With a press release that simply declares this as "sinister psych, semi-acoustic noise" and a photograph on the back of the LP with the band posturing with instruments in a crumpled shack out in the forest, this record was pretty much made for Aquarius. Onde is a project that has come out of Noise Maker's Fifes, a theatrically Neo-Dada ensemble in the same orbit as Nurse With Wound and HNAS. The best known member of these groups is Timo Von Luijk, who had recorded briefly in Mirror with Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann and more recently has continued on with Heemann as In Camera. Onde delivers with the sinister psych and semi-acoustic noise with four long form slabs of drone murk with one side being more of the dark, gloomy drone strategy, the other belonging to a monstrous heaviosity for sheer noise. The mellower shadowy half recalls Taj Mahal Travellers meandering through electronics and instrumental flutter with bits of the impressionist atmospheres of Mirror and In Camera coming through. On the flip, Onde crash head forward into the acoustic noise compaction of bowed metals, screeched steel strings, and growling amplifiers somewhere between Birchville Cat Motel, Organum, and Sunroof! It's pretty awesome.
Onde hail from the Belgian underground, and members of Onde had all been part of the psychedelic collage ensemble Noise-Maker's Fifes, a project that had more than a few parallels to HNAS. The first Onde record was something of a continuation of the gloomy atmospherics built from semi-improvised gestures; but Purple is an entirely different beast, that seems to lock itself onto the motorik rhythm and atonal squalor that Tony Conrad & Faust generated on their seminal Outside The Dream Syndicate. Even if they are not intentionally paying homage to that album, they do a damn good job of replicating that single-minded, art-rock minimalism with sustained violin harmonics shot through with an insistent heartbeat kick-drum rhythm and double-timed guitar arpeggiation that phases out of its monotone with throat-singing harmonics. Onde's harmonics seem to have more of an expressionist urgency than the cantankerous pursuit of a pure minimalism that Conrad demands on Outside The Dream Syndicate; but this is nevertheless fantastic. While the album was cut to be played at 45rpm, we are probably not alone in dropping the needle onto this record at 33rpm. This surely must have been by Onde's design, as at 33rpm the record now takes on a Neu! 2 feel with a slow-motion crawl of those hypnotic rhythms and detuned heaviness now oozing forth from the thick stringed drones, sounding all the more monstrous. Yeah, it's like getting two records for the price of one. Fuck, yeah!
We discovered the 200mg label via their recently released No Skull Left Unturned retrospective, which covered all the various Man Is The Bastard offshoots, the music of course was amazing, but it was also incredibly packaged, with multiple discs, patches, pins, books and booklets, so over the top. We decided to dig a little deeper and discovered a whole slew of strange and mysterious dark sounds, from ambient drone to outsider blackness to noise, everything we heard we dug, so we decided to dig a little deeper and list everything we could get.
This release, from an entity known simply as Ondo, comes to us from Sweden, and is one looooong 40 minute track, of deep metallic dronemusic, thick shimmering layers of distorted sound, reverberating buzz, and smeared streaks of electronics. The sound is creepy and ominous, very cinematic, it's not hard to imagine some long tracking shot of an old graveyard, huge black birds soaring overhead, a dilapidated old house, a rusted out car in the yard, a tire swing barely shifting in the afternoon breeze, the sort of sloooooow shot that builds the suspense, that readies you for whatever horror might lie in wait. That's what the music of Ondo sounds like. Long drawn out tones, deep resonant notes, thick crumbling corrosive rumbles, bits of feedback and snippets of voices, everything dripping in effects and oozing with menace. This is definitely dark ambient music, but it's not all that ambient, it's active, some strange lifeforce inhabits these sounds and propels it forward, along with the listener, drawing us ever closer to some inexorable doom. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 101 COPIES! Packaged in a cool oversized screenprinted cardstock sleeve, inside a 12 page printed black and white booklet on thick cream colored paper, packed with cool creepy old woodcuts.
The second of two new releases on the always kick ass Paradigms label from the UK. The first being the reviewed-elsewhere-on-this-list latest release from 4AD ethereal drifters The Victims Shudder, the other, being this, the latest slab of crushing black ambience and deep dark dronemusic from Sweden's Ondo. Weirdly enough, we were already fans having dug heavily the cd-r released on 200mg a short while back, and were already pining for more, and voila. Whereas that cd-r was a single looooong song, this disc is split into distinct movements, each a bleak and caustic chunk of truly ominous ambience. Actually, there is so much stuff going on, and this is so dark and heavy, it's almost disingenuous to call it ambient music. This is cinematic abstract free noise drone music. Heavy enough to worm its way inside the ears of drone inclined metalheads, but dark and blissed out enough to keep the drone obsessed in downtuned druggy nirvana.
The label mentions early Earth, Raison D'Etre and Fennesz, and damn if all three of those don't definitely apply. Pretty melodies are buried under slabs of grinding buzz, chords are woven into undulating sheets of fuzzy sound, everything is hissy and glitchy, with a gauzy sheen. Imagine Earth 2 as reimagined by Christian Fennesz and you might be getting close. Chords and notes, churn and throb, blackened sounds pulse ominously enveloping crystalline shimmers and music box like melodies, voices and samples are chopped up and distorted, riffs are pulled apart into washed out smears of sound. Some of the tracks definitely border on serious doom territory, while others are blurred distorted dreamscapes, all skittery and smeared, dark pianos, radio distortion and amp buzz, distant melodic whir, all tangled into something creepy and beautiful, strings draped over crumbling industrial crunch, all woven around heaving heaviness, rendered in slow moving swells. Way recommended for fans of things slow and low, dark and doomy, murky and mysterious.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Packaged in a white dvd style case, with a full color cover and printed black and white insert.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This release on Polish label Perunrun comes to us via AQ pal Smolken who is Dead Raven Choir. One Inch Of Shadow are DRC labelmates in Poland and share a similar aesthetic although OIOS are essentially a pop band, but sort of a slowcore pop band, all murky and dreary and reverby. Creeping lugubrious basslines, whispery, heavily affected vocals, dreamy, swampy ambient backgrounds, simple shuffling beats, fuzzy far-away horns, smeary indistinct melodies, and repetetive, pulsing, rhythmic arrangements make this a gorgeously hypnotic late night listen. Fans of Low and Codeine, and even Tindersticks or the Blackheart Procession might really dig this.
Nico meets Jandek in these beautifully introspective proto-goth dirges by an anonymous woman from Czechoslovakia who moved to Canada and self-released these songs on a series of singles in the late seventies and early eighties. Music was her outlet to deal with the depression and alienation she felt living away from her home country, and these songs are almost laughably dour, though also quite lovably naive. Mostly performed with delicate Eastern-European tinged organ drones, she later recorded under the name, The Triffids (no connection to The Australian group), with an instrumental track that includes percussion and synth. Early demos are also included here, and display a slightly brighter air with acoustic guitar and reverbed vocals that will appeal to fans of Liz Harris (aka Grouper). Perhaps not a record for everyone, but those with unusual and eccentric tastes towards obscure but sincere outsiders will find a lot to love here!
