Yes, yes, yes, that is a very problematic title to a very good noise album. Mlehst has long been one of the stalwarts of the British noise community, releasing tons of micro-edition works in fits and starts since 1993. There's long been an unseemly psycho-sexual nature to the titles and artwork from Mlehst, who had cited that these references had much more to do with the surreal strangeness of sexual perversions rather than any prurient interest in them (pun very much intended); but it's hard to look the other way when it comes to an album with such a misogynistic declaration. Noise is inherently aggressive, but it is not inherently transgressive or inherently macho. There's no justification that we can offer to a title like Mlehst's Cunt Trouble; but we can say that the sounds within could have easily been lifted from the slippery controlled feedback drones that Arcane Device or Ryoji Ikeda had created circa 1992, albeit filtered through the sewer-stained gunk of some cassette left to fester in Mlehst's shed for a decade or so. It's actually very much akin to the recent Kleistwahr album that we listed recently, as a series of dense, psychically-charged, industrial-drone mantras flecked with diamond bright shimmers of shoegazing glassiness that then turn into a leaden-grey fog of rumble and crunch. The recordings do not deserve such a title. It's much better than that!
Drone Records -- run by Stefan Knappe of Troum and Maeror Tri -- exclusively produces seven inches mostly by emerging artists who specialize in expressive drone work (hence the label name). While there is something to be said for Drone's dedication to unknown artists, the work that comes from the ongoing series tends to be some of the best work from each of the artists' respective
Mnem's "Hypstatic Ground" is another fine entry from the ongoing Drone series. It appears that Mnem is a couple of Finnish guys who have been tinkering around with the mechanisms of old reel-to-reel tape machines, to build warbling compositions of collaged creaks, clatterings, and buzzes with all sorts of slow descents into rumbling noise and infernal rhythmic grindings. If Philip Jeck ever wanted to make a piece that was seething and angry and subtly brutal, it would probably sound like this. Limited to 250 copies.
Aeolian harps are relatively simple devices made from of a couple planks of wood and a taut wire, which are placed in relation to a wind source to transform the speed, force, and directionality of the air itself into an extended drone. David Kenny's Aeolian
As of spring 2007, the nomadic lifestyle of Michael Northam may land the American born sound artist in New Delhi where he might manage a media arts facility or he might take up the humble calling of a gardener in the south of France, where he could find plenty of inspiration for his ecologically tinged compositions. The excitement, fear, and instability of not really knowing where housing might come from has been the existence for Mr. Northam for many years now, and he's always managed to build an impressively cohesive body of work through composition, performance, and exhibition. The Automnal 2003 disc was originally a self-published CD-R which Northam gave to his friends and colleagues as a testament to the benefits, joys, trials, and failures to his chosen lifestyle. During the 24 months between August 2001 and the autumn of 2003, Northam picked up and moved his studio 13 times across Europe and North America; and the three extended tracks on Automnal represent three particular places along that journey. The first track opens with a glassy drone of sustained string vibration which sound remarkably like the more pastoral tones of Phill Niblock. Aquatic rumblings and fluttering patterns emerge as complementary elements to the Northam's droning infinitude that aptly fits Northam's geographical subject, a glacier on the Switzerland / France border. The second track is my (Jim's) favorite piece that Northam has created to date. With a gaping low-end drone beautifully stacked with what seem to be choral harmonics built from the environmental recordings of crickets near a stream, Northam offers a breaktaking, nocturnal piece of activated ambience much like Zoviet France's Shadow Thief Of The Sun or Gas' Konigsforst minus the motorik rhythm, of course. For the finale of Automnal 2003, Northam presents a sinewy vibrational hypnosis that's quite similar in frequency to the first track, yet he manages to dislocate the bleary ambience with a subcutaneous stream of crackle and static. A wonderful record!
This 3" CD from the always impressive sound artist mnortham (nee Michael Northam) was conceived as a tribute to his father who was a race car driver from 1949 until 1965. In those days, Northam's father strapped himself into what was quite literally a rocket of a car, as it was little more than a aerodynamic cylindrical frame, a beast of an engine, four wheels, and barely enough room to cram in the driver. While the sound artist Northam didn't have any archival recordings of the race car driver Northam as source material, mnortham did venture to the Terre Haute Raceway back in the summer of 2005. From the field recordings of that event, mnortham concocts a surprisingly elegant collage of cyclical tumblings and aerating sonic masses reflecting the centripetal forces of the human body when put under such rigorous conditions. As volatile and aggressive as the soundfield of raceways can be (one can look no further than the Santa Pod collection of racetrack recordings released by Ash International a few years back), mnortham has wholly avoided the Merzbowian noise precepts. While cacophonous in the truest sense of the word, Go is a certainly not a noise composition instead adhering to the signature aggregate sound of compounding and compacting layers of sound into a vulcanized, elliptical drone mass aiming for the elation from speed and acceleration over the testosterone implied by the roar of an engine. Very well done.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Sound piled upon sound piled upon sound and piled on more sound is the signature of Michael Northam's process in his installations and compositions. Far from the irritating collisions of sound in Merzbow, Northam softens, rounds, and blurs his dense collages into a shadowy minimalism; and the Molecular Knot Phase One is an excellent example of Northam's methods. He began this short 20 minute composition with source material he produced with Seth Nehil, whereby the two gently struck a variety of zithers and found objects. Northam then extracted tiny sounds (hence the title) from that source material, stretched and compounded them into timbral drones, then densely collaged those sounds into the eerie mass found on Molecular Knot Phase One. Very nicely done.
The expatriate American sound artist Michael Northam has been wandering across Europe for many years now, finding himself in various residency programs where he has built an impressive body of installations, collaborations, and recordings from densely superimposed sounds that result in gorgeous swarms of magnetic vibrations and droning minimalism. For better or for worse, Northam has consistently released his work on small labels in small editions, meaning that we've not been able to dedicate as much to his work as we would like. Porous is one of those, released on the Cloudmirror label, which Northam had a hand in establishing. This lengthy, two-part composition is a reworking of a 24 channel installation Northam produced for the Klangturm in St. Polten, Austria back in September of 2001. Northam typically begins with acoustic instruments or phenomenon; and Porous is no different, as he collects tiny sounds from plucked pine cones, rustled leaves, and scribblings from other found objects. Slowly, he builds these textural sounds into quiet thrashings of muffled events that begin to echo and fold on top of each other into a thick droning mass. A very nice record, Porous ends up sounding not too far from the best work of Francisco Lopez, Andrew Chalk, Ellen Fullman, and Loren Chasse.
MNortham (who has previously been sighted on the fantastic Ora album Anagram and in recent collaboration with Francisco Lopez) and JGrzinich are sound artists investigating the properties of various organic acoustic forms, making use of long wire devices, found
We kinda went nuts for the recent Echospace record, The Coldest Season. So much so that we made it our record of the week. And judging by the response, most aQ customers dug it just as much as we did. Which makes sense really. A modern take on that old Chain Reaction sound we all love so much. Heroin House, or whatever you want to call it, muddy murky atmospheres wrapped around deep throbbing four on the floor pulses, smeared and blurred, the sound gloriously washed out and dreamlike. Super spaced out abstract dub, beats drifting in wide open expanses of FX and electronic glitch and shimmer. Dance music for those of us who loathe the dancefloor and instead lurk in the shadows. The rhythm is probably still gonna get you, but it's going to creep up on you slowly and wrap you in its inky black embrace, and pull you into the swirling fuzzy abyss.
