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In the liner notes, a smug Maurizio Bianchi (aka MB) included a quote from Genesis P-Orridge who described MB's early 80's industrial noise records as 'boring, meaningless, pathetic'. I'd agree with MB in claiming that Gen was jealous, as MB was able to construct brutal hallucinatory recordings of electronic noise that offer metaphors of microscopic anyeurisms which collapse the body from within. Bleak chilling drones that are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler's most neurotic, Nurse With Wound's most droning, and Whitehouse's least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with a more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he joined a monastary.
Some of my favourite 'noise' records that have been gratefully reissued, thus sparing me from shelling out the $120.00 that I've seen the vinyl editions of these records going for!
The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.
Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button!
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Originally released in 1983 on Broken Flag (the malignant UK label which spawned Skullflower and Ramleh), "The Plain Truth" distances itself considerably from MB's preceeding electroshock bricolages, coming closest to the "Forbidden Planet" aesthetic of poetically bleak electronics. If one were to ask me to bet on when Maurzio Bianchi (MB) came to God, I'd put $100 on this record. Aside from the giveaway inscription "This record is dedicated to all the redeemed people," "The Plain Truth" has dropped the decomposition metaphors of sound / body from Bianchi's arsenal of sound and has left behind a swirling miasma of cosmic synth drones that one might find in Conrad Schnitzler's most mindwarping psychedelectronics. Regardless of the status of Bianchi's belief at the time of this recording, "The Plain Truth" is a fabulous piece of kaleidoscopic darkness.
The mythology of Maurizio Bianchi / MB has been well documented here at Aquarius; as we have long been spellbound by many of his classic industrial productions. He began experimenting with electronics, noise, and 'tape decomposition' in the late '70s, recording at a feverish pace over a five year period. He released a handful of records on Sterile, Broken Flag, and Come Organisation, with a few albums being self-financed private pressings. All of these albums quickly went out of print, not only due to the quality of the recordings, but because of his mysterious disappearance from the music scene, spawning a number of implausible legends. In the late '90s, the Italian avant-garde label Alga Marghen embarked on a reissue campaign of MB's classic albums. Those 10 discs, too, went out print leading to yet another campaign of Bianchi's earliest work. Carcinosi was one of those 10 Alga Marghen albums, and has now gotten the reissue treatment from Menstrual Recordings.
If there is one MB record to own, it's Carcinosi - the existentially bleak synthesis of the divebomb synth squalor found on his early work like Symphony for a Genocide and the frigid drone exasperation of his finale Armaghedon. Originally released in 1983 as a private edition of 400 copies, Carcinosi is part two of his dyptic of 'bionic music' alongside Endometrio. The metaphors of cancer mutating within a technologized body parallel a text in which Bianchi refers to this work as a warning of another Auschwitz. Bianchi's Carcinosi masterfully actualizes his grim metaphors with a mesmeric carousel of dark fractures, muted noise and disorienting synthetic pulsations smothered in a heavily saturated wall of delay. Again just 400 copies of this are around, with an exact reproduction of the original artwork with the album itself pressed on clear vinyl.
At this point, pretty much the entirety of Maurizio Bianchi's catalogue of cassettes, lps, and compilation tracks chronicling his frenzied output from 1980 to 1984, should have been exhausted by now through various reissue campaigns. But even after the multiple boxsets and reissues, there's still somehow enough material to warrant an exceptional collection of frigid electronics from the latter days of MB's seminal output. We've long told the bizarre tale of Maurizio Bianchi, but here's his background in a nut shell: Bianchi was one of the pioneers of Italian industrial music compressing the already bleak synthmuzik of Conrad Schnitzler into an existentially devastating morass of electronic drones, echoing rhythms, and deadened wastelands. His early recordings were released infamously under the moniker Leibstandarte SS MB, and released through the Come Organisation and laced with Nazi speeches and true crime dramatizations. Bianchi and Come's William Bennett disagree over who authorized the inclusion of the morally questionable Nazi recordings, but those albums sealed Bianchi's reputation as a blunt composer of early power electronics. Between 1980-1984, Bianchi recorded incessantly producing a weighty archive of tapes and albums before he publicly quit music in pursuit of his religious beliefs. The last four proper MB records from that time period - Endometrio, Carcinosi, The Plain Truth, and Armaghedon - marked an aesthetic and conceptual shift for Bianchi as gloomy introspection settled through the work's iron-gray ripples that replaced the panzer rhythms and genocidal allusions. Those four records are easily our favorite work here at aQ; and we're very happy to report that the bulk of the material on Giudizio Finale was composed during this same time period. The first five tracks are drawn from super obscure cassette compilations, with the last three being unreleased material of the fizzing high-voltage patterns of Bianchi's marching drum machines and metallic noise that dominated such albums as Symphony For A Genocide. While a lot of the MB archival collections (especially those Vinyl On Demand boxsets) are designed with the collector in mind, Giudizio Finale actually makes for an impressive introduction to his work. At the same time, none of this material has been featured on any of the reissues so far, well, to the best of our knowledge at least. A limited release of 250 numbered copies.
Maurizio Bianchi is one the pioneers of Italian Industrial music, transforming the psychedelic electronics of the likes of Conrad Schniztler, Cluster, Eno, Neu!, etc. into a chilling, dark theater of cancerous sounds that had become the template for the countless dark ambient / industrialists who followed. His story is a peculiar one, as he was incessantly productive throughout the late '70s and early '80s until he unexpectedly stopped in 1984. This musical cessation served to heighten the mystique around the man, as rumors and falsehoods swirled around his legacy, followed by numerous bootleg tapes and LPs of his rarities. Mectpyo Bakterium was an album originally released on lp back in 1982 on the Mnemonists' imprint DYS out of Colorado, and then later in 1998 on cd through the Alga Marghen reissue campaign of his major records. And here is the first repress of the vinyl which goes for a very pretty penny on the collector's market.
Mectpyo Bakterium is a bleak piece of electronic expressionism, with shivering tones and slashing bursts of clinical noise meandering through minefields of grim atmospheres. As it was originally released on LP, the two main tracks of this album are each side-long excursions that mutate and fold on top of themselves, beginning at very dark, very grim launching points and ending up in an entirely different mindframe, having rotated through dour melodies, squalid noises, funeral drum machine marches, and further bleak electronics. It makes sense for this to be a worthy contemporary of TG, Cabaret Voltaire, and Whitehouse! This officially sanctioned lp is limited to 275 copies in a nearly exact reproduction of the original.