Comes with insert with lyric translations. Limited edition of 500.
A while back we reviewed Hypnos, the most recent release from composer/guitarist Mario Diaz DeLeon, which at the time we described as sounding like the soundtrack to some strange apocalyptic planetarium show, fusing tranced out minimal kosmische drift and processed guitar textures to churning SUNNO))) like doomdrone, all blurred into a constantly shifting landscape of seriously heavy modern minimalism, that bordered on the maximal.
So here we have DeLeon's most recent release, now under the name Oneirogen, the name of a track from Hypnos, and it should this come as no surprise that Oneirogen is not all that far removed from Hypnos, if anything the sound here are more song-like, and overall more metallic. Just check out the first track, which begins as a swirl of processed guitars, before suddenly a massive downtuned riff rolls in, thick, sludgey and doomy, and soon those two disparate elements seem to coalesce, and a second guitar swoops in the lay down soaring dramatic guitar melodies over the top. Almost leads in fact, giving the whole thing a seriously epic power metal vibe. It's not hard to imagine this as the intro track to some unreleased Lost Horizon or Blind Guardian record. Which if you couldn't tell, means we're digging this like crazy.
We were all prepared to say that the rest of the record wasn't so overtly metal, but then track two "Pathogen" starts up with shimmering synths, pulsing cosmically, and then BAM, in comes the guitar, a roiling low end rumble, and a soaring distorted melody, another track that sounds like some strange hybrid of epic power metal and blissed out komische new age. And this time we won't bother, the rest of the record IS more of the same, and it's awesome, and epic, sure the guitars don't always come crashing in. Occasionally the sound stays locked in a shimmery synth swirl, or a gristly drone, but more often than not, those two sounds collide in a glorious supernova of sound. The 14+ minute centerpiece "Katabasis" is the ultimate example, with long stretches of wild squealing drones, and tranced out minimal buzz, but then total epic power metal riffage, some cool wavery high end sine tone shimmer, and some grinding epic upper register sort-of-shred, not to mention some creepy, twang flecked synth soaked ambience, and one stretch that sounds almost chorale. We were wondering when the worlds of kosmische new age, modern minimal composition and epic power metal would collide. And now that they have, it sounds so much better than we ever could have imagined.
So, Gneiss Things made a small batch of discs for this Oneohtrix Point Never album back at the end of 2008, probably not anticipating that OPN would become something of a big deal via his cyborg meditation music. A Pact Between Strangers was the second recording for OPN, predated only by the Betrayed In The Octagon album, which first came out as a cassette on Deception Island and later got released on LP through No Fun. By now, most everything that Dan Lopatin has released as Oneohtrix Point Never has gone out of print; so Gneiss Things wisely decided to make another run down to Kinkos, run off some more color copies of the artwork, and press up another batch of discs. But it will inevitably be a small window of time in which we'll be offering these discs.
That said, A Pact Between Strangers is not all that dissimilar to the long sprawling sci-fi tracks of Betrayed In The Octagon with shimmering synth patterns gliding along those day-glo lazer tones without much use of the sequenced arpeggiations that Lopatin had featured so prominently on Zones Without People or the KGB Man material.
Limited as fuck, and just as recommended.
On this 7", the title track from the most recent Oneohtrix Point Never full length gets two radically different reworkings, one from Antony (of & The Johnsons), the other by Christian Fennesz.
The original "Returnal" was a dizzying slab of robotic future funk, all pulsing synths, processed machinelike vox, a tripped out hybrid of Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and M83, all fuzzy, and swirly and psychedelic and spaced out, but these two reimaginings couldn't be further from the original. First up, Antony strips away all the synths, and reinterprets it as a torch song, played entirely on an acoustic piano (by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix, himself), the sound lush and elegiac, Antony's vocals moving and emotional, intense and so dramatic, the new version a haunting dark ballad, that even to fans of the Oneohtrix original, will most likely sound like a completely different beast.
Fennesz takes the Antony version from the A-side, and pulls it apart, blurs and softens the sounds into softly spinning clouds, taking various tones and stretching them way out, letting the piano drift in and out, the vocals slipping from gently reverbed to layered heavily effected, looped and repeated mantra like, occasionally disappearing into a squall of dubbed out effects, other times suspended in a field of pixilated piano and thick streaks of chordal clusters, eventually building to a warm lush psychedelic climax, before settling back to earth, fading out completely, leaving just shadowy traces and slowly decaying sonic contrails...
Probably quite limited, as these things most often are, features some sleek minimal Mego style cover art/design by none other than Stephen O'Malley.
Oneohtrix Point Never is the work of Brooklyn's Daniel Lopatin who also records as Infinity Window with Taylor Richardson, operating in that curious resuscitation of progressive electronics which so far hasn't strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. Yet that's exactly the time period which Lopatin seems intent on mining. Fortunately for all of us, Lopatin enjoys the benefit of being born well past the New Age nadir, and he can selective mine the past through a darkening lens of noise culture and with a skepticism that selects against dopey (even if earnestly penned) philosophies and woefully lackluster music. Nope, Oneohtrix Point Never is none of these, despite a conscious nostaglic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The label tag of No Fun Productions should also be an indication of where this may lie on the musical spectrum.
Both sides of Betrayed In The Octagon open with two sprawling pieces of densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. The other pieces bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arppegiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced). This is great stuff that won't last for long. No Fun only printed up 300 of these!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Copies from copies of copies upon copies to copies through copies on copies of more copies. Daniel Lopatin was but a babe in the early '80s - the global time frame which stands central to his Oneohtrix Point Never project, where Russian TV advertisements, faded slow-jam hits, and forgotten futures all get misinterpreted, rewired, and misremembered through an android dream. Much of his past work revolved around the step sequencing and ambient swoosh that filtered through the kosmische aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler with plenty of sci-fi sound design moments thrown in for good measure amidst the angular trajectories of his obtuse electronica. Where Lopatin had been instrumental in bringing this retrogarde aesthetic to a broader audience, he's dropped much of the compositional framework that went into albums like Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. Some of the swelling Vangelis synth pads reappear on Replica, but this album has much more in common with a plunderphonia aesthetic, with his 'ghost vocal' samples getting caught in an inexplicable feedback loop as a self-perpetuating syntax error within a Cray supercomputer which got hung up trying to come to terms with the audio-visual data from bad VHS transfers from old episodes of Max Headroom. Some of Lopatin's sounds originated from a series of compilations of late night TV commercials from the '80s, with the saccharine strings, flutes, and pianos cycling in elliptical patterns that scrub backwards and forwards. On "Sleep Dealer" in particular, these loops snap with a hard-disc rigidity more in common with the Oval disc-skipping mantras on Diskont 94 or the winking electronica of The Books. "Submersible" locks onto a middle-eastern rhythm, conjuring the ghost of Muslimgauze in an appropriation of an appropriation. For as much hype as this record has received, Replica is a very abstract and deliberately confusing proposition for OPN, one which we have been digging quite a bit. Killer cover art to boot!
