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V/VM's prankster electronica furrows its brow for "Masters Of The Absurd" -- a far more seriously minded vinyl-only release of digital crunch and mind-erasing distortion than is ususal for these guys, who are normally so worthy of the album's title. Yes, absurdity has always had a place within the work of this Manchester duo; but here, their anarchic glee in atomizing sound information has released a malevolent alter-ego who has little patience for the silliness of their earlier work crafted from digitally damaged thrift store vinyl. V/VM's grand absurdist gesture on "Masters Of The Absurd" is the assignment of a pig farmer and a butcher as the protagonists in their electronica drama. Beyond that, there isn't much logic to V/VM's assaults: just thick layers of overloaded digital noise, decomposing tonal drone haze, stolen fanfares of bombastic almost Wagnerian scores, and an obliteration of George Michael's "Careless Whisper" for those wanting a smattering of V/VM giddiness. Willfully difficult data jamming and blistering electro-shock treatment!
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Oh no. V/VM has too much time on their hands. "Sick-Love" is a collection of their warbled hard disc edit / hack jobs that butcher top 40 love ballads from The Spice Girls, Simply Red, Lionel Ritchie, Berlin, etc... This record is a really bad joke that goes on too long...which maybe puts it into the good joke category. Wait a minute, shouldn't V/VM and Neil Hambuger get together for an all star comedy album?
While V/VM has recently been responsible for some of the worst and most unlistenable mash-ups of UK pop hits into ring-modulated pisstakes, this twin set "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" steps away from their recent atrocities. But it's still hard to trust that V/VM has constructed these recordings with any degree of sincerity; rather, I would postulate that these albums could be KLF-like jokes attempting to seduce the aloof audiences from the IDM crowd into liking V/VM again, much like the KLF did in their ambient record "Chill Out" in which they derided the early '90s ambient scene as being just music for sheep by making one of the best examples of ambient techno. I have no proof for this assumption, just a hunch and an innate distrust for V/VM. Regardless, V/VM claims that the two parts to "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" are the same, when to any sane individual they are clearly different with a less than solid conceptual connection.
The blue album - being the digitally coarse noise album in the pairing - could be viewed as the negation of all of the beautiful melodies and subtle structures of the first. Yet, this side of the dyptic doesn't entirely work as a noise album full of immediate impact and visceral textures and stands more as an execution of a concept. Allan wondered if it's the same V/VM as before and if there had been some internal personnel shifting within the group. Quite possible.
While V/VM has recently been responsible for some of the worst and most unlistenable mash-ups of UK pop hits into ring-modulated pisstakes, this twin set "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" steps away from their recent atrocities. But it's still hard to trust that V/VM has constructed these recordings with any degree of sincerity; rather, I would postulate that these albums could be KLF-like jokes attempting to seduce the aloof audiences from the IDM crowd into liking V/VM again, much like the KLF did in their ambient record "Chill Out" in which they derided the early '90s ambient scene as being just music for sheep by making one of the best examples of ambient techno. I have no proof for this assumption, just a hunch and an innate distrust for V/VM. Regardless, V/VM claims that the two parts to "Sometimes, Good Things Happen" are the same, when to any sane individual they are clearly different with a less than solid conceptual connection.
If you have to choose one over the other (and that is recommended), pick the Orange disc. This album is a dreamy collection of floating ambient washes, metallic drones, and sensibly minimal rhythmic clicks, not at unlike the acclaimed Aphex Twin album "Selected Ambient Works Vol 2." Surprisingly listenable, but should you trust V/VM to not laugh at you for enjoying this? Of course not. But so what?
V/VM was the first project that forced sonic hermit Leyland Kirby into the public eye, when he emerged as a giddy figurehead for the amphetamine-amped drill'n'bass that blossomed around the likes of Hrvatski, Aphex Twin, and Atari Teenage Riot in the late '90s. For all of the hype that surrounded him, Kirby's 'sound' was essentially, a purposefully aggravating, immature brand of cheap musical humor by turns, brutal, noisy, dumb and occasionally sort of genius, although it mostly tended toward the goofy - which included shameful plunderings of '80s dreck ballads, by running a Chris Deburgh or a Lionel Richie song through a ring modulator. Yeah, much of the V/VM material was ridiculous, puerile, and lots of times borderline unlistenable. But that sort of seemed like the point...
Not surprisingly, we avoided much of the early V/VM stuff, circa '90s and '00s; but those glimpses of genius, would later blossom into the sublime transcendent beauty of Kirby's Caretaker persona, and we were not alone in finding Kirby's work as The Caretaker thoroughly sublime, a stunning haunted ballroom approach to ambient composition through massive amounts of cathedral reverb and ample chorales of surface noise from antiquated '78s.
That said, The Death Of Rave project is perhaps the one body of work from V/VM that should most certainly be heard. And which maybe not surprisingly ran concurrent with some of the earlier explorations as The Caretaker, first being released online as a massive archive of over 200 dancefloor anthems being time-stretched and reworked into rave's anti-apotheosis. No rhythm, no release, no exhilaration, this was all grey sculpted noise and decommissioned electricity. This 'partial flashback' represents the best material from that unwieldy catalog which now seems to have vanished from the internet. (Long live the physical medium!) The Death Of Rave cultivates a slow, almost industrially-minded tension of granular electronic noise, with a sense of fictional memories similar to those created in Kirby's dilated 78 recontextualations as The Caretaker. Here, those would be the fabricated memories sought by Roy Batty and his fellow replicants in Blade Runner, flickering repetitions of pixels into dense networks of cold data that in another context would be a jacked-up acid track or a sensual deep-house groove. But here, it's poetically and poignantly vacant - a residual memory recoded as the empty warehouse itself, where a party once happened, with the floor covered in crushed plastic cups, two-day old vomit-n-beer, broken high-heels, and cigarette butts. And in the maudlin mind of Kirby, that's something quite beautiful.
