There doesn't seem to be any useful information about The Oval Language to be found. What we can say is that this German duo has been making a peculiar brand of dada noise and aktionist concrete since the '80s and they have a really shitty website which indicates that they occasionally play some German noise festivals. But nothing is at all indicative of how fucked up The Oval Language is. Much of this would have fit alongside any number of thoroughly damaged cassette compilations circa 1987 on Broken Flag or Bain Total alongside Controlled Bleeding, Etant Donnes, Le Syndicat, and Merzbow. Their din is distinctly lo-fi with swarms of accumulated tape noise and overdriven distortion running throughout the recordings. The first 8 tracks on this disc were rescued from old tapes, which may or may not have been released back in the day (like we said, there's no information about this project anywhere), with the first tracks taking after Neubauten in thrashing some unfortunate pieces of metal and wood in a big warehouse. Then comes a rather sickening piece of garbled microphone digestion that may or may not have been influenced by the likes of Otto Muhler or Sudden Infant with gross-out lurches and heaves of ipecac-induced vocalizations amidst tape machinations of metal on metal squalor. Full-throttle noise explosions come afterwards, all shrouded in the obliterated tape-deck miasma that was a signature of many industrial-noise musicians from the '80s. Very well done we might add!
The last 8 tracks are remixes by the underground German noise musician Guido Hubner (aka Das Synthetische Mishgewebe), and while of the wooden plonks and metallic crashes seem similar to those on The Oval Languages original recordings, there's no information as to whether these remixes are from those tracks or from other tapes that were so murky and fucked up that they needed somebody to completely rework the material. As such Hubner does a commendable job in keeping to the spirit of those earlier tracks, with lots of tapedeck start and stop jitteriness and mumbling bumps in the night. The main difference Hubner adds to these noises is found in his abrasive use of crashing loop techniques. Even though Monochrome Vision did include some liner notes in Russian and English about the group, little of it is of interest and none of it offers context as to where The Oval Language operated or why they did what they did. It's a mystery... granted a very fucked-up and noisy mystery. Limited stock.
MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!! MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!! MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT!!
The above is of course for the benefit of the legions of Mississippi obsessives, that seems to be growing with each and every release. Fans who will buy anything and everything Mississippi, whether it's blues, or gospel, or world music, whether it's African or Greek, classic New Zealand pop, or legendary underground Portland Punk. Which is totally understandable, the guys at Mississippi have great taste, and besides their incredible compilations, and unearthed rarities, they also have a knack for picking out old records that folks have been DYING to get on vinyl. But even if you're not a Mississippi obsessive, this here is well worth checking out. And may be just the disc to convert you to the cult of Mississippi...
Here we have a kick ass gospel record from 1963, originally reissued on Arhoolie, now available on Mississippi, ON VINYL. And while we're not super well versed in gospel music, we do dig what we've heard, but very little of what we've heard sounds like the Rev. Louis Overstreet. It's festive and inspirational, but at the same time it's super rocking. Most of the tracks collected here are relentless garage gospel grooves, the guitar and drums locked into killer jams, the guitar occasionally pealing off some wild licks, but for the most part offering up a jangly twangy strum, the congregation clapping in time, and hooting and hollering. The testifying is minimal, and when there are vocals, they are alternately crooned and howled, The Rev.'s voice is gritty and soulful, but even when he's singing, it's the groove, irresistible and unstoppable and most certainly inspired. It does slow down here and there, and gets all super bluesy and soulful, but for the most part, An Evening With is some seriously rollicking and rocking praise-the-Lord good time gospel rhythm and blues!
Probably would have been a lot easier to get us to go to church when we were younger if it sounded like this!
Italian duo OvO is a band that we think a select crowd of AQ-customers will totally appreciate. But...don't look at that awful cover. Oooh, what were they thinking? Well the (sorta) little-girl voice of OvO's singer Stefania does perhaps explain the little-girl drawing on the cover (which she drew). As does the Load label's often willfully 'ugly' aesthetic. But where that illustration is sort of twee, cringe-inducing cutesiness, Stefania's voice is far from cutesy! It's a rabid, wretched little girl we're talking about. Her yelping shriek has been compared to both a squeaky toy and a wheezing dog dying by folks here at AQ. Basically, if you hate the extended high-pitched babble of Yoko Ono, stay away! Nerve-grating for sure. We don't know how she does it. Must need a lot of lozenges.
Meanwhile, OvO's music ranges from chaotic punk frenzy to plodding, art-rock dirge. In addition to the unusual, extreme vocals, OvO also uses/abuses cello, for extra droning ambience. They're hard to compare to anybody, but we'll throw out these names: the aforementioned Yoko Ono, Load labelmates Noxagt, Double Nelson, Oxbow, and Khanate. Or maybe a twisted, primitive, Japanoise version of Devil Doll ('cause they're Italian and sorta theatrical sounding). Definitely not always (ever?) easy listening, but strangely fascinating. For us, it's the endurance-testing 20 minute title track that makes this a keeper. A torturous trudge with throaty rasping and heavy doomy death-knell drums and guitar. Oppressive. Depressive. Feedback hell gargle. Very much in the vein of Corrupted and Khanate. But with witchy Yoko vox! Like we said, the select few will love it.