FINALLY ALSO AVAILABLE ON CD!! Here's what we said about the vinyl version a couple weeks back:
With the opening squall of electrical noise on his latest Oneohtrix Point Never album, Daniel Lopatin must have been paying homage to Mego's history of digital cacophony, with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Florian Hecker, and Zbigniew Karkowski all abusing binary code through their releases on the label. Of course, Lopatin's signature sound is a throwback to the bygone era of education films about the wonders of chemistry and the drama of the space program with their cheesy, blooping soundtracks, so an homage to Mego is not entirely out of character from a conceptual point of view. Beyond this assaulting track, the elastic surfaces and geometric patterns which have become the hallmark of Oneohtrix Point Never work their magic on Returnal. On the title track with its staccato synthesis, Lopatin tricks his voice out through a couple of pitchshifters, rendering it very much in line with what Karin Dreijer Andersson has done in The Knife and Fever Ray. This isn't the first time he's sung on a track, as he did entertain some robotic vocals on one of those KGB Man cassettes from 2009. He follows this with a series of tracks overlapping cathode-ray drones, algorithmic shapeshifting, and pools of synthetic android tears all of which revolve into curving compositions that split the difference between pastoral new age drool puddling and progressive electronics with a nod to atonal cybernetics. Like Emeralds, who have also signed to Editions Mego, Oneohtrix Point Never has been on quite a roll, and Returnal lives up to all the hype.
The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material!
Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced).
Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors.
Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!
Russian Mind is the third piece of vinyl to be released in 2009 by Daniel Lopatin's ever-amazing Oneohtrix Point Never, following Zones Without People and Betrayed In The Octagon. All three of these LPs have recently been collected on the Rifts anthology, also released through No Fun, and this week's Record Of The Week!
The ideas of a forgotten future had been recently employed by Leyland Kirby on the driftscape trilogy Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was; but where Kirby pegged his lost future as somewhere in the early portion of the 20th century, reclaimed through downpitched and blurred 78s, Lopatin firmly pegs his lost future as the one perceived from the time period between 1975 and 1985. Given the title of this album, Lopatin's retro-garde zone-tripping looks back to the former Soviet Union. Such is also the case for some of Lopatin's appropriated video work, which features '80s Russian commercials with all sorts of a wonderfully corn-ball, lazer-clad video effects. Furthermore, he claims this album was "transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia." Nope, there is no such institute at the Russian Academy, but it makes for a good piece of fictional context.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind, and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms in the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Russian Mind tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors. A marvelous record for sure.
Not only do we finally have the awesome Oneohtrix Point Never Returnal record now available on cd, we also just got in OPN's Young Beidnahga, released as part of Ruralfaune's Synth series (along with the Innercity reviewed elsewhere on this week's list too!), but it sold out so quick we never got a single copy. Thankfully, the label decided to do one more small batch, so the band would have copies to sell on their recent European tour, and we'd have copies to sell in the shop!
Three tracks, 26 minutes, long form blissed out spacedrones, but somehow a bit more twisted and gnarled than other OPN releases, beginning with some sprawling wavery tones that sound almost Native American, the synths soon go wild, emitting wild tangles of melody, laced with what sounds like fluttering flutes, a wild trancelike swirling soft psychedelic squall that goes on and on and on, until eventually morphing into what sounds like several minutes of lazer battle! The second track continues in much the same vein with spidery melodies branching out and intertwining, trills and arpeggiated runs, all laid over hazy whirs and a fuzzed out, blurred background soundscape, those flute like flutters return, everything sun dappled and reflective, this track two morphs part way through and becomes a woozy sprawl of spare lo-fi analog synth squiggle. The last track is definitely a surprise, a strange stripped down coda, all acoustic guitars, strange effected vocals, some sort of druggy psychedelic dronefolk, lo-fi and a bit twisted, but also weirdly lovely.
Strange for sure, even by already strange OPN standards, far out and space-y and psychedelic, this should appeal to all you kraut-drone space-synth fanatics...
Be warned, we got a little less than 40 copies, and we won't be able to get more, so this is it, and it's a doozy, so if you're already a fan, you're FOR SURE gonna want one, and if you've always wanted to check out OPN, this is as good a place to start as any....
It makes perfect sense that Daniel Lopatin is a fan of J.G. Ballard, the late author of dystopian environments plagued and / or graced with the dilemmas of the relationship between man and machine. Lopatin's previous entry as Oneohtrix Point Never was the Memory Vague dvd on Root Strata, recycling '80s computer animation from YouTube to serve as the visual data for his sci-fi soundtracks of analog synthesis; and there was no doubt about the peculiar Ballardian aura to that dvd which enjoyed a bittersweet optimism for the future of technology with its sensual grasp upon the 'new.' For this album - Zones Without People - Lopatin continues to delight us with his perfectly anachronistic use of synthesizers to capture the early '80s memories of early afterschool science specials, cheap sci-fi soundtracks, and the never-ending fascination with space. Lopatin is keenly aware that we don't have teleportation devices, jetpacks, or holidays on the moon; and an undercurrent of sadness does seem to bubble from below all of his compositions. In fact, Lopatin describes the strategies he employs for his poly-synths as "grid tears," imbuing a sense of melancholy through his rigid network of percolating tones and bleeps.
Above an solar-powered electric hum, the album opens with a series of interwoven synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arppegiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lapotin gets to the title track, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the flip side is a dud. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters as the second side's opening cut. Cosmic arpeggiations and star-gazing drones settle in the rest of this amazing record. Don't expect this to be around for long. We're not the only one's freaking out about Oneohtrix Point Never, and Zones Without People is limited to 400 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
These two tapes, housed in a soft-plastic case a la RRRecords, offer documentation of four live, and very nice electronic sets from one evening at the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn, featuring the 2009 darling of outro-electronics Oneohtrix Point Never, the ever impressive Keith Fullerton Whitman, No Fun Acid (aka Carlos Giffoni in his 'acid' guise), and Prehistoric Blackout (aka Taylor Richardson of Infinity Window).
Oneohtrix Point Never begins his set with a lugubrious plodding synth melody before nestling into those stratospheric arcs of Juno-synth tones found on his recent Russian Mind LP. Keith Fullerton Whitman kicks out squiggles and step-patterned melodic phrases via a C64 emulator on his iPhone (no shit!) which gradually explode into a kaleidoscopic supernova after lifting out of a thick set of modulated tones 'n' drones. Giffoni has been talking up his love of acid techno with No Fun Acid being the project to act upon that infatuation. He sets down a simple breakbeat and begins a set that would make Phuture proud, in a pretty straight forward, but wholly effective techno workout. Prehistoric Blackout offers a four-note synth melody that drifts with counterpointed arpeggiations, tremolo lazer beams of sound, and tripped out, looping electronics. It should be noted that this is a room recording, and not a board mix. But as a result, there is some very amusing banter that Whitman provides at the end of his set with two enthusiastic women describing his set as a being akin to achieving multiple orgasms. Ahem. Throughout most of the sets, the audience politely stays quiet with the exception for the beginning of the Prehistoric Blackout set. Super limited, we've got less than a dozen of these.
