Well, if you've wondered where in the world has Robert Millis been for the past year, the answer is India, as the avant-everything guitarist from the Climax Golden Twins somehow cajoled his way into getting a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a year conducting ethnomusicological research on the subcontinent. Truth be told, our man Millis stained his fingers on curry and cigarettes while thumbing through old '78s for a year. Not a bad gig, if you can get it! But his working vacation was a productive one too, as a spate of new releases are on the immediate horizon of his sidereal collages for prismatic drone, raga mysticism, and polyglot psychedelic narcosis. Millis declares this cassette to be a re-imagined construct of solo material and Climax Golden Twin tracks of old; but even for CGT / Millis completists like we are, it's hard to pick out much of anything that is obviously tied to a gem like the Imperial Household Orchestra, Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds, or those asskicking AFCGT records. Millis stitches together disembodied drones, skittering satellite transmissions, and swampy field recordings that on the A side of this tape could be some unearthed Steven Stapleton / Chris Watson collaboration. Until that improbable event happens, we'll happily settle for Millis' tape. The flipside is all slippery minimalism through purring overtones and sensually rippling glissandos hitting all the right sweets spots of La Monte Young transcendentalism, before Millis introduces some found recordings of Jonestown-esque ritualized vocal incantations that turn the vibe from pleasantly opiated to seriously creepy. Fucking great stuff that's limited to something like 200 copies.
Polyglot might be just the right word to describe what Robert Millis and his Climax Golden Twins have been up to for the past two decades or so. An album might be a ramshackle collage of blisterfuck noise-rock, another might be a graceful set of murder ballads, and yet another might hypnotize the listener through an alpha-state minimalism. And then, there's Millis' acclaimed collections of olde-timey '78s and raw field recordings of indigenous folk songs, much of which has been released through those tasty labels Sublime Frequencies and Dust-To-Digital. The solo work from Millis tends more toward the dronemuzik and hallucinatory collage axis of CGT's multi-headed agenda, although he has been known to strum out a sadsack blues number that might straddle the worlds of Alan Bishop and Roscoe Holcomb; but here on the impeccable new album Relief, Millis tunes in and drops out with a blearily psychedelic album of forgotten sounds, ghostly fragments, and Pacific Ocean drones. The album begins with a comedic outburst from one of Millis' 78s with a helpful direction to "hear the secret sentence played out on the talking typewriter" followed by a jaunty clatter of a manual typewriter all wrapped in scratchy-vinyl, crackling goodness. Immediately, the album delves into a swarming tone-float of harmonic overtones pecked with trilling glissandos. The source for this sound has got to be a plung - a Bangladeshi mouth-organ used specifically by the Murung peoples living deep in the rainforest, as this sound is uniquely atonal and wrigglingly eerie in its wavering notes. Millis furthers this wooziness by rarifying these sounds into the holy minimalism conjured by LaMonte Young, Angus Maclise, and company. After swimming here in these golden pools for a good five or six minutes, Millis drops the needle on a dramatic orchestral swell that would be the envy of the Caretaker's sunken ballroom recordings. A couple of hip-swaying recombinations of temple music rhythms and Les Baxter exotica glide in and out of Millis' glassy-eyed shimmeriness and post-Eno piano constellations. The album's finale is an impressionistic driftscape of languid, temple bell & gong tones stretched into a gorgeous, expansive cloud of lush harmonics giving way to a metronomic wooden rhythm that leads to a set of solitary piano notes suspended over Mariana trench diving-bell ambience. Limited to 400 copies, and comes with the requisite download code. So fucking good.
Robert Millis is a man of many talents: a Climax Golden Twin, a collector '78s resulting in the impeccable Victrola Favorites book & compilation, purveyor of searing avant-scum-noise-rock in AFCGT, a world traveller in search of esoterica for Sublime Frequencies, a field recordist of frogs, birds, blue jeans salesmen, etc. etc. etc. Despite his many activities, Millis' recorded output has almost entirely been by way of collaboration, making this self-released gem of a solo album all the more special. This is closer related to the collage work that Millis has contributed to the Climax Golden Twins, bridging all of those aforementioned interests in a polyglot of psychedelic drone smear pocked with snippets of conversation, poetic extracts from his collection of '78s, and a judicious amount of vinyl crackling. An album such as this would easily be confused for the hermetic revelations that Philip Jeck extracts from his rough shod vinyl and turntables; but Millis seems to counterpoint the crackle and the clean with more drama than Jeck, almost positing the crackle like a punchline in a joke that breaks through one of Millis' blissed out shimmers constructed from loops and drones from guitar, bells, and glass harmonica, where haunted melodies from times long gone whisper through the mix. But at another instance, Millis leaps geographically from a field recording of loosely played Thai temple music into a shortwave burst of noise seamlessly mixed through a cloud of insects and back into one of his sleepy drones. The logic of the album may seem absurd from afar; but the internal logic is peculiarly sensible, as if Millis were tapping into some stream of consciousness that subcutaneously connects all of these intermingling sounds. Limited to something like 50 copies, but maybe we'll be able to get more... maybe not. Very highly recommended no matter how you slice it.
Kristin Miltner is one of many very talented electronic musicians from the Bay Area who has gone through Mills College with a deft understanding of Max/MSP language and how to apply that understanding to a post-techno framework of electronica. While she has collaborated in a couple of other recorded projects, Grains stands as her solo debut, and it's quite a gem of twinkling glitch-based electronica and crunchy rhythmic skitter. Fragmenting tiny snippets of her own voice and splicing it all back together with all of the digital threads exposed, Miltner builds looping melodies that hold the same languid sensibility found on those beloved Colleen records, but with the additional pixel smear patina from the likes of Tim Hecker and Fennesz. Using these melodies as the building blocks to her pop-song length pieces, Miltner stacks these sounds with increasing density and jagged drum machines, all the while maintaining the basic tune of the melody. Grains emerges as a short and sweet reprisal of the classic Autechre use of melody with plenty of technological tricks up its sleeve to keep it charming, fresh, and unique. Very nicely done.