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Produced at tail end of 1981 and self-released in the beginning of the following year, Menses marked the second proper piece of vinyl for MB following his highly acclaimed album Symphony For A Genocide on Sterile. At this time, Bianchi was in the throes of a manic production schedule, producing close to 30 records from 1979 to 1984 with the dozen or so slabs of vinyl representing some of the most visionary examples of power-electronics and hyper-minimal industrialized torpor from that period. Here on Menses, factory floor rhythms are cobbled together from primitive drum machines marching through a set of martial, if tinny beats and pangs, setting the foundation to Menses' side-long track "Yra." Keeping the whole structure of the piece "decomposed" and / or wholly variable, Bianchi laces this black-tunnel-vision-quest with dive-bomb electronic squalls descending onto his horror-laden spectral drones. It's wholly in keeping with Bianchi's unrepentant obsession with the psychic / psychological collapse of the self through the symbolism of sexual deviance, totalitarian force, technological advances, and the horrors of genocide. The flipside "Scent" is even more unhinged, settling on frequencies of sharp abrasiveness manifested in another time and another place through Whitehouse's Wasp synths. The rhythm box underbelly is done away with in favor of a vertiginous network of crushed muscle tissue and misfiring nerve endings, all of which is cycling through a corroded tape-delay machine of sorts. This marks the fourth pressing of this on vinyl, and in keeping with the previous iterations, it's incredibly limited. Something around 200 copies or so. Do note that some of the sleeves had their corners bent upon arrival from Italy.
Hospital Recordings has just reissued the first proper M.B. album, which first came out on Sterile Records in 1981 and then again on CD on Alga Marghen in the mid '90s. They've redone the design, making it look more stripped down, lo-fi and punk rock with gritty scans of the Alga Marghen artwork and old school cut and paste liner notes (that unfortunately seem to be missing some of the original notes), but don't let the makeover fool you, this is still some of the most abject and brilliantly bleak dronemusic ever.
Symphony For A Genocide wasn't the first recording for the Italian Industrialist, as he did have some earlier recordings as Sacher-Pelz and the infamous Leibstandarte SS MB albums (on which Whitehouse's William Bennett dubbed various Nazi speeches on top of Bianchi's music without Bianchi's permission). Bianchi's work does come out of a transgressive mindset; but one that is uniformly misanthropic, nihilistic, and utterly black. On this album, MB construct brutal, hallucinatory blasts of electronic noise and grinding rhythms of hand-cut tape noise and overblown synthetic distortion. These, bleak chilling drones are reminiscent of Conrad Schnitzler at his most neurotic, Nurse With Wound at their most droning, and Whitehouse at their least annoying. MB's very prolific career in the early 80's with more than a dozen records was cut short in 1984 at which time he declared himself a Jehovah's Witness and ceased making music until recently when he finally returned to the blackened ambience of old.
It should also be noted that the recordings of Symphony For A Genocide are drastically different from another set of recordings called SFAG (Symphony For A Genocide), which has also gotten the reissue treatment twice, adding extra confusion into the mix.
Teban Slide Art collects a body of work from the industrial pioneer Maurizio Bianchi that has long been a point of controversy in the history of noise music. At the very beginning of his career, Bianchi had 'signed' a contract with Whitehouse's William Bennett for the release of two albums on Bennett's Come Organisation label. There were rumors that Bennett and Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound drafted a completely daft contract that assumed all of the rights to Bianchi's work, which Bianchi signed. Here is where the story splits, as Bianchi claimed that he never consented to the additional overlay of Third Reich speeches found on these recordings, nor to rechristening of his nom de plume from MB to Leibstandarte SS MB; where Bennett asserts that the albums were released as Bianchi intended, and his latent religious conversion a few years later around 1984 sparked his discontent. Regardless of which of these stories is the actual truth, those early Leibstandarte SS MB albums quickly became the stuff of legend and myth, with very few ever actually hearing any of those recordings. What prompted Bianchi to agree to reissue these recordings is also a bit of mystery, but here they are - Triumph Of The Will and Weltanschauung (the two Come Organisation albums) and Lebensraum (an unreleased album that was unofficially issued as a cassette by Murder Release). The cancerous sounds that Bianchi produced are sinister echoes of bone-chilling vibrations, throbbing rhythms, deranged anti-melodies, and horrifying atmospheres that drip through Bianchi's frigid electronics which are not too far from the material he produced on albums like Menses and Neuro Habitat around the same time. Not all of the tracks are laced with Nazi speeches, but when they are, the mastering pushes Bianchi's cold synth-noise into the background. All this said, it is impossible to escape the context of those speeches; but the intent of lacing these two becomes unclear. Is this the simulacrum approach to the modern society as being so corrupt that the crimes of the Third Reich are still within the capacity of the human condition? Or was this something akin to a very British form of black humor (especially if this was in fact Bennett adding the speeches later) in poking fun at all of the 'transgressive' references that punk and industrial culture were appropriating? The verdict is still out. Limited to 413 copies.
In 1984, Maurizio Bianchi called it quits for the first time, as the pioneer of Italian Industrial music had found himself and his work at odds with his spiritual beliefs, opting for communion with the divine instead of wallowing in the abjection of humanity. Some 15 years later, he started making music again in a flurry of collaborations and micro-edition releases only to stop rather suddenly in 2009. Bianchi's final official album of the first (and undeniably best) phase was the self-released Armaghedon - a soundtrack to an unfinished film that would have been really interesting to have seen. Unfortunately, Bianchi destroyed more than half of the pressing of Armaghedon, with the film probably suffering the same fate. Telemediggo would have been the follow-up to Armaghedon, and is a continuation of the free-floating almost psychedelic dronework that shows a considerable amount of maturity of Bianchi's compositional prowess. Gone are the almost meandering attempts at Frankensteinian synth-melody and gone are the panzer division rhythms found on albums like Symphony For A Genocide and Menses. Instead, the gasping environments from Bianchi's final period could be considered placid in comparison to his more suffocating works, as if he's allowing for slivers of light to seep through the vast darkness. A heavy piece of refined minimalism! We should note that we've listed this on cd (accompanied with a bonus cd-r entitled Bacterhabitat of unfinished material from 1983 or thereabouts), but this is first time these recordings have been on vinyl. Super limited pressing of just 100 copies. Restocks are unlikely.
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Following the release of the Teban Slide Art collection of Maurizio Bianchi material that dates back to early 1981 of the infamous Leibstandarte SS MB recordings released on William Bennett's Come Organisation, we find ourselves at the end of 1984 with Telemediggo. Bianchi's final official album was the self-released Armaghedon - a soundtrack to an unfinished film that would have been really interesting to have seen. Unfortunately, Bianchi destroyed more than half of the pressing of Armaghedon, with the film probably suffering the same fate. All of this was spurned by his religious conversion, becoming a Jehovah's Witness, causing him to eschew many of the ties he made with the industrial / experimental community for well over a decade. Telemediggo would have been the follow-up to Armaghedon, and is a continuation of the free-floating almost psychedelic dronework that shows a considerable amount of maturity of Bianchi's compositional prowess. Gone are the almost meandering attempts at melody and gone are the panzer division rhythms found on albums like Symphony For A Genocide. Instead, the gasping environments from Bianchi's final period could be considered placid in comparison to his more suffocating works, as if he's allowing for slivers of light to seep through the vast darkness. Don't worry, Telemediggo is a heavy piece of refined minimalism! There were a handful of private issue cassettes of this album that made the rounds, eventually getting bootlegged under the title "Extreme Man 2" in 1990. Another bootleg made the rounds of some sketches that Bianchi was working on, and that had the title "Extreme Man 1." This cassette is reprised as the second disc here, rechristened as Baterhabitat. For some reason, this second disc is a professionally duplicated cd-r, where the disc of Telemediggo is a properly replicated cd. Hmm. These recordings are considerably rougher than Telemediggo and do expose some of Bianchi's process, as he began to layer sympathetic synth sounds that he describes as a "mixture of bacteriological wall of noise." He indicates that the recordings date back to 1982, but seem to have been left unfinished. Packaged in a really cool metal box that solves the problem of those Chain Reaction metal boxes with a soft-felt case that holds both discs. Limited to 208 copies.