Well, Yoko Ono's always generated love-her or hate-her responses, and this new disc sure is no letdown in that department! For the Yoko Ono lovers at AQ (Allan, for instance), it offers some prime '70s style Yoko screech, proving that even at 68 years old she's
Depending on where you stand with Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth's avant explorations, this is either a dream come true or a nightmare collaboration. It sounds exactly like what you would imagine. Extended vocal freakouts, chiming detuned arpeggiations, blithe detached whispered murmurs, ritualistic vocalized koans, distorted feedback squalls and even some right wing slamming poetry in the round. But besides that last part, it rarely comes off as indulgent as we feared, and the fact that it was recorded in a day, gives the pieces an urgency and vitality that would have been lost had it been more composed. Yokokimthurston definitely would have made a great installment in the group's SYR experimental series, and as a part of that series might have felt more substantial, and been granted more of a musical gravitas. As it stands in most music press this record is being treated more as Yoko acting as some therapeutic arbitration for Kim and Thurston to work out their post-marriage musical relationship. Please! As if the three of them didn't have anything better to do. Disregard the hype (or lack of) and check it out, it's definitely pretty great!
Plenty of artists we love have mustered beautiful, droney compositions through the act of decay. Look no further than the AQ favorites from William Basinski's sublime Disintegration Loops, the crumbling digitalia of Tim Hecker, and even our own Jim Haynes has his special rusting techniques with sound and image. So when it comes to an album called Entropy which comes from the Japanese drone 'n' field recordist Yui Onodera, we have to wonder how it measures up.
We gotta say this is a beautiful piece of grey-smeared ambience, but we're scratching our head over how this sounds like the world falling apart. This would be a perfect rainy day, contemplative soundtrack, but not exactly a meditation on entropy. Well, maybe except for the Loren Chasse-like crumbling of soil, pebbles, and leaves on the untitled second track which quietly tumbles into a series of evolving loops that blur into a sleep-inducing drone of oceanic waves and shimmering tones. The way this track progresses is how the entire record is situated -- a very calm, sedate, yet hypnotizing collection of drones and tones that float out of stacked guitars and processed field recordings. The fourth track is pure drone bliss straight out of the Chalk / Coleclough axis of smeared dronemaking precision; and the sixth has more of a Popul Vuh two-note melody oozing out of Onodera's shoegazing guitar chords, which have been filtered, layered, re-recorded, layered again, echoed, reverbed, and back again. Onodera has produced some great recordings for Mystery Sea and And/OAR, but this one was actually something he released back in 2005 through his Critical Path imprint. Even if this doesn't inspire the idea of entropy for us, Onodera has still made a fantastic and beautiful drone record here. Check it out!
Not much information to present about who Yui Onodera is. Nor is there anything in the way of a conceptual framework to guide one through this album beyond its sources from "environmental sound and pump organ." Not that it really matters anyway, as Suisei is a gorgeous album of darkly textured drones with parallels to Thomas Koner's isolationist compositions or Keith Berry's precious deconstructions. Wind, rain, and water all make themselves known in the collection of field recordings, as does the pump organ, which reveals itself in harmonic sustained tones with a spectral timbre (e.g. Niblock, Radigue, Chalk, etc.). During a particular enigmatic episode, wooden creaks and sodden groans duet with a motorized persistant soft-grind, giving the impression that some unscrupulous machine is quietly compacting sinews, meat, and bone. Strangely, it never sounds macabre or unsettlingly grotesque; rather, these crunching textures situate humbly next to a hypnotic wash of compressed static and melancholic shadowy drone, which sublimely shift into a slippery crescendo of grey massed sound. Very, very well done!
Dig the creepy cover, the extended claw like arms extended above a shadowy shawled woman, the whole image hazy and ghostly, and inside, strange electronic ghostly minimal dream pop that is the perfect soundtrack for that image, and for a lost world of similar sights, of blood red moons, of creatures in the dark, of low lit mysterious after hours underground gatherings, welcome to Witch House. No doubt most folks have already heard something about this new movement/genre, a twisted sample heavy dark minimal electronic music, which may have begun life as a witchy sort of house music, but has blossomed into a whole cadre of bands, make spooky, and evocative, and darkly lovely music. Most of these sounds released on limited tapes or cd-rs or as free downloads, the bands all named with strange option-control heavy keyboard characters, little black triangles, underscores, tiny crosses, jumbles of &'s and *'s, even OOOOO is written oOoOO, and who knows how it's pronounced. We could list some of the other bands, but it's probably just as easy to set your font for Zapf Dingbats and peck away at random!
But for all the secrecy and purposeful obfuscation, when you finally get your ears on this stuff, it is indeed, pretty fantastic. Woozy, warped, haunting, hypnotic, mysterious, dark, retro, futuristic, minimal, electronic, sampled, looped, depending on the group, it could be some sort of bewitching IDM shuffle, or some horror movie sampling bit of plunderphonia, or in the case of oOoOO, a gorgeous chunk of electronica flecked otherworldly dream pop. Skeletal and shoegazey, a soft pop cold wave wreathed in a ghostly haze, like Cocteau Twins or Slowdive but chopped & screwed. There's a little of that eighties sci-fi synth soundtrack stuff that's so popular right now, but somehow here it sounds more genuine, more a part of the admittedly twisted whole. Swirling effects, spectral ambience, atmospheric synth shimmer, occasionally slipping into some dark and sinister propulsive kraut disco, vocals clipped and looped into clouds of psychedelic soft noise, other times, the sound drifts more toward eighties MTV style yacht rock, but again, dubbed out, slowed down and wrapped in a blurred gauze, and throughout it all, the wispy angelic wraithlike female vocals, ethereal and ephemeral, a dreamy sonic thread that holds it all together.
Gorgeous stuff for sure. Anyone into all that hypnogogic pop stuff, or tripped out lo-fi cold wave, as well as folks like Zola Jesus, Nite Jewel, or even Beach House and other shoegazey dreampoppers, here's something just a bit darker, and a bit more out there, for when you're wandering the streets at night, or holed up in your house, lights out, candles lit and emotions dark, needing something pretty and poppy still, but infinitely more murky and mysterious.