So here's a new record from longtime AQ fave Antony Milton, who runs the kick ass cd-r label PseudoArcana. Not a new record entirely, actually originally released on cassette, then on cd-r and now on cd (our sincerest apologies to anyone who will be buying this for the THIRD time), this time re-re-released by Last Visible Dog who now seem to be the go to guys to have your already released cd-r's released once again! But hell, most of you probably missed out the first two times around (we sure did), so here's a chance to catch up and make it right! This isn't at all like the Antony Milton we've come to adore, which in no way is a bad thing. Milton has bestowed upon us record after record of sublime drones and experimental ambience, all of it pretty darn amazing. But this is a whole 'nother side of Mr. Milton, a more lo-fi, home recorded, bedroom folk side. And quite a nice side it is. Originally Recorded in 1997 and 1998 the two records that comprise this disc are intimate folk pop songs, lots of strummed guitar, simple percussion, and Milton's quavering almost-falsetto sadboy vocals. Drifting and delicate, simple and insistent, sweetly innocent but with haunting otherworldly filigree. Certainly in the tradition of New Zealand bedroom songsmiths Alastair Galbraith, Peter Jeffries, Roy Mongomery, but with definite shades of the US four-track underground (Sentridoh, Iran, Supreme Dicks, etc.). Towards the second half of the record, the freakout factor definitely picks up, with stretches of wild guitar and slabs of almost-noise, but at it's core this is still a ultra personal, super lovely slab of folky pop lovliness!
Pseudo Arcana head honcho starts this disc off with some real Raster-Noton style static clickery but manages to sound way more organic, with throbbing pulses of low end that abruptly cut out and become a dreamy, thrumming, humming wash of warm drones ans slowly shifting spaced-out swish and whir. The rest of the record runs the gamut from noise-y drone ala the Dead C, with bursts of harsh noise and looped samplesforming loping 'rhythms', to all out N O I S E, to dreamy subterranean dronescapes reminiscent of Birchville Cat Motel, to almost-pop buried under fuzz and hiss and distrorted to the point of being pop-no-more.
Four tracks of droning dreaminess. Track one is a stuttering, wheezing violin drone over absent mindedly strummed, downtuned guitars sounding like a doped up Roy Montgomery. The second track is an industrial landscape of machinery buzz and electronic hiss
Siren Performance was devised as an installation using the sounds of air raid sirens and the various sonic harmonics and overtones that resulted from multiple / competeing sound sources. This disc contains a 15 minute recording of the source material for the installation as well as a performance featuring the air raid sirens, as well as Campbell Kneale on electronics, Antony Milton on sampler and broken violin, as well as a few other folks on bass, guitar and more electronics. The sound is stark and beautiful, mournfully wailing like ghosts and wind, slowly pitched up and down. The performance takes those sounds and turns them into a thick drone-y wash of sirens and vigorously bowed stringed instruments which takes the piece into Conrad / Cale / Maclise / Palestine territory.
Antony Milton is one busy man, not only does he run the amazing PseudoArcana label, but he also makes tons of music as A.M., Mrtyu, in the Stumps, the Nether Dawn and more. Did we also mention he's a postman?
The End Of This Short Road is the latest from this underground dynamo, and is most definitely the most song oriented. We know full well Milton is capable of weaving gorgeous expanses of droney bliss, as well as monstrous slabs of downtuned brutality, but who knew he had such a deft hand at delicate songsmithery, but he does, and pretty much every track on The End Of This Short Road is a gem. Fear not, the weird lo-fi warbles and buzzy drone drenched whirs are still present and accounted for, but they tend to be beneath bits of jangle and croon, instead of on their own (although that does happen here and there).
The quieter pretty songs sound a bit like a more lo-fi Sparklehorse, with a little Alastair Galbraith mixed in and maybe with Roy Montgomery on guitar. Soft whispery vocals over delicate melodies, all filtered through that distinctly NZ filter. While the more rocking songs, are super psychedelic, with aggressive strumming, lost of reverb and delay, intense little squalls of minor key jangle and crunch, that manage to be both noisy and pretty, intense but strangely sad and wistful. Recommended for soft hearted noisies and noisy hearted folkies...
MIMEO stands for Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra, a massive ensemble of European electronic musicians and improvisers that includes Keith Rowe, Phil Durrant, Kaffe Matthews, Jerome Noetinger, Gert-Jan Prins, Cor Fuhler, Thomas Lehn, Marcus Schmickler,
So far, the only thing we've reviewed on the awesome Ormolycka label, run by aQ pal Jason, was the cassette version of Liturgy's Renihilation, the one that featured a bad ass Liturgy jungle remix courtesy of our very own Andee. But we do carry everything else on the label, we just get such limited copies, they never make it onto the list, tapes by Pistol Disko, Anthro Rex, Synt.Tofs, Shams, M Ax Noi Mach, Modern Witch, Dubknowdub, GDFX, Pushups, Diamond Black Hearted Boy, A Magic Whistle, Juiceboxx, Frak, Narwhalz, Death Grips, Pictureplane, Kalambya Sisters and more! Phew. Ormolycka has also just started doing 7"s, the first two of which we have in stock, and we've go just enough to list!
Although we've never reviewed anything by Mincemeat Or Tenspeed, some aQ folks have been fans for a while, in fact he played a while back at a secret brunch show in a cave right by the water. We have no idea who Dan Friel is [2013 edit: now we do, and he's got a great record called Total Folklore coming out on Thrill Jockey in February], but this is some sort of collaboration, hence the tongue twisty moniker.
Not sure what we were expecting but it sure wasn't this, the A side starts out all awesomely gristly rhythmic buzz, wrapped in distorted keening melodies, sounding a bit like Amps For Christ or Bastard Noise, all sorts of warped squiggles, and stuttery glitched out rhythms, surprisingly melodic, almost poppy in its own way, like some fractured blast of rhythmic soft noise bliss out.
And if the A side is -almost- poppy, then the B side is full on pop, sounding a bit like some super catchy chunk of indie rock, rendered in glitched out analog buzz, a looped sort of hooky lo-fi electro that is just about the catchiest shit we've heard in ages. Awesome.
Limited too, and pressed on swank milky blue vinyl!
Gorgeous disc of strangely melodic, creepy black ambience, four long tracks that shimmer, chrip, creep, rumble and drift...