Incense & Black Light is the new record from Rod Modell, one half of Echospace, and while everything we loved about the Echospace record is here in full effect, it's even noisier and buzzier and grittier, which can only mean we might even like it more�
The opening track is super dense and heavy, a swirling cloud of crumbling distortion, a bassline that almost sounds like some muted metal riff, but completely abstracted and disembodied, a rhythm buried beneath layers of grit and grime, the track peppered with jagged blasts of glitch and hiss, the whole thing looped into something, that despite all of it's harshness and density, is almost groovy.
The second track begins with some Pole like dub throb, drifting on a layer of gristly hiss, those big echoey crunches pulsing and fading into the mist, beneath it all a throbbing bassline and some muted percussion, sounding like a rougher more raw Echospace. After that the record drifts into much less noisy territory, dipping its toes into some Kompakt like minimalism, still dubby and dreamy, but a bit more skittery, and not nearly as dark and dense. After three songs of gauzy late night Kompakt style minimal techno, the record dips back into the darkness, a slowly shifting smear of pixilated digital crunch, long blurred waves of prickly buzz, all woven into a gorgeously gauzy sheet of sound, that seems to billow in some midnight breeze, laced with crackles and hiss, almost completely devoid of any rhythm. Almost.
The next two tracks crank the dub factor, dialing back the noise a bit, but keeping the effects distorted and the beats crunchy, a sort of Kraftwerk groove pulled apart into some alien dub, hovering over a sea of whirring hum and buried buzz, the melody clipped and bouncing from beat to beat before fading into the roiling ambient murk.
Finally, the last two tracks finish things off, the way they started, with some sort of damaged dub, via Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz, the second to last a gorgeous dubby driftscape, the beats barely holding together, the sound of lapping waves another layer of hiss and buzz, the whole dub drifting into its constituent parts, so druggy and dreamy and blissed out, while the last is glimmering shimmering effulgence, sun dappled sparkles stretched into slow whirring slabs of soft fuzzy thrum, like someone took a single measure of the blissiest Orb song, and stretched it out to 5 minutes, the chords pulled apart exposing the notes within, the notes pulled apart, crumbling to pieces, just blurry shadows, all woven into some slow slippery sonic stream, gauzy, buzzy, warm and dreamlike.
If you loved that Echospace record, but wondered what it would have sounded like if it was mixed by Fennesz, or recorded by Tim Hecker, or spun in a DJ set by Philip Jeck (and who among us didn't?), then this just might be exactly what you're looking for.
Not for the faint of heart. But pretty bad ass. If you can say that about an academic, avant-garde, micro-detailed, solo VIOLIN recording. Two discs worth to boot! Norwegian composer Ole-Henrik Moe (henceforth known as OHM as per the liner notes), who studied with extreme 20th c. classical dude Iannis Xenakis, offers up 43+40 minutes of stark, scary musick, all brilliantly performed by his wife, violinist Kari Ronnekleiv. Disc one, "Ciaccona", is a tour-de-force of scratching and sawing and scraping, tortured strings sculpting some kind of strange and terrible beauty out of the vast (yet intimate) soundspace that the resonant silences present here delineate. In fact, these recordings took place an a (presumably empty) church, that Ronnekleiv alone fills with menacing drones. It's pretty frickin' amazing that this is all played straight through by one person. She's got incredible stamina and such subtle, awesome control, her fingers commanding overtones, with no overdubs.
More high end shriek and suspenseful shimmer is to be heard on disc two, "3 Persephone Perceptions". On both discs, at times it's like you're hearing the violin analog to a free jazz saxphonist's circular breathing freakout, or for that matter a demented little kid's frantic balloon-rubbing. But plenty of it is quiet and atmospheric as well, full of droning delicate waver, suggesting the weeping of a frightened child. Sudden bursts of sound are the whip hand coming down.
With all these dynamics of hush and hysterics, this is a palate cleanser that puts other stuff in perspective... put on some, say, Wolf Eyes or Yellow Swans on after this and they'll sound like campfire singalongs. Heck try this back to back with some black metal, we swear the corpsepainted ones will seem just a little less intense than they previously did. Hmm...Orthrelm/Octis might be a match for it though. Maybe it's the association we make between stabbing violins and stabbing knives due to Bernard Herrmann's infamous score to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, but this is definitely "shower scene" music at times. And the whole thing could easily be running through the head of any self-respecting resident of your local Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Play it LOUD. And tremble.
Perhaps how we're describing this isn't what OHM intended... but c'mon it's what any normal person's gonna hear. And also what any abnormal person (i.e. typical AQ customer) who digs the weirder, out-there edges of "20th Century Classical" (a la Xenakis), is gonna like.
Comes in the usual nice Rune Grammofon packaging with a suitably evocative Kim Hiorthoy designed digipack sleeve.
It's so inspiring and sadly all too rare to find someone who was making challenging music that sounded ahead of their time decades ago, and who is STILL pushing themselves to creating music with the same adventure and scope. All too often, those who were at the forefront of creative musical invention end up settling down and creating safe and boring music as the years pass. Even many AQ psych/prog/kraut favorites end up going that route. For proof just take a listen to what folks like Franco Battiato or Tangerine Dream made decades into their careers. Luckily there are some exceptions to that downward spiral, and Dieter Moebius is a perfect example of how one can continue to make weird and wonderful music years and years after they first hit the scene. From his pioneering krautrock/kosmische work with Cluster and Harmonia as well as collaborations with Brian Eno, it would be very easy and well deserved for Moebius to just rest on his laurels. But even after those trailblazing years of the '70s he continued to make great albums into the 80's and still does today. Nurton, released in 2006, is his first solo outing in over seven years and it finds him as unpredictable and pleasing as ever. The sounds he creates take twists and turns that hold your attention fast, and he's always able to take you to a special spaced-out place full of wonder, bliss and intrigue. Crazy instrumental electronica to put the youngsters in the field to shame.
Mutiilation, Vlad Tepes, Belketre, Torgeist... all groups that typically inspire a certain amount of reverence and awed respect in black metal circles, those outfits being the more well known members of Les Legions Noires, aka the Black Legions, a small underground group of black metal musicians, who came together in the late eighties / early nineties, and created a super distinctive, and extremely kult body of work. The Black Legions numbered maybe ten people, but in different configurations, those ten formed multiple bands and projects, and released super limited, and nearly impossible to get demos, from strangely named hordes like Vzaeurvbtre, Brenoritvrezorkre and Vermyapre Kommando. And while the sound was typically raw and primitive, black and buzzy, noisy and super lo-fi, there was another side of the Black Legions, groups who trafficked in a sound a bit more mysterious and moody, a black ambient strain that gave us outfits like Amaka Hahina and Aakon Keetreh. But by far, our favorite of those more black ambient Black Legions groups, was Moevot, aka Vordb Dreagvor Uezreevb, who also played in loads of other Black Legions outfits like Belketre, Torgeist, Brenoritvrezorkre, Vagezaryavtre, etc.
Moevot conjure up a seriously grim and creepy sound world, brooding and murky, the sound fuzzy and low fidelity but somehow simultaneously lush and layered. The overall sound has a vibe much like current soundscapers like The Caretaker and Tim Hecker, but more home brewed, more raw and primitive, stripped down and skeletal in places, but almost noisy in others. Some tracks sound like black metal riffs, played with no distortion, slowed down and blurred into swirling streaks of pulsing mesmer, others are just voices, and sound choral / liturgical, haunting and hushed. Scattered throughout are field recordings of crackling fires, chirping birds, whispering winds all woven into softly whirring organs, gentle acoustic guitar strum, monk like chanting, and woozy spectral croons, long stretches of near silence, bleed into dreamily melancholic slow motion melodies, tranquil and soporifically hypnotic. Hushed, barely there drifts, float over distant sonic swirls, buried murky melodies unfurl throughout, there ARE raspy vokills here and there, but they sound so much more mysteriously abject when placed amidst the otherwise dreamlike blackened sonic landscapes.