A new name in the Celebrate Psi Phenomenon stable, this Scottish outfit manage to take the low tuned, tectonic guitar rumble of Earth / Sunn 0))) / etc., rev it up a little, add some melody and make it sort of rock, in a seasick, lurching through six inches of tar, being crushed beneath a black sky sort of way. And that's only the first track. Track two is a dizzying expanse of creaking machinery, dubby guitars, reverb and echo all over the place, some seriously overblown, guitar soaked dark ambience. Track three manages to mix the two together. The guitars are still there, fuzzing and buzzing and squriming like downed electrical wires, but they're spitting sparks from beneath a warm ocean of thick chords and muted feedback, melodic and drifting dreamily, a bit like Sunroof! or Vibracathedral Orchestra. Really nice. Fans of the Earth / Sunn 0))) / Corrupted / dirgedronedoom axis will NEED this for track one, but drone freeks will find the whole thing essential listening. SUPER LIMITED AS ALWAYS!! NOT SURE WE'LL BE ABLE TO GET MORE WHEN THESE ARE GONE!
Three extended tracks of improvised free-form avant-noise drone from this LA outfit. Imagine the Dead C, slowly crumbling from the inside out, all vestiges of 'rock' and 'composition' are now a viscous puddle in front of your speakers, leaving just a splattery, skeletal clattery clank of a record. A huge cavernous space, a player in each corner, sending pipes and guitars and drum sticks and plectrums careening across the floor, raising an unholy, but pretty damn pleasing racket.
The Los Angeles duo of Doug Russell and Peter Kolovos has expanded their lineup as well as sonic capacities with newcomer Andrew Maxwell, formerly of SF's Caroliner. With this second lp, Open City has abandoned the haze of a pure sonic assault for a more rigid and dynamic "free" approach. Audiophile vinyl housed in a beautiful heavy duty gatefold sleeve and limited to 500 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The debut lp from Los Angeles-based duo of Doug Russell and Peter Kolovos (they have since expanded into a trio). Two sidelong pieces of Branca informed sonic dissolution, both recorded live in 1997. Handsomely packaged in a heavy duty gatefold sleeve in an edition of 500.
We first heard Operative (a.ka. Scott Goodwin of Bonus) at the Root Strata curated music festival, On Land, last September here at San Francisco's Cafe Du Nord. Expecting to hear some piercing long-form drone meditation, we were pleasantly surprised that Goodwin was joined by two live drummers for a set of exuberant and organic minimal house workouts that were a welcome change of tone from much of the beautiful but exhausting roster of introspective drone experimentation that had been happening throughout the day.
Likewise, we're keen on this 12". "Ramp" begins with a slow-rising siren tone that continually elevates in pitch. As it's countered by other rising tones in a sort of Charlemagne Palestine-ish way, the drums and steady bass tones kick in taking the track to an urgent futuristic thriller as scored by Giorgio Moroder kind of territory. "Pulse" is more organic, taking warm rhythmic synth loops and looping them on top of each other to a pulsating and hypnotic 4/4 rhythm. So good!
This 12" marking Operative's debut comes courtesy of Honey Owens' (Valet, Jackie-O Motherfucker) new label for left-field techno, Ecstacy. Look out for her Miracles Club 12" on a future list!
Boston's Ophibre (aka Benjamin Rossingol) has been releasing tiny editions of cassettes, cd-rs, and at least one reel-to-reel tape for the past five or six years. His work often revels in forgotten / obsolete technologies whose artifacts and residues become the source material for his crusty drones, abraded noise, and splattered musique concrete constructions; he couples those sounds with a dry blackhumor that falls somewhere between GX Jupitter-Larsen and George Macunias. This album, released on Intransitive's new series of hyper-limited cd-rs, draws from Rossignol's experience with an MRI machine while he was participating in a few medical studies to help pay the bills. As the giant powerful magnetic spun around him, Rossignol found himself hearing a complementary series of harmonic tones that didn't appear to be originating form the MRI. He wasn't sure if those sounds were hallucinatory or if they were some peculiar acoustic phenomenon that he had discovered. Here, he's attempting to replicate that experience through configurations of controlled feedback, synth overdrive, and dead-eyed noise. The first track is a screeching rasp of magnetic noise, particle accelerated vibration, and hurricane fury, that's well-suited to the likes of Birchville Cat Motel and Hototogisu; but after this 15 minute blast of noise, Ophibre's sublime, yet gritty dronescaping takes over with mirrored tones and hazy echoes that appear like the tracers from a bad drug reaction, flickering upon his murky immersions. All things that we dig in our dronemusik! Limited to 100 copies.
We flipped for the first Opium Warlords record, so much so that we wanted to make it Record Of The Week, but like this new one, it was just too difficult to keep in stock and available. Otherwise you might be reading a Record Of The Week review right now instead of just a VERY enthusiastic highlight review! OW is the most recent, and most active solo project of S.A. Hynninen, aka Albert Witchfinder, he of late great doomlords Reverend Bizarre, not to mention, the man behind weirdo avant doom outfit KLV, as well as spaced out doom sludge psychedelic one man band The Puritan.
So here's mysterious missive number two from Hynninen's Opium Warlords, the very strangely named We Meditate Under The Pussy In The Sky, and if anything, it's even more far our and difficult to describe. We'd say it's doom, but really it's not, not really, or it is, at least in places, but otherwise, it's pretty experimental. We'd like to say it's heavy, and it is, but only in places, we CAN say, it's psychedelic, cuz it is all over, and weird, and warped, and demented and damaged. This is definitely one of those records, where all you can really do is describe the sounds.
The brief opener is a five minute drift of shimmering guitar, of clanging chords, a droned out psychedelic guitarscape, that flits from hushed drift to crashing chaotic clang and back again, it's slow building psychguitar intro to what is essentially the record's centerpiece, the 12 minute "Slippy", which also just happens to be the most whatthefuck track here. Beginning with tribal drums and haunted house organs, we were preparing for a sort of majestic creeping doom, but instead, after about 2 minutes, the sound shifts dramatically, like someone switched channels, and the sound is suddenly a weird sort of calypso-like prog, angular guitars, super distorted, bursts of jagged cymbal crash, harsh hellish vokills, looped and loopy, all over a strange sort of shuffling groove, but that only lasts for a couple minutes as well, before the sound slips into a hushed barely there drone, before exploding into that calypso prog freakout once again. Eventually, the sound settles into a dark bit of psychedelic shimmer, all clean guitar, minor key melody, clean vocal croon, sounding almost like fifties doo wop, this too goes on for ages, until suddenly, the track explodes into a heaving blast of lurching distortion drenched doom, laced with weird jagged dynamic stop/starts, and then again, slips into that weird calypso like percussion for the last minute or so. Holy Finnish whatthefuck. So nuts, but so genius!