Harmonium! Tape delay! Oscillator! Oh my, this is ever nice. A solo project by Peeesseye's Jaime Fennelly, the "harmoniumist", tape delayer, and oscillator operator in question (he's also responsible for assorted synth processing, and there's other sounds such as pipe organ heard on here as well), Mind Over Mirrors is already up to its fourth album (in only 3 years) with this cd and lp for Immune, following releases on such labels as Aguirre and Digitalis, that we foolishly ignored, this being the first Mind Over Mirrors we've reviewed - and once we tear ourselves away from its warm embrace, we'll have to look into those earlier outings. 'Cause the six tracks here, ranging in length from under 4 minutes to over 18, of blissfully melodic, minimalist repetition, are all quite delightful and droneful indeed. So soothing and sacred-sounding, some with gently surging rhythms, others with placid deep drones. The mystic glow emanating from this release is hard to resist. Our newest nighttime drifting off to sleep listening favorite (we should make section for that in the store - come to think of it, we did a whole in-between list about music like that once, didn't we?), and nice to put on in the morning when you wake up, too.
Includes some guest guitar from Scott Tuma of Souled American and Matt Christensen of Zelienople, btw, and also the vinyl version comes with a download, fyi.
3rd album (right?) from this band of Rhode Island noise dance nutters... really great, like their others, and dig that D&D module referencing/punning title!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ming (aka Campbell Kneale, aka Birchville Cat Motel, aka Celebrate Psi Phenomenon head honcho) has slowly been drifting into more metallic sound worlds with his last few releases, as BCM but also as the distinctly more metal Black Boned Angel, but with Ming, Kneale seems to be channelling a more divine scree, the upper register droning skree-scapes pioneered by the likes of Albert Ayler and Sun Ra, and more recently paid homage to by folks like Sunroof!, Total, Vibracathedral Orchestra and the like. Two discs, seven tracks, two hours of keening wailing drones, scraping and bleating, at times harsh and chaotic, with lots of feedback and clatter, and at others, shimmering and crystalline with warm whirling sonic ripples. Found sounds, field recordings, sounds that resemble but probably aren't actually throat singing, chanting, horns, squealing guitars, all captured on a crappy hand held recorder, for maximum grit and and a gorgeously blow out quality. Epic and transcendental, and in its own way quite brutal and beautiful. As with all things Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, this is VERY VERY LIMITED!!!
The black musical cloud continues to creep wraithlike across the land, with yet another release on the Battlecruiser label, the metal imprint of Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. A home for all sorts of metallic sound, not necessarily metal per se, but experimentalists indulging their deep down metallic longings. We reviewed Ming's Hands Red With The Blood Of Her Enemies double cd-r on the last list, a massive expanse of Sunroof! / Total like free rock skree, droning and whirring and shimmering in lengthy swaths of gorgeous ambience. At once soothing and smooth, jagged and harsh. Well, The Kill sounds like that record's evil twin, or that record in an alternate, perhaps more evil dimension. Th sonic descriptors could be the same, droning, whirring shimmering, but instead of sheets of rich tonal color, and warm rumbling drones, The Kill is twenty minutes of monochromatic, hissing and harshed out hellish noise. It sounds a bit like there are some howled vocals and perhaps even a melody, but it could just be our ears playing tricks on us. Because if that stuff is there, it is suffocating beneath an impenetrable slab of pink noise buzz, a swirling miasma of hateful hiss and shrieking static. The Kill is definitely a harsh noise record, or maybe an industrial drone record, the metal here being implied or rather conveyed through the dark and brutal aggressiveness. But who was expecting (or wanting) a 'normal' metal record from Battlecruiser anyway? SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
Latest release from Campbell Kneale's Don't Fuck With Magic Label, this one from the mysterious Ming, which when you realize that Ming is in fact Kneale himself, doesn't seem so mysterious after all. Kneale, who previously performed as Birchville Cat Motel, still performs as Our Love Will Destroy The World, used to run the Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, and who also plays in Black Boned Angel, seems to have returned to his Ming moniker to create something a bit more minimal and dark. Far removed from the collaged and looped heaviness of OLWDTW, the doomy blackened crush of BBA and the blissed out cacophony of Birchville, Ming here occupies a space much more abstract, and when we said minimal and dark, we meant WAY minimal and WAY dark.
The record starts out so hushed we had to crank the volume to be sue anything was going on, but once we did, we were quickly enveloped in a dark swirling low end fog, a rumbling whirring creep, that almost sounds like an even more abstract minimal Bohren. Around this amorphous bassy drift, float random sounds, breaths, footsteps, all manner of ambient noise, but be prepared at about 8 minutes, if you have the volume cranked, you're gonna want to dial it back quick, before your speakers blow and the vibrations send everything crashing to the floor. A thick swath of rib cage rattling bass, warm and thick and loud, but loud in the way only extreme low end can be, felt more than heard, and so it goes, all manner of tones and drones, layered and intertwined, unleashing more low end overtones. It's at about 21 minutes in, when all that low end is joined by a strange soft cacophony of chiming tones and mysterious textural scrapes, those sounds too are soon blurred and smeared into another layer of deep dark shimmer, the final 8 or 9 minutes find the low end receding, leaving a strange collage of percussion and fragmented melody, skitters and scrapes, creaks and chimes, all slowing down and slowly fading out.
Wow. not at all what we expected, but we like it, A LOT. Reminds us of Thomas Koner or Organum, in fact this Ming seems to fall right in between the two, a mix of bowed metal and clatter and clang, and deep subterranean resonance. Super dark and gorgeous and hauntingly hypnotic and...
EXTREMELY LIMITED. We got about half of the extremely small pressing, and if past Don't Fuck With Magic releases are any indicator, these will no doubt disappear quick, and it's unclear whether we'll be able to get any more or not...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Release number 3 from this great new New Zealand label. Just like the first two (Rosy Parlane and Parmentier, reviewed in the last AQ-List) these are all-white packages of beautiful, minimal music.
The duo known as Minit present the blueprints for an architectural space in which lumbering loops and pin-pricks of static reconstitute the flow of empty space. A subtle beauty is captured within the lugubrious drones.