Brian McBride, for those who don't know, is one half of beloved slowcore drone drift soundscapers Stars Of The Lid, and based on the reviews on the aQuarius website, you might assume they were one of our all time favorite bands, and well, you would most definitely be correct. If there was indeed an official aQ pantheon, Stars Of The Lid would absolutely be included, their records, spanning the last two decades now, have without fail been absolutely breathtaking works of sublime ambient brilliance, from raw blurred 4 track shimmer, to the more orchestral and composed later releases, we can't think of a SOTL record that we didn't love.
The Effective Disorder is a score McBride recorded for a documentary film called Vanishing Of The Bees, and in the liner notes, McBride explains that he tried his best to compose music that was hopeful, striving to capture in music the "gloriousness of the bees", but that the result was more in keeping with his past works, pieces that tended toward the melancholy and lamentable, that dark and haunting and sweetly sorrowful. And we're not complaining one bit!
The Effective Disorder plays out like it could very well have been a new Stars Of The Lid records, lush and orchestrated, but still intimate and emotional. Separated into suites, the opening two parter mixes the muted sitar-like buzz of old SOTL soundscapes, with soaring strings, swirling streaks of minor key melody, and lots of space, the sounds unfurled in glacial swells, gorgeous harmonies left to gradually fade and drift into nothingness.
"Girl Nap" is about as close as The Effective Disorder comes to sunshiney, but even then it's just barely, sun dappled shimmer dissipates in a haze of hushed soft focus blur, peppered with far away reverbed piano, "Several Tries (In An Unelevated Style)" is another assemblage of longform tones, lushly layered, the overtones adding color and movement, "Supposed Essay On The Piano (B Major Piano Adagietto)" adds horns, the mournful brass moans giving the already sorrowful sound a funereal cast, but shot though with warm hints of hope.
The three part "Toil Theme" is brooding and ominous, haunting and delicate, another dreamscape of minor key swells, while "Beekeepers Vs Warfare Chemicals" drapes tinkling chimes over streaks of stings, and warm sun dappled melodies, the track gradually transforming into something much darker and depressive.
The brief closer, "Chamber Minuet" is the perfect coda, a brief recapitulation of the rest of the score, and of the two sides of McBride's composing style, beginning with a rough bit of low fidelity drift, gauzy and hushed, before it blossoms into a more traditional sounding string quartet, dramatic and majestic, only to slip right back into the opening ominous minimal drift. So lovely and captivating.
The music perhaps darker than the film makers intended, but for the purposes of pure listening, removed from the visuals, Stars Of The Lid fans will not be disappointed, nor will fans of dark brooding ambience.
Brian McBride is one half of AQ faves Stars Of The Lid, a group who specialized in somnambulent moonlit guitarscapes, dark and gorgeously lugubrious, and who more recently have begun to explore more lush and epic musical vistas. Some of our favorite late night dreamy drones have come from those Stars, so it's no surprise that McBride's first proper solo outing is just as mysterious and compelling. A lush series of swoonsome smears, warm chordal swells stretched into slow burning minor key sagas, minor key but still strangely hopeful sounding, sun dappled with the first rays of morning light after an endless night of darkness and despair. Each piece on When The Detail Lost Its Freedom is delicately assembled from minimal violins, gentle piano, moaning trumpets, haunting western guitar, drifting disembodied vocals, and warm reverb, all swirled into indistinct shapes, like opening your eyes first thing in the morning, a hazy blurry dreamlike world, so serene and peaceful. At times, it almost sounds like the most minimal of post rock, but slowed down to a drumless crawl, the occasional vocals definitely remind us of Low, a darkly romantic slowcore, but wherever McBride takes these songs, we're never far from slipping back into a doleful drift of melancholy moods and slow shifting shimmers. It's sort of like staring into a thick cloudy swirl of sound, dense and drifting, with the occasional melody or voice slowly emerging and taking shape before flickering and fading out, dissolving into the swells of surrounding sound. So lovely.
After releasing dozens of tapes and tons of limited releases, Sean McCann delivers his gorgeous vinyl debut on local SF label, DNT. If Sean McCann is a new name to your list of weirdo dronesters, you better get hip quick, McCann is one of the most prolific ambient artists of recent years, and has delivered countless offerings of violin based, long-tone beauty on almost every home-spun tape label around. And even though "Chances Are Staying" is McCann's first attempt at vinyl glory, he's no newcomer to the soft-drifting world of string-based soundscaping.
What really draws us into McCann's music is his signature, ever-changing kaleidoscopic whirl, sounds and notes constantly shifting and swirling over crumbling layers of noise and grit, never a boring moment in an ocean of crashing color and melodic smear, so propelling yet immersive and entrancing. There's a refined quality to McCann's music that definitely reminds us of stuff on the Kompakt label, but that precision is offset by a weirdo playfulness that leaves each track unpredictable and completely fluid. It also reminds us of early Not Not Fun releases or maybe Ducktails. "Labyrinth" opens with a gauzy melodic passage, distant bells and chimes echo into a rhythmic lull, synthy washes and a deep low-end pulse guide you deeper into a gorgeous ambient headspace. Dry passages of violin stretch across the echoing beauty below, a buzzing drone builds into an epic flurry until suddenly the track is over and you're itching for more! "County Heirlooms" is another favorite, drum and bass set the rhythmic pulse as soaring strings and bellowing horns become tangled in a mess of field recordings, drones, and weirdo noise, so nice and quite unlike anything we've heard before. Somehow pleasant and very very strange all at once, like someone manipulating a Pharoah Sanders tape while a krautrock rhythm section rehearses next door.
So Rad! Super unique and super limited to 400 hand number copies, we got these straight from the label, pretty sure it'll be out of print in no time, so pick one up!
Another crazy limited cassette release. This one from a name we'd never heard before, Sean McCann, but judging from this tape, we'll definitely want to be hearing more.
The sound is super distorted and in-the-red, lo-fi and warbly, like it was recorded on some old thrift store tape on a busted up tape recorder, the guitar being the focal point, but rendered in numerous un-guitar-like sounds and setting, simple strums are distorted to the point of complete collapse, strange effects make the tape sound like it's skipping, vocals howl and croon, everything super washed out.
Some tracks are warm and whirring and warbly, almost old timey sounding, everything shimmery and dreamlike, circus like melodies, kitchen sink percussion, and a soft focus patina of fuzz and buzz and whir, the tape continually slowing to a crawl, or skipping and hiccupping like the stop and record buttons getting pushed, others are dense and chaotic, but with the same sort of sun dappled summer dreaminess, the distortion and the tape drop outs as much, if not more of, a part of the sound than the actual instruments.