So gorgeous and otherworldly, a bleary, balearic sprawl of soft focus, creeping black beauty, a grimly blissful songsuite that's equal part slowed down nightmare lullaby and woozy atmospheric dreamdrift thrum. If this weren't a cassette that was LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, you can bet this would have / could have / should have been a Record Of The Week!
We only have 5 or 6 of these which is probably enough, cuz boy is this a weird one. We've had these for a really long time, so can't remember the story about who this guy is or what else he's done, but this record, well, it starts out with SEVENTY FIVE super short vocal experiments, as in 6 seconds to 29 seconds, running the gamut from animal like growls, wild hysterical shrieks, disembodied humming, percussive experiments, heavily effected beat box, sort of throat singing, growly death metal grunts, operatic howling, and pretty much all manner of fucked up vocalizations. Think an audio test record featuring nothing but Eye from the Boredoms doing vocal exercises. Fucked up, weird, a novelty, totally cracked and demented. Definitely worth it to disrupt your next party or to torture your downstairs neighbors, but hold on, there's a nearly hour long final track, also seemingly constructed from vocals (?) and it's gorgeous, an extended soundscape of layered hum, of shimmering drones, distant click and skitter, deep bell like tones, murky floorcore, looped stuttering rumbles, moaning and groaning warbles, all drifting beneath a thick fuzzy haze. Almost sounds like it could be the first 75 fragments combined into one thick swirling morass.
Definitely cool And quite weird. We only have a tiny handful, so act fast if you want one of these...
This is the debut full length from this US artist/soundscaper, whom we first heard via a remix on Harald Grosskopf's Synthesist/Re-Synthesist lp, and whose sound falls somewhere between the ADD short attention span plunderphonia of John Oswald, and the textured, layered, warblescapes of turntablist Philip Jeck. Two sprawling sidelong tracks, that sound like they could be part one and two of the same piece, finds Moff, employing a definite kitchen sink style of composition, that initially had us hearing some Our Love Will Destroy The World, especially in his ability to create rhythms and grooves from strange samples and layered loops, in places it gives the sound a sort of hip hop / dance music vibe, but that vibe is subtle, and sort of gets lots in Moff's wild collaged soundscapes, the structures lurching and stuttering, the sound dense and chaotic and not a little bit noisy, super psychedelic, tripped out and in its own way sort of heavy.
The sound palette, and the seamless juxtapositions, also remind us of DJ Female Convict Scorpion, only armed with a DOZEN turntables instead of just two. A constant barrage of samples and snippets, looped and layered, tripped out and kosmische at times, darkly psychedelic and almost jazzy at others, it's definitely chaos, but some impossibly controlled chaos, the whole thing strangely, and seemingly impossibly melodic, the idea of some random jazz loop, some burst of truncated rhythm and some weird little blurt of distorted crunch, would somehow come together to form some brief bit of super hooky, noisy catchiness, speaks to Moff's mastery. A dizzying, mind melting sonic overload that is pure ear candy, absolute headphone blissout, with the B side sounding almost soundtracky, but the soundtrack to some sort of wild, super lysergic drug freakout, or perhaps some super arty, experimental film all rapid cuts and flickering images, the noisiness finally abating near the end of the album, and blissing out into a dreamy droney coda. WAY recommended.
And like all Pan releases, super deluxe packaging, the record housed in fantastic silkscreened PVC jackets over printed full color sleeves, pressed on 140 gram vinyl and of course EXTREMELY LIMITED!!!
Record number two for Pan from this LA soundscaper / visual artist takes up where the last one, Commercial Mouth, left off, a dizzying sonic collage that we compared in that first review to both Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World and local turntablist DJ Female Convict Scorpion, and this new one definitely falls more toward the latter, a heady psychedelic soundscape of orchestral blurts, noisy, avant chaos, densely layered headphone deep listening rife with moaning brass, atonal symphonic sprawls, at times sounding like Philip Jeck spinning multiple Art Of Noise records, while an orchestra tunes up in the background, everything wreathed in clouds of alien electronics, lilting melodies, thick swells of grinding low end thrum, buried percussion, another record with impeccable sound design, reminding us of other aQ faves like Roly Porter or Ben Frost, but Jar Moff's modus operandi is way more chaotic and abstract, a Joe Meek kitchen sink approach that defines JM's maximal soundworld, one that sans headphones can be a bit overwhelming, but close listening reveals the constantly shifting layers, the collapsing textures, and blossoming melodies, distorted guitars, plinkety plonk piano, sawed strings, all smeared into swirling zephyrs of sound, coalescing into dense, deep psych-noise dronemusic, then just as quickly splintering into more abstract, avant ambience and spacious psychedelic drift.
Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker, and housed in a white sleeve wrapped in a super striking yellow and black silk-screened PVC jacket, with some primitive glyph like abstract artwork.
For a land as huge as Russia, the amount of exceptional music that makes it half way round the world to Aquairus is proportionally very small, especially when compared to how much we get in from New Zealand and Finland. Thus, we were quite intrigued by the prospects of the Russian ensemble The Moglass who prefer to qualify their music as 'personal folk' -- an anti-genre that is beyond the mutable definitions of post-rock, psychedelia, or space-rock. That said, The Moglass are not without precedents, as this trio (armed with guitars, bass, old Soviet synths, and tons of effects) realizes the pinnacles of Popul Vuh (particularly their Werner Herzog soundtracks) entirely through the haunted drones of guitar feedback. Periodically, they have included several radio transmissions all in Russian, so the exact meaning is unknown to us, but the urgency of some of those broadcasts speaks of traumatic events. These work very similar to Godspeed! You Black Emperor's found sound interludes (e.g. "the car's on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel..."), but the mysteriousness due to the language barrier works to enhance the overall mood of the drone rather than compartmentalize it into leftist rhetoric. Although it's a mere 30 minutes long, "Kogda Vse Zveri Zhili Kak Dobrye Sosedi" (which we learned from their website translates as When All the Animals Lived As Good Neighbours) is a remarkably strong album.
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It's been a while since we've heard from Ukrainian abstract free folk ensemble The Moglass, who in the past have spun darkly delicate webs of creaking ambience, rumbling disembodied drones, stumbling tribal primitivism, all tangled up in a massive swirl of dreamlike ether.
Thankfully not too much has changed. Incorporating bits of jazz (via subtle sax) and all sorts of found sound and field recordings, The Moglass spread simple guitars out over skeletal frameworks of not-quite-rhythms, glistening sonic sparkle, and moody murk, creating slow swirls of ominous sound. The thing about The Moglass, is that they don't just create noises and sounds, little sonic events that 'happen' and then fade away, their music has a purpose, a drive, a direction, the guitars, and the spare riffs they unleash are propulsive, they carry us forward, pulling us by the ear into a world that sounds simultaneously fascinating and frightening. Bits of intercepted shortwave radio, the sounds of families talking, and children playing, are slowly subsumed by thick low end melodies, warm bowed warbles, glistening with bits of glitch and buzz, sleepy and serene, but always gorgeously melancholy. Maybe more than any of their other records, Sparrow Juice has a bit more twang, a little spaghetti western, a little Morricone, although they do a fantastic job of stripping those sounds down and stretching them out into abstract desertscapes. Elsewhere, music boxes hover weightless above creaks and scrapes, thick swirls of molasses like sound crawl glacier-like, swallowing all the sounds it encounters and building to an almost roar, thick fuzzy sun dappled buzz slithers and shimmers like purloined slabs of some long lost M83 single, and guitars and computers and synthesizers are wrapped into rightly wound knots and allowed to slowly unravel, becoming big billowy clouds of rumbling whir and keening skree. So good.