Wow, so many cool little labels all over the world. Each with it's own strange little niche. None stranger than Japan's Spekk label, who we first discovered when they released a compilation of out of print demos by local outfit the Alps (featuring our very own Scott). In the process of getting Alps cds, we also discovered they had released a cd from Jefre Cantu of Tarentel, as well as an amazing compilation of Small Melodies, featuring a handful of AQ faves composing gorgeous lullaby like tunes. They were also responsible for an old out of print disc from AQ fave William Basinski.
So we were more than a little excited to get wind of a new batch of Spekk releases, especially when we heard about this one, Textures In Glass Tubes And Reed Organ, by Minoru Sato and ASUNA. The liner notes are a little too dense for us to truly understand what was going on when this music was created, but the vibe we got, was similar to that of another AQ fave, Toshiya Tsunoda, who records the sympathetic vibrations running through huge objects, bridges, pieces of metal, docks, handrails, wind...
For the first track, five harmonic states were recorded separately, using a chord organ to cause sympathetic vibrations in glass tubes, or something like that. Regardless, the result is a dense, subtly shimmering near static drone. Five tones, each layered upon the other, woven into a reverberating tapestry of sound, a glistening dreamlike blur, very Niblock like in it's swirl of subtle overtones, the various tones beating and pulsing almost imperceptibly, 38 minutes of pure glimmering sun dappled soft static bliss.
The second track, utilizes an entirely different method for producing the sound, still with chord organ and glass tubes, explained in detail in the liner notes, but still a little dense for us to truly understand the method, it almost doesn't matter, this track too is a gorgeous slab of slow shifting minimalism, a muted hum, streaked with various subtle tonal variations, again the multiple layers of sound pulsing and rippling, giving the track some sort of invisible propulsion, the sound of light traveling through water, shimmering, shifting, sparkling, but sort of suspended and frozen in time, moving but so slowly it appears to just be vibrating in place, and just like the first track, total bliss out minimalist mesmer.
Packaged in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder, with photos of the instruments and extensive liner notes on the creation of the music within.
Um, last list we had the Quintet recording on Sub Rosa featuring these two unusual, improvising vocalists backed by drums, bass, and double bass. We might have scared some of you away by saying that sometimes the singing sounded like "Muppety monsters with gastric disorders" but it was REALLY GREAT (and we still have a few, be brave). For the adventurous folks who agreed with us (and perhaps more folks whom we might now convince to take a chance), here's the other, simultaneously released Sub Rosa disc we mentioned in that earlier review, Minton and Chen as an acoustic vocal duo only, no instrumental accompaniment at all. So everything you hear here, believe it or not, comes out of their mouths. Once again, it's quite weird and reminiscent perhaps of the most extreme vocal experiments you might have heard from Mike Patton or Eye Yamatsuka, though they mostly never scream or shout, making all these weird noises without really raising their voices at all.
We listed the other one first 'cause we thought (perhaps foolishly) that it was the more accessible, but really this one too, once you get into it, is a fascinatingly varied, corporal soundscape that can be both atmospheric and ridiculous, all the more impressive considering the "limitations" of the sound sources - two human voices - which don't really sound all that limited here! Being human voices (or whatever you would call noises emitted from someone's mouth - these aren't regular speaking or singing voices by a long shot) the sounds here have an emotional resonance even at their most nonsensical, something you wouldn't always get as immediately with free instrumental improv (which makes us think: the way the late Hans Reichel's bowed wooden "daxophones" were so effective, was in how they mimicked the human voice - and it's the lung power blowing the breath of Brotzmann through his horn that truly speaks to us). Minton and Chen cut out the middleman (instrument) and do it themselves, with artistry and inspiration. Intriguing and (for us at least) entertaining too - c'mon, 50+ minutes of moanings and groanings, mutterings and croakings, babblings and raspberry-blowings can't not be kind of funny, eh!
Some recommended, unusual improv here. We were quite surprised at what a pleasant and compelling listen this is, considering the definite weirdness and occasional wackiness of it, which comes mainly from the "Two Voices" referred to in the title. Those two voices - belonging to Phil Minton and Audrey Chen (who also have a duo-only all-voice disc out on Sub Rosa, released simultaneously with this, that we'll be listing soon too) - specialize in mostly nonverbal, nonsensical "singing" - not really what most folks would call singing, but freely improvised sound-making with lips, teeth, tongue, throat, lungs... And what they do is really taken to extremes here - quiet extremes as there's not really any screaming or shouting. Lots of moaning muttering mumbling whining wailing whispering whistling burbling babbling blubbering hissing and humming, however. Pretty much almost any noise you could imagine being able to make with your mouth and some others that you can't! And while without meaning linguistically, you can't say it's not meaningful on some other level, more primal and emotive.
Sometimes there's a silliness to it, Minton and Chen sounding like Muppety monsters with gastric disorders, but sometimes it can be downright disturbing, harrowing stuff like a chorus of damned souls; either way we're enjoying it and we think fans of, like, Mike Patton's various vocal experiments and a lot of the singing of Eye from the Boredoms would really dig this too. Obviously that also goes for anyone already into UK voice improv vet Phil Minton - or similar "sound poet" Jaap Blonk of Holland.
On the face of it what we've just described might seem to be outside of a lot of folks' usual musical comfort zone, but for those with open ears, we feel that this comes off as being intriguing and entrancing rather than in any way annoying, also in part perhaps because of the other elements on here, the "Four Instruments" portion of this quintet (as well as singing, Chen plays cello, Segers is on electric bass, Jacquemyn on double bass, and Verbruggen plays drums), which provide the perfect environment of gently improvised "chamber orchestra" music for these eccentric voices to inhabit. The instruments and voices really mesh well, the musicians laying down delicate drones, skittery percussion, scraping strings... all of which mimic or is mimicked at times by the human voices themselves, achieving an atmospheric synthesis, so you can't always tell what's voice and what's instrument, not to mention how many there are.