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V/VM's humor requires that their audience not just be familiar with the artists they appropriate but already be over exposed by their insipid pop songs. It may be a delusional agenda, but V/VM's total destruction of such chart toppers as Elton John, Posh Spice, Lionel Ritchie, etc... is swathed in the righteousness of a dadaist salvation: that the world will be much better off if every pop hit has its obliterated V/VM twin. On paper, that sounds like a great idea; but the realization on a Fisher Price turntable and a Kaoss Pad is less than ideal. But it is funny...sort of.
Vadim's super slow motion hip hop minimalism has been funked up with some west coast style turntable tricks ala Skratch Piklz or Cut Chemist. Vadim has also employed a wide variety of vocal talents (including EI-P, BMS, Skinnyman, etc.) but the highlight is Sarah Jones completely non-pretentious femminist reinterpretation of The Last Poets!
Remix of Vadim's USSR Repertoire, including an Oval mix.
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It would be nice to think that after a long day of hammering shards of technotic minimalism from the handbuilt electronics of Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio sleeps next to these machines, operating them in his dreams, their toggles triggered in cybernetic response to the colorful pools of abtract imagery in his subconscious, while at the same time capturing the soothing comfort of a room being slept in at 4 in the morning. While such technology may be entirely out of reach (even for the talented circuit builders of Pan Sonic), Vainio's "Kajo" is a beautiful placid album of serial electrical events that could have been the result of such a sleep-composition. Very nice.
Kilo finds our man Mika Vainio returning to the rhythm and noise once again, and very few people have ever done that combination as successfully as this Finnish electronic artist. Vainio's career, as you probably know, began in the early '90s through the project Panasonic (which later had to be rechristened as Pan Sonic for obvious reasons), with slippery grids of pure-tone bleeps and clinical atmospheres haunted a swaggering techno that aligned in equal parts with Plastikman, Suicide, and Throbbing Gristle. The monumental 4cd set Kesto by Pan Sonic from 2004 marked one of the most exhaustive statements of experimental electronica EVER produced; and the resulting world tour led to the collapse of the Pan Sonic. Vainio remained steadfast in his solo productions since the demise of Pan Sonic, alternating his major albums between the rhythmic workouts and sleepless landscapes of drone-splattered electro-acoustics. Even on an off day, Vainio's rhythmic explorations are at the top of the heap... And on Kilo, Mika Vainio is in top form. His post-techno, breakbeat rhythms have always enjoyed a bad-ass swagger, and those grooves persist on Kilo through an industrial barrage of jackhammered sequencing, Martin Rev-esque pulsations, and cyclotron velocities spun from his analogue noiseboxes. Another very impressive album from Mr. Vainio!
Sure, this is the solo album on which Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio picks up the guitar, but the sounds that he wrangles from that instrument are not all that dissimilar from those he crafted on the final Pan Sonic album Gravitoni, and especially on the first half of their 4cd opus Kesto. There's long been a swagger to the low-slung electronic rhythm and noise that brought Pan Sonic closer to an electro-punk rockabilly sound by simulating a snarling guitar with accelerating riffs of synthesized distortion that had more in common with the growl of a motorcycle than the squelch of an 808. So, when Vainio switches out his tone generators for a guitar, he's still got all the tools to distort, corrode, and disintegrate the sounds of six strings with considerable aplomb. The drum machines, the spatialized approach to editing, the white hot shards of electricity, the swarming noise, and Vainio's ability to control all of his cacophonic sounds are all present on Life (...It Eats You Up). "Mining" is an exemplary track displaying Vainio's ability to work a brutalist noise-guitar riff into his jittery industrial groove, sounding something like a downtuned Big Black or loosened-up Godflesh. Many will comment on Vainio's cover of The Stooges "Open Up And Bleed" which strikes a glam rock strut with drum track and smolderingly dissonant guitar riffs. It must be said that Vainio's cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" on Oleva was a better choice; but this one is pretty damn good too. The rock-n-roll mimesis of these tracks disintegrates over the remainder of the album, where splinters of guitar noise pop through walls of electrified drone, ominous hums, and demolished doom-laden ambience which aren't too far from the realms of KTL or Black Boned Angel. Pretty fucking great.
Mika of Panasonic's solo album, almost an hour of squeaks, subsonic rumbles, ear piercing whistles and barely audible drones. Either your favorite record of the year or you couldn't care less...
This single from the Finnish electronica giant Mika Vainio (one half of the Pan Sonic duo) was meant to be available as a special release on Record Store Day, but it arrived about a week late. These things, of course, do happen. But we've got 'em now, and while RSD 2012 is past, these are still crazy limited, and most likely will be gone in a flash!
Mostly when Vainio records under his given name, his electronics are thoroughly abstracted and dislocated from the rhythmic strategies he produces in Pan Sonic. Those recordings tend to be strange, dream-time excursions of Tesla coil charges and mad-scientist fizzle, but here on this single, Vainio returns to the 'rhythm', which has long been his strong suit. The A side is grinding, shuffle-techno number whose heavy rhythmic swagger and cycloramic distortion locks in step with the Pan Sonic albums Kesto and Gravitoni. The B side is a tad mellower with a groovy noirish rhythm, but equally as dark. One time pressing of 750 copies!
Revitty? Might that have something to do with Martin Rev? It's hard to say if the word means anything other than simple being a title for this solo project from Mika Vainio, one of the two shockheaded Finns behind Pan Sonic. As the electron wrangler for Suicide, Martin Rev has clearly been a major influence on Vainio's work, especially in how to extend electronic sounds through dynamic usage of pattern, repetition, and variation. Both Pan Sonic and Suicide have always been known for the rhythmic pounding of their scalding electric minimalism; yet in most of Vainio's solo work, the rhythmic structures are merely hinted at through nuanced implications or entirely done away with in the spirit of grand abstractions. What's left for Vainio's sound sculpting is raw energy often recklessly unleashed in radioactive bursts with only ghostly hints at a pulsing electricity within. So maybe we're grasping at straws to add some context to this work, but it's still a mighty fine piece of Finnish electronic abstraction, chock full of bleakness and aggression.