Second missive from this mysterious Ukrainian ensemble exploring the dark and cobwebby corners of free folk, shuffling rhythmic tribalism, space-y dronemusic, and splattery free rock ambience. A dreamy and expansive travelogue of endless soundscapes, glassy sheets of crystalline shimmer, warm and smooth, with melodies woven subtly throughout. Metallic glistenings, tinkling guitars and glitchy crunch struggle to disrupt the ambient dreaminess while occasional machine like rhythms chug tirelessly over atonal melodic clusters and urgently strummed angular guitar chords. Even though the band themselves describe their music as 'personal folk music', the actual sound is much closer to the drone music of AQ faves Jonathan Coleclough, Mirror or Organum, and occasionally the free ambient clatter of the Dead C or Skullflower. Really gorgeous stuff.
Second Rune Grammofon album from this extreme improv duo from Norway! It makes sense that they'd have an exclamation point as part of their name, as their music is indeed punctuated with glitchy outbursts, zaps of loud guitar/drums/electronics. Meanwhile, "MoHa" simply references their names: Morten J. Olsen and Anders Hana, both of whom are members of Ultralyd as well. We compared their first disc of hyperactive skree to some of Mick Barr's stuff, and to the most nutty bits from their labelmates Supersilent. Now we can add that shortly after our first listen to Norwegianism, we put on a classic avant-garde electro-acoustic album from 1970 by Luciano Berio, and after a few minutes got confused and thought we were still listening to MoHa!, when the Berio got into a particularly crinkly and chaotic passage of electronic bleepage. We like it best, though, when MoHa! pace themselves, give the music space to breathe, maybe even settle into some broken-down rhythm for a while (which are the parts that remind us of Supersilent), as on the track "Home Two".
We guess they may have titled this album Norwegianism 'cause they recorded it in Geneva and mixed it in Berlin, and felt that they were bringing some Norwegian noise to those locales. Also it could be in recognition of the fact that they get monetary support from the Arts Council Norway -- apparently Norwegian taxpayers are a lot more musically open-minded than the typical US citizen!
As always (this is their 3rd album), the exclamation point in this Norwegian industrial-skronk duo's name is quite appropriate. They definitely provide some bang for your buck, if you're into this extreme style of choppy, panicked trash-compactor "jazz", wherein sizzling electronics collide with machine-like percussion in a satisfyingly spastic frenzy. Electric guitar, keyboard, drummachine, drums, and something called "supercollider3" (a software program?) are deployed for maximum density and intensity, sounding something like a bunch of John Zorn types trapped in an exploding Radio Shack.
The album title One-Way Ticket To Candyland only makes us think that these guys have already splurged on the sugary treats, certainly seeming a bit hyperactively agitated by -something- in their quirky, chaotic music making. Yet the weird thing is, despite their jitters, they have such a knack for getting all the little pulsating puzzle pieces of their only seemingly messy compositions/improvisations to fit together remarkably well, turning this way and that like tiny, precision cogs in a well designed machine. All their herky-jerky blurting turns out to be exactly according to spec.
Knowing this, they almost get sassy, in that there's a bit of smartass punkrock 'tude to their (instrumental) song titles, from "The Shitman" to "Oh My God It's Rave". Shades of Don Cab!
We recently reviewed an lp on the Pan label from Mohammad, a Greek trio specializing in long form acoustic drone music. It was a stunning collection of modern minimalism created from just cello, contrabass and oscillators, the group conjuring up a rib cage rattling thrum in the form of huge organic expanses of low end sound, we still have a few of those limited lps left, anyone into dronemusic, from the modern minimalism of Phill Niblock, to the crushing dronedirgedrone of SUNNO)), should absolutely grab one before they're gone (& we also have ONE copy of a super limited triple lp Mohammad box set, check the instock not yet reviewed section!). We dug that Pan lp so much, that we got in touch with the band to get copies of this, their first cd release, and like the lp, it's incredible. But unlike that lp, it's much more rooted in classical music, slightly less abstract, with the opening track sounding a bit like some haunting chamber music, albeit all lower register, but it's so haunting, and stately, and strangely majestic. The tones rumble and reverberate, melodies play out in slow motion, a funereal threnody that creeps and drifts until the final few minutes when the sound seems to blossom into something much more psychedelic.
The rest of the record is equally fantastic, "Skora" is even more minimal, nearly inaudible sans headphones, but strap some on, and you're submerged in a strange subterranean sound world, a sort of ultra spare slowcore drift, softly undulating barely there tones, that seem to grow more gristly as the track progresses. Deep foghorn moans wreathed in crunchy swirls of soft focus static, and near the end, the sound suddenly gets LOWER and BASSIER, not sure how it's possible, but suddenly, your speakers are on the verge of blowing, the bones in your ears vibrating at an alarming rate. Amazing.
"Lamane Kradoj" is still even MORE minimal yet, reminding us of those old Restgeraeusch records, which were sourced from the industrial noises in an office, the whir of the air conditioning, the rumble of the elevator down the hall, this is just a barely there field of low end static, that doesn't really build until the last minute or too, where it coalesces into the sound of some strange churning machine. "Lentzen Tranen" is like an acoustic version of that Nurse With Wound creaking ship record, all groans and rumbles, the sound of being in some rickety structure, which reacts to all of the vibrations outside, cars whizzing past, buses, subtle shifts in the earth's tectonic plates, all somehow woven into a gorgeously hypnotic thrum.
And finally, the closer, sort of bookending the record, with a dark jazzy creep, starting out as a barely there drift, but soon morphing into some haunting doomjazz, the cello laying down woozy melodies over contrabass rumbles, and distant oscillator hum, jaunty by comparison, a truly strange coda, to a wonderfully mysterious drone record...
Record number three from this Greek trio, but the first one we've managed to stock, and holy moly were we blown away. Mohammad specialize in long-form drone works, focusing on the low LOW end - drone lovers be warned, this will blow your mind. Anyone can coax rumbles and buzz from a guitar leaned against an amp, but these guys, utilizing just cello, contrabass and some oscillators, conjure up a sprawling expanse of ribcage rattling, soul stirring thrum, a breathtaking acoustic dronemusic, lush and organic, resonant and expansive. Super shorthand would be to say these guys sound like an acoustic SUNNO))), but their sound retains much more melody and nuance, sounding almost folky at times, near symphonic at others, and occasionally liturgical. The reverberant buzz of vibrating strings, slow shifting overtones, a dirgey doom folk by way of La Monte Young, slowed down to the point of near stasis, but still rife with texture and dynamics. The fact that these sounds are acoustic, give the sound a very organic feel, the sound or resonating wood is tough to simulate, and at high volumes, the music here is near transcendent, the sounds extremely physical in their heft, primal and powerful, but also intimate and emotional. It's a soundtracky atmospheric ambience, but fused to a mutated strain of modern minimalism, with the vibe of something ritualistic and timeless. It's impossible not to imagine these sounds being performed by some cloaked court musicians, in some mysterious black castle, hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. It's also hard to not imagine these guys teaming up with Russian drone vocalists Phurpa, for what would have to be the heaviest, droniest, acoustic performance EVER.