New on Drone Records! Ovro is a Finnish woman who has recorded a handful of dark, dark, dark electronic albums for the steel-eyed Some Place Else label. Her contribution to the Drone series curated by Stefan Knappe of Troum, features two tracks of underwater percolations and bubblings, not all of that far removed from the geothermal vent recordings that Jakob Kirkegaard presented through Touch a while back. On top of these thick, churning, low-end rumbles, Ovro musters an unsettled chorus of scraped guitars and found object manipulation that pushes what otherwise could have been a clinical investigation into geologic sound towards the sound esoterica of Cranioclast, Coil, and irr. app. (ext.). As with all Drone singles, this is limited to 300 copies; and for this edition, Ovro has hand mounted photo negatives to the covers.
We loved the most recent record on Paradigms from these Boston psychedelic drifters, a haunting collection of abstract dronefolk and electronic flecked ambient drift. But for whatever reason, we never got enough copies to list, which is a shame, cuz it's definitely something aQ dronefans would dig. But hopefully, we'll make up for it a bit with this new one, a single track lp called Destroyers Of The Moon, which is a gloriously epic landscape of cinematic swirls, of dusky twang, of thick analog synth thrum, sweeping strings, subtly psychedelic effects, super dark and brooding, haunting and cinematic, the music is a lush layered sprawl of long tones, of disembodied chamber music, and of ominous dronefolk doominess. The vocals are a raspy whisper, giving the movements with vocals the feel of one of the Neurosis acoustic side projects, but when the vocals fade, the sound blossoms into something more abstract, draping smoldering folky twang over heaving rumbles and swells, the vibe is a little bit Barn Owl, a little bit later Earth, some slow build Godspeed going on too, especially with the strings, and while it's not a single album long track proper, it is essentially a linked set of songs, an epic songsuite of spectral, minimalist doom folk chamber psych dreaminess.
But it's not all hushed and dreamlike, thick swaths of fuzz guitar roll in, adding some shadowy heft, and transforming the sound into something a bit more droned out and almost metallic, but never fully loosing itself from the swirling psychedelic spaciness and creeping downer folk that is the core of Owlfood's sound. There's one stretch of soft, rumbling noise, droned out and mesmerizing, that gradually coalesces into some clanging jangly chords, bursting into some noisy effects heavy strum, the vocals follow suit, even more heavily effected, it's super dramatic and tripped out, and might just be the best part of the record, tense and intense, super tripped out, but still anchored by those Morricone-esque guitar melodies, building to a seriously freaked out sonic squall, one we almost wish could have been sustained for the rest of the record, but instead, the song shifts back into doomfolk mode, and the rest of the record, drifts darkly, from strummed, sinister mesmer, to string flecked folk-drone shimmer, finishing with a bit of swirling string psychedelia.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!! Includes a digital download as well!
We first discovered mysterious multiple w'd dronedrift outfit Owwl via a cd-r that showed up one day in the mail, and we were pretty much totally smitten on first listen. This German duo specializes in that sort of ultra minimal dronemusic we can't ever get enough of, blackened sprawls of obsidian thrum and softly pulsating rumbles, long tones spread way out and layered into lush landscapes of dark overtones and perceived rhythms. The thing that really made Owwl stand out was that they augmented their drones with a 19th century reed organ, giving the sound a haunting organic feel, and transforming it into something much more emotional and evocative than most the guitardrone records we hear.
So it makes perfect sense that they would end up on Utech, who seem to specialize in the sort of blackened minimalism and psychdrone mesmer that Owwl traffic in, and it is indeed a perfect match. This latest missive from Owwl is even darker and denser than the cd-r, the sounds impossibly lush, at times reminding us of some Phill Niblock piece slowed down to a crawl, but with the same sort of overtones, the sound deceivingly static, but alive with all manner of sonic subtleties. But it's not all pure dronemusic, the band do explore a more psychedelic sound, creating shimmery ragas, the harmonium unfurling a gorgeously warm thrum, that the group stretch waaaaay out, wreathing it in guitar buzz and pulsating swells of crumbling distortion, or wrapping it in sheets of muted feedback. The sound veers into an almost industrial black ambience, abject and corrosive, but still washed out and dreamlike, before settling into a long stretch of whirring chordal shimmer, a dense softnoise cloud that seems to ooze and expand, the sound growing more and more lush, the blackness revealing colors hidden within, a smoldering soundworld of blunted tones, blurred chords, and beautiful black drift.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Housed in a super striking oversized sleeve.
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We've mentioned it before, but we do find it sort of strange, the device of doubling a letter in a band name (Mutiilation, Celestiial) or even adding s superfluous one (Wooden Shjips), and now we have Owwl, and granted, Owwl is a way cooler name that Owl. This German duo sent us their cd-r, and like many things, there it sat, for way too long, cuz when we finally did throw it on, we were pretty captivated. Guitardrone records are no new thing, but these guys definitely offer their own take, the instrumentation to begin with, guitar feedback and a 19th century reed organ, and that's it, improvised live in the studio, these three long tracks are lush and dark and haunting and hypnotic. The guitar and the organ both trafficking mostly in low tones so it's often difficult to tell which is which, deep rumbles, and layered whirs, keening almost melodies, the sound so thick at times it almost sounds orchestral, often building to epic crescendos, the sound threatening to crumble, the feedback just this side of howling, instead pulsing and undulating and adding a subtle, almost rhythmic component.