It's soothingly bass-heavy, as you might imagine from the instrumentation, and also as we said rather gentle and oddly pleasant, with quiet blissed-out stretches, despite its textural density and potential disturbance factor. Even when Minton, on the fourth track, gets into some rapid fire glossolalic mumbo-jumbo like an auctioneer with Tourette's, it's actually somewhat hypnotic (or amusing). By the way, he's the only person on here with whom were were previously familiar (and we haven't reviewed much by him, just a couple albums he's been on with folks like Bob Ostertag and Tom Cora), most of the other folks are presumably from the Belgian improv scene since this was recorded in Brussels and released on Sub Rosa.
Again, like we said, a bit of a surprise, but we've been listening to this A LOT, even when going to sleep at night. Strange dreams...
It's been well over a decade since our ears have been assaulted by a -new- recording from intense Swiss industrial-jazz juggernaut 16-17, though thankfully in recent years there's been a couple crucial reissues via the Savage Land label, including one, of 1994's Gyatso, that we made a Record Of The Week not too long ago, in 2008.
While 16-17 are long gone, now it's almost as if some of their extreme spirit has been reincarnated in the form of this new band, MIR, whose debut compact disc on Savage Land is in fact produced by 16-17 mastermind Alex Buess. MIR, it turns out, is the project of one-time 16-17 drummer Daniel Buess (who is apparently NOT related to Alex, oddly enough) in a trio with two others. Daniel is credited with drums, metal percussions, and electronics, while the other members of MIR play guitar, bass, organ, and synth, lots of synth. Heavily effected electronics and punishing percussive strikes are definitely the two key elements of MIR's all-instrumental "experimental rock music" sound. They traffic in droning noise, isolationist improv, sludge and skree filled soundscapery, and no wavish punk, MIR synthesizing something both avant garde and physically primal.
Among the seven tracks on this not-quite-half-hour album, the most 16-17 sounding one here is probably "Animal Instinct", with the swingin' jackboot precision of its big rhythmic boom-thwap, floor-scraping distorted bass, and dense layers of abstract electronic groan and drone (however there's no sax attack though, which is one way that MIR differs from 16-17). To mention a few other songs, there's also the skittery grooves of "Jimbo", the sinister shimmering drones of "Organ Donor", the uptempo energetic guitar throttling of "Hit", and the sudden attacks and echoed decay of the darkly atmospheric "Terminal Reverb", which sounds like it's part Starfuckers, part Spectre.
Also we could also compare MIR to a mix of Supersilent and Shit & Shine, perhaps... along with, of course, 16-17. Very cool, and best played LOUD, if you dare.
Another bleak and black slab of experimental drone in metal's clothing, and as always totally fucking great. From Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel) experiMETAL Battlecrusier label comes the mysterious Mirag (whom it is suspected might in fact be Matthew Bower of Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, etc.), whose wash of fuzzed out guitar grrrrrr is as swoonsome as it is brutal, a warm woozy swell of icepicks to the ear, as soothing and hypnotic and droning as it is fierce and furiously fuzzy. Huge churning swaths of mega-distorted guitars, moaning and grinding, rumbling and squealing, wrapped in all shades of grey and black, a desolate industrial fog, whose harsh and oppressive vibe is reminiscent of late eighties, early nineties NYC knuckle dragging thud and pound: Swans, Cop Shoot Cop, Unsane. But the sound itself has more in common with Total and Burning Star Core and Hototogisu and that sort of warm soft noise, huge walls of slow shifting vaccum cleaner guitar, thick and pulsing, nearly static, with occasional flares of melted melodies that are swallowed up almost as soon as they appear.
SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
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For those who remember the Suck.com parody of the descriptions found on Aquarius Records' tags, Suck.com had rewritten our description of a Helen Mirra 10" to read "Lush, enigmatic, forgiving, like a less neurotic Cat Power." Actually that description aptly pegged that Helen Mirra record (which we didn't really like all that much) way better than we did originally. However, it doesn't really apply to Mirra's first CD "Field Geometry" - which is a minimalist Americana meditation sounding a lot like a super slowed down John Fahey backed by the constant rustle of a seamstress weaving. Spartanly beautiful and mysteriously evolving. Completely recommended.
Both Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann of the the drone-improv outfit Mirror had been commissioned to remix elements from Brandon Walls' "Cassia Fistula" album. In spite of the fact that the source album was a dud, this limited edition 7" is quite good, with delicate feedback modulations and thick drones culled from analogue synthesis, ending up a bit more electronic than any of the Mirror albums. The packaging -- just a generic 7" sleeve -- leaves much to be desired though.
This installment from the prolific Mirror catalogue finds Mirror's core protagonists Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heeman working with the avant-rock darling Jim O'Rourke, who has kept himself busy by joining Sonic Youth. His presence will certainly bring this understated drone project to a bigger audience, and hopefully more attention to the reclusive, yet brilliant Chalk, whose solo work as well as his work with Organum, Ora, and Jonathan Coleclough remain all-time favorites here at Aquarius. The recordings found here were culled from a Mirror performance at the Lagerhaus in Bremen, Germany just a few months back in April 2002. The instrumentation appears to be organ, drone guitar, bowed metal, and some unidentified resonant clatter hovering at the event horizon much like the miniature sounds that Keith Rowe has produced for the recent AMM recordings. Through the glassine drone tricks that Chalk and Heeman have perfected in previous Mirror recordings, all of these sounds seamlessly meld into a tranquil piece of evocative ambience. Sporadically, a tremolo flutter emerges, probably indicative of some laptop trickery from O'Rourke. Do not fear, O'Rourke has left his Max / MSP patches turned off and thoughtfully ensured that his contribution was complementary to the Mirror sound. "Die Spiegelmanufaktur" is the least ominous Mirror recording, conjuring images of the colorful spectacle of calm sunrises, but fortunately, Mirror veer far from the artistic suicide of New Age drivel. This is another beautiful recording for Mirror.
While in a few months a slightly different mix of this performance will be published on CD, "Die Spiegelmanufaktur" is now available as a picture disc feature Chalk's artwork and is strictly limited to 400 copies!