This will no doubt make lots of our year end lists, and it's only April. Dark and heavy enough for folks into extreme drones, but mysterious and musical enough to appeal to modern minimalists, and really anyone into mysterious sounds and dark dreaminess.
Like all Pan releases, the packaging is fantastic, a printed heavy stock matte sleeve, housed in a heavy plastic PVC jacket, screen printed in silver metallic ink, super striking!
We first discovered this Greek trio via their mind blowing Som Sakrifis lp on Pan, which was the first time we'd heard these guys, their unorthodox instrumentation (cello, contrabass and oscillators) creating stunning longform modern minimalist dronemusic. We sold tons of that lp, and then tons more of their Roto Vildblomma cd, and at the time managed to get just a few of a deluxe triple lp box set called Spiriti. Well that boxset (which is still available, we can order you one, just ask, it's pricey, and comes direct from Greece so might be a while, but it's worth it), was equally stunning, and was just reissued on cd, so now that it's available at a more reasonable price, we figured the aQ dronelords and droneladies out there, might want more Mohammad, cuz we sure did.
Not nearly as ultra-minimal as the other two records, Spiriti opens with what essentially sounds like ultra doom played on string instruments, SUNNO))) for string quartet (or duo in this case), moaning chords, slow motion thrum, buzz and rumble, slow shifting overtones, rib cage rattling low end, as we're listening to this first track for the fourth or fifth time, we're thinking it's already worth the price of admission. Ominous and haunting, moody and brooding and seriously sinister, but also strangely lovely. The rest of the first movement (the first lp in the box) expands on that sort of string-drone dirgery, woozy chords, melodies that blur and bleed into each other, incredibly heavy, the sound of those vibrating strings and the reverberating instruments totally mesmerizing, and near physical in the way the soundwaves seems to envelop your whole body.
The second movement (lp) finds the band delving back into the more minimal sounds that made up much of the other two records, hushed rumbles, distant shimmers, and near silence, ultra minimalism, at times sounding a bit like the recent record of the week from Will Over Matter melted down into its very sonic essence, the second movement, slipping from that hushed Teutonic rumble, to more moaning strings, and back again, the stringed instruments offering a strangely melodic counterpoint to the barely there low end passages, like Kornos Quartet jamming with Francisco Lopez!
Finally, movement three (originally the 3rd lp in the box), unfurls a rumbling, roiling sprawl of chordal churn, cinematic and sinister, tense and intense, which eventually devolves into another stretch if industrial whir, a field of hiss and hum that's more physical than sonic, only to be augmented by grinding synth swells, and deep low end pulsations, before finally finishing off with another stretch of buzzing string-ed chamber doom. So goddamn good. And absolutely recommended for drone fanatics, and fans of modern avant minimalism.
We've been obsessed with this Greek trio since we first heard their Som Sakrifis lp on Pan, a gorgeous collection of ultra low end minimalism, haunting, rib cage rattling drones, and ritualistic bass tone soundscapes, so much so that ever since, we've done our best to track down every single thing we could find.
This new one is the first in a three part trilogy, and finds the Mohammad trio, employing cello, contrabass and electronics to once again craft a stunning landscape of hushed sound, but unlike much of the music on those other releases, which took the instruments and transformed them into nearly unrecognizable sounds, blurred into softly undulating layers, and slow moving tectonic shimmers, the sounds here are much more organic, in fact, for the bulk of the record, Mohammad sound like a proper string section, albeit all VERY low strings.
The record starts with a field recording, voices, whipping wind, children laughing and playing, fluttering flutes, which quickly segues into a thick field of buzzing strings, but mysteriously arranged into something much more percussive and abrasive, the strings more scraped than bowed, the sounds percussive and rhythmic, haunting and sinister. The electronic component this time around is also subtle, adding texture more than anything else, the scraping strings, warm and reverberant, the melodies mournful and melancholic, often blurring into long form tones, and unfurling clouds of subtle overtones, with some of the tracks inserting long stretches of near silence, creating an even more mysterious low end landscape, and conversely, some of the tracks build to near cacophonous levels, the sound nearly psychedelic, before settling once again, into something melancholic and moody, the second to last track, maybe the most achingly beautiful of the bunch, before the closer, which bookends the record with what sounds like a nighttime field recording of crickets, mysterious and lovely.
Fantastic as always, and while this is in constant rotation around the shop, we find ourselves already looking forward to the 2nd and 3rd parts of the trilogy...
Altered state exploration and bedroom mysticism is on tap from North Carolina's Robert Thompson, who's taken up the moniker Mohave Triangles. Thompson has crafted the standard fair torrent of cassette releases, now offering his wares through the shambolic cottage industry label Hooker Vision out of rural Georgia. This tape opens with a spoken word segment from a Native American shaman explaining a recurrent prophecy about a messenger arriving at the end of a cycle of time. With accompanying ambience, the piece closely resembles the beginning of Godspeed! You Black Emperor's F#A# lp. But instead of orchestrated rock crescendo, Thompson zones out a very hypnotic piece of murky ambience, one that would harken back to classic Zoviet France or perhaps Basinski's shortwave compositions, through the hazy mirage of slowly repeating, constantly shimmering sounds. Elsewhere, he picks up the guitar, dialed into plenty of looping patterns, delays, and effects, skewing the Mark McGuire sound towards a freeform approach to avant-trance dronescaping. Limited to 100 copies!
One of two new cassettes on this week's list from UK cassette label The Tapeworm, the other a weird bit of haunting minimal living room ambient electronica slowcore from Old Apparatus, and this collection of tape experiments from multimedia artist/musician Achim Mohne, whose sounds sources are almost as interesting and baffling as what he does with those sources, a 1982 instructional tape for a Blaupunkt tape player, that overlaps various instructions in different languages, as well as adding blasts of white noise, overlapping the various different styles of music offered as samples, and messing with the tape speed. A serious blast of Plunderphonia for sure.
Then there's a track that uses as its source a 1999 performance for disassembled VCR's, video monitors, glue, medical gloves and rubbing alcohol, with Mohne cutting up the tapes, taping them back together, and manipulating them over the VCR's playback heads, the result is a dark, woozy assemblage of hiss and warble, whirs and disembodied voices, snippets of music and dialogue, deep rumbling tones and plenty of glitch and thrum and buzz, it sounds a bit like something you'd hear on Raster-Noton, albeit a bit more collaged, homebrewed and lo-fi. Another track is a live performance for multiple turntables and cassette recorders, and finds Mohne mixing a dizzying onslaught of different musics and sounds, from pop to noise, from metal to classical, all chopped up and looped and layered, almost like a skipping Negativland cd, or some sort of John Oswald / Philip Jeck DJ set.
There are a couple tracks that employ handheld recorders, one that uses recordings of fairy tales, another that's a sort of twisted Jeck style tape player / turntable mash up, those all murky and muted and droned out and atmospheric, and then prepare yourself for the final jam, a super short ultra dense blast of tape noise, that's actually the beginnings and ends of the first 34 releases on The Tapeworm label! Cool twisted stuff, that ends up being surprisingly haunting and beautiful much of the time. And features an awesome (and awesomely creepy) cover drawing of some character called Pooman, in a drawing called "The Tapewyrm Will Drive Out Any Stuck Up Turd With Fragrant Sound!" Indeed!