The tracks slip easily from high end thrum, to deep sonorous shimmer, the various bits of buzz and rumble, often turning caustic, the sounds becoming crunchy and crumbly, the distortion seeming to transform the notes and chords into strange decaying textures, sometimes splintering into near chaos, other times slipping into more meditative drifts. The final track is a series of dense swells, the layered tones pulsing and beating against each others, the various overtones creating strange overlapping rhythms, the sound seemingly alive, an active expanse of droneguitar on the verge of blossoming into pure psychedelia, especially when a cascading avalanche of high end tones rains down on the churning black rumble below.
LIMITED TO 70 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered. These are the last copies available. They come packaged in super swank hand made mini book-like sleeves, with an actual photo affixed to the front, while inside there's a nice printed vellum insert.
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For those of you unfamiliar with OX, a quick look at the cover should tell you all you need to know. The image on the front it a towering Orange amplifier, the back cover, a close up of some amplifier vacuum tubes. Two songs to a side, with titles like "Seismic", "Mass", "The Horror" and "Abyss". And hell, the record's called Aftermath. Plus, it's on Finnish label Kult Of Nihilow, who in the past have brought us records from Boris, , Dot [.], Church Of Misery, Fleshpress and Stumm. So if you guessed massive, pummeling, sloooooow, doooooom, dirge heaviness, you've definitely come to the right place.
We listed a 10" from OX years ago, and sadly we were only ever able to get about a dozen. We got a whole lot more this time, but these will probably still be gone before you know it. OX is the one man guitar doom project of Ken Baluke, who spends most of his time wielding his axe in Canadian doom groove outfit Sons Of Otis, but in OX, it's just him, and his guitar, and what sounds like lots and lots of really big amps. OX is definitely a practitioner of that sort of slow motion sludge guitar ambience, but definitely has his own unique angle. The core of OX's sound is a thick slithery Earth 2 style glacial riffing, a black liquid doom that sort of seeps out of your speakers, but above this dense low end is a gloriously fuzzed out effulgence, all glistening fuzz and radiant sparkle. Those two extremes all tangled up and constantly bleeding into one another. Haunting and heavy and so beautiful. Not sure whether it's supposed to play at 33 or 45, but sounds great either way. On 33 it's a sloooooooooooow crawl, at 45, it's still slow, but a little less murky and more luminous. Sort of like having two different, but equally heavy and kick ass records in one!
LIMITED TO 255 COPIES!! We got about 40 of those, and once they are gone we most likely won't be able to get more.
If someone had never heard San Francisco's Oxbow before, and knew nothing about them - or for that matter knew nothing about Sammy Davis Jr. either - we wonder what they'd make of that album title/cover art? Definitely wouldn't help 'em guess what sort of music lies within, some of the earliest and insanest stuff by an AQ fave band we lovingly call "fucked rock geniuses". If you are one of those innocent souls who have never heard Oxbow before, well, dive in here and see if you can take it. And needless to say, if you are already an Oxbow fan, of course you NEED this if you don't have it already, which you might not, since until now Oxbow's 1991 sophomore album King Of The Jews has never been available as a domestic compact disc release. It has been paired previously with their 1989 debut Fuckfest as an abridged single cd, and then later as a double, both imports long out of print, as are of course the original vinyl lps on Oxbow's own label CFY Records. And this new Hydra Head reissue is the most deluxe and definitive, packaged in a nice paste-on mini lp-style sleeve, and enhanced with four bonus tracks, three of 'em previously unreleased.
Back when we reviewed Hydra Head's similarly presented, equally essential reissue of Fuckfest in 2009, we said that when they did King Of The Jews, we'd probably just write more or less the same review, that is, saying that this record also displays all the elements of Oxbow we appreciate: primal swampy skree and atmospheric loud-soft dynamics, lumbering slide guitar sickness and singer Eugene's regression therapy vocal histrionics... it's part Scratch Acid (or Jesus Lizard), part Butthole Surfers, part Birthday Party, part Cormac McCarthy novel, part primal psycho-sexual cabaret, part utterly alien WTF?!
This album's special guest star Lydia Lunch joins the madness on 2 of the cuts, "Daughter" and "Angel", utterly subsumed into the crazy, kecak-y, confusional handclap chaos of the former (what an album opener, damn!!), adding extra drama to the latter. Not that Oxbow needs much help in the drama department; Eugene's bedlamite mewlings and mutterings amidst the band's desolate atmospheres and sudden rock spasms are both bizarre and intense and go way beyond mere music-as-entertainment that's for sure.
Oxbow has been keeping rock weird for a long time now, and this is one of the most crucial documents in their entire discography. It'll clue you to the Oxbow formula of lots of tension, not so much release, though there's more of the latter here than on some other Oxbow outings... Highly, highly recommended!
