on earlier 12" with the other 4 being new to this album.
Now available on vinyl!
We love dancehall. A lot! Makes perfect sense too, a grinding, pounding, throbbing mix of hip hop and dub, with that totally repetitive, hypnotic, instantly recognizable dancehall beat, you know: BOMP..BOMP.........BOMP..BOMP.........BOMP..BOMP. With tongue twisting toasting over the top. Very similar to grime (which is probably why we love grime so much too). Hard really to improve on dancehall, you could maybe, rough it up a little, and, which gives us ragga of course, but then, you could also make the beats even thicker and crunchier and WAY more distorted, you could have the vocalists toast through a tin can and twine run through a fuzzbox and plugged into a battered old blown out loudspeaker, you could take all that stuff and supercharge it, send it coursing through your speakers as if your stereo was struck by lightning, the resulting sounds coming out of your speaker a hard and heavy, fierce and fucked up, super aggressive and distorted but still totally wild and danceable digital hardcore ragga. Whoowee!! Fuck yeah! Similar to the way Alec Empire and other folks took drum 'n' bass and jungle and turned it into superdistorted hardcore brutality, a few likeminded noiseniks have been doing the same with ragga, giving it a DHR makeover, turning already pretty aggressive ragga music into a brain melting blast of buzzing and blown out dancehall. One of those folks is the UK's Kevin Martin, who after years of lurking on the fringes of the noise underground, running the Pathological label and playing in God, Ice and a handfull of other fucked up dubbed out noise outfits (maybe hinting at what was to come), renamed himself the Bug, and started making dark and dense dubby dancehall, the new sound owing as much to classic dub and dancehall as it did to his time spent playing weird fucked up noisiness. A few years back the Bug hooked up with Rootsman and formed Razor X Production, a dynamic duo that began to whip up all sorts of brutal distorted ragga classics, all big beats, blown out production and toasting by some of the world's best reggae / dub / ragga vocalists: Cutty Ranks, He-Man, Daddy Freddy, Tony Tuff, Mexican, El Feco and more. This double disc collects some of the best singles, beats are jagged and sharp, distorted stabs, rumbling rib cage rattling low end, synths are massive thick smears of speaker shredding fuzz, each track a pulsing, throbbing dubbed out groove as hard and pummeling as it is groovy and funky. If all "dance music" was this fucked up and firece and fun even us wallflowers would be forced to spend all our evenings sweating and slithering all over the dance floor.
Re is a duo featuring one of the founders of Constellation Records, who -- it must be stated -- is not a member of their flagship ensemble Godspeed You Black Emperor. Rather, this is the most electronically based outfit to emerge from the Canadian collective. The very slow looping sounds and the occasional clatter of distant mechanized beats has drawn Re to compare themselves to Aphex Twin. Yes, this is wishful thinking. Not to say that this isn't an OK album, but that "Mnant" (with its songs entitled "Scue," "Cipe," "Buke," "Volve," "Ject," "Gulate") is a bit more clever in its semi-ambient electronics than memorable.
Not only does this mix come from our favorite 'techno' label, Kompakt, but it was compiled by a Mexican DJ/producer, Rebolledo, who's got a thing for Filipino '70s psych rock guitarist Wally Gonzalez (of Juan De La Cruz fame, down & dirty Filipino proto-metallers par excellance). aQuarius customers might remember, we even reviewed cd reissues of Wally's two late '70s solo albums some years ago, one of which, 1978's Wally On The Road, provides the intro and outro tracks on this disc, via Rebo's edits of "Wally's Blues" from that album. Perhaps surprisingly, Wally's space-ily effected soloing totally works in the context of all the propulsive and powerful electronic music elsewhere on here. Not only that, but the cover photo has been done as an homage to Wally On The Road, as well - Rebolledo has carefully recreated that album's cover scene, posing identically to Wally, seated on a dirtbike in front of a Porsche, with a pair of fancy cowboy boots on the ground nearby.