Of all of the Mirror records that have come out over the past three or four years, "Eye Of The Storm" has so far been the cream of the crop for the impressionistic drone duo of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann. Originally released as an incredibly limited and incredibly expensive lp (even by Mirror standards) complete with an individually printed etching smeared with watercolors, "Eye Of The Storm" has thankfully been reissued on CD by Heemann's Streamline label, although with much more economical packaging. The sounds on this album immediately manifest a sublime sense of calm and tranquility, underpinned by subtly unnerving, haunting evocations that keep this album far from the realm of New Age drivel. Environmental sounds of wind, surf, and maybe even distant highways comprise the bulk of the source material, although Chalk and Heemann have multi-tracked and down-pitched these elements as to blur all of the edges and muffle the references. The duo couples these environmental passages with a quiet and slow chorus of bells, gongs, and singing bowls which flutter and quiver with an elegantly restrainted use of electronics. Perhaps because of the source material in question, "Eye Of The Storm" sparks a physicality of meteorological phenomenon, especially the cold & humid foggy air of a sleepy coastal town, yet it is eerily unwelcoming. Absolutely one of my (Jim's) favorite records of all time.
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The breathtakingly beautiful collaborations between Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann as Mirror have resulted in three superb deep listening / tonal drift records in a little under a year, with "Eye of The Storm" for Streamline, "Ringstones" for Some Fine Legacy, and this for Die Stadt. While their production techniques revolve around blurring the sonic edges of arcane source material (highway field recordings, bowed metals, and tape machine backmasking), Mirror allows more of the source material to speak on its own with extended notes from orchestral warm-ups. They have layered hazy passages for lengthy french horns, warm strings, and a handful of their own mysterious drones within a slow building composition. If you've fallen for Chalk's work in the past, this album will certainly impress you also. Stunning work.
In November 2000, Mirror travelled to the US for a handful of shows in Austin, Chicago, and maybe a few other places in between (unfortunately not San Francisco). While cd-r bootlegs of those shows have been circulating, "I Paint For Love Of Color" is the second official documentation of that US tour, the first being the "Island" 2LP on Die Stadt. Mirror, of course, is the
With a pressing of 1000 copies, Mirror's "Islands" may stay in print a little bit longer than all of the previous outings from this magnificent drone ensemble. Beginning as a duo of hermetic Andrew Chalk and part-time Nurse With Wound collaborator Christoph Heemann, Mirror has officially expanded into a trio with the addition of Andreas Martin -- Heemann's former partner in the
"Islands" finds Mirror returning to the guitar with much more successful results. Sprawling across four sides of translucent blue vinyl, "Islands" seemlessly melts both studio sessions and live recordings from a series of recent shows in Austin, Texas. Like all of Mirror's albums, "Islands" appears as a fragment of a much larger composition which extends well beyond the temporal constraints of any given media. Complex ever shifting drones and mercurial tonalities belie the instrumentation being solely guitars, as field recordings of rainstorms and shadowy metallic striations emerge within Mirror's thick ambient wash. Of course, it's recommended. But don't expect this to last, despite the larger pressing.
Back in 2003, Streamline reissued the first Mirror record Eye Of The Storm on cd; and now Robot has seen fit to reissue another early Mirror record Nightwalkers. Originally released back in 2000, Nightwalkers found Mirror's core duo of Christoph Heemann and Andrew Chalk working with Andreas Martin, who had previously collaborated with Heemann in producing the crushed-velvet prog / ambience of Mimir. Martin's presence on this album definitely changes Mirror's awe-inspiring dronescapes built from manipulated field recordings and sustained tonalities; first of all there are clusters of drum machine rhythms which interrupt the tranquil beauty of the signature Chalk / Heeman minimalism, and elsewhere, Martin brings a wholly unmysterious e-bow guitar sound to Mirror as well. This has never been our favorite Mirror record, but even the weakest Mirror record is still pretty darn good in the greater scheme of things.
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Mirror is the collaborative work of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann (whose production talent has recently been employed by Nurse With Wound). Through the gradual introduction of delicate hazy drones which provide little external references, Mirror's audio alchemy is apt to delude the listener about the length of these two beautiful and hypnotic recordings. We had thought that this might be the more affordable version of the first Mirror album (which ran around $55.00 due to the individually printed etchings as on the artwork), but it's an entirely new album. As with each Andrew Chalk release that has presented itself to us, this is highly recommended!
Finally! The first CD release from Mirror, the AQ-favorite duo of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann (nope, no Jim O'Rourke or Andreas Martin on this album) whose previous recordings had been all been vinyl only releases! As was hinted in their last album "Die Spiegelmanufaktur," Mirror express themselves on "Solaris" less through the quest for the drone supreme of unidentifiable tonal fluctuations and more through the delicate interplay of slowly evolving improvisations sounding not unlike recent AMM swimming in the murk of drainage-ditch reverberation. Similarly, the instrumentation has shifted more towards the free-improv territory, centered around prepared piano and clarinet with plenty of drone processing. Neither instrument come across as being typically employed, as the woodwind emits breathy rushes of sound at times and at others haunted bleats resonating like Tibetan thigh-bone horns that had been so prevalent with the early Current 93 and Lustmord recordings. Slightly more conventional in its use, the prepared piano comes across as delicate plucks of the piano's strings and muffled clusters of notes hovering throughout the spatial plane. Nicely done.
Except in unabashedly biased reviews from this store, Christoph Heeman continues to get the bulk of the credit for the successes of Mirror; but again, we must reiterate that Mirror is a collaboration with Andrew Chalk. His sustained bowing drones have previously been heard in his work with Jonathan Coleclough on Sumac, some of the more tranquil compositions by Organum, and a few hard-to-find solo albums; and his aesthetic of a whispered minimalism that has the ability to stop time is front and center on Still Valley, even though occasional Mirror-man Jim O'Rourke contributes to this LP only release. There's actually very little to talk about, as backwards masked drones (from what may be long-stringed instruments, bowed cymbals, or even just guitars) linger along the horizon like a mirage, flickering with a formless consistency. Absolutely gorgeous.