Rock and roll as a raw nerve art form, that's the intense Oxbow aethetic... a band that dares you to listen, much less attend one of their shows. Avant garde yet drawn to swampy roots, Oxbow's approach is both intellectual and primal at the same time, these men channeling psychic and physical distress into their music, so much tension and release it's disturbing to behold... This brilliant and unique Bay Area outfit has been going strong against all odds for almost two decades now (!) and with each passing year seem to gain a wider audience, despite never ever being a part of any scene or trend. Not one that would help them, anyway. Except maybe now, that they've seemingly been accepted into the Neurosis/Isis axis of arty post-metal noisecore, releasing their last full-length An Evil Heat 4 or 5 years ago on the Neurot label and now (finally!) reappearing on Hydra Head with this cd+dvd package. Love That's Last isn't exactly the new Oxbow opus we've being waiting for, since it's not an all-new album but rather a collection, complete with commentary and lyrics in the booklet, of unreleased live cuts, improv tracks, compilation rarities, and a few "greatest hits" from their hard to find early albums. You'll certainly get a representative serving of their cathartic ugly/pretty rock action here, with all of Oxbow's characteristic Bonham beats, slide guitar skronk, droning ambience, and of course the distinctive mewling/screaming baby monster vocalizations of scary front man/fighting man Eugene Robinson. Highlights (and that's what all this is, really) range from their infamous "Insylum" duet with Marianne Faithful from 1996's Serenade In Red to the 1998 live recording "Glimmer Bird" to the prototypical expression of Oxbow anguish that is "Yoke" from their 1989 Fuckfest debut. Ten tracks in all... you too might be crying like a baby when it's over. Oxbow would be happy about that.
The DVD portion includes 5.1 mixes of a handful of Oxbow classics, plus filmmaker Christian Anthony's Oxbow documentary Music For Adults (previously available here at AQ when it was a dvd-r release) with outtakes too, AND a bunch of additional live footage of the band in Belgium and San Francisco. Here's what we said about Music For Adults before: "Now you can vicariously join Oxbow for their summer 2002 European tour. Even better than actually being there, you can enjoy their shows and tour hijinx without running any risk of Oxbow singer Eugene getting you in a headlock (and pulling down your pants, as happens to at least one unhappy Scotsman in this film). The live footage captures the Oxbow rock machine in all their twisted, bawling glory, while the 'behind-the-scenes' stuff will show you that they're actually all really nice guys!"
So, Oxbow fans NEED this. And it's obviously the first thing the prospective Oxbow fan needs to pick up as well. Hopefully that's just what's gonna happen. Recommended as always with all Oxbow product!
Two of our favorite WTF black metal oddities from the late nineties, available again thanks to the weirdos at Ormolycka, and listening to these records again all these years later, they still sound as ridiculous and confusional as they did back in the day. Not at all what we were expecting from a former member of At The Gates, but we're guessing this could very well have been the reason for his departure, cuz Oxiplegatz is some sort of post black metal, avant power metal, rock opera electronica? Sounds confusing, that's cuz it IS. 1998's Sidereal Journey, the group's last record, is all programmed drums, buzzing riffage, dramatic female vocals, equal parts weird anime soundtrack, Dodheimsgard B-side, and over the top power metal cheese, but all filtered through Oxiplegatz's cracked outsider metal lens, the resulting epic is just geniusly absurd, right down to the band name, which comes from a Donald Duck comic, this sci-fi metal opera is dizzying and epic, totally over the top flitting from spacey ambience, to churning grinding blackened metal crush, to fuzzy girl pop weirdness and back again, with most of the (super brief) tracks some tangled collision of all of the above. Metalheads will likely HATE, but if you like fucked up sonic ridiculousness, albeit expertly constructed, and brilliantly performed, this will definitely hit the spot. And if your taste in metal runs toward the silly and completely baffling, well, this is definitely for you.
Sidereal Journey is paired with 1996's Worlds And Worlds, which while still sci-fi, and epic, is much less demented, a furious blackened buzz drenched power metal, that swirls and soars, progged out and super dense, but still extremely METAL. It is however far from straight up black metal, fear not, there's plenty of synthy goofiness, those female vocals (supposedly his girlfriend, whose computer generated naked body is also featured on the cover) all over the place, bombastic dramatic male crooning too, faux strings, symphonic, orchestral, electronics, even what sounds like electronic accordion, crazy stuff for sure, and goddamn if it doesn't sound as cool and crazy all these years later.
Packaged in a double cassette case, full color J-cards, one tape bright green, the other lavender, and of course, super duper limited!