Noisy, but that sort of soft noise, dreamy, but not sleepy, instead a sort of druggy bleary eyed drift, think lo-fi folk or pop, via Merzbow, filtered through Philip Jeck and Tim Hecker, recorded by Faxed Head, and played back on a Dictaphone with dying batteries plugged into a massive P.A. with blown speakers. So cool.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! In beautiful silk screened sleeves, with a printed insert, each tape hand numbered.
San Franciscan Sean McCann has produced a ton of material running the gamut between splattery feral pop, crusty noise, and dreamy droneworks; and despite our neighborly geographies, we've only managed to get a hold of a few of his recordings, most of which tend toward the micro-edition side of things. The fine folks at Foxy Digitalis have been showering this guy with praise; and now we can see why on this great cassette from the increasingly essential cassette label Monorail Trespassing. Wind In Their Way begins with a sweeping atmosphere of elongated drone, smoke, and shadow with an elegant violin emoting sad, sad melodies all bathed in reverb, looped back into those background sounds, and muddled nicely into the mix. Here, McCann seems to be paralleling what fellow Bay Area stringed conjurer Darwinsbitch had mustered on her impressive Ore album released earlier in 2009. This same direction continues on the second side of the album, with more shimmering tones that probably have their origins from a guitar, producing majestic swells of ambience not nearly as dark as those by Troum but just as ethereal, with those gauzy, flickering ghosts of sound woven in and out. Peter Wright and Machinefabriek even come to mind on this lovely, lovely, lovely piece. Limited to 125 copies!
Vacant lots. Empty storefronts. Warehouses pocked with shattered windows, rusted walls, and pigeon shit. These are haunts for Christopher McFall when he collects field recordings in and around his hometown of Kansas City. The area where McFall has a studio is one of the rundown areas of town, that once was a thriving nexus of commerce and culture, but for the most part has crumbled under neglect; and The City Of Almost is a well constructed album that wholly embody the grit, decay, murk, and dust of those crumbling spaces. His processed recordings amplify the melancholy of the space through his ominous looping techniques and the atmospheres of malaise which hang upon elongated drones raked with wind-swept textures and numerous passages of scraped objects distressed by the elements over the years. These moments of The City Of Almost do recall some of the earlier dystopic works from John Grzinich, Michael Northam, and the non Jewelled Antler sounds of Loren Chasse; but McFall furthers the theatrical and allegorical sense of neglect through a fortunate discovery of an stash of musty old records and a barely functioning turntable during his wanderings. Thus, the scratchiness of dust upon the needle and ghostly hints of a forgotten melody also work their way into McFall's work, with references to Philip Jeck being noted even as McFall slows everything down way further than Jeck ever did to match the turgid pacing of the album. We've heard a few pieces from McFall over the years, and this one is the strongest to date.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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From the same label that brought us the truly disturbing Conet Project comes Stephen P. McGreevy's VLF recordings. With a knowledge of basic radio telescopics, a few choice geographical / atmospheric anomalies, and a good ear, McGreevy records the earth's electromagnetic signature generated through such phenomenon as the Alaskan Northern Lights. Delicate whistles streak over loud crackles, that bring to mind Id Battery's fascination with recorded fire, or John Duncan's shortwave radio experiments. Word of caution, one of our faithful customers complained that this created rather deleterious psychosomatic effects.
As many of you probably know, Mark McGuire is the guitarist from Emeralds and has been recording boatloads of tapes and cd-rs both within Emeralds and of the solo variety. Many of these had been released in tiny editions of less than 100 copies, few of which probably travel beyond the Cuyahoga county lines and even fewer manage to end up west of the Rockies. It's been said that these small editions act as something of a musical diary for McGuire, but each of his recordings had been so fully realized that it's hard not to think of him as some ridiculous prodigy channeling the best lazer 'n' crystal Krautrock vibe from Manuel Gottsching, Achim Reichel, and Gunter Schickert.
A Young Person's Guide To Mark McGuire is the much-needed retrospective of a good chunk of those limited edition releases, offering further proof of McGuire's prodigy status. From the opening track on the first disc - 2008's "Dream Team" - all of the hallmarks of McGuire's soaring guitar techniques are present. This track is more in keeping with his 2010 Living With Yourself album on Editions Mego with its sorta-shoegazed blur of skyward gazing drones, that's almost jaunty in comparison to the melancholy that oozes from Emeralds. That's not to say that McGuire doesn't get moody elsewhere on this album ("Flight" and "The Path Lined With Colorful Stones" are excellent examples of this facet to his work). While McGuire is pretty keen on working through countless variations on layered melody and arpeggiated hypnosis, the breaks from that modus operandi are certainly intriguing. Take the Phillip Jeck like collage of operatic vocals and orchestral flares amidst a sea of low-end vibration on "Ghosts Around A Tree," and then there's the Vini Reilly / John Fahey interplay through the elliptically fingerpicked acoustic number "Sun Shining Through The Open Barn Door," that's about as aptly named as you could get.
A stunning anthology for sure!
It's gonna be interesting to hear what Emeralds will sound like on their follow-up to the 2010 album Does It Look Like I'm Here? Since that album, two of the three members - John Elliott and Mark McGuire - have been super prolific in their own projects, all of which seem to be eschewing the post-noise melancholy which streamed through Emeralds' melodies of intertwined kosmische synth arpeggiation and stratospheric guitar loopings. Elliott's numerous solo and side projects have found him entertaining a new age ethos more and more, complete with a cosmically induced alter-ego. So far the music's still good for Elliott, but there could be some warning signs that he could take a nose-dive in the worst possible way. At least, his Spectrum Spools imprint seems to be keeping an edgier sensibility (especially those Bee Mask albums). Mark McGuire's own work has been one of a perpetually-stoned-in-summertime time-loop, where his brightly ringing guitar wraps itself into layered patterns upon which he builds cinematically charged ambient-pop crescendos. His album Living With Yourself certainly built from this template, and McGuire proves just how versatile that template can be on Get Lost. There's plenty of effervescent synths which noodle and blorp through rippling echo patterns, which takeover McGuire's proceedings on the aptly named "Firefly Constellations" but McGuire is at his best when employing guitar and loop station as on the urgent chime of "Another Dead End" furthered by Vini Reilly like flourishes that burst into an expressive solo mirroring something from early Guru Guru. The rest of the tracks settle into a warm groove as if bathed in late-summer sunlight, including the vocal number "Alma" which certainly looks to Animal Collective in its quadruple-tracked vocals but with an ear for Eno's melodies instead of Brian Wilson's. McGuire has never failed in delivering something lovely, and that's the case with Get Lost.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The guitarist from Emeralds explores his psychedelic side on Invisible World. There's always been a kosmische aesthetic in the music of Emeralds, brought on by the spiraling interplay between synth and guitar, whose rapid fire arppeggios blur into trippy drones. Much of those same strategies are employed here on Invisible World, with McGuire channelling Michael Rother from Neu! 75. Some of the loops that McGuire lays down are a bit heavier than what you might find in Emeralds; but then he'll switch things up for something infinitely warmer and more summery, almost like Ducktails or something off an early Ariel Pink record. Recorded direct to tape, with all the hiss and roughness of the recording left as is. And as with all of the Emeralds related tape releases, this one is super limited. So limited in fact that it's already sold out from the label. These are the last and only copies we'll have, so act fast...