Time Examined is a monograph that documents Mika Vainio's scores for installation, film, theater, and performance, sounding very much like the work that Vainio has been releasing through Touch in recent years. As most folks probably already know, Vainio is half of the minimalist techno project Pan Sonic, but his solo work has become increasingly devoid of rhythm, with suspended tones, industrially-minded field recordings, prolonged electrical gasps, explorations into signal decay, and metallic echoes cast upon a black canvas of expansive nothingness. These installations within employ numerous visual cues - vintage clocks, old lightbulbs, transistor radios, vacuum tubes, Soviet-era electrical components, industrial films from the 1940s, and other ephemeral equipment from science laboratories from a past era. There had always been something elegantly retrograde about Vainio's electronic tinkerings with sound, and his installation work certainly reinforces this reading into his work. The accompanying 92 page book features tons of images from these installations, films, performances, and dance pieces with accompanying texts from CM von Hausswolff and Daniela Cascella. The first of the two cds features scores from over the past 15 years; and the second disc features the tone-plus-bleep split 1997 release Mikro Makro that Vainio produced alongside Carsten Nicolai (then recording just as Noto). A very nicely designed document!
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Following the bleak shiftings of sound on his albums "Okno" and "Ydin", Vainio (who also works in Pan Sonic and has a list of pseudonyms including �, Kentolevi, Tekonivel, and Philus) sets up the electrostatic buzz of his Complex Sound Generator against the body cavity throb of huge slo-mo beats. An excellent (if only 20 minutes long, lacking in artwork, and very hard-to-find) document from this AQ-beloved electronica artist.
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'Ydin' is a limited edition release of 750 copies of dark haunting electronic minimalism. Raster has proclaimed this to be best solo project from Vainio (of Pan Sonic, 0, Philus, Kentolevi, Tekonivel). Certainly it's in the running. As one of Vainio's non-beat oriented psychoacoustic compositions, Ydin is an exploration of electricity buzzing with delicate pulses, slashing noises, and eerie reverberations. Excellent!
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Mika Vainio of Pan(a)sonic and Sahko fame, Pita of Mego, and minimalist Charlemange Palestine each composed and performed a piece for machines (duh) that include the electric siren and 'bell tree'. The one collaboration between Pita and Mika Vainio is certainly worth the price of admission alone... 12 minutes of sublime murky beep and click composed entirely out of the processed sounds of typewriters!!!
Panasonic team up with Alan Vega of Sucide fame for a full-length!
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Vaisanen is one half of Pan Sonic with Mika Vainio, and presents his contribution to what may be the coolest series for 1999. Noton / Raster has commissioned 12 electro-minimalists to reconstitute 20 minutes for the next millenium. Vaisanen is clearly the brutalist of Pan Sonic (where as Vainio is the sublimist) presenting harsh tones coupled with electronica 4/4 pulses.
Ilpo Vaisanen hasn't had nearly as prolific a solo career as Mika Vainio - his companion in Pan Sonic who has a plethora of solo projects under his own name and as Ø, Philus, Tekonivel, and Kentolevi. "Asuma" is actually his first full album, finding a good home on Mego. After his electro-rhythm crunch which he contributed to Raster / Noton's "20 to 2000" series and a hard to find 12" of similar post-techno damage, we were surprised that his debut solo project had more more in common with Vainio's dreamy electro-acoustic collages.
"Asuma" acoustically feels as if it is intentionally paralleling the optical phenomenon of a mirage -- with wavering textures that never provide much definition to objects near the horizon in an environment of oppressive heat. Vaisanen keeps the subtle rhythmic elements (perhaps generated by voltage fluctuations rather than drum machines) submissive to the hot-wired buzzing drones from ill-tempered cable groundings. Really sublime and quite unassuming.
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Skweee!
Recording as Locust back in the late '90s, Mark Van Hoen produced a signature post-IDM electronica that was sublime in mood but was fraught with overly complicated rhythms and portentous song cycles that weighed far too heavily on what might have developed into something on par with Biosphere or Bowery Electric. As a result, much of his output is immediately attractive but has failed to rise above the overwrought production he endlessly piled on to his sounds.
Fortunately, recently Van Hoen came upon an experimental tape piece he made at the precocious age of 13, when he was remastering some of his earlier tracks from the '90s. That archival track centered on a mashed-up banal pop song with garbled vocals and backwards recordings of church organs, creating something quite spooky and arresting. Van Hoen took the simplicity of that process to heart (but not the track itself, drat!), recording much of The Revenant Diary on a 4-track, which is pretty much unheard of in this day and age of Ableton. The results find Van Hoen at his absolute best, shorn of those implausible complexities which troubled his earlier recordings, rendering an album that should warrant plenty of comparisons to Demdike Stare as a very well executed piece of hauntological electronica.
The warbly, decaying drones from those 4-track levitate in an uneasy fashion at the beginning of the album, suffocating what was once a vigorous drill-n-bass workout into fizzling skitter amidst the shadow, grain, and hiss of "Garabndl X", leading into the hypnotic "Don't Look Back", whose looping female vocals intoning the track's title, orbit a strutting, dubbed-out, mid-tempo rhythm that wouldn't seem out of place on Tricky's Maxinquaye. "No Distance" glides two streams of reverberant ambience along a computer-mad sequencing as a meeting between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal. While all of this may be simple from Van Hoen's perspective, The Revenant Diary is a richly textured album that dynamically jumps from vertiginous ambient passages into throbbing, post-dubstep explorations of rhythm. Let's hope that Van Hoen keeps it this 'simple' for the next record!