It may seem like a curious title for Mirror, who are best known for simple if anthropomorphic allusions in their titles rather than something more fitting for the Icelandic absurdists Stilluppsteypa; yet one cannot forget that Mirror's Christoph Heemann began his musical career in the Nurse With Wound obsessed ensemble Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, which translates as Moose Without A Sofa. That is not to say that Viking Burial for a French Car recalls the surrealistic meandering of HNAS, rather it sounds much like all of the other Mirror recordings -- tranquil, somber, and hypnotic dronescapes that hover like a wintery fog. With the inclusion of a few Scotsmen (David Keenan, Alex Neilson, and Gavin Laird) alongside Andrew Chalk and Heemann, the Mirror sound is altered a little bit. At first, Mirror unveils a sonorous tone of what could be a thousand car horns bleating into a canyon. This undulating mass of sound gradually gives way a post-AMM / Organum clamour of drum kit improv tumbling and textural growling, before dissolving back to the introductory funereal timbers that drift onward to oblivion.
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During the last year, Mirror has quietly released 6 albums - several of them incredibly limited art editions, wrapped in etchings, hand drawings, or monoprints. "Visiting Star" is one of those art editions (hence the price) with a lengthy strip of delicate paper hand patinaed with coppers, blues, and silvers and then wrapped around a standard black album cover. The color choice is one that matches the overall tonal quality that Mirror has been mastering during their brief but incredibly prolific career. Once simply the duo of AQ-favorite Andrew Chalk and recent Nurse With Wound collaborator Christoph Heemann, Mirror has recently expanded its membership to include Andreas Martin (who worked with Heemann in the '80s dadaist collage ensemble H.N.A.S.). While the first document of the new Mirror lineup faltered a bit, Mirror has returned to form with 'Visiting Star' -- mostly by recognizing that what Mirror does best is allow for Chalk's aesthetic of reflective metallic tones to float through space with all of their sublime glory intact. Here, Mirror's working process reveals itself a bit more, as eBowed guitars drift lazily alongside gently bowed gongs and bells. Absolute beauty.
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It was a lot easier to fuck with the mainstream media back in the '80s. Negativland certainly had the most success thanks to the hoax that surrounded the cancellation of their 1988 tour as the band were under scrutiny by Federal agent Dick Jordan for their connection to a murders that took place in Minnesota by a presumed fan. While the crime was true, the idiocy and lackluster fact finding from the national media made Negativland an underground sensation, all of which was exposed on their 1989 album Helter Stupid. The NYC anarcho-industrial outfit Missing Foundation had their fun with CBS in 1988 who ran a ludicrously unchecked expose on the band, aligning their political declarations of classist warfare with Satanism and accusing them of being the root of most every problem in New York (drugs, blight, graffiti, vandalism, and of course those rampant Satanists who were lurking at every corner). Such is a commonplace error in discussing transgressive art - that the work at hand causes social diseases and not as the artist often intends for the work to be a mirror of the conditions that led to social collapse and malaise. It made for a sensational media event for Missing Foundation, whose relative high profile for a noise-junk industrial noise band led them to a publishing deal with Restless in 1990.
Missing Foundation's second outing 1933 was the album that set the stage for that CBS interview. It was released originally on vinyl in 1988 by the gritty scum-noise-punk label Purge/Sound League (later reissued in a campaign by Restless as well), and those Missing Foundation slabs of wax ironically became very collectible records. Where the debut smashed everything to bits and scattered the remnants of noise and rhythm to tape, 1933 was considerably more militant in the junkyard bashing, which provided much more comparisons to Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept. The infernally smoldering guitars are still present, but lockstep effectively with the bashed rhythms. "Martyr Of The City" and "Turmoil" entertain an aggro-hardcore / mosh-pit sound to the chugging guitar riffs, explosive drums, and the bullhorn vocals from Peter Missing. It can be very hypnotic, but it's also utterly nihilistic. Elsewhere, the sounds collapse into oil-stained and bum-trash strewn recordings of guttural distortion, indeterminate scraping, and throat mangled yelps that could be the sordid, psychic field recordings of New York's social malaise that festered in the late '80s. The Lower-East side of Manhattan will probably never sound like this ever again.
The logo of the upside-down martini glass that graces the cover of Missing Foundation's debut album was a ubiquitous graffiti tag in New York City during the band's zenith in the late '80s. The tagging of that logo went hand in hand with pre-Occupy movement declarations that "Your House Is Mine," "1988 = 1933," and "The Party Is Over" (the pictogrammatic translation of their logo) on buildings that were once squats or cheap rentals which speculators were looking to flip in the gentrification of Manhattan. Missing Foundation's politics may have anticipated those of the Occupy Movement, but their anarchic strategies were far more hostile, uncompromising and heroically degenerate. So much so that they were actually accused of starting the Tompkins Square Park Riot in August 1988. The band's figurehead Peter Missing had helped organize a demonstration protesting the police crackdown of the homeless through a curfew placed on the park. Missing Foundation was one of several bands that performed during the protest and the intensity of their metal bashing, industrial noise riffage, and sloganeering bullhorn vocals may have agitated the protesters into action; but the riot that took place probably would have happened one way or the other. It's a great urban legend that these squalid industrial art-punks started a riot, but that's not exactly true.
For all of the legends, lies, and myths that surrounded Missing Foundation, their recordings were every bit the sonic assault they were regarded as. The eponymous album from 1987 originally came out on the Purge/Sound League label which also put out albums from Borbetomagus and Rat At Rat R, which actually makes for a pretty good triangulation for Missing Foundation. Their first album emerges out of the whole pig-fuck sound of Live Skull and Pussy Galore with formless clouds of guitar negativity, loping basslines that might be traced to NYC hardcore or maybe across the country to Flipper, and junked metal percussion all tossed into a Bellvue bedlam of the No Wave anti-structures from Mars or even the more oblique moments from No Trend. The album's closing tracks "Waco Waco" and "Perversion" are probably the closest to something which might get confused with song as Missing Foundation wrenches Swans brutalism from their early Filth / Cop period into a hammered guitar / bass / junk plod. The originals of this album were going for a pretty penny on the collector's market, but for the time being Dais has this reissue in print. Bad vibes all around.