Despite a solo discography that tallies well above 30 titles, Mark McGuire has quipped that Living With Yourself is, in his mind, his 'first' album, because it was the first album to emerge as a properly replicated cd and slab of vinyl without originally getting released first as a micro-edition tape or cd-r. Fair enough. McGuire is also the principle guitarist for Emeralds, who also has a discography with a boatload of releases; the man specializes in sustained flares of kosmische guitar arpeggiations recalling Manuel Gottsching and Achim Reichel. In both Emeralds and his solo work, he's at his best when his guitar seems to effortlessly transmit bittersweet, counterpoint melodies within his arching dronerock compositions. It takes Living With Yourself awhile to get to those epiphanous moments, after McGuire churns through a Takoma inspired acoustic guitar workout situated alongside home recordings of some family gathering with a cassette deck recording the affair. By the time, McGuire arrives at "Clouds Rolling In" a distant melancholy settles upon his Durutti Column like guitar lines that skitter in circles to build his impressionist atmosphere. Similarly moody tracks lead up through the album's conclusion, a straight-up, instrumental-rock number with his stratospheric guitar riffs buttressed by a drummer, edging much more into the cinematic Explosions In The Sky territory. Certainly not what we were expecting, but could this be the lead in for McGuire to start scoring movie soundtracks?
Yes, it's another solo album from Emeralds' guitarist Mark McGuire, and yes, it's totally awesome. Off In The Distance was originally a cassette that came out briefly back in 2008, but had been so beloved by the dudes who put out the tape that vinyl became a necessity. And it's a perfect format for McGuire's kosmische zoner jams, with all his continued allusions to Ash Ra Tempel, Gunter Schickert, Michael Rother, Popul Vuh, and Achim Reichel that stretch into grand movements of psychedelic melancholy. Slow-motion, aquatic bubblings of analog synths percolate upon an undulating bed of guitar drones muffling the growls from a distortion box. All the while, McGuire layers his signature elliptical guitar arpeggiated melodies that snap into locked grooves only to mutate effortlessly into doubles and triples of themselves, resulting in the passages of spaceship lift-off on a exploratory mission towards the heart of glowing nebulae. Towards the end of the first side, McGuire transitions into a particularly maudlin riff of intertwined and overlaid guitars, making some of us here think back to that incredible Dreamies album of symphonic psychedelic mope. Off In The Distance strikes that balance found in so much of the Emeralds / McGuire axis of music making, that of the inner-cosmonaut in pursuit of transcendence and/or tranquilization on one hand, and on the other, he channels something profoundly sad as McGuire's aware that such pursuits can only be fleeting at best. Undoubtedly beautiful stuff from McGuire. Limited to 500 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Much like on his recent solo acoustic radio session lp, on Things Fall Apart, Emeralds member Mark McGuire once again ditches the effects (mostly), going it alone, sans his synthesizer compatriots, with just some hazy guitar strum, looped hypnotic melody, and away we go...
...Into some sort of ethereal washed out dreamscape of elliptical guitar figures, interwoven and overlapping, mesmerizing and hypnotic, slowly shifting, a gorgeous new age krautdrone drift, crystalline and delicate, it's a slow build, but eventually, the tracks grow more fierce, darker, and more dense, with some fuzzy psychedelic guitars adding extra buzz and filigree, ratcheting up the space rock vibe, but never letting loose completely.
Contemplative, sun-dappled tranquility is the order of the day here. Or rather the order of the cool breezy sun-setting Summery eve. Some aQ folks were hearing some Jerry Garcia, in his Zabriske Point solo guitar mode, others some krauty shimmery smoothness a la Michael Rother, both are equally applicable, Things Fall Apart is a soft focus prismatic drift of fluttery krautfolk and subtle spaced out avant Appalachia, broadcast through a gauzey veil of ephemeral shimmer. Lovely. And of course, EXTREMELY LIMITED.
Previously listed on vinyl, now finally available on cd, another fantastic release from Mark McGuire, a member of psych synth drone aQ faves Emeralds, this a cd reissue of two loooong out of print cassettes, consisting of four long tracks, of processed and looped guitarmusic, a gloriously kosmiche hypnotic and repetitive space rock kraut drone, beginning with an odd, somewhat out of place sample, but as soon as the guitars kick in we're immediately transported to some strange other world of crystals and prisms, the sonic sunlight unfurling glorious sheets of color, stuttery looped tangles of spidery guitar gives way to thick swells of crumbling corrosive fuzz, warm and lush and billowy, a wall of metalgaze blur that soon shifts back into a dizzying swirl of looped and layered melodies, that shifts and undulates and morphs from muted blissful smears to straight up folky strum.
The second track is another gorgeous loopscape, chiming guitar harmonics, and short sharp bursts of static, simple subtle melodies underneath, almost poppy sounding, until it collapses into a soft swirling tangle of layered synths and dizzying serpentine melodies, only to again to return to something much more traditionally strummy, a simple moody guitar figure layered over electronic chitter that sounds a bit like crickets in the fading afternoon light.
Track three beings with flurry of chiming high end guitars, like fireflies, they swirl and flit, the almost-melodies constantly in motion, the sound growing ever more lush and complex and dense, so hypnotic, loop after loop laid atop the loops that came before, a lovely slow build, that eventually joins the twinkling looped melodies with subtle guitar strum, and washed out string-like swells, the whole thing growing more and more hazy and distorted and metallic, dissipating in a lovely tangle of decaying loops.
Finally, the record ends with some heavily delayed and looped minimal guitars, muffled and muted, chiming and percussive, very Reich / Riley sounding, again blossoming into lush latticeworks of overlapping melodies and overtones, it's not until near the end that the guitars begin to become effected, the guitars seemingly transforming into synths, a buzzy, fuzzy, but still fantastically mesmerizing finale.
There are those who might have doubts about an ACOUSTIC guitar record from cosmic zoner Mark McGuire, who has been honing his Achim Reichel / Gunter Schickert guitar arpeggiations in the soon to be legendary trio Emeralds. You might say to yourself, when has Emeralds ever used an acoustic guitar? Can he really play without tons of tripped out effects? Is he good enough without a battery of synths supporting him? Any and all doubts should be dispelled in listening to this record. Yeah, this is really pretty special. McGuire offers five lengthy pieces of psychedelic folk via an acoustic guitar, probably buttressed by a loop station on a few passages during these pieces. The brightly rendered guitar chiming from McGuire's acoustic guitar noticeably detours from the rounded tonal arcs of Emeralds psych-drone workouts; but the rhythmic locomotive aspects from some of the later Emeralds recordings are prominent throughout this album. The nearly sidelong "Burning Leaves" centers upon a rich and warmly clad elliptical strum that spins in a duet around some lovely melodic notes dotting about. As hypnotic as the piece is, it's also downright playful. Other tracks like "At First Sight" and especially "Second Thoughts" have much more of a downer, maudlin vibe that spills through the almost raga hypnosis of McGuire's fingerpicking. Great stuff that would certainly appeal to fans of James Blackshaw, Six Organs, and maybe even Vini Riley. Dare it be said, but had this been released sometime in 1970, this would probably have landed on Takoma!