Those Vinyl On Demand boxsets are a very tempting proposition. Some are no brainers - SPK, The Hafler Trio, and John Duncan all offered up utter classics of unreleased or impossible to find recordings spanning multiple pieces of wax and housed inside handsome packaging. But others are a bit too obscure to fork over well over a hundred bucks for an unknown quantity. Van Kaye & Ignit were one of those terminally obscure minimal wave projects whose collected works had been anthologized through a massive 5lp boxset on Vinyl On Demand. It came and went as too much of an expense for us to invest in. Thankfully Dark Entries has extracted a good chunk of that material in the form of this 2lp set, plus the tracks from the duos first seven inch not found on that VoD set. Van Kaye & Ignit (nee Ed Van Kasteren and Ignatine Bekken) began their fruitful collaborations in the late '70s with the former hailing from more of a punk background and the latter from the realm of performance art, with both sharing an infatuation with DIY electronics. A Slight Delay was a cassette release the band self-published on their own Ding Dong Records, which later would go on to release works by the Legendary Pink Dots, Bene Gesserit, and that amazing Andre De Saint-Obin album. The idiosyncratic melding of experimental modelling, pop-song naivete, and inventive use of electronics found in all of those other bands is something that Van Kaye & Ignit share. Given a spacious Martin Hannett production, the turbine electronic stabs and spry drum programming of "Beach" could have been a Hacienda hit for Factory Records, but as it stands, it's just one of many deft synth-wave / mutant-disco / synth-punk tunes on A Slight Delay. While that track's an instrumental along with about half of those found on this 2lp set, Van Kaye and Ignit do share the vocal duties when called for, with Ignit being the stronger of the two with her Nina Hagen theatricality and Van Kayen adopting the untrained approach of Genesis P-Orridge. Along with the Belgian comrades of Bene Gesserit, Pseudo Code, and the rest of the Insane Music network, Van Kaye & Ignit have a sympathetic sound to those antipodean malcontents Severed Heads. Another great find from Dark Entries; and we gotta wonder if there's going to be a cottage industry of somebody going through the Vinyl On Demand catalogue to reissue those reissues in more economical chunks.
Yet another bit of gorgeous drifting pop ambience from the Echospace camp, this time from the unknown to us Brock Van Wey, which is strange in part because he's from right here in SF, and apparently he's been making this divine dreaminess for a while now.
Well, no use in lamenting what we may have missed, better to just leap straight in to these white clouds, and live in the moment. And Van Wey's moment is indeed divine, a series of sprawling gauzy ethereal moments in fact, all soft tones, and softly tumbling melodies. We hear Brian Eno all over this for sure, as well as Gas and Roedelius and Reich, needless to say if those names mean anything to you, odds are this could well become your new favorite late night chill out music.
A hushed ambient pop drift, equal parts new age shimmer, and muted electronic thrum, here and there the sound gets super fuzzy and washed out and suddenly we're reminded of the Field, or perhaps a beatless M83, that same sort of sun dappled soft focus looped mesmer, often the sound seems to be constructed from voices, layered and effected, a hauntingly organic and lovely assemblage of tones and textures, alternately rendered in minimal drift, and maximal shimmer. So gorgeous. Gorgeous enough that Echospace mainman Stephen Hitchell was so smitten that he added a whole extra disc of his own reinterpretation / remix of the album, and if Hitchell's version, while dramatically different, is just as good. The fuzzed out bliss is muted and blurred and backgrounded, allowing rhythms and minimal textures to drive these versions, the sound very much Chain Reaction, a glitchy skeletal dub, wreathed in soft smears of the original's dreamy buzz, a super modern dubbed out click and glitch and thump and pulse, that drifts from warm gristled buzz, to lounge-y almost exotica, to full on dark space dub, and finally to warm, hissy, glitchy, skittery, washed out dreamdrone ambience. Both discs on their own would be essential listening, but together, this couldn't be more recommended.
Finally, a remastered vinyl reissue of the Blade Runner score sees the light of day. It's funny that most people know the music of Chariots Of Fire far more than they know the actual movie, but with Vangelis's other big soundtrack, for an undoubtedly more famous film, the original score has been somewhat difficult to secure. It did not get an official release until 1994, 12 years after the film debuted, and over the years multiple versions have become available that either added to or subtracted from the original material. The movie itself has multiple versions, and with the 1992 Director's Cut arguably becoming the definitive version of the film, the Vangelis score finally became available as well, a version so intertwined with the film that it also includes snippets of dialogue from this futuristic noir masterpiece. The score, a mix of mystical exotica, dark electronic minimalism and sadly romantic themes, is marked by heavy electronic treatments and classical instrumentation evoking a hazy twilight dreaminess and melancholic longing that serves the film exquisitely. Easily a touchstone for a lot of modern day synth-worshippers, get this score on vinyl while you can, as it is already out of print awaiting a repress apparently. Like all limited things, eventually "all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" (sorry, we had to fit that line in here somewhere!).
By now, we know exactly what to expect from a new Echospace record. Total soft focus Pop Ambient bliss out. Abstract, ethereal, gauzy, murky, meditative, Variant is the perfect addition to the Echospace stable, exploring similar sonics, but adding a definite darkness, wreathing the shimmer and drift in a surf like crackle and hum, the buried melodies, more like pulses, distant throbs, the heroin house of classic Chain Reaction rendered even more indistinct, the beats, skeletal and glitchy, just as often slipping into the background, to lurk rhythmically below the constantly shifting layers of bristly texture. And it's that texture that defines The Setting Sun, where plenty of electronica is wispy and shadowy and otherworldly and effervescent, Variant is most definitely a much more grim, and foreboding proposition, the dubbed out elements floating in a morass of processed record crackle, of blurred white noise, the hiss of electronic rainfall. The best moments in fact are when the texture and ambience swell and swallow up all the other elements, leaving a dark shimmery cloud of sound particles to drift and glimmer and glisten before the beat, or melody finally struggles back to the surface.
The 23 minute closing track is a gorgeous (and surprisingly) crystalline chunk of slow burning shimmer, pulled apart into a sort of ultra abstract slowcore, all the above mentioned buzz and crackle relegated to the background, a sibilance WAY off in the distance, the sound warm, and melancholy, sun dappled and delicate, a pretty and sunshiney coda to an otherwise dark and dense disc of dubbed out electronic ambient hiss and pulse. Easily our new favorite late night drifting off disc...