More exceptional recordings broadcast from the house of Emeralds! Mist is the collaboration between Emeralds' John Elliott and Sam Goldberg, both employing a bunch of synthesizers for this sci-fi extravaganza. Like Emeralds (and all of the other John Elliott productions for that matter), Glowing Net locates itself at the tail end of the post-krautrock explorations of progressive electronics from the early '80s that quickly devolved into new age drivel and tepid incidental music. Much of that devolution of kosmische music into garbage came at the hands of too many portentous concepts and over-reaching metaphysical agendas, and while Elliott and Goldberg are tapping into a poetry of galactic expansiveness through their electronics, they never lose sight of the simple elegance of an arpeggiated melody, open-ended allusions, or a bittersweet reflectiveness that comes from the benefit of hindsight. The album opens with a plaintive aquatic percolation that slides into a tighter, focused lazerbeam of sequences on "Sky High" that at once speaks to fellow hypnotist Oneohtrix Point Never and the soaring work of J.D. Emmanuel. "Mist Stream" acquires something similar to Wolfgang Voigt's highly innovative ambient swoosh on the Gas album Pop, soaring above a low-ratcheted arpeggiation. Very impressive stuff, that could easily be extended into a 20 minute zoner jam, but Mist has condensed this down to an economic four minute track. While this album is cut at 45 rpm, we've resisted our normal urge to spin these at 33, since Mist got everything just right at this speed. No need to fuck with genius!
Since Emeralds released their impeccable album Does It Look Like I'm Here in 2010, the trio has set a very high bar for themselves, not only for the next Emeralds record (whenever that may surface) but also for all of the individual members' various side projects. For the most part, everything John Elliott, Mark McGuire, and Steve Hauschildt have produced by themselves has not strayed far from the Emeralds aesthetic of luminous, analogue electronics that harkens back to the progressive sounds of Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, and early Tangerine Dream, and there have been some completely sublime moments that came close to Does It Look Like I'm Here. The Imaginary Softwoods double lp set was one such album, as was the McGuire solo lp Off In The Distance, and now we have this Mist 2lp, released through John Elliott's Mego-manufactured imprint Spectrum Spools. Mist finds synth-wrangler Elliott working with fellow Cleveland native Sam Goldberg; the two had previously released a couple of lps of sparkling electronics on Arbor and Am. While those records were quite good, House is fucking great.
Out of a tightly interlocking set of synthetic percolations, the opening track "Twin Lanes" launches upward into satellite orbit with an effervescent burst of shimmering noises and one of Elliott's impeccable bass-melodies (think back to "Candyshop" on the aforementioned Emeralds album Does It Look Like I'm Here). "Mist House" is a radiant track of tonefloat purity and church organ hallowedness that eschews the early tracks' step sequencing and arpeggios, while keeping the same sparkling atmosphere. The transition from the fuzzy static laden percolations from "Dead Occasions" to the Kraftwerkian sequences of the mechanical track "Ovary Stunts" is particularly dramatic, especially given the polygon layers of sci-fi melodic wander on the latter track that gives Mist a very Oneohtrix Point Never feel. The album's finale "P.M." fills up all of side D, with prolonged passages of hypnotic arpeggiations coated with interstellar space dust and girded with a sublime motorik churning of step sequenced bass synths. House is easily the best Mist lp to date, and ranks up there amongst the many Emeralds related projects.
Mist is the Ohio-centric retro-grade electronics duo featuring John Elliott of Emeralds and Sam Goldberg, who runs the Pizza Night tape label. This is actually the third outing for Mist, as the two have mustered a couple of other cassettes, released earlier this year which disappeared before we even had the chance to grab any. Fortunately, we did manage to snag some of this LP on Amethyst Sunset, which will most likely be around for at least a little while, although it is limited to 500 copies. The Elliott / Goldberg authored electronics here don't veer too much from the Emeralds spaced-out electronics that reflect the best in the realm of late '70s / early '80s progressive electronics (e.g. the more abstracted moments from Kraftwerk and the Eno collaborations with Fripp and Cluster). It's not quite as dark or as melancholy as Emeralds and thus sounds like those sci-fi percolations that fellow knob-twiddler Oneohtrix Point Never and Pulse Emitter have rejuvinated in recent years. Certainly, these are elegant passages of arppegiating analogue electronics and heavily sequenced patterns that intertwine nicely into chiming, sparkling, bubbling zone-tripping.
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This is the cd reissue of a unusual neo-Dadaist collage from the Mixed Band Philanthropist originally on vinyl only from Selektion back in 1986 or so. Recombining source material from Nurse With Wound, Organum, P16.D4, Andrew Chalk, The New Blockaders, S.B.O.T.H.I. (Achim Wollschied), Merzbow, Controlled Bleeding, Asmus Teitchens, and dozens more, the Mixed Band Philanthropist's wacky noise assault is similar in nature to the blistering collages found on Nurse With Wound's "Sylvie & Babs" album. Strains of this mid-80's experimental sound can be heard in the laptop collages from the Mego technicians.
A few years back, Kiyoshi Mizutani ventured into the Tanzawa mountain range located to the southwest of Tokyo in order to document the sounds of that very isolated region. In the liner notes to this album, Mizutani explains that this region enjoys a complex history with centuries worth of military endeavors and legends including one tragedy which Mizutani alludes to about "the losing army's princess." Needless to say, the mountains may have been of strategic importance to any number of rival factions; but by now, their remoteness and desolation harbors only a small population. He focuses his attention upon three aspects of those mountains: the natural (which is the dominant voice of the Tanzawan environment), the ceremonial folklore of the people, and the residual noise of the man-made. Mizutani's love of bird sounds was evident on one of his early sound works simply entitled Bird Songs; and the spirited chatter of many a bird dots Mizutani's field recordings. Crickets, cicadas, and plenty of insect choruses also feature into Scenery Of The Border, as does a broad range of watery recordings from quiet drips from a misty rain to the immersive white noise of waterfalls. The few recordings that feature a human presence are of restrained Shinto and Buddhist ceremonies, which Mizutani mentions have rarely been heard outside of that region. It's these ritualistic stompings and hushed bits of chanting that stand amongst the highlights of this incredible field recording document.
During the '80s, Kyoshi Mizutani was a member of Merzbow with Masami Akita - the man who's name is often synonymous with Merzbow, in spite of the many individuals who have helped with his ongoing Merzbow project. For this album, Mizutani presents six different and mostly untreated field recordings with tenuous connections to bird songs. The first track features the most overt manipulation