Third mysterious sonic missive from this Northwestern lo-fi synthscaper, and like the two tapes that came before, it's another wild and wooly mad scientist concoction of stuttery beats, creepy soundtracky synths, woozy loops, and all manner of warped effects. At first we dug this stuff just cuz it was kinda far out and fun, but with every record the sounds get better, the arrangements more fully fleshed out, and with Octagonal Wax, we're really beginning to wonder how this guys has remained such a secret. Just check out the opener, "50 Times Higher Than Any Normal Man", with its weird little blurts of synth squelch, woozy haunted house ambience, bloopy bleepy 8-bit video game melodies, all wrapped on a creepy cinematic Goblin-y gauze, playful but also infused with a strange sinister streak, which is precisely what makes this stuff so good. The last Oxykitten played out more like a summer party record, but this one is ominous and a little bit wintery, the opener a herald of strange dark times to come, leading directly into "Drowning Inside", which weds a thick buzzing synth to swoonsome melancholic strings, some weird wah wah melodies and a lumbering staticky beat. But it too has a strangely melancholy cast, with some almost choral like sounds that give this the vibe of some heartbreaking montage, and weirdly enough, sort of sounds like a WAY better produced Fastest.
From there on out, the sounds continues on in much the same fashion, definitely slipping into much more sun dappled sonic climes, but almost always drifting back toward something more woozy and moody, with a lot of the tracks touching on Carpenter / Goblin retro-synth soundtrack territory, making Oxykitten definitely ripe for discovery by fans of Umberto, Zombi, Majeure and all that stuff. That said, this is much definitely way more home brewed and DIY, which also in many ways makes it more appealing, strangely idiosyncratic, a dizzying melange of retro soundtracks, modern beatscaping, and outsider synth oddities. Another weirdo winner from Oxykitten!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Includes digital download coupon!
We've been raving about krautdronedrifters Expo 70 quite a bit around these parts, and you all have been equally smitten it seems. Their blissful spaced out meditations, looped guitars and thick washes of outerspace shimmer pushing all our krautrock and doomdrone buttons.
But imagine Expo 70 with a bit more muscle, more grit, more guitars, more synths, just... MORE. A bit darker, a bit heavier, more buzz and more layers, less blissy and more propulsive. Imagine almost if you can, a more metal Expo 70, and maybe you'd end up with something like Ozmadawn.
We highlighted a disc by an SF band called Horseflesh a short while ago, a killer slab of post industrial krautdrone, channeling the German masters, but also more recent floorcore like Wolf Eyes, Yellow Swans, Skaters, etc. Well, the man behind Horseflesh just so happens to be half of the duo known as Ozmadawn, and on Rise Of The Moth, he and his partner take up from where Horseflesh left off, jettisoning some of the washed out shimmer and industrial crunch for something much more thick and corrosive, blown out and druggy, dense throbbing pulsing blasts of buzzing snarling layered krautdrone nirvana. Falling somewhere between Popol Vuh and SUNNO))), Hawkwind and Vulture Club, gloriously trance inducing outerspace hypno-heaviness. Not to say there aren't blissed out moments, there definitely are, the band unfurls super dreamy synthscapes, that drift and pulse, that feel like they trail off into forever, but those tranquil stretches always eventually seem to build into something equally hypnotic but way more fierce, soon overtaken by coruscating blackdrone guitars, and all manner of thick buzz and oscillating whir, somehow retaining the same sense of mesmer, but within a much more dense and aggressive framework. Simultaneously thick and heavy, soft and space-y, murky and metallic, drone-y and dreamy.
Packaged in cool hand screenprinted digipaks, pressed on black cd-r's, with a screen printed cardstock insert, and each with a unique 'recycled' Ozmadawn sticker.
Latest release from Bay Area blissdronespacedrift duo Ozmadawn, this one a gorgeously and elaborately packaged double cassette of music for sleep, separated into two sections, "For Sleep Or Meditation" and "For Smoke And Spirits".
The first tape is designed as the title suggests, for meditation and sleep, and is indeed a dark, dolorous bit of drifting low end, slow motion rhythmic swells, shimmering drifts of soft buzz and delicately crumbling distortion, lots of space, distant hiss, a softly swirling bit of minimal ambience, but with a dash of grimnity, this is not totally blissful and dreamy, the sounds here are dark and haunting, the mood harrowing, the overall vibe cinematic, the soundtrack to late nights and lost caves, to grey clouds drifting in front of a blood red moon, the various bits of electronic glitch, sound like they could be field recordings, insects, small creatures exploring their nocturnal landscape, all quite beautiful, but simultaneously quite dark.
The flipside gets even more evocative, with a layer of hiss that makes the record sound like it's wreathed in a rainstorm, or at the very least a late afternoon shower, the rumbling and buzzing drifting way back behind a sheet of processed hiss, the whole thing a softly shimmering bit of deep blackened late night moodmusic. So nice.
The second tape, the one designated "For Smoke + Spirits" is indeed a much more stirring bit of soundscapery, right out of the gate, creepy and tense, long tones wrapped around repeated motifs, total scary soundtrack stuff, a slow build from haunting to downright freaked out, streaks of feedback, a low lumbering melody, but right up in front a bit of sustained chordal soft focus skree that will most definitely have your hairs standing on end. Still pretty and mesmerizing, but seriously and cinematically harrowing, eventually building to a full on swarm-of-insects frenzy, a buzzing, swirling, convulsing wall of sound, while underneath, the original creep and drift continues to hover, the mix of the two disparate elements creating something gorgeously noisy, and/or noisily gorgeous.