You know some smart ass had to do it... call his project 'Various Artists' to confuse retail clerks who wouldn't be called the shiniest tools in the shed. Well, Various Artists is just one guy who has a number of releases for Chain Reaction - the hypermininal techno collective from Berlin which spawned Porter Ricks, Vainquer, Pole, Monolake, etc. The remixing artists for this single are Autechre and Funkstorung on one side doing their vertiginous electronica breaks, while the flip features Chain Reaction's Pole and Monolake who extend the granular synth pulse of Various Artists into thunderous dub and shifting techno. Pretty damn cool.
Death & Unity With God was originally one of those tiny edition tape boxsets that Hospital Productions released at some point in 2014. Yes, those six cassettes will be reprised at some point onto a 3cd anthology through Modern Love; but for now, we have this 2lp set which sports 12 of the 20 songs. Missing are a handful of the slug-paced techno torpor tracks from Vatican Shadow; and while the vinyl set is pretty outstanding, the complete package will be found on the triple cd set!
Vatican Shadow is, of course, Dominick Fernow - the man also behind Prurient and the Hospital Productions empire. Over the past three or four years, Fernow has shifted his focus almost entirely to toward Vatican Shadow, using a loose critique of religious indoctrination as the conceptual framework for his spare rhythmic exercises in crunchy Middle Eastern electro dervishes. The precursor this work is obviously Muslimgauze; and the work on Death & Unity With God continues along this same trajectory, linking the distinctly American cult of personality catastrophes (Jim Jones, David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh) with the ideological endgames of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The political rhetoric to this work quickly wane in the seductive power of Fernow's rhythms, and that may be the point. But more likely this disconnect recalls a common critique of Fernow's work as being thoroughly surface oriented with a armor-plated facades of masculinity, intellectualism, etc. covering up something that's hollow, missing, or lacking. This however is all thrown out the window when it comes to how good a producer Fernow can be, with Death & Unity With God being one of his most subtly dramatic piece of modern day electronica. Bleak electrical chorales and dread-inducing rumblings haunt these 12 tracks that are girded upon slowly unfurling spare rhythms whose breakbeats slink with an desert-dry Arabic groove alternating with nocturnally muted techno, laced with arid dub echo, gothy whipcrack snares, and motorik noise hypnosis. There's only 300 copies of this pressing; and these will not last long.
Ornamented Walls is the latest blast of primitive gothic electro industrial from Dominick Fernow, Hospital Records head honcho, and the man behind Prurient, Christian Cosmos, as well as sometime member of Cold Cave. And while this is the third or fourth VS record we've reviewed, this one differs in a big way, namely its creation. The A side is a vinyl reissue of a super limited tape (17 copies, sold at the first VS live show), which demonstrated Fernow's cassette deck technique, as in using tape decks and a mixer the way a DJ does a turntable and mixer, a primitive collage of blown out beats, of distorted melodies, of caustic noise, and all manner of raw buzzing texture, somehow deftly woven into a churning electro industrial crunch that kills. The three tracks on side A are live rehearsals for the above mentioned gig, and are raw, and powerful, intense and surprisingly nuanced, flitting from chaotic caustic crush, to stripped down droned out beatscape, to churning industrial pound, the sounds hissy and crackly, lots of tape noise, and murky whirring soft noise shimmer, not to mention mysterious voices, bits of other songs, primitive samples, stuttering beats and throbbing in-the-red basslines.
The flipside features a handful of tracks whipped up post show, using the same multi tape deck set up, and offers up still more of the same, thick insectoid buzz, dirgey distorted beats, creepy droned out melodies, swirling gristly textures, dark sinister atmospheres, and some gorgeously crumbling blurred bliss out noise, sounding a bit like Muslimgauze by way of Tim Hecker. In fact the B side tends toward the minimal and abstract, a more mellow balance to the A side's bombast, but it's great stuff, skeletal and spare, haunting and sinister, much more moody and atmospheric, gorgeous stuff, which definitely had us hoping there was more of this tucked way in the vaults somewhere.
Yet another killer collection of murky, Middle East obsessed gothic industrial slo-mo techno from Dom Fernow, who in addition to recording as Vatican Shadow, also does time in new wave combo Cold Cave, runs the Hospital label, and also has about a million other projects, including Prurient, Christian Cosmos, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement and loads more.
As Vatican Shadow, Fernow weaves a murky, moody landscape of slow, skittering beats, zombie like lumbering grooves, primitive lo-fi synth melodies, whirring drones, everything washed out and grey, each track nearly a static loop, a core rhythm, and an abstract melodic component, locked into a tranced out mesmer, while all around, strange sounds drift in and fade out, soft washes of atmospheric shimmer, reverbed synth squelch, lots of echo and reverb, giving much of the sound a dubby vibe. Muslimgauze is definitely an apt comparison in places, as are outfits like Techno Animal, although Fernow's approach is much more reductionist, his soundworld more about the minutiae of the sounds, the mood, the texture, the vibe, a track like "Muscle Hijacker Tribal Affiliation", is super simple on the surface, a looped synth, a clattery bit of percussion, a crawling techno pulse, and what sounds like some processed heavy breathing, but somehow Fernow deftly transforms those constituent parts into something much more harrowing and haunting, making the over the top song titles sound like plausible descriptions of what exactly Fernow is trying to evoke with these minimal masterpieces. Some tracks do crank up the tempo, but even then, the skittery rhythmic jitter is often wrapped in heaving swells of crumbling blacknoise, or distant swaths of ominous chordal rumble, so instead of propulsion, those jacked rhythms, simply add more texture, the gristled skitter bleeding into the black sonic shadows surrounding them, and when the beat does fragment and explode as it often does, not only does it inspire a sort of music malevolence, and emotional dread, it also again harkens back to Fernow's gothic roots, sounding like the sounds could be emanating from some dank gothic bunker in the East Village, circa early eighties, from a mysterious dark room way in the back of the club. The same is true when electric guitars enter the mix, the weird metallic riffery often sounds a bit like a way more minimal Ministry, stripped down to its very essence, and once locked into the inevitable looped out trance, gradually transforms into something much more mysterious and mesmeric.