So that's pretty cool, and odd, as is this disc, really one of the most captivating, hypnotic, groovy techno mixes we've heard in a while, with lots of interesting standout tracks. 'Bangers' if you will. Among 'em, several exclusive cuts, including Rebo's own studio contribution, the amazing "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", an intensely, relentlessly mesmeric track with bizarrely accented/inflected vocals repeating the title phrase over and over with fierce emotion. The duo Rebo's in with Superpitcher, Pachanga Boys, is here too, and they and he both do some remixes as well. Other artists appearing: Wolfgang Voigt, Red Axes, The Love Supreme, Justus Kohncke, The Twins, C.A.R., Christian S., Sebastian Bouchet, Gebr. Teichmann, Barnt, Slove, and Vox Low. An excellent, idiosyncratic mix we just kinda can't stop playing!
Cd-only, but in June Kompakt will be releasing a 12" vinyl ep featuring an extended 'raw' mix of "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar" as well as two more cuts taken from this album also previously not on vinyl, so any discerning DJ's out there ought to look for that when we have it.
Last list we highlighted the Kompakt mix cd from Mexican DJ/producer Rebolledo, Momento Drive. This 12" ep with the same name features three of the rarest trax from that mix, released on vinyl for the first time, including probably our favorite from that mix, Rebolledo's own "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", here presented in an 'extended raw version'. Again, totally mesmeric and relentless, and a bit bizarre as well due to the vocal part (the title, repeated over an over in a weird, intense accent and manner). The other two selections have Rebolledo's hand in 'em too, one's the Pachango Boys (Rebo's duo with Superpitcher) doing a remix of "Flash" by Stove, the other a Rebo remix of a track by Red Axes. DJs, in particular, ought to think about grabbing this.
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Four versions of a new Red Snapper tune--versions by David Holmes and Two Lone Swordsmen.
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Latest full-length from this British funky drum n' bass band (yes, a live band) in the Mo'Wax tradition.
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What do you get when you cross weirdo Spanish noiseniks Billy Bao with filthy Swedish garage sludge punks the Brainbombs (and by extension, weirdo noise rock minimalists No Balls)?? Apparently you get Regler, a twisted, extremely noisy, high concept, SUPER group, who deliver some seriously difficult listening. Two distinctly different stripes of difficult listening, in fact.
The A side, as is further evidenced by the graphical representation on the jacket, is straight up D-Beat blasting, for the entire side. That's right, furious noise drenched riffing, and frantic, relentless drumming, locked in a continuous frenzy for the entire A side, the result is by turns mesmerizing and infuriating. Folks looking for 'songs' or 'music' (why would you be looking for those on a record like this in the first place?) will definitely be disappointed, but if you're after some dense, heavily layered, modern minimalist metal, this might just push those buttons, cuz really, after a minute or two, it's easy to get lost in sound, much like the trance inducing properties of black metal, the sound here is relentless and totally hypnotic, with the sound changing subtly throughout, the sonic shifts much more dramatic once you're locked in and listening close, the drumming too, seems to phase weirdly, producing still more off kilter weirdness. Needless to say, not for everybody, but for us, we're pretty into it. and that's at 45rpm, slow it down, and suddenly it's a bit more Brainbombsy, still tranced out and repetitive, but sludgier and murkier filthier.
The flipside might even be more frustrating for most folks, the sort of thing that might have been right at home on the recent Sounds Of Silence compilation we made Record of The Week a while back, what we're assuming, is an edit of all the NON-musical elements in the recording of the A side, lots of silence, some blurts of drum freakouts, some weird chordal fadeouts, it's literally like someone grabbed the bits of tape before and after every take and edited them into a single weird near silent it of conceptual sound art. Some breathing, little bits of music here and there, lots of tape buzz and hiss, super weird, but actually very cool. Headphones are required, and then cranking the volume too (although the occasional blast of sound, might freak you out), but then if this wasn't meant to freak you out in the first place, we'd be pretty surprised.