ULTRA limited, as in 50 copies, we got about a dozen, they come housed in those oversized plastic clamshell cases, the kind that usually contain language tapes or instructional cassettes, the sleeve is hand stamped, hand numbered, and assembled one at a time, featuring a cool reflective front cover, includes a printed insert, and again, will probably be gone in no time...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not to be confused with SF heavy noise rockers Pigs, this P.I.G.S. is a mystery, like much of the stuff we get from our pal Jason's Ormolycka label, obviously it's an acronym, that must stand for something. And here is where we usually might offer up all the possible things it stands for, but this time we're gonna skip that, mostly cuz we can't figure out one that accurately describes the grinding, crumbling, speaker shredding assault of these particular P.I.G.S. Think Merzbow, or Incapacitants, there's definitely some old school harsh noise / Japanoise worship going on here. No skree or shriek, this is not high end aural punishment, instead the sonic palette is more low end, rumbles and crunches, a roiling blackened swirl of caustic crush. In fact, it sounds a little like the tape player ate the tape, got all tangled up, and then instead of spitting it out, just got more and more tangled, and the machine got more and more angry, spewing forth a wild tangled of blacknoise. Definitely not easy listening, and only for noise nerds, so if you have a shelf full of old RRR releases and/or have paid to see a long haired Japanese guy yell into a change purse or play something that looked like a wooden plank with effects pedals nailed to it, then this will probably be right up your alley. And yeah, also pretty limited, as these Ormolycka things generally are...
Oh how we adore the Finnish label Fonal Records -- home to the likes of Kemialliset Ystavat, Islaja, Kiila and Es. And now, won't you please kindly welcome the newest addition to the Fonal roster, Paavoharju! We can say that that welcoming 'em is not such a difficult thing to do 'cause they sure do make some wonderful music! In fact, Cup (and Jim for that matter) has listened to it almost every day since its arrival. It's true!
Note: We don't want to deny anyone the pristine 'first listen' magic that we experienced. We can attest that it was a sheer delight packed with many surprises, and our fondness has only grown with each listen. So if you want your introductory spin to be 'pure', please be forewarned that this review contains what some might call spoilers... that means stop reading now!
In many ways Paavoharju can be likened to fellow enchanting Finnish artists Lau Nau and Fonal labelmates Islaja, but their finely detailed yet loosely strung music is considerably more melted and collaged and electronic. Listening to Yha Hamaraa is almost like eavesdropping on a dream... or having someone else's heartbreaking memories come back to hazily haunt you. Sounds, voices and melodies drift in and out of focus, occasionally overlapping and seeping into one another. Sometimes it seems like you're listening to a rickety old radio with the dial set between stations so that the sounds somehow magically fit together. Odd faintly familiar elements make their presence felt such as in the ninth song where the male vocal melody brought to mind a twisted folk (and of course very Finnish) version of "Stairway To Heaven". The swooping, trebly female vocals find their own special place between Indian film music singers and the Southeast Asian voices that surface on the similarly (un)structured Sublime Frequencies travelogue field recording compilations. And reference must be made to Bjork as well! Now after having read this far in our review, you might find the very first track with its swell of distorted static-y noise to be somewhat unexpected, disorienting even, but we encourage you to go with it (and with us). Allow the wash of sounds to transport you into Paavoharju's intoxicating world. Completely and utterly breathtaking.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We only have a dozen or so of these, and it's unclear whether we can get more of these, so we won't bother going into too much detail. A split release, from the Skaters' Pacific City label, this one featuring new aQ faves the Monopoly Child Star Searchers on one side, the new to us Pacific Rate Temple Band, who we will assume is another Skaters side project.
The MCSS are in fine form as always, creating a sound so fantastically alien, we're still unable to pinpoint how much of it is played, how much is sampled, what instruments are used. Regardless, it's a gorgeously tripped out tribal dronejam. With way more guitar (?) this time around keening and waiting over that distinctive Monopoly murky tribal rhythm. The sound sometimes hiccup when the tape jogs, but it only adds to the weirdness. Warbly and dizzying and another recording towards convincing us we just might dig MCSS more than the Skaters!
Pacific Rate Temple Band have a similarly hazy sound, but the percussion is more distant or buried, instead the focus is on long drawn out high end tones, a sort of upper register skree, layered notes, overlapping tones, all shifting and beating subtly against each other, very primal and tribal, sun dappled and shimmering. It almost sounds like a high end remix of the other side, or if it were possible, the two sides played simultaneously would probably sound amazing.
Either way, this is some gorgeous stuff, and is of course limited, and again we only have a dozen, so be warned...