When You Are Crawling is an ep addendum to the recent Remember Your Black Day full length from Vatican Shadow, aka Hospital Productions and Prurient mastermind Dom Fernow. Vatican Shadow's Middle Eastern gothic industrial techno gets a slight reworking here, with two tracks from Remember revisited, first the title track, which gets smoothed out a bit, its churning rhythm laced with looped breathing, and backed by minor key melodies, spare and skeletal, even more so here, the beats building throughout, until the final few minutes is transformed into something much more aggro and electro, all the while, the background sounds remain hushed and abstract. The other reworked track is "Not The Son Of A Desert Storm But the Child Of Chechnya", which is all girded industrial churn, and deep chanted monk like vocals, the sounds grimy and gristly, and once again, the beats seeming to transform over the length of the track, getting dirtier and murkier, the surrounding sounds this time following suit, a mesmerizingly propulsive industrial electro groove.
"Atta's Apartment Slated For Demolition (Bouthayna Engineering)" appropriates its title from an older Vatican Shadow release, and unfurls a heady bit of minimalist skitter, draped over soft focus chordal swells, and shimmering distant drones, much more laid back than the other two tracks, and the longest at nearly 15 minutes, the sound shifts constantly, getting murkier and housier part way through, before once again splintering into something much more caustic and corrosive near the track's end, and again, it's just the beats being mutated, as the background sounds remain washed out and melancholic. Finally, "Al Qaeda" is another dark groove, Muslimgauze by way of Techno Animal maybe, a moody, murky sprawl, that in this case, grows MORE murky, shedding most of the surrounding sounds leaving just a stuttery beat, surrounded by sonic echoes and abstract shadows.
Wierd Records have brought us some amazing records over the last few years, from Led Er Est, Martial Canterel, Xeno & Oaklander, Staccato Du Mal and others, but this one might just be the coolest, and the weirdest (wierdest?) of the bunch. From the above mentioned bands, it's obvious that Wierd traffics in darkwave / coldwave / newwave music primarily, and this debut from Canadian outfit Vaura, definitely does fit in there, somewhere, sort of...
But unlike those bands, Vaura is HEAVY, the sound dense and epic, and times intense and downright crushing, while at others, droned out and dour. At their gloomiest, we're reminded of French retrowavers Soror Dolorosa, the sound a sort of death rock, beholden to groups like Joy Division and the Cure, but there's no denying the metal element, hinting at the likes of both Liturgy and Katatonia, which makes more sense when you know Vaura's pedigree. A group you might not expect to include members of Dysrhythmia, Kayo Dot, Secret Chiefs 3, and maybe most surprising of all Gorguts, who are responsible for what might be one of aQ's favorite death metal records of all time, Obscura. So the real question is maybe what is a death metal guy doing in a band like this, and how the heck did these weirdos and metalheads end up with a dark, gloomy, heavy record on Wierd? And really the answer is who cares. We're just happy to have this strange slab of moody heaviness, and it's quickly become the only thing we want to listen to.
The sound is a bit confusional, but only when you're trying to describe it, cuz on paper, it seems like a mess, like a weird whatthefuck that would never work, but in action, it's awesome. Hooky and heavy, brooding and moody and metallic, thick guitars, chiming and shimmering one second, churning and chugging the next, sinewy basslines, the vocals deep and dramatic, subtly processed, the songs proggy and intricate, some incredible drumming, the songs super melodic, even poppy in places, but occasionally peppered with bursts of gloom infused black metal, complete with blast beats, and deep ominous vox, atonal chords, often splintering into a grinding almost death metal, but more muddy and gothic and less distinctly metal, everything wreathed in cool textured psychedelic guitars, dense squalls of dark sonic energy, layered chordal thrum and swirls of FX and streaks of feedback. And while the sound seems to always return to a sort of dark, and heavy, gloom rock, it's what the group do to and with that sound that makes this so transcendent.
And while the record definitely works as an album, the individual songs and sound are super varied, from the washed out black metal flecked gloominess of "Obsidian Damascene Sun", with its furious double kick drumming, and swirling psychedelic guitar filigree, to the churning bombastic almost doom-ed heaviness of "Uncreated Light (Transfiguration)", to the strangely ritualistic sounding "The Column's Vein", all rumbling low end, and chanted monklike vox, to the acoustic gloom-folk of the title track, a gorgeously moving softly psychedelic steel string ballad, the record culminating in our favorite track, "The Zahir" which begins as a barely there rumbling drone, underpinning steel string guitar strum, some softly crooned vox and chiming harmonics, which disappear in a squall of massive distorted riffage and swirling feedback, the whole song transformed into a whirling propulsive sprawl of melodic drone-psych, a brooding slow build that becomes a heavy gloom pop, driving and intense, in comes some metal vokills and some tangled super catchy guitar melodies, all over tribal drumming, and thick buzzing guitars, the sound gradually falling apart, and transforming into a woozy detuned dirge, only to explode into a crushingly heavy, gloriously blown out Godspeed style epic outro, wild streaks of psych guitar, pounding chaotic drumming, clouds of swirling effects, definitely the sort of thing that should have been stretched out for another 20 minutes or so, but instead, collapses in a field of glitch and static, buzz and crumble. So fucking awesome. A practically perfect slab of heavy gloominess / gloomy heaviness. And a new aQ favorite for sure.
Techno/electronica remixes of your Vegetable Orchestra favorites, from the likes of Ricardo Villalobos, Luciano, Oliver Hacke, Basteroid, Sian, and others.