So yeah, while we endeavor to get sufficient copies of the new Brainbombs 2lp, maybe this will tide you over. But really, it probably won't. Recommended for anyone into arty noise, modern minimalism, warped metal experimentation, field recordings, and willful sonic provocateurs of all stripes. Cool cover art, no download, and LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
In recent years there's been a plethora of attempts at merging free jazz with an updated often electronic sound. The results of this merging have often been quite lackluster and disappointing. There has always been something that seems so forced in those unions. So when we heard that legendary and way too underrated jazz percussionist Steve Reid had enlisted the electronic hands of Kieran Hebden of Fridge and Four Tet fame we were both interested yet cautious not to get our hopes to high because of how past collaborations like this have turned out. Luckily our fear was immediately squashed as we put this on. The sounds of vintage prime-time-soul-infused-forward-thinking-jazz a la Art Ensemble of Chicago were coming out our speakers and it was a sound that we know we could rejoice in. The electronics are very subtle and add a nice texture in the moments they appear. This is not some sloppy throw in some samples and clicks and cuts under sax kind of affair. Reid oozes with confidence and a presence that marches with groove and flare. This is for sure one of the best new jazz albums to grace AQ in quite a while. Highly recommended!
Everyone who bought that Soundmurderer drum and bass comp cd on Violent Turd from a while back should just buy this too. Wicked old school drum and bass. Simple and dumb, with lots of Amen breaks and sirens and clipped samples, bass bin rattling lows, tweeter twitching synth stabs, time stretched ragga toasting and just all the big dumb jungle you can handle. This totally brings me back to when the whole AQ crew would go to the only local bar in SF that played jungle, and we would just sit in front of the speakers and LOVE IT. There's a bunch of classics on here (a few that were on the Soundmurderer comp), and there's some brutal 'soul diva' stuff too, but basically this is just classic fucking jungle / drum and bass, that we never get tired of hearing!
Another batch of classic jungle from one of the grand masters of the era (early nineties) Remarc. These are all unreleased dubplates and are all smoking hot. Chopped Amen breaks, huge fuzzed out basslines, and ragga toasting all over the place. Derivative and repetitive, and definitely stuck in the nineties, but if you're anything like us you could listen to this stuff all the time, non-stop and NEVER get tired of it. That Amen drum break is just so wicked. It's hard to beleieve that just a drum beat by itself could be so catchy, but we've had this beat stuck in our heads for the last decade!
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Finally available on CD (through a P&D deal set up by Nu Gruv Alliance), The Remote Viewer is one of dozens of artists whose affinity for Autechre has helped fuse a solid variant of IDM (which unfortunately has no name other than 'this sounds like Autechre'). Krispity, krunchity beats paired with dark ominous melodies and sufficient digital clickery are the order of the day on this surprisingly good release which is perhaps closer to the Boards of Canada end of that narrow spectrum of electronica with an emphasis more of space and bedroom melancholia. The LP is also still available for 8.98.
No, not the Whitesnake song, though surely a somewhat ironic reference. Craig and Andrew of Leeds outfit Hood bring us their second album (not including a handful of singles) of pretty downpop electronica. Much like the electronic efforts of their former group or a melancholic Aphex Twin, the combination of minimal breakbeats and soft atmospherics offer listeners a pleasant, though sometimes tedious exploration of the coalescence of organisms and digitalia. Nice, but nothing groundbreaking here. Featuring guest vocals by Nicola of Empress / Boyracer fame.
For those unfamiliar, The Remote Viewer is an off shoot of the UK band Hood (as well as other projects The Boats and The Famous Boyfriend), and their music is not all that dissimilar, perhaps drawing even closer together with each subsequent release. Both of them fuse indie pop with ambient electronic glitch in their instrumentals and vocal songs and draw from a broad spectrum of influences. Faint pop melodies waft through, percussive chimes materialize occasionally suggesting Far East inspirations. The sixth song "I'm Sad Feeling!" sounds like it'd fit very well alongside the beloved Piano Magic album Low Birth Weight. Ever so delicate and dreamy but with a somber heaviness flowing just under the surface.