The last three songs are on the shorter side and are not nearly so twisted. The first is a sprawl of doomic dirgery, laced with chiming clean guitars, and underpinned by roiling basslines, and what sounds like hysterical female screams, the sound growing more and more Eastern sounding, and buzzy, as the track progresses, sounding like some droned out snake charmer jam by the end. The second is a seriously distorted drum and bass dirge that sounds a bit like Ride For Revenge, super murky and minimal, before shifting gears partway through into a sort of Hypothermia style post-black metal / post rock clean guitar and drums groove, which is soon joined by buzzing psychedelic guitar tendrils, ending with an abstract sprawl of dubbed out FX drenched bass buzz. Finally, the third, and last track of the closing three, erupts in a billow of amp buzz and rumbling distortion, out of which emerges a dreamy tangle of guitar melodies, laid back and woozy, the final track playing out more like an outro, nothing too weird or tripped out, just a darkly psychedelic coda, surprisingly lovely considering the tweaked and twisted nature of the rest of the record.
Another blast of confusional brilliance from this Finnish master of baffling psychedelic heaviness and outsider minimal doom confusion. Recommended to all Finnish music freaks for sure, but also anyone into confounding heavy outsider weirdness, which we're guessing is a whole lot of you.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ora's rotating core of musicians has at times featured AQ favorites Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough, but here Ora's ringleader Darren Tate has employed Colin Potter's aeolian strings and the extensive field recordings of Michael Northam to marvelous results. The rich details of cold soil crackle, damp rocks dripping water, and wind rustling though decaying leaves situate within a thick tonal droning haziness. In spite of Coleclough's and Chalk's absence this is a remarkable album that matches its beautiful packaging (two pieces of clear vinyl obscuring close up photographs of a marsh).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate formed Ora well over a decade ago and have released numerous self-released cassettes and limited cd-r editions of their mysterious ambience and delicate textures. In working with such prolific collaborators as Jonathan Coleclough, Lol Coxhill, Colin Potter, Daisuke Suzuki, and Michael Northam, Ora has masterfully collected a wunderkammer of drones. Each of Ora's mesmerisms possess an elegant antiquity that eeriely display a sense of history but have little context as to an origin or insight into the placement of one sound to another. Just as a 17th Century historical aesthetician would arrange heliotropes, alchemical machines, hermetic documents, and taxidemy specimens in a manner that emphasized the beauty of the object, Ora intuitively develops their slow building drones out of aqueous field recordings, undefined magnetic fluctuations, aeolian strings, and Chalk's resonant bells, gongs, and metal.
"Aureum" is a double LP collection of the rarities found on their self-released cassettes / cd-rs and showcases the three distinct facets of the Ora, which parallel the distinct personalities which went into the project, specifically Chalk, Tate, and studio wizard Colin Potter (whose ICR studio was the recording site for all of the Ora sessions). Tate's aesthetic favors the textures, especially crackly field recordings. Chalk prefers the extended metallic tone float of various resonnating objects, and Potter tends to blur everything into a sweeping haze. Absolutely beautiful.
Many moons ago, Darren Tate and Andrew Chalk found their way to Colin Potter's IC Studios, where the three initiated the humble yet eccentric drone project Ora, with occasional help from the likes of Jonathan Coleclough, Daisuke Suzuki, MNortham, and Lol
With Darren continuing on as Monos, Andrew working in Mirror, and Colin busy engineering / collaborating with Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Monos, and dozens of other projects, Ora has ceased to be, and "Final" is probably the last Ora document to be released. Culled mostly from the CD-Rs "Live," "Distances," and "New Movements In G," this anthology does also include a couple of unreleased tracks. As the more recent Monos and Mirror recordings reflect, Ora's specialty has been the construction of the opiated drone that implores a sort-of calmness but at the same time actively confronts the listener with its sound rather than floating to the back as aural wallpaper. Built from field recordings, bowed metals, and various electronics, Ora situates their drones within a wide spectrum of textures -- ranging from the sporadic use of angular blurts from Lol Coxhill's sax and accompanying dense scrapes like a huge boulder getting pushed across a concrete floor, to tiny fluctuations from flutes and sitars. "Final" stands as yet another exceptional record from this small aesthetic circle of UK drone artists.
Morgendammerung is another posthumous release form the drone ensemble Ora, which consisted of Darren Tate, Colin Potter, and Andrew Chalk with occasional contributions from Lol Coxhill, Jonathan Coleclough, mnortham, and Daisuke Suzuki. Both of the extended tracks from Morgendammerung originate from the long out of print cd-r New Movements In G, originally released on Darren Tate's own Gnome Records back in 1998. Vapor trails of cold watery field recordings nestle into the hushed sounds of Ora's enigmatic rituals of quiet gong and bell interplay. While Coxhill supposedly contributed some sax work on one of the two tracks, it's impossible to tell as Ora's trio of producers superbly abstracted all of the sounds into these monoliths of quivering drones. It should be noted that neither of these tracks had been reissued on the two Ora retrospectives Final and After The Rainfall. Limited to 400 copies.
The inscription for Ora's "Rosea" states that this music is "full of Elves and Gnomes" and those of you familiar with the little things in life that we here at Aquarius love, you know that gnomes and elves fit right in (last list's "Ancient Forest of Elves" anyone?). Although the notes on the back, provided by the ususally tight lipped recluses Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough, share none of the valuable insight into the music of gnome and elves that the inscription implied. Anyway, Ora is the textural drone collective that features Darren Tate, Lol Coxhill, Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound), as well as the aforementioned Chalk & Coleclough. This 94-95 record's loosely structured field recordings of geese and what Byram thinks sounds like someone rolling around on a couch with contact mics taped to their latex t-shirt coalesce into signature patterns of sound that fade in and out of delicate drones. Texturally, Ora has always been quite adventurous, and "Rosea" is no exception. Limited to 500 copies.
Previously a quadruple lp, now on double cd in a deluxe oversized package!!
Perhaps the only bright side to the passing of one of the most ambitious but relatively unsung figures in early electronic music, is that the archives of hundreds of reels of unreleased recordings of sound experiments, tape compositions, field recordings, cinematic sound effects and�Musique Concrete are just starting to be released to a wider audience. Young Americans did a stellar job with the first Daphne Oram vinyl overview, Oramics, which was a retrospective of her long and varied career from her time as a wartime radio technician to becoming an electronic instrument pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Now that her invention, The "Oramics" machine (the first electronic musical instrument designed and built by a woman), has gone on display at the Science Museum in London, Daphne Oram's legacy is finally moving into its rightful place. This deluxe compilation is the first in a planned series of releases that dig deep into Oram's vast recording archive. Painstakingly compiled and restored from over 400 tapes and mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, The Oram Tapes Volume One features 37 previously unheard recordings (a bit less than what was on the vinyl version). While most of the pieces are short, they show a darker and more layered compositional style than what one may be used to from the bigger names of The Radiophonic Workshop. While the typical Workshop compositional bloops and bleeps were often steeped in a science fiction futurity, Oram was more often concerned with the mystery and science of sound composition, and the place where the sounds of machines and nature overlapped. That is probably why her effects reel for the film 2001 sounds more like haunted insects and cathedral-like atmospherics rather than say, robotic whirrs and laser-like phasing. There is a thoughtful and cerebral consideration in her compositions that allows us to imagine and nearly inhabit the world she is building in sound. Quite stunning!