This is a nice surprise from the Schematic label who are more well known for their electronica and abstract hip hop. Completely mesmerising and hypnotic instrumentals performed on all sorts of Spanish, African, Egyptian, and Arabic traditional hand drums: doira, frame drum, bendir, bodhran, tamborine and more. Rhythmic and dreamy, throbbing and pulsing, so simple but so nice. Manages to avoid sounding new age-y or hippyish, and instead just sounds completely and simply gorgeous. Rattle and buzz, warm throaty, deep reverberent rhythms, with occasional faux-throat singing adding to the overall drone-y, mesmeric ambience. Percussion-obsessives will absolutely need this, but it will totally hit the spot for all you hippy-folksters into the stumbling, tribal rhythms of the No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand Of The Man.
Hymen have always treated us to some of the most amazing packaging, from elaborate deluxe lps to cd sets/shirts in stickered tupperware containers, but this has to take the cake. A small red box, constructed from gorgeously thick textured, deep red card stock, with the credits embossed on the cover. Open it up to reveal a three inch cd in a full color sleeve with perfectly photoshopped street signs again depicting the credits. But lift out the cd and a small plastic television is set in a little television-shaped cut out. It's one of those little tourist/souvenir plastic TV's that you hold up to the light to see the tiny photos inside. And the photos inside are all the credits of the cd photoshopped into different locations, on billboards, on grain silos, on insects even. Just amazing. Even people who don't like Venetian Snares have been buying this after seeing the packaging. So, the music. The 3" cd contains one 15 minute track, of skittery, slithery, Aphex-like beat heavy electronica. None of that SUPER abrasive drill and bass VS is infamous for, this is surprisingly varied and melodic and quite possibly one of his best tracks.
Short, two song blast of skittery, noodly, spastic breakbeat weirdness from Canada's biggest breakcore/drill and bass export. One side is funky and skittery, with blooping bass, and warbly melodies not unlike the VS we're used to, the other is an all new direction, a sort of jazzy fusion-y funk workout, complete with slap bass, and little bursts of soulful horns as well as a latin percussion breakdown about halfway through. Think Squarepusher meets Mahavishnu meets Tito Puente. Cool.
The string soaked brooding post Aphex cinematic skitter of 2005's Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett showed us the dark and haunting side of Venetian Snares' usual head spinning electronic fuckery, which definitely threw us all for a loop. The record right after though, Meathole, was a return to the spastic breakcore slice and dice sound that pretty much defined the Venetian Snares. So where to next for this one man beat terrorist? How about to the brilliantly titled Cavalcade Of Glee And Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms. A record with all the splatter and splutter, skitter and scuffle as Meathole, a wild world of dizzying drill and bass, a dense spazzscape of machine gun beats and hiccupping loops, but as the title might lead you to believe, lots more fun and funny, playful and goofy weirdness.
This Cavalcade Of Glee is a confusional world of circus melodies shattered into a million pieces, packed into a cannon and fired right into your ear, beats shuffle and skitter, sometimes into snarling swarms of near digital hardcore, but just as often a lumbering lope through a world of big soft shapes and crazy dayglo colors. The melodies twist and turn, a kaleidoscopic swirl of synths and sonic snippets, lo-fi blasts of deconstructed 8 bit crunch, voices drift in and out, swathed in reverb or drenched in distortion, a totally exhausting but completely exhilarating ride. Like Aphex Twin, Chris Clark, Lesser, Autechre, and Squarepusher all tossed into a blender, the resulting sonic goo, drizzled over cotton candy, sprinkled with tabs of acid, placed in the mouth of a really scary clown, who proceeds to do spit-take after spit-take, splattering you with gobs of gloriously grinding, bizarre breakcore!
Killer cover art too, lots of cow parts, pipes and gears. Euwww.
We're so used to Venetian Snares, aka Aaron Funk, constantly taking the piss, we assumed the title of his new ep was just that, a title, a clever turn of phrase that would go well with Funk's super frantic, slice and dice drill and bass, but lo and behold, this is actually a reggae record, but done Snares style. Not sure if this is old reggae jams redone, or if Funk whipped these up from scratch, but this is about THEE most exciting reggae record we've heard in ages. The classic sounds are all there, that up-stroke jangle guitar, the dubbed out rhythms, the melodies, the skittery snare drum, but here, it's all tangled up, and augmented with some creepy deep growled vox, the sounds careening all over the place, melodies surfacing and then pulled apart and sent careening into the ether, sounds are clipped, pulled apart, beats stutter, there's some super thick synthbass buzz too, a little bit of a dubstep vibe here and there, but somehow, with all the fucking about and sonic alchemy going on, it still sounds like reggae, and it still sounds respectful to the form, if that makes any sense. This isn't so much subverting the sound as it is glorifying it, Funk seems to be taking a classic sound and making it all his own, while remaining true to the spirit of the original.
And we have to say, while we don't dig too much modern reggae, and are WAY partial to the classics, the old Trojan records and all that, at the risk of pissing off purists, holy shit, this just might be the best modern 'reggae' record EVER!
The problem with a list like this (well one of them at least) and with bands who release a record or two every year, after a few years, you begin to run out of things to say, you end up wanting to just say something along the lines, of "read that old review" or "sounds like that other one we loved". Which is sometimes fair enough, as some bands do continue to mine similar ground. But in the case of Venetian Snares, it's not that easy. We thought we had him pegged, as a mash up jungle drill and bass freak, but then he learns how to play strings, and hits us with a gorgeous elegiac suite of moving Eastern European gypsy jams, with only a tiny bit of manic drum programming, the focus on actual songs, on mood and melancholy, then he'll flip again and kick out a disc of old school rave jams, then some old school raga jungle. The thing is, it's ALL great, and somehow it all sounds distinctly like Venetian Snares, which is especially difficult with this kind of music, sample based, chopped rhythms, but VS has such a distinctive vibe, the rhythms impossibly complex, the samples usually goofy, but sometimes freaked out, other times creepy, all the various elements seamlessly smoothed into something not really seamless or smooth at all, but wild and chaotic and well over the top.