The former core trio of post rock combo Tarentel (Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Danny Paul Grody and Trevor Montgomery) have been on a roll lately, releasing tons of solo, side projects and collaborative efforts! Danny and Trevor are both in The Drift and synth duo Believer, which both have new releases out or coming soon. Danny has got a new solo album on Students of Decay that'll be here shortly. Trevor has been on the last two Date Palms records and released the Isidore Ducasse lp with Jefre, and Jefre has released recently a solo album on Type and a record with his other outfit, The Alps on Mexican Summer. Hardest working local musicians? Maybe so now that the three of them have reunited together in this new outfit, Moholy-Nagy (rhymes with mirage, hence the title of the album, Like Mirage). Named after the Bauhaus artist and professor whose photogram experiments and industrial design aesthetic have made him known as one of the fathers of Light Art, the band have made a gorgeous record of light-searching cosmic excursions utilizing synths, piano, pastoral guitar and drum machine. Dreamy and drifting but also focused and grounded, Like Mirage hones the strongest sensibilities of each member into something truly collaborative. And though cosmically charged music has been the modus operandi of all three members through most of their side and solo projects and labels, Like Mirage manages to sound completely distinctive from their other projects which is a strong indicator of the masterful musicianship each one brings to the table. Beautiful stuff!
This is not at all what we were expecting, but holy shit, is it cool. Moin is actually a side project / offshoot of Raime, whose gorgeously murky and bleak exercise in creeping, claustrophobic, electronic minimalism, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, was a HUGE favorite around here, but as Moin, that sound gets recast as something less electronic, and more, well, sort of noise rock, for lack of a better descriptor. If it's at all possible, and judging from this, it most certainly is, Moin is like a weird noise rock version of Raime, the programmed beats, replaced by dense, motorik, muscly drumming, the various loops and layers transformed into spidery minor key guitar melodies, the vibe propulsive, hypnotic, tranced out, and still very very dark. Imagine an even more stripped down Laddio Bollocko, the 'band' locked into seemingly simple hypno-rock grooves, and just churning out totally mesmerizing, shadowy heaviness. Opener "Murphy" almost sounds like a Sling outtake, fused with a little Rapeman, with some Godspeed ambience mixed in. And if that sounds like impossible band math, well, we would have thought so too. "Stacie" (all the tracks have people names, a la the first Slint record too, hmm), is much more stripped down and low slung, arranged more like an electronic track, brooding and slow building, more about the vibe, and the mood, and the rhythm, and the texture, the guitars crumbling and crunchy, but spare and sparse, melancholic and haunting. And finally "Clancy" lays down a mathy stuttery beat, beneath sheets of feedback, before the main riff rolls in, another strange sample layered over the top, the guitars jagged and percussive, very Albini-esque for sure, but even more restrained and textural, all with a sort of post punk / industrial feel, and like the other two tracks, totally trancey, minimal noise rock nirvana!
Definite contender for best cover art ever. Super striking orange on brown paper space demon, wielding a huge broad sword amidst jagged mountain peaks, but abstract enough so that it takes a minute to figure out what it is. The band name is pretty awesome too, Moknok, scrawled in a sort of drippy angular metal font on the back, and the record is called Slugstorm. Open it up, and the band members are wearing sweaters and gas masks, and there's a scrawled drawing of a cat skull. So we were definitely expecting some sort of demonic sludge or black drone, but this is nothing of the sort. These guys are from Copenhagen, and weave�violin, drums, organ and guitar into loping mathy jangle and moody mournful slowcore. Everything off kilter, damaged and demented, warped and weird, like an even more tweaked Deerhoof...
Most of the record is a sort of cracked pop, stumbling and confusional, but weirdly hooky and catchy, but here and there the band explore other sonic territory, buzzy droning stretches of minor key strum, like a more drugged and art damaged Dirty Three, haunting hippy folk that wanders and meanders, Stooges-y garage stomp, but all of it is slightly and gorgeously, a little bit off.�
It all sounds as if it was some transmission from another dimension, but in the crossing over, Moknok's pop music got all bent up and twisted, and we love it.�
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Pretty sure we won't be able to get more when we run out...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Originally released for this year's Record Store Day, Flashbacks And Dream Sequences collects (almost) everything recorded by these aQ beloved Aussie experimental jangle poppers. The Moles were never a household name, at least in most normal households, which is totally a shame, cuz their perfectly crafted bittersweet jangle pop sounds as good now as it did decades ago. Like lots of folks, we discovered the Moles a bit circuitously. Not sure how many folks remember the band Cardinal, they only released one proper full length, back in the nineties (you can find the review elsewhere on the aQ site), but to this day, it remains quite possibly one of the most perfect orchestral pop records ever released. And before there was Cardinal, there was the Moles.
The Moles is the band that Richard Davies of Cardinal, called home before that band was born, and while not quite as lush or orchestral as Cardinal, the sound is a classic slice of primo late '80s & early '90s New Zealand / Flying Nun style style experimental pop. Droning and hypnotic, with lots of jagged unfinished edges, weird almost industrial noise bits, plenty of Brit pop jangle, the sounds swirling and sweet and spacious, dreamy and melancholy, warbly organs, lush Rickenbacker guitars, sunny, reverbed harmonies, Davies' strange crooned vocals, sometimes Robyn Hitchcock-ish, other times closer to a Morrissey like drawl, everything swaddled in a hazy psychedelic production. But for as experimental as the Moles were, all of that experimentalism was wrapped around some incredibly catchy pop, hooks galore, not always proudly on display, sometimes nearly totally obfuscated, but just as often, set up right in front, and allowed to shine, an approach to pop that to this day still seems distinctly from that era / region. Yet seems impossibly prescient of what was to come.
Fans of NZ outfits like Tall Dwarfs, the Bats, the Clean, the 3Ds, the Chills, Straightjacket Fits, the Verlaines, could have easily missed out on the Moles, they were actually from Australia after all, and were sort of underground even among the already underground, plus they were definitely a bit weirder, but now's the time to right that wrong, this stuff is timeless, sounding as good as ever, these two discs are overflowing with some incredible pop songs, and half the fun is digging through all the psychedelic strangeness to find them.
This double disc set collects the group's albums proper, Untune The Sky and Instinct, as well as a treasure trove of singles, B-sides and unreleased rarities!
Probably the most well known of the groups contributing to this most recent collection of limited 7" singles from Germany's Drone Records. Gorgeously packaged, matte black ink on gloss black sleeves, pressed on black vinyl, black on grey cardstock insert, the first edition and thus limited to ONLY 300 COPIES!
Two short tracks, the first an ominous ambience of deep rumbles and hushed atmosphere, haunting minor key melodies stretched into blurred streaks of sound, after drifting through a little cloud of percussion at the beginning, only to emerge into a bleak expanse of slowly unfurling low end and soft black shimmer. The flipside picks up right where the A side ends, growing less and less ominous, becoming more and more dreamy and blissed out, the ominous black clouds slowly parting to reveal a sprawling expanse of steel grey winter sky. So nice!