London's Mark Wastell has been privy to some rather unexpected (and unexpectedly great!) collaborations in recent years. Best known for his work with various quiet, AMM-inspired improvisers from the New London Silence community, he's turned recently to working with electronic musicians with a proclivity for tension, intensity, and blackened soundfields. There's the rather impressive Oceans Of Blood & Blood project that Wastell has instigated with Skull Defekts' Joachim Nordwall, and now there's this duet with Jonathan McHugh. A sound designer of the same name has worked on the Saw series of movies, but we're pretty sure these are not the same character even if there is some rather psychoacoustically challenging noises to be found on Hydrotaphia. With Wastell on his 32" gong that he's been using for many years now and McHugh on an Arp synth, the two begin to coax a series of low-end rumbles very much on par with the Deathprod / early Thomas Koner constructions, with McHugh gradually injecting small squiggles of electrical fizzes that eventually coalesce into a pure high-end tone that will certainly clear out any earwax if you happen to be listening on headphones. This rather bracing duality of low-end rumbles and high frequencies subsides after about ten minutes leaving more of those enveloping, icy surfaces of gong resonance. McHugh dials in a growling drone towards the end of the 45 minute composition, building into a gnarled set of tempestuous, electronic noise with a bleak feel that lends much more to the Dilloway / Michigan axis of American noisemongering. Quite impressive!
We've always love musicians who make music out of ice, so we were super intrigued by this 7". The latest from Land and Sea, the Oakland-based imprint that publishes small run books and records from visual and sound artists, this is a beautifully minimal sound piece by artist and sound engineer, Colin McKelvey. Taking his inspiration from a famous conceptual sculpture from 1970 by Bay Area artist Paul Kos called Sound of Ice Melting, where Kos placed eight microphones around a large ice block to amplify the sound of its melting. Originally composed by McKelvey as a long-form composition called "Composition for Synthesizer, Voice and Ice", this 7" is two versions of various "canti" (a poetic division, or significant excerpt) from the original composition, a studio edit and a live edit that was performed at the Berkeley Art Museum in conjunction with a show that featured the Paul Kos sculpture. The piece is about space as much as it's about sound and the atmosphere involving the modular synth in varied frequencies along with the slow rumble of ice create a reverent but slowly destabilizing mood. The live edit has more of an echoing atmosphere given the reverberating properties of the architecture in which it was performed. Fans of the Touch label and experimental composers like Alvin Curran will find lots to love here. Beautifully packaged in an embossed white paper sleeve on clear vinyl with inserts including notes on the piece and an essay on the ambiguities of ephemeral sound. Limited to 100 copies, we have 5, we may be able to get more, but no guarantees, so you know what that means!
The tactile squiggles, zoner-drool time suspension, and tape machined guttural splutter of Collin McKelvey's Macro-negative conjure the lovingly grossed-out images of long lost Schimpfluch tapes. There was a legendary-yet-unheard performance of three of the Schimpfluch dudes (probably Phillips, G*Park, and Joke) smashing their contact miced faces into plates of spaghetti while a lithe woman serenaded them with electrified violin drones. While we've not actually heard any actual documentation of this particular aktion, we have a pretty damn good idea of what it might have sounded like. It would be a stretch to think that Bay Area audio-visual artist Collin McKelvey has taken up a similar strategy of fucked-in-the-head method acting, but some of the sounds he's grafted onto this tape have a profoundly scatological implications. One of the sides of this cassette opens with a disturbing set of pitch-shifted samples of intestinal gurgles and saliva dripped smacks (well, that's what it sounds like) which are overtaken by a slumped drone of 60hz electric hum cycling. The other side is grounded with a similarly electrocuted tonefloat with what sounds like a mass extinction of thousands of shrimp having their exoskeletons ripped off in mid-swim. Either that or it's a Small Cruel Party / Yeast Culture collage of tiny shards of flint, shale, and sandstone. Sicktones abound. It's limited to 50 copies and comes with a silkscreened cover.
As of the end of 2013, the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art has temporarily closed its physical doors at its Third Street location, with plans to expand outward and upward from that structural footprint. Collin McKelvey and John Davis are two Bay Area media artists who happen to work at SFMOMA; and the two embarked on their Episteme project to document the ephemera and non-Art objects that would have typically gone unnoticed by the visitors and even the staff. A book was published for a short-lived exhibition of the visual documentation of said ephemera. Included with that book was a 7" of processed field recordings of the more banal, behind-the-scenes sounds at SFMOMA. The book seems to be sold out, but we did get a hold of some of these 7" singles of which we think there were about 100 copies in total. Each artist offers their own interpretation with McKelvey taking an abstract, phonographer approach with various shuffles, creaking wheels, HVAC purrs, and forgotten institutional clatter. Davis' track takes an opposite approach, recontextualizing various snippets of field recordings into motorik rhythms and radiophonic swarms with a nice Schnitzler / Moebius vibe.
Some super nice, unexpected sounds from Austin based soundsculpter Shawn David McMillen. While Tompkins Square is now releasing this on cd (the vinyl has been out a little longer courtesy of Emperor Jones) we mistakenly jumped to some conclusions before we even threw this one in, assuming McMillen to be another in a long line of finger picking Appalachian style Fahey disciples, and we have to admit we were a bit relieved to discover this was not actually the case. We can't deny that there have been some great releases in that style over the last few years but we've reached critical mass, especially when folks like James Blackshaw and Jack Rose have already raised the bar so high that most others can't really compete. McMillen on the other hand explores a more experimental approach to his playing which comes off sounding like a more subdued No Neck Blues Band at times which to our ears sounded damn fine. We were also reminded of the wandering explorations of Loren Chasse and the more delicate side of the Jeweled Antler family. What a nice surprise, excellent!