This latest disc is all over the map, but the focus seems to be a mash up of classic hip hop, nineties rave music, and as always furious rapid fire jungle rhythms, often bordering on gabber. Listening to this, it's easy to just get lost in the flurry of beats, the chopped up and reassembled loops and samples, without asking "how the fuck does anybody make this shit?!" One can only imagine he assembles it measure by measure, slowed down to quarter speed, painstakingly assembling each beat, but then somehow being able to visualize it all revved up and lightning fast. Even then, it boggles the mind. It's like trying to figure out the working methods of a mad scientist. It's almost better not to think about it at all, just to revel in the madcap, kick ass blown-out-beat demented dancefloor world of Venetian Snares.
So how does Detrimentalist! stack up? Well obviously it's not at all dark and brooding like his two string-ed records, but it fits pretty well amidst is other dancier discs, this one somehow seems more of a party record, with lots of vocal bits, fragments of raps, bits of toasting, all chopped and tangled up within the impossibly convoluted rhythms, which here are as funky and impossible sounding as ever, thick slabs of buzzing snarling synth, even a bit of a dubstep vibe here and there, some definite nods to that classic Aphex sound, a handful of 8-bit videogame jams, dizzying rave collages wrapped around classic Amen and Apache breaks. There's an awesome ravey raga jungle jam that goes from almost traditional sounding to some sort of video game rave with some of the most awesome drill and bass all synched up with stuttering rave synths, and a toasted refrain about some motherfucker wanting to see his dogs die (?). There are a handful of the tracks laced with minor key melodies and have some serious musical weight to them, moody and intense, droney and atmospheric, even peppered with dizzying squalls of rapid fire rhythms, they still feel like more than dancefloor fodder. But it wouldn't be VS without some seriously cracked and wacked sonic wickedness, and there's plenty of that too. Once again, ESSENTIAL Snares, as it's quickly becoming one of our favorites, and for newbies, as fucked up and freaked out as Detrimentalist is (then again they all are sort of), it's a pretty excellent introduction to what will no doubt blossom into a full blown obsession.
More hyperspastic drill'n'bass from the super prolific Aaron Funk. Less aggressive and painful than last year's "Making Orange Things". Less playful than the recent "Songs About My Cat". "Doll Doll Doll" is a more straight ahead techno/d'n'b effort,
Yet another blast of misanthropic, demented and damaged, ultra complex and super sick splattercore-broken-beat-drum-and-bass madness from Aaron Funk aka Venetian Snares. This stuff is so much more complicated and fucking creepy than any of his contemporaries. Take Aphex Twin at his most complex (Boy Girl maybe) mix in some Lesser (totally irrational beats chopped to bits) plus some truly creepy samples and some hateful misanthropy (Pornography, S+M, Snuff films, Whitehouse, Trevor Brown who once again supplies the suitable pervy album art, etc.) and filter it all through the 'Snares wicked sense of drama and melody, and his knack for making impossibly stuttery beats and retarded rhythms coalesce into some painfully dark, amazingly appealing and truly nightmarish electronic mayhem.
MPEG Download: "Befriend A Child Killer Remix" [/audio/venetianbefriend.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Befriend A Child Killer Remix" [/audio/venetianbefriend.m3u]
Aaron Funk steps back from his supercharged darkcore breakbeat noise mashups for a more accessible, yet still jacked up, ass moving and wicked as shit record. With drum programming much like mid-period Aphex Twin and faux fusion jazz breaks ala Squarepusher, "Higgins Ultra Low Track..." sounds as if it could've been on Warp back in 1996. Not a bad thing, though we suspect this record is just a break from the noisecore aesthetic that Funk is so good at. Here we see not-so-old-school rave styles clash with hyperspastic in-yr-face d'n'b attacks. Operatic vocals are mutated, timestretched, diced and recontextualized amidst rapid waves of snare rushes and pummelling beats. Extremely poppy and ultra catchy, this is far far away from the jackhammer assault of his collaboration with Speedranch, "Making Orange Things", but still retains that sinister edge inherent in all of Funk's work.
Just found a very, very small stash in the back of the store of this we think now out of print release, which we reviewed way back on list #193, so let's list it again, and put it on sale too while they last (it was $14.98 before)...
This may not be the best Venetian Snares record, a brief 25 minutes (6 tracks) of Aaron Funk's immediately recognizable spastic cut and paste, drill and bass madness, but it's quite possibly the most striking, with some depraved and amazing Trevor Brown artwork (and supposedly banned, as the artwork is only fully revealed on the inside). You know, the usual TB business: naked young Japanese girl, toys, lollipops, dildos, etc. That said, this is definitely a decent slab of short attention span, anti-dancefloor splattery buzz, and not only will Venetian Snares' completists want to snap this up, so will you Trevor Brown obsessives.
After the strange and glorious string drenched, Eastern tinged, drill and bass drama of Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, we were all sort of surprised when Venetian Snares' next disc Meathole was a return to his old more straight ahead, chopped and clipped, skittering, head spinning drum and bass buzz and sputter. Then the record after that, Cavalcade Of Glee And Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms, continued in the same vein. Which we're totally fine with. More than fine in fact. As much as we loved the ultra cinematic vibe of Rossz, that classic Venetian Snares spastic insanity never fails to get our blood rushing and our ears bleeding, all over the place!!! But we'd be lying if we didn't tell you were were pretty dang thrilled with Hospitality, and a surprising return to the sound of Rossz. Pizzicato strings, fluttering flutes, plinkety plonk percussion, all tangled up in grinding splattery, lightning fast, rhythmic chaos. Sweet minor key melodies splinter into schizo skitter, huge sweeping epics, strangely lilting and melancholic, burst into a hail storm of jagged beats and fractured drill and bass. Church organs hover and wheeze over a skeletal framework of super spare but still all tangly and convoluted hiccupping stutter. Aphex Twin may have invented this particular strain of emo-melodic-drum-and-bass-whatever with his classic "Girl / Boy", but Venetian Snares has definitely run with it, turning an experiment, into a full fledged new world of emotional electronica.
Fierce and funny, funky and fresh, dark and mysterious, brooding and totally catchy. So essential.