Latest disc of sonic exploration from this Swedish dronescaping ensemble. With such a darkly minimal sound, it's amazing that, at least for this recording. Moljebka Pvlse included ten members! Credited, with among other things, sounds (yep, just 'sounds'), no-input mixing board, synthesizers, melodica, field recording, cymbals, guitar, voices, flute, electric piano, text, didgeridoo, mbira and supercollider(!), this expansive ensemble takes all of that and manages to distill it into the darkest and simplest of sounds. A nearly seventy minute single piece, slowly sprawling out from a stretch of barely there shimmer into gradually more and more active low end minimalism. Long drawn out tones, mysterious bits of glitch and click, haunting voices, moaning and mumbling, chanting and intoning, bits of creaking and tiny swirls of FX, deep swells of synth and barely discernible rhythms, everything constantly shifting and gradually changing shapes, some parts almost coalescing into fragmented bits of actual pop (albeit stripped down and smeared), while others are mostly melody free, remaining stretched out and abstract. Quite sinister and lovely, dark and subtly intense, not all that far removed from the sounds of Troum and Thomas Koner and other practitioners of the drone and drift. Which as avid AQ customers should realize, is indeed a very good thing.�
Unfortunately we've somehow missed out on Moljebka Pvlse until now, although this Swedish dronescaping project has produced some exceptional work for Cold Meat Industies and Eibon. Tamon is a bit of a detour for Moljebka Pvlse which has typically offered somnolent, hypnotic sounds on par with Troum and Thomas Koner. Here, Moljebka Pvlse quite literally shatters the lulling atmospheres with two monstrous slabs of digitized noise surrounded by extended passages of eerie electric hummings. The juxtaposition of the calmer pools of sound and the infernal noise is purposefully jarring, as they simply butt up against each other. As good as Moljebka Pvlse has been at creating the sublime drone, he's equally proficient in noisemaking, on par with Merzbow's recent headcleansing output. Well worth checking this one out!
While Malcolm Bly's ambient project Mollusk is conceptually grounded within the biology of ancient sea creatures, his "Accretions" album holds a lot of similarities to the deep space music found on Hearts of Space or just the backing ambience that would go along with a Carl Sagan narration about "the billions and billions of stars that span the night sky." Sure the case could be made
Finally! Been waiting for the vinyl version of this for a while now. Taking the slow boat all the way from Spain, but it was well worth it, sounds awesome, looks amazing. Metallic gold and black on shimmery silver matte finish, all new artwork. SUPER LIMITED, we got a bunch, but we won't be able to get more. Here's more about the music inside:
A while ago we were informed that French ultradoom combo Monarch had called it a day. We were crushed. One of our favorite purveyors of filthy slow motion doooooooooom, fronted by a woman, a rarity in doom for sure, and with a penchant for smiley skulls and Hello Kitty. A band that seemed tailor made for the very bizarre tastes of the AQ faithful, seemed to be no more.�
But before we could begin our campaign of mourning, black clothes spray painted with cute skulls, black Hello Kitty armbands, we discovered that in fact we were misinformed, or maybe the band had taken a break, or something, but we cared not, for whatever reason, Monarch was still alive, and would live to doom another day. And doom they did. Gracing us with more and more glorious downtuned heaviness, including their bad ass cover of Turbonegro's "I Got Erection"!
So now that we're pretty comfortable with the continued existence of our favorite cute doomsters, we can wait patiently for each new, massive slab of harsh slow motion glacial dooooooooooooooooooooom. And for folks new to Monarch, don't go expecting this to actually -sound- cute. They may be fronted by an adorable French girl, who spins playfully on the beach in their videos, but when she opens her mouth to sing, it's the sound of blackness and misery, a demonic caterwaul, unrivaled by most male metal vocalists. And sure the art on their records may be cute cartoon burning churches and big eyed ghosts, but the sounds inside are slow and black as tar, guitars tuned so low they rumble instead of roar, drum beats so far apart, the drummer can probably smoke a cigarette between beats.�And we're happy to report that this 16+ minute chunk of doom is all that and more. The more being the haunting ethereal female vocals partway through... Crushingly heavy, weirdly beautiful. A plodding symphony in slow motion. Essential Monarch beautiful brutality.
The surprise here is the Grey Daturas track, also a 16 minute epic, that on first listen sounds surprisingly doomy, and a lot like the Monarch track. The Daturas are often heavy, but rarely doomy like this, but it suits them. And they pepper their doom with all sorts of sonic weirdness, bits of electronic fuckery, strange modulated feedback, subtle FX, until about 13 minutes in, when the song suddenly morphs into a muted wall of smeared and crumbling white noise, a blast of blurred sound that eventually fades into nothingness.�
Pretty amazing stuff, from both bands. Doom hounds will be well pleased.
Oh man! Where would we be without the Moog (pronounced MOAG, not MOOG). We wouldn't have Stereolab, or Tortoise, or E.L.P. (says Andee!) or almost any of the risk taking bands of the last thirty years. Well, we'd probably still have 'em but boy would they sound completely different. And most certainly not nearly as good! The history of Robert Moog (who is unbelievably cute and so effusive about his keyboards and the folks who play them) and the development of the synthesizer is totally fascinating, especially so for music tech nerds, but definitely fun for anyone to watch. Loads of insane footage from the sixties and seventies: Moog instructional videos, live performances, interviews, and up close examinations of the machine itself, a snarled mass of wires and knobs and plugs that look almost organic, like the inside of a human being! But it's definitely the live performances that drive the point home, showing the Moog in its element demonstrating quite easily how it managed to define and recreate the possibilities of synthesized sound! A particularly awesome clip features Gershon Kingsley (of Perrey and Kinglsey) defending the Moog against critics who at the time claimed it was a machine NOT a musical instrument, some Stereolab shot right here in SF, and of course some INSANE Keith Emerson Moog jams. Later in the film there's a brief bit on the theremin, but for the most part it's all about the moog!
Extra stuff includes deleted scenes, interviews with DJ Spooky, TIm Gane of Stereolab, Charlie Clouser of Nine Inch Nails, and more Bob Moog himself, as well as extra live footage from Money Mark, The Album Leaf, and more. Probably the most amazing extra though is a Schaefer Beer commercial, where a dude all decked out in his seventies finery, plays a wild Moog-ed up version of the Schaefer beer theme before pouring himself a tall cool one!!
YESS!!! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Those are direct quotes from Allan the day he discovered, totally out of the blue, that this album had been reissued on cd by the Japanese label EM Records (same folks who put out the Symphony of the Birds reish reviewed elsewhere this list). Kerry and Andee were both in the office that day and can attest that Allan just about jumped out of his skin, his voice positively yelping with excitement. And now we're ALL going ohmigod, ohmigod too since the box from Japan that Allan ordered arrived and Moolah is among us.
Ok, so what the heck is Moolah?? Well we're talking a super-obscure psychedelic/experimental Holy Grail album here. Allan only knew about it 'cause he'd heard some of it on a cd-r burn that our pal Loren Chasse had gotten from Jan Anderzen of Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat. Totally weird, damaged, krautrocky cosmic psych with electronic drones, haunting classical piano, and fucked up rhythms! According to Anderzen, it was an ultra rare LP from the '70s by a band called Moolah, entitled Woe Ye Demons Possessed. Wow. Allan found it hard to believe that was really true, and that it wasn't just something recorded by some genius Finnish forest freak friend of Anderzen's directly for the cd-r. But some diligent research revealed that the mysterious Moolah was indeed a band from New York who released an album on what was probably their own label, Druidstone (!), in 1974. But it was still pretty much unknown and almost utterly unobtainable. It didn't seem to have ever been reissued. And even our most '70s knowledgable psych-rock reissue supplier in Sweden hadn't heard of it at all. But we never lost hope. And now, thanks to the extremely strange and cool Japanese label EM Records, here at last we present to you Moolah on cd! We're still left in the dark about a lot of the details of this mysterious record's history (EM's sales info is mostly in Japanese) but from the album cover notes reproduced in the cd package we can tell you that the men behind Moolah were a duo named Walter Burns and Maurice Roberson, who recorded this, "their paranormal concertwork ...a cosmic rock relaxation creation" at a "secret studio in New York's Greenwich Village". There's also some amazing pagan poetry on the sleeve, here's a few lines: "Licking BLOOD Drinking TEARS Sacrificing LOVE on the Altar of Tomorrow Eating FRUITS of Stolen Vineyards With Withered Young Mouthes That Sing The OLD SONGS WHICH WERE FORBID".