Ever since we first heard the mysterious MCMS, sharing space with the equally mysterious Yermo on a cd-r released on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomena cd-r label, we were hooked. Big time. Two absolutely stunning cd-r's followed. But as with most cd-r's they quickly went out of print and were seemingly lost forever. Well lucky for us, AQ pal Chris Moon who runs the Last Visible Dog label (and who just happens to be in MCMS) has stepped up and re-released on real cds both of those out of print discs, adding their half of the aforementioned split with Yermo as well as the tracks from their lathe cut lp on Eclipse (which was limited to 50 copies). Everything all in one convenient triple cd package. So what the hell does it sound like you ask? Imagine a weird, British style folk, loosely strummed acoustic guitars, warbly flute and urgently whispered vocals. Churning hyperdistorted guitars, random, 'free' percussion, sometimes just a simple plodding thud, all deteriorating into soft mumbly melodies and found sounds, mysterious and ambient. Dirty, gritty garage-y dirge/drone rock, Krautrock-ish rhythms filtered through a Dead C noiserock aesthetic that veers into noisy freakout territory, careening wildly from tuneless, Comus style pagan folk to chaotic free rock, to blissful dronescapes. A meandering soundscape of clatter and buzz, drone and thump, skree and whir, all very atmospheric. Moments of Sunroof! like lo-fi bliss disrupted by bursts of spastic percussive splatter and amp/instrument malfunction. Anyone into NZ noise rock (Dead C, Gate, etc), the current crop of free folk (Jewelled Antler, NNCK, Sunburned Hand, etc.) or just weird and wonderful, fucked up and noisy experimental free-folk-rock-noise-whatever definitely needs this. (Though, we wish Chris had come up with a different sort of package for these cds, he kept the cost down by eschewing a jewel box in favor of a three-pocket plastic sleeve, that's nice and slim but more or less ensures that all the discs will wind up with some minor cosmetic scratches on their playing surfaces. Nothing serious but still too bad.)
This is dirge-y, dirty, grungy tribal FREEROCK. '3' starts off with churning hyperdistorted guitars, random, 'free' percussion, sometimes just a simple plodding thud, which all deteriorate into softly strummed guitars and found sounds, mysterious and ambient. The rest of the record is a meandering soundscape of clatter and buzz, drone and thump, skree and whir, all very atmospheric. Moments of Sunroof! like lo-fi bliss disrupted by bursts of spastic percussive splatter and amp/instrument malfunction.
We totally loved the MCMS cd-r on Celebrate Psi Phenomena (a split with Yermo, now out of print), so we were pretty psyched for TWO new titles courtesy of our pals at Last Visible Dog. Starts off as weird, British style folk, loosely strummed acoustic guitars, warbly flute and urgently whispered vocals. This soon becomes a dirty, gritty garage-y dirge/drone rock workout. Krautrock-ish rhythms filtered through a Dead C noiserock aesthetic that veers into noisy freakout territory. The record continues on, careening wildly from tuneless, Comus style pagan folk to chaotic free rock, to blissful dronescapes. Good stuff.
Another new name from Campbell Kneale's mighty Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, and it's yet another winner. A hyperminimal dronescape of warm underwater tones, thick and slow moving, dreamy and surreal, muted melodies stretched into thick blankets of fuzzy warmth. The second half of the record sounds like a straight field recording, wind and footsteps and dogs barking and the faraway whir and hum of everyday life, lovely and serene.
Orbiting With Screwdrivers is comprised of seven austere soundscapes from this veteran aural experimentalist from Montreal, Quebec. Continuing on in the collaborative community spirit that has made that city's cativatingly diverse art and music so captivating, Mecha Fixes Clocks aka Michel F. Cote (we resisted the urge to concoct some clever punny statement about his moniker and time spent listing to this cd) crafted this 49 minute long album from hours upon hours of recorded material he received from over a dozen of his fellow French Canadian contributors some of which are already quite familiar to AQ such as Christof Migone and Martin Tetrault. Some tracks are so minimal, they're barely there save for a single strikes of a piano key or ghostly plucks of a stringed instrument left to linger in the air. Others offer more atmospheric 'presence' in the form of vaporous drones or high pitched prickly squeals. All of them evoke open, abandoned, unlit spaces. When played in the store, this received numerous enthusiastically curious queries. Check it out.
We first heard from the oddly titled Medroxy Progesteron Acetate on a split 7" with Warmth a while back, but this is the first we've heard since, a sprawling double cassette epic, of burnt out psychedelic drift and drone out black synth shimmer, rife with strange voices and sampled vocals, buried melodies and constantly shifting textures and tones. Dense stretched out drone music, lush layered abstract psych-synth minimalism, slow-motion muted industrial creep, squalls of grinding sci-fi noise, or thick bleary buzz, this is heavy, deep, dark listening, paranoid, sinister, ominous, otherworldly, haunting, harrowing, but at the same time, strangely blissed out, mesmerizing, dense and dark and in its own bleak and black way surprisingly dreamy. Muted rhythmic drift fused to ethereal shimmer, and softly roiling sonic murk, the voices constantly in the distance, occasionally moving to the fore, intoning some mysterious passage only to be swallowed up and covered in layer after layer of hum and thrum and rumble. Fans of Pulse Emitter, Grasslung, and other synth-drone alchemists will definitely dig, but the constant flow of samples and strange voices and mysterious broadcasts, gives this the vibe of some fucked up soundtrack, or some purloined surveillance tape set to music, which is what makes this so cool. And so trippy, fucked up and frightening.
Like all Black Horizons releases, crazy deluxe packaging, two tapes housed in one of those cool double tape cases, with two full color printed J-cards, on metallic paper, each with an insert with all the 'lyrics' and liner notes, and each either silver or gold, matching whichever tape it accompanies.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!
It was stated in the one sheet that Roel Meelkop 'has been compared to Bernhard Gunter, (but) his work is... above all more audible" Hey, they stole our joke! Regardless, Meelkop presents shifting walls of granite sounds which are slowly grinding against each other leaving behind a residue which some may call musique concrete.
The four pieces include one solo track from Meelkop (Goem, THU20), one collaborative piece, and two from Toy Bizarre. Both excel at environmentally based recordings with Meelkop tearing these sounds apart leaving their intrinsic silences behind and Toy Bizarre focusing more on the uncanny behaviour of his raw recordings. Their collaborative pieces narratively links the precedant (the Meelkop track) with the following Toy Bizarre track, as hard disc processing overlay and intercept the fractured sounds of each other to rather electronic means.
We've slowly been dipping into the impressive catalog of Debacle Records, and pretty much everything we've heard so far has ruled, the recently reviewed Blackout cd-r by space psych explorers Expo 70, and the synth and vocal bliss drone excursions of The Slaves, and now this, the most recent record from Megabats, whose pun titled cd-r offers up a selection of sounds that definitely fit pretty perfectly between both The Slaves and Expo 70, as well as other spaced out electronic weirdos like Fuck Buttons and Oneohtrix Point Never and Pulse Emitter, a sort of sci-fi synth drone tethered to pulsing minimal electro, and then blurred into hazy expanses of far out shimmery drone flecked electro synth throb, that manages to be energizing and urgent, while somehow remaining blissed out and spacey and oh so hypnotic.
The 'beats' are buried underneath thick layers of synth buzz, the beat usually a barely audible pulse, a sort of heroin house underwater rhythm, skeletal and spare, there less for propulsion or groove, and more for an anchor, a mesmerizing metronomic center, which entrances and enthralls, as the layers of buzz and thrum slowly wrap themselves around you and fill your ears with liquid warmth.
Total late night drugged out, sun rise chill out drift off soundscapery, every track here is epic and repetitive and hypnotic, many ditching the pulse completely and instead unfurling lush landscapes of glistening glimmering synthy shimmer, sun dappled sheets of spacey swirl, culminating in the title track, which takes all of the above, and adds a strangely ominous vibe, cinematic and darkly sinister, a fuzzy low end drone drifting beneath crystalline melodies and hushed buzzy blur, the two elements inexorably linked, a darkly beautiful bit of soundtracky synth swell, haunting but also weirdly spacey and soothing, a brooding new age spacesynth finish to a pretty fantastic collection of otherworldly, electro zoner-drone drone-drift bliss!