Wow, What a nice and welcome surprise for early electronic music fans! This 2cd anthology is the first re-issued work from one of the most important and unsung heroes of electronic music, Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop. Beginning her career in the forties with the BBC as a "music balancer" (an arduous task of syncing recorded taped music with a live performance feed so that broadcasts would remain uninterrupted in case of war-time blackouts), Oram spent most of her nights fascinated with synthetic sounds and experimenting with oscillators and tape machines, as well as composing unperformed orchestral works and sound pieces for film and play commissions. Promoted to music studio manager, she campaigned for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities for composing music and sound effects using electronic music and musique concrete techniques for use in its programming which led to the founding of the Radiophonic workshop in early 1958. However, her desires to compose music and further her studies and development of synthetic music theory, caused her to leave the BBC a year later. Working off two grants from the Gulbenkian foundation in the 1960's, and supplementing her income through advertising work, she developed her most unique contribution, the Oramics composition machine and the drawn sound technique, an elaborate mechanism that allowed her to create pure sound through the transcription of drawn lines. For being the first woman to direct an electronic music studio as well as the first woman to design and construct an electronic music instrument, her legacy remains largely unnoticed in this male-dominated field. She lectured extensively and wrote one of the most philosophical books on electronic music, called An Individual Note of Music, continuing her developments with early Apple computers until a series of two strokes forced her to retire. She died in 2003. Culled from an extensive archive of compositional pieces, film and play commissions, early sound experiments with the Oramics machine, and advertising jingles, this anthology covers material from the late fifties to the early seventies. Fans of Delia Derbyshire, Raymond Scott and early electronic music enthusiasts of all sorts will find lots to love here. Highly Recommended!!!!
Perhaps the only bright side to the passing of one of the most ambitious but relatively unsung figures in early electronic music, is that the archives of hundreds of reels of unreleased recordings of sound experiments, tape compositions, field recordings, cinematic sound effects and�Musique Concrete are just starting to be released to a wider audience. Young Americans did a stellar job with the first Daphne Oram vinyl overview, Oramics, which was a retrospective of her long and varied career from her time as a wartime radio technician to becoming an electronic instrument pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Now that her invention, The "Oramics" machine (the first electronic musical instrument designed and built by a woman), has gone on display at the Science Museum in London, Daphne Oram's legacy is finally moving into its rightful place. This deluxe 4lp compilation is the first in a planned series of releases that dig deep into Oram's vast recording archive. Painstakingly compiled and restored from over 400 tapes and mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, The Oram Tapes Volume One features 46 previously unheard recordings cut at 45 rpm for deeper sound quality. While most of the pieces are short, they show a darker and more layered compositional style than what one may be used to from the bigger names of The Radiophonic Workshop. While the typical Workshop compositional bloops and bleeps were often steeped in a science fiction futurity, Oram was more often concerned with the mystery and science of sound composition, and the place where the sounds of machines and nature overlapped. That is probably why her effects reel for the film 2001 sounds more like haunted insects and cathedral-like atmospherics rather than say, robotic whirrs and laser-like phasing. There is a thoughtful and cerebral consideration in her compositions that allows us to imagine and nearly inhabit the world she is building in sound. Quite stunning!
In a word, wow. That's how our review of the debut, 2012 Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere release wrapped up, after several gushing paragraphs. Let's cut to the chase and simply open this review the same way; in a word, wow!
This 2nd Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere double cd set is their 2nd Aquarius Record Of The Week, and that was an easy decision to make. Nobody else out there sounds like this, 'cause nobody else out there thinks this BIG, and combines all these elements so perfectly - experimental electronics, improv jazz, avant-classical choral music, chamber rock, modern minimalism, pulsating krautrock beats, progressive symphonics, ambient drone, and much more� Possibly you could liken the OUA to a 'big band' version of Norway's Supersilent, just possibly, to get started. Aptly named, this Orchestra is a large scale project, and it's no wonder, so far, that they always make fully-packed double disc sets.
Led by Martin Archer (who appeared on another recent aQ list with the latest from the avant-industrial Combat Astronomy project, of which he is part) and Chris Bywater, the UK's Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere is indeed a large ensemble, the multi-instrumental Archer/Bywater duo (organ, electronics, electric piano, saxophones, clarinet, synthesizers, samples, percussion, voice, electric violin, etc., etc.) joined by a half dozen additional musicians bringing in everything from electric bass to flutes to glockenspiel, that core unit then further augmented by the participation of various satellite groups with which there is some overlap of personnel: the 20-person Juxtavoices chorus, the La Garotte String Quartet, and The Divine Winds.
While the first OUA album took several years to complete, this one came together in a shorter span of time, constructed from edits of live improvisations, and is no less impressive for that. It's mysterious and moody, as well as active and dramatic - when the Juxtavoices get involved, look out!
The first disc begins with "Dominant Growth Direction" - a powerful intro that zooms and whooshes with such physical heft, heck it should be used for the Dolby THX they play in the movie theater before the movie starts. That's followed by the beautiful, haunting grooves of "Paratacamite"; more atmospheric even is the next track, "Bilateral Coordination Activities Are Calming", featuring field recordings (birds, water) woven in among the drones and woodwinds and percussive sounds. Next, "Modus" is a glitchy avant-funk fusion jam, like some sort of electric Miles meets This Heat hybrid, with a definite David Shire "Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3" suspense soundtrack vibe as well. Want some even more out there 'band math' from this review? Skip ahead to disc one's blissfully grooving 14+ minute finale, which we're thinkin' sounds like a spaced out Oren Ambarchi/Augustus Pablo collaboration!!
Ok, but we can't go on describing this track by track, even briefly. That's not even all of the first disc we've covered. You want to read an even lengthier OUA review, look at our last one (and we do have a few of those sets back in stock, by the way). There's a lot here, and all of it is awesome, you get the idea.
And the thing is, for as vast and sprawling as these discs (and each track on 'em) are, there are no missteps. It's tight like that. So tastefully, cleverly crafted. It's compelling, intriguing, and evocative; ambitious but never over indulgent, never taking any wrong turns. Always on point. Or at least, that's what we think, what can we say, this just brings together a lot of sounds we like, we're hearing echoes of everything from Circle to Alice Coltrane, from Supersilent to Lumerians, from 3 Leafs to Terry Riley (just to drop a few names) and does it so dang well, and uniquely. Can we say wow, again?!
As soon as we heard this the massive and mesmeric sounds found here on the debut from the Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere, we knew it was Record Of The Week material! And while it's the record of our week (and many weeks to come, we imagine), it was three years in the making, a grandiose accomplishment involving the efforts of around 40 musicians and singers.