Adam Pacione's blissed ambience has quietly enthralled us over many years now; and he continues his relationship with the exceptional Elevator Bath label, who has issued this wondrous album through an ongoing series of picture discs that previously included work by Rick Reed, our own Jim Haynes, and Dale Lloyd (reviewed elsewhere on this list). Pacione claims a bunch of sources for Dobranoc, including guitar, field recordings, analogue synth, Moog filters, and shortwave radio. He seems intent on extracting particular, harmonious colors from each of those materials and working them into a monochromatic blur of softened dronescaping and hushed ambience. The faintest of half-melodies work through Pacione's stately compositions; and it's easy to become lost in these extended moments on Dobranoc. Throughout, Pacione streams a series of delicate textures that could be snow coming through the radio, or it could be a light shower of rain that settles behind much of Pacione's sustained tonal flutterings. No matter the source, the slight abrasions of these sounds act as a ghostly counterpoint to the purity that Pacione gets out of his drones. The resulting wanderings through his radiant soundfields have much of the sense of mystery that Zoviet France managed on Shadow Thief Of The Sun or that emerged from the more minimal explorations of Stars Of The Lid. The picture disc features two blurred macro-lens images sporting oversaturated colors abstracted through the lens; and these are suitable visuals to accompany Pacione's ethereal work. Limited to 268 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
After a handful of amazing, and of course super limited cd-r's comes the debut real cd full length from Adam Pacione, a modern day practitioner of ambient alchemy, realized in the form of luxuriously understated dreamdrone music. Still limited (329 copies) of course, and still amazing, Pacione channels the spirit of Brian Eno, William Basinksi and other like minded explorers of musical inner space through lengthy drifts of super soft focus abstract sound. Each track is an impossibly spacious underwater world of murk and murmur, muted rumbles, smoothed out expanses of shimmering fuzz, gentle lilting smears of sound, all subtly looped into incredibly hypnotic barely shifting soundscapes.
Ultra minimal for sure, but so dense and layered that the songs and sounds seem to change shape and color with every listen. Smooth and darkly glistening, Pacione crafts a deep lush sound, while somehow managing to retain bits of lo-fi sonic grit that help add all sorts of unlikely texture and timbre to Pacione's otherwise ultra serene drift. A perfect dreamlike blend of dark glacial glide and warm glistening glimmer. Another absolutely essential disc of gorgeous late night drift.
Packaged in lovely screen printed, recycled paper jackets, with printed inner sleeves. And again LIMITED TO 329 COPIES!!! So not sure how long these will last.
Like fellow Texan mesmerists Stars Of The Lid, Adam Pacione's sounds are utterly timeless with only the barest gesture of movement to deliver a beautiful arc of sublime driftwork impressionism. Similarly, Pacione is quite the craftsman for these utterly beautiful surfaces of subtle sonic reflections and refractions, choosing to spend many years on a set of recordings instead of churning out the cd-rs. This ambient alchemist had issued a variation of With Wakened Eyes back in 2005, with the material dating back a few years earlier. We've not heard the earlier version (although some of the sources mutated into his impeccable Sisyphus CD), but this sounds damn good to us. The aforementioned Stars Of The Lid, William Basinski, and the best of Brian Eno's ambient compositions come to mind when trolling through the expansive wash of drift and drone of With Wakened Eyes. Pacione's blurred soundfield actively engages in softened vibration, aerosolized melodies, sunbleached drones, and sustained tones that glimmer with a blinding sunbeam shot through a dense thicket of leaves, making for a gorgeous, late night drone album. Limited edition of 100 copies.
Brand new full length of hushed minimal pastoral psychedelia from the duo of Spencer Grady and Steven Lewis, who also do time in aQ fave Rameses III, and like we mentioned in the review of the cd ep we listed a while back, the sound of Padang Food Tigers is like a more minimal version of the sound of their main group, the songs lush layered expanses of hushed folky drift, laced with field recordings, the sound of rainfall seems to run throughout, as if the listener was eavesdropping on some intimate back porch rainy day jam.
Most of the songs here feature just a couple instruments, usually guitar, banjo, lapsteel, piano, even harmonica, the song a gradual unfurling of some lazy woozy melody, the sound rich with room sound, a lush natural reverb, a dream like echo, the opener introduces the record with the sound of rain, over which a haunting piano plays a funereal lament, accompanied by banjo, the two playing out a skeletal harmony, often making it difficult to tell which is which, the perfect intro to such an introspective record.
Much of the record is like some sort of abstract, Appalachia, subtle strum, slippery slide, all spread way out, letting notes flutter and fade, spinning surprisingly lush streaks of warm whirring buzz, the tracks with banjo sound like slow motion bluegrass, other tracks introduce more natural sounds, rushing rivers, chirping crickets, and suddenly the jam seems to have moved creekside, the notes bouncing off the porch and joining the sounds of the woods and water, a few of the tracks build and become epic and emotional, like the soaring majesty of "Right Up Rosster", a lush swirl of strummed high end steel strings and warm piano chords, the sound almost liturgical, but so dreamy and divine.
And the record finishes with a bit of music box like melody, woven into some spare late night folk, all warm and lit by flickering firelight, a darkly dreamy finish to a darkly dreamy record. So nice.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, already sold out at the label!
The strangely named Padang Food Tigers, are actually an offshoot of blissed out pastoral dream drone folk outfit Rameses III, and it sounds like it.