At last, for those of you whose turntables are built sturdily enough to withstand the massive heaviness, here's some VINYL from former AQ Record Of The Weekers, Megaton Leviathan, those droning Portland doomsters who, while as heavy as their name so inadequately attempts to indicate, are surprisingly somnolently mesmeric too!
Released on their own label, it's a limited lp pressing of their original 2009 demo tape, five tracks, around 34 minutes of doooOOOOOooooom. The first two tracks, "Water Wealth Hell On Earth" and "Guns And LSD" both were later rerecorded for their cd debut that we made ROTW, while the other 3, "Repeating Patterns Of Love", "Time Fades", and "Turlock", all appeared redone on their 2011 demo cassette as well. So, no new songs, but if you don't have the original demo, you haven't heard these versions before, and in any case this is the only way to weigh your turntable down with their doom, as we said... though as we also have said, ML's doom is a special sort of "soft doom", as much spacey slowcore shoegaze as it is anything else, uniquely so even on these, their debut recordings.
We all went a little crazy for the debut from Portland doomlords Megaton Leviathan, whose particular brand of doom was on the poppy, melodic, washed out and dreamy side of the doom spectrum. So much so that we felt obligated to come up with a new term for their sound, 'soft doom', when we made their cd a Record Of The Week. And we still can't get enough of these guys' woozy, spacey slowcore laced, drone flecked soft doom. So we were psyched to discover a brand new cassette, their newest demo, a teaser for their forthcoming full length, and if anything, the 'softness' of their doom has been transformed into something more like spaciness this time around. At least on the opening track, that sounds like Hawkwind crossed with Spacemen 3 and slowed down to a plodding, nodding dirge, hazy squalls of wah guitar, sung/spoken vocals, everything drenched in effects, shards of vocals, slivers of guitars, sent spinning into space trailing streaks of echo and reverb and delay, a sprawling drug rock space drone epic, that rivals most of the other bands out there who set their controls for space rock. In the case of Megaton Leviathan, it somehow sounds more organic, like their quest for slo-mo soft doom heaviness just somehow ended up here.
And as the record plays on, it becomes evident that the first track was no fluke, the doom almost entirely replaced by drugged out space rock and psychedelic slowcore, sure it's still dark and heavy, and slow and dirgey and okay, a bit doomy, but it's way less 'doom' and way more washed out, woozy, lysergic, hazy, gauzy, hypno-dronerock, repetitive, and cyclical, and hypnotic, the production simultaneously lush and lo-fi, the distortion cranked way up, but instead of making it heavy, it makes the sounds crumble and wash out and crystallize, making the overall sound seem that much more warm and rough and organic, especially when the band slips into slow spaciness, all low slung bass, melodic guitar echoes, and big drums, lumbering and loose, the sort of thing Three Mile Pilot were masters of in the old days, loads of space, all held together by sinewy basslines and krauty rhythms, and then the guitars come back in, and again, we're well past doom, the sound lifting free of the surface, and drifting heavenward, somehow mixing Hawkwind, Codeine, Low, Spacemen 3, Loop, a little doom, lots of drugs, and even more effects, into the sort of thing that should have fans of the current crop of space rockers (Wooden Shjips, Carlton Melton, White Hills, Moon Duo, Heads, Lumerians, White Noise Sound) losing their shit.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, and record on swank reflective gold cassettes.
Megaweapon is Mr. DJ George Chen (of Zum Magazine / indie music label right here in the Bay Area) and a few of his Oakland cohorts from Boxleitner and K.I.T. Together they're makin' 'tape music'. Dropsouts is a coarsely ground and blended 4-track recording of noise-alicious distorted scraping, looping and churning. A brief but notable track is the second - a scant thirty seven seconds of what sounds like a chat between two homemade foghorns. 25 minutes total. Limited 'pressing' of 75.
Over the past five years (or so), the work of Francisco Meirino has moved ever forward by leaps and bounds. Once the man discovered what could be done with an EMF detector, his aesthetic world exploded from that of a guttural noise-monger to that of an exemplary composer of muscular electro-acoustics. In sonorizing the signals from his EMF detector, Meirino gives voice to the electrical field in any given space. Parapsychologists and ghost hunters have used these devices as citations pointing to their claims of hauntings, poltergeist activity, and residual energies from psychic distress. Not surprisingly, Meirino did engage in the realm of the paranormal by working with ghost hunter Michael Esposito on an album mapped out of EVP recordings sourced by Meirino and researched by Esposito. Audio bleedthrough, spikes of energy, crude stabs of noise, electrified drone, and disruptions of all kind are commonplace within the sonic markmaking for Meirino; and Notebook (Techniques Of Self-Destruction) stands as one of the finest albums in Meirino's catalogue. Aggressive cuts across tape and digital files reveal jagged edges between frequencies and sonorities that Meirno exaggerates and telescopes as if all of his sounds were atomic particles irradiated with x-rays and then smashed against the clinical floor of some Swiss laboratory left to wiggle, glow, and collapse without much concern from the technician doing the smashing. There is a violence to Meirino's work, and it's one that carries over from his youthful days working under the noise moniker Phroq. The violence is actually more impactful given the dynamics of Meirino's techniques and compositional artistry. It's obvious that he's been pursuing a parallel path as that of the Schimpfluch Gruppe (e.g. Rudolf Eb.Er, G*Park, Dave Phillips, and Sudden Infant); and Notebook is a worthy contender to follow in that lineage of transgressive actions and theatrical nihilism.
The Swiss electro-acoustic tactician Francisco Meirino has proven a deft hand in cajoling caustic jolts of static and searing chunks of noises from electro-magnetic sources, growing leaps and bounds from his earliest recordings as Phroq to the intensely dynamic output he's been steadily releasing under his own name over the past couple of years. This album's title refers to the UPIC system developed by Xenakis as a means of drawing on a digitizing tablet which provides vector coordinates to a program controlling particular sound sources, which for Meirino's purposes include snow falling, bones cracking, magnetic field disturbances, and insect noises. As interesting as Xenakis' UPIC system is, it's reassuring that Meirino treats the device as just another tool in his arsenal to direct his own aesthetic and not let the tool itself speak any louder than necessary. Radioactive streams of static electricity and piercing sinewaves ground the scattered tactile events which at times sound more like resonant gongs and small scraps of metal whose trailing decay undulates in rippling patterns that parallel Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie. Throughout the 37 minute piece, Meirino returns to the densely phased, atonal concoctions of sinewaves and static that accelerate and deflate out of pockets of agitated acoustically sourced sources. Where those cracking bones are in the mix is anybody's guess, as he adheres a sharply toxic aura to all of his sounds. Like Dave Phillips and G*Park, he's at the vanguard of contemporary Swiss electro-acoustic malevolence. Limited to 350 copies.