The British new music ensemble responsible for this sprawling double cd has an appropriately evocative name, they are in the business of generating clouds of sound from on high, and they are indeed a sort of Orchestra, certainly a lot of musicians on a lot of intruments making a BIG sound, the actual core group of the UOA itself comprising only five folks, but they're augmented by a string quartet (the La Garotte String Quartet), a woodwinds ensemble (The Divine Winds), and a 25 person avant-garde choral group (Juxtavoices).
Together, the UOA and friends create a hybrid akin to 20th century classical chamber music meets propulsive krautrock meets '70s cosmic jazz (some parts, like the ten minute track "Coherent Backscattering" that closes the first disc, remind us of the wonderful Alice Coltrane With Strings album World Galaxy, complete with what sounds like varispeed tape manipulation)� But it's probably most heavily influenced by the work of modern minimalist master Terry Riley in particular - imagine portions of the Riley/Cale album Church Of Anthrax heavied up by a psychedelic stage band, with tons of synth and electronics amidst the strings and horns and percussive skitter. Other comparisons we could cite include the Swedish sixties psych groups Parson Sound/International Harvester (also big Riley fans), some large prog jazz rock ensembles of the '70s, like Keith Tippett's Canterbury based Centipede, and krautrockers Out Of Focus (circa Four Letter Monday Afternoon), as well as various underground free drone ensembles of more recent vintage.
The two part, twenty-plus-minute "Seen From Above" early in the first disc is really worth the price of admission alone, a tour de force that sums up the glories of the OUA without revealing quite all the secrets that you'll encounter elsewhere on these two densely-packed discs (77+ minutes disc 1, 76+ minutes disc 2, no wasted space in other words, you get your money's worth!). The piece is full of droning deep rumbles that resolve into strong bass pulsations, graced with gorgeous organ tones, and dramatic drum rolls and cymbal crashes.
But the next track, the 10 minute plus "The Opposition Effect" is equally impressive, getting even heavier with the krautROCK elements, and brings the Juxtavoices to bear as well, with some intense vocal chant that reminds us of the aforementioned International Harvester.
And so it goes, and goes, the UOA at times bombastic and heavy, at others more hauntingly subtle and murmuring, with squeaks and mumbles, like an orchestra tuning up, in a murky sonic miasma. Much of this is stirring & cinematic, with parts that remind us of Godspeed! You Black Emperor and experimental Norwegian "death-jazzers" Supersilent too. The latter especially on disc two, which opens in an even, ah, moodier mood, the sound ever more abstract and ambient on "An Open Vista Is Revealed", followed by "He Died Before I Could Get My Revenge", which begins with shimmering jittering electronics and stumbling drums. Towards the end of that track, the Juxtavoices ensemble is employed to provide a bed of buried, layered and effected vocal snippets on the subject of the track's disturbing title (giving both a "hearing creepy voices in your head" and "overheard noisy cocktail party conversation" vibe at once). On both discs, the Juxtavoices talents are used judiciously in ways that really put this over the top in the sheer weirdness dep't., really letting it all out in feral, primal form amidst the murk of disc two's closer "Their Dark Presence Stretches Through The Void".
Oh, and eventually of course the krauty drum propulsion kicks in on this disc as well.
Essentially, the UOA take krautrock derived, pounding rhythmic hypnosis a la Circle, and combines it with the symphonic majesty of something like another recent aQ Record Of The Week, the reissue of William Sheller's glorious Lux Aeterna, if you can imagine that, or (if you've ever heard it) Richard Youngs' pseudo prog-rock Ilk project taken to Magma-like orchestral extremes.
At the core of the UOA, is English composer/improviser Martin Archer, also a member of The Divine Winds, and organizer of Juxtavoices. He's a quite prolific musician, who runs the Discus label that put this out, and we should really review more of his releases in future. Previously, Archer's name HAS appeared on the aQ list as a key member of crushing industrial doom/free jazz prog outfit Combat Astronomy, much loved by us; he's also the fellow responsible for the Saint Agnes Fountain album from about ten years ago, a clever hoax that purported to be an early '70s recording from a fictional female Japanese minimalist composer named Masayo Asahara (and if you liked that Martin Archer alter-ego as much as we did, you'll totally dig the UOA, they seem to share a lot of the same sonic inspirations).
Martin, we're impressed. And this couldn't be more up our alley, as you can perhaps judge by the artists we've attempted to compare this to. In a word, wow.
With almost each release now, Richard H. Kirk offers us a new pseudonym, although he's still best known for his collaboration with Stephen Mallinder in the legendary industrial / electronica outfit Cabaret Voltaire. Purportedly rediscovering classical music and
Finally available on cd, the previously vinyl-only debut lp from former Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt. And as we mentioned in our review of the lp, don't be expecting a blown out noise record, instead, this is solo guitar, Orcutt's take on Fahey, although his take is decidedly more twisted and chaotic and idiosyncratic and NOISY. The cd version features a bunch of bonus tracks not on the original vinyl (but more on those later)...
When we first got the lp in, we couldn't keep it in stock, we kept having to postpone reviewing it in fact, 'cause every time a new list Friday would roll around, we'd discover that we had sold out again and would have to wait for Orcutt to drop off more records, when the same thing would happen again. We finally got enough to list and review and they blew out of here, and again, we'd sell 'em as fast as we could get 'em in, until finally there were no more to be had.
Thankfully the cd version is less limited and should ne a wee bit more available. But now you're probably asking yourself, what's so great about this, why have they been flying out of here? Maybe it's 'cause this was picked by the editors of The Wire as number 3 in their top 50 albums of 2009. Or maybe 'cause so many AQ customers have an unhealthy obsession with the seminal underground '90s no wavey noise rock outfit that Orcutt used to abuse his guitar in, the notorious Harry Pussy. But this is pretty far from the skronk and spazz of HP. Well, it's still noisy in its way, but what Orcutt is playing here on this solo guitar album is "the blues". In an "American (very) Primitive" style. That's right, it's kinda the Harry Pussy version of John Fahey or something. Totally tangled, out there improvs from a guy who's really really feeling it, you can tell.
His steel string acoustic guitar is only strung with four strings (missing the two in the middle, apparently, who needs 'em) and it's recorded up close and personal, played in a choppily percussive, and definitely emotive way. Appalachian angst that's sometimes stark, the background hum or tape hiss somehow somber, but mostly crowded with energetic bluesy bursts of notes spilling all over themselves, punctuated by occasional yelps and hollers as the spirit moves him. Imagine an agitated, ADD old timey outsider artist on Mississippi, also part Tetuzi Akiyama, part Jandek...
Sure, there's some folks who might bring out the hoary old argument that "I could play like that too". But they didn't, and Orcutt did, and we're digging it! Definitely for fans of avant electric guitar freakouts - even though this is all-acoustic!
The cd version tacks on six bonus tracks, two from a 7" single we never even saw (or heard) and 4 unreleased tracks exclusive to this release, and if anything, the extra tracks are alternatingly more melodic and pretty, more intense and frenzied, but they all sound cut from the same fucked up, outsider psychedelic guitar freakout cloth. So awesome!