And the music is as amazing as what Allan remembered. Dreamy, beautiful ambience -and- disturbingly chaotic, claustrophobic sounds. Shimmery, murky, distorted, primitive... is it even rock music? For the day, about as far out as you could get. Indeed, ahead of its time. Such tracks as "Crystal Waters", "Terror Is Real" and "The Hatd Hit" are lo-fi jams full of dubby echo effects, indistinct voices intoning New Age ideas, crazy backwards percussion, and insectoid squiggles of electronics. And we think we heard a purring cat in there too. The question is: did the Moolah duo simply inhabit their own, messed-up, mystical little world (which seems likely, judging by those sleeve notes of theirs), or had these guys heard records by early Kraftwerk, Amon Duul, Kluster, and Neu!? We wonder. But either way, the krautrock scene's freakiest had nothing on Moolah. File with such rare, eccentric, outsider psych artifacts as the Cromagnon's Orgasm, Yahowha 13's Penetration, and Comus' First Utterance. What a find. If you like weird, lost, lovely, maybe a bit frightening music THIS IS FOR YOU.
Compositions for organ... ominous glowing church... suspense and strength... two young players... mining gold from the Moondog vaults.
There are so so many sides of Moondog, and so many and incredibly varied sounds he's created throughout his long and eccentric life of music making. From inventing his own instruments to performing on street corners to incorporating field recordings into his songs, to collaborating with the London Philharmonic, the list goes on and on. While Moondog is mostly lauded for the sounds he created with his wide range of instruments, it's the sound of his voice in the songs he sang sprinkled throughout his catalog that have always left us in such awe, generating both bewilderment and delight. Originally released on LP in Germany in 1978, H'art Songs is an awesome disc of Moondog vocal tracks, a few of which we had heard on other collections and were already in love with, as well as a bunch that are brand new to our ears. With piano and his own percussion as the musical backdrop, it's Moondogs's totally unique and intimate vocal delivery and word play that makes these songs so weirdly enchanting. Playful and poetic while also emotional and personal. Just like everything else Moondog created in his life, these songs do feel like they are from a different world. So strange and so damn good. This is a must have for Moondog fans!
Dug up a just a couple of these (as in only TWO copies) mysterious discs, a two track cd-r from Aussie experimental ambientists Moonmilk, who released a killer 3" a while back on the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis...Don't label. For those who remember that one, The World Creaks offers up more of the same, a fantastically tripped out and hazy blur of layered soft keyboard noise, lush roiling textures, swirling fractured FX, stuttering loops, wheezing melodies, all stretched and blurred into long expanses of hypnotic lysergic free noise drift, that slips from hazy upper register ur-drone to murky muddied low-end creep. The sort of stuff that should definitely appeal to folks into Skaters, Monopoly Child Star Searchers, James Ferraro, Yellow Swans, and all that sorta pretty noisiness.
Beautiful oversized screen printed covers, two printed, inserts on heavy textured paper, and again this is WAY out of print, and these are the last two copies EVER.
We found a handful of titles, maybe only 5 or 6 of each, from Aussie label Diagnosis� Don't! We've had these for ages, and odds are these are long gone as they were pretty limited to begin with, but for a few of you, here's your chance to grab one (or all) of these super limited 3" cd-r's.
Moonmilk are another Australian combo, who specialize in lo-fi experimental ambience, utilizing keyboards, loops, effects, guitars, microphones, tapes, melodica and other noise making devices, this duo whip up some seriously dense blur, a warm whirring landscape of wheezing melodies, throbbing low end, swirling hiss, gorgeous languorous layered drones, random percussion, lo-fi but lush, minimal but expansive, definitely some dreamdrone goodness for the freedrone cd-r set. Two tracks, 12 minutes. Definitely like to hear more from these two....
Packaged in thick cardstock mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. And again, we only have a VERY FEW of these....
The short, one sentence review: it's the debut solo album from keyboard player from AQ fave Goblinesque math rock duo Zombi, and if you like Zombi, you'll probably really like this! More details, if necessary... Well, a little tizzy of controversy got started here at Aquarius when we scoped the sticker that Relapse stuck on the front of these cds. To quote, "The Henge is a huge, psychedelic, symphonic affair with Moore's patented cinematic brand of keyboard driven horror score virtuosity. For fans of Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Black Ice, Brian Eno, Ash Ra Tempel, Robert Fripp's 'Frippertronics', Heldon". No denying that this sounds quite a bit like all of that, it describes this pretty well. But we must take exception to the use of the word "patented"! Did Heldon, Goblin, John Carpenter et.al. all forget to contact the government, and then wily Steve Moore slipped in and got the patent!? Huh. Poor choice of words, "patented". But we know what they meant. It's the sound that Zombi is known for (being infuenced by) and they do it really well, and that's what this sounds like, basically Zombi without the drummer, if anything more '70s and cinematic sounding, also really sci-fi cosmic.
To his credit, Moore doesn't overtly pull out the ol' "imaginary soundtrack" concept, but he sure could have. In fact some of the more bombastic moments it seems like he's just waiting for Hollywood to come knockin', to score their next horror blockbuster. Elsewhere, at the very least this could be the most sinister soundtrack to a PBS documentary ever! Alternatively, we might describe this as New Age nightmare music. Moore's minimal-wave soundscapes, full of nervous rhythms, ominous drones, & electronic symphonics, are tense yet often deceptively pleasant. It's paranoid, menacing Muzak that hypnotizes like an unholy mix of A.R.& Machines and Dave Borden's Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co., plus all the other names dropped in the blurb quoted above. A fine follow up to Surface To Air, even thought it's not technically a Zombi album!
Almost like a teaser for the forthcoming Zombi full length, Escape Velocity, comes this killer two track 12" from one half of Zombi, Steve Moore, whose solo recordings are (thankfully) not all that far removed from the Zombi mothership.
It's easy to be dismissive at this point of this sound, cuz there are just soooo many folks doing it, sci-fi soundtracks, eighties straight to video B movies, John Carpenter, Goblin, but Zombi were there first, and still do it better than most, and hearing Moore's latest blast of cosmic disco sci-fi nu-age techno synthscapery it's easy to see why he and his two man crew inspired such a legion of similarly sonically obsessed sci-fi minions.
The title track here is a fantastic chunk of outer space sci-fi synth drift, the robotic pulse underscores sweeping swells of moody melody, pappered with occasional bits of percussive bloopery, the rhythms muted and minimal, the pulsing synths driving the proceedings more than the beats, but the beats are still there, adding texture, and eventually a skittery skeletal framework for Moore's cinematic synthesized cosmic drift.
The flipside begins all washed out and woozy, lush, layered synth swirls, a slow moving outer space shimmer, but soon, the synth low end begins to percolate right below the surface, not quite disrupting the new age vibe, but adding a bit of momentum and propulsion. Eventually the beat comes in, but it's not so much a beat, as a pulse, a single house-y kick drum, but the result is perfect, adding just the slightest bit of groove, allowing the rest of the track to swirl and whirl and drift, all hazy and dreamily druggy and spaced out, the sound building to a driving and dramatic crescendo, before slipping away in a soft hazy swirl of slow fading synth shimmer. So good!
Needless to say, absolutely required listening for fans of Umberto, Zombi, Xander Harris, John Carpenter, Goblin, Blizaro, Applehead, Gatekeeper, Expo 70, Roll The Dice, Nightsatan, Twins and all the rest. Packaged in a plain black disco style big hole 12"s sleeve.