You'd never know from listening to Porcelain Opera, that the man behind Rene Hell is also the man responsible for the noisy weirdness of Secret Abuse, and is a member of crusty dirge punks Deep Jew, cuz Porcelain Opera is a whole different world of sound. One that fuses the muted minimal electronic pulse of Basic Channel, with the tripped out psychedelic synthscapes of folks like Emeralds and Oneohtrix, but it's so much more than that. The sound definitely dips liberally into that eighties retro soundtrack vibe of folks like John Carpenter and Goblin, but filters it through a mysterious post industrial electronic aesthetic, creating thick swaths of garbled vocal synth tangle, laced with shards of strange glitched out crunch, and crumbling distorted buzz, voices surface and swirl, twisted and tweaked, a haunting alien robot electro, that will quickly give way to a glimmering pop ambient drift, all shimmering motes of sonic light, floating on layers of ethereal thrum, total sun dappled new age kraut synth bliss. The whole record is like some sort of sonic feverdream. Warm wisps of blurred glitch underpins squalls of processed vox, and propulsive new wave synth crunch, pulses thump beneath a glimmering sky of chiming overtones, and strange softly warped fuzz, murky burbling electronics smolder and sprawl into blackened synthesizer dronescapes, peppered with short bursts of white noise static, and jagged shards of cut up vocals, eventually, building to a deliriously warm wall of shoegazey buzz, before finally finishing off with a swirling blur of intertwined synth melodies, like some sort of retro prog smeared into something much murkier and more washed out, bleary eared and ephemeral.
A weird record for sure, but one that should definitely appeal to fans of Emeralds, Oneohtrix, Expo 70, and other modern kosmische space kraut weirdos, but Rene Hell definitely takes that sound, and makes it all his own, exploring the way out, outer fringes of modern electronic synth kraut psychedelia...
Fantastic split from aQ faves Rene Hell, and until now unknown to us Three Legged Race, both 'groups' paying homage to early electronic music, experimental tape music and science fiction outsider bedroom private press weirdness.
Rene Hell offers up a 4 part series of zoner synthscapes, lush layers of buzzing rumbling electronics, buried, barely there vox, haunting and cinematic, with distinctly pop music melodies, but here suspended in charged fields of squelch and whir and buzz. As the songsuite progresses, the sound shifts to something more new agey and washed out, total Tangerine Dream style kosmische bliss out, swirly and hypnotic, space-y and sun dappled, total trance-y synth age drift, which again changes tone and drifts into something a bit more ominous like the opening track, more cinematic creep, slow, low tones, mysterious and atmospheric, subtly rhythmic, soft swells over buried pulses, finally moving into the closing track, which manages to fuse those two sides of RH's sound, the fluttery super nova synthkraut bliss and the brooding minimal electronic flutter, darkly dramatic, rife with dense chordal swells, swirling black ambient atmophere and more of those muted murky voices.
The flipside is similarly dark and mysterious and electronic, courtesy of Three Legged Race, aka Robert Beatty, who starts his side off with an unexpected chunk of woozy, lo-fi Scott Tuma like loner folk guitar haze, all murky and spidery, underpinned by a soft field of hauzy crackly thrum, glistening melodies drifting in the ether, hushed and lovely, until... in swoop some super twisted processed robotic vox, heavily effected and distorted and crunchy, totally at odds with the rest of the song, but it somehow sort of works.
After a brief swath of Radiophonic Workshop style electronic percolations, raw outer space shimmer, sixties sci-fi sound effects and hauntological bleep and bloop, the record blossoms into a sprawling stretch of glitched out primitive analog electronics, sounding a bit like Bruce Haack, but way more fractured and distorted and processed, a malfunctioning starfield of sound that manages to be weirdly melodic and subtly rhythmic, the background growing louder and murkier and more ominous as the track progresses. So good. Both sides are incredible. Way recommended for fans of the burgeoning new wave of spaced out sci-fi synth drone, especially folks who might be on the hunt for something darker and weirder and slightly more cracked.
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Between the recent delightful Senor Coconut reissues and new albums by Los Negritos, the man behind it all aka Atom Heart (uh, aka Uwe Schmidt) simply cannot be stopped... and who'd want him to anyways! Here's another of his musical incarnations, Replikant Rumba Rockers (let's hear you say that one five times fast!). For Atom Heart fans, this needs no introduction nor any explanation. For others, well, if you wanna get whipped up into a frenzy of deliciously bizarre laptop-tronica, few midi-minded artists can do it like he can and in so many different candy-colored guises. With that in mind, we have to note that this might be one of his most surprising low-key cds. It struck us as being positively sedate by his standards, yet still super fun! Mixed by frequent collaborator Burnt Friedman.