A short three track ep of sun dappled folky drift, sounding like three movements of a single piece, all hazy and hushed and delicate and lovely, the simple strummed melodies drift above field recordings of wind and water, wrapped in lush gauzy swells of soft focus whir, laced with tinkling chimes and distant bells, a slowly unfurling landscape of abstract folk drone meditative mesmer, eventually the instruments fade, leaving just the chimes and the sound of the world outside. Only to have the simple strumming reemerge over a brief stretch of crackle and pop, the sounds presumably of a warm fire in the hearth, this time there's piano as well, a delicate counterpoint to the crystalline guitar, which drifts lazily into the final track, the piano more pronounced, this time everything underpinned by the thick liquid buzz of a bowed cello, the deep resonant rumble wrapping warmly around melancholy pointilist piano, a sonic rendering of a lazy summer afternoon, the trees waving in the breeze, a stream burbling nearby, a glimmering world of tranquil bliss and washed out dreamlike folk drone ambience. So lovely. Sad it's so short.
Packaged in a stamped cardstock sleeve, LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Another back room discovery, a little stash of these until-now-unreviewed discs, 2008's Pause For The Jet, from aQ fave Daniel Padden, whose solo records we ended up digging way more than his day job in Volcano The Bear. Not to slag VtB, but Padden on his own, manages to create gorgeously head spinning, fractured and fantastical worlds of sound, schizophrenic and chaotic for sure, leaping willynilly from all out noise assault to lilting folk, from murky drone to twangy ethereal drift, which in other hands could definitely be jarring and disorienting, and, well... hell, it still is in Padden's hands, but there's just something about the way he strings all those disparate sounds together that works. Although works in a way that will most likely not be obvious to the casual listener, but by now, anyone into weird homebrewed sounds, will no doubt find much to dig here (and anyone whole loved Padden's other discs, you're probably gonna want this too!).
Pause For The Jet seems to tend toward the drone and the drift, sort of, 17 songs most of them pretty short, some as short as 30 seconds, the longest almost 5 minutes, but the rest hovering between 1 and 3 minutes, which might frustrate some, looking for long, slowly unfurling dronescapes, but taken as brief bits of droning sound and twisted melodic weirdness, PFTJ is a pretty appealing listen. Stretches of ethereal shimmer, underpinned by plonking piano and low slung bass, slip into maddeningly fractured collages of varispeed tape manipulation, hazy blurred drift and disembodied pump organ, detuned twang flecked campfire folk gives way to hushed melancholic thrum, Tow Waits-ish back alley cabaret is peppered with Ribot like guitar buzz and still more tape weirdness, elsewhere strings keen and buzz and bombinate, Padden croons beautifully over skeletal melodies, dark swells of thumping upright bass pulse beneath Herrmann like strings and noisy percussion, the record lumbering back and forth between atonal skronk, and haunting avant lo-fi folk, psychedelic shimmer, and disembodied ghostlike creep.
Another one we have VERY few copies of, so act fast...
As much as we all dig Volcano The Bear, we've actually been loving VtB member Daniel Padden's One Ensemble project even more. While Volcano are more of a surreal dada-ist experimental sound outfit, for the One Ensemble, Padden takes those same Dadaist tendencies but tempers them a bit, wrapping them around pretty pop or lilting folk and creating some truly alien sounding prettiness.
But on this ultra limited lp, Padden takes his One Ensemble and wanders back into some serious Volcano The Bear territory. Demented music box melodies drift amidst soaring strings, clinking clanking percussion, deep moaning cellos, bursts of staticky field recordings and manipulated field recordings, while over the top float haunting mysterious melodies. Sounds a bit like a more druggy demented Tom Waits.
Elsewhere, thick washes of fuzzed out ambient whir wrap themselves around damaged pitch shifted guitar warble, junk yard percussion marches through thick clouds of ominous drones, detuned acoustic guitars shimmer beneath heavily reverbed scrapes and squeaks and wheezing harmonica melodies. A totally mesmerizing, dizzying and damaged trawl through some surreal junk yard filled with broken musical instruments and ghost musicians, jamming in the middle of the night to an audience of beat up stuffed animals and rusted out appliances. So cool!
Packaged in a super spiffy crayon colored owl, coloring book collage cover.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!! We got a bunch, but it's already sold out and out of print at the label so once these sell out we won't be able to get more.
As much as we dig UK musical experimentalists Volcano The Bear and their disjointed sonic surrealism, VtB member Daniel Padden has always managed to take that sound of theirs even further, somewhere else entirely, to a place where his juxtapositions coalesce into a dark and highly personal, mostly instrumental melancholia. Meandering and thoughtful, like a twilight walk through a musical forest, just wandering, laying down on the ground when the mood strikes you, gazing at patches of sky through the dense canopy of leaves, feeling the wet earth soak through your clothes, shivering as small insects crawl all over you tickling your skin, squinting as you're blinded by a brilliant shaft of sunlight that breaks through the trees, then melts into the forest floor beneath while you're sprinkled with a fine mist as the wind looses the condensation from the branches. This not-so-precise effect is achieved with reverby pianos in vast expanses of space, slippery slide guitar, plinkety plonk keyboards, soaring minor key strings, Appalachian guitar picking over squirming beds of bombinating drones. Padden's dense buzzing ragas are all dreamy and melancholy and super intimate and personal sounding, but somehow at the same time are grandiose and epic, with occasional waltz-like marches, like chamber music for some outer space / otherworldly king and his court. Occasionally delicate and haunting, occasionally rambunctious and a little chaotic. But always totally beautiful and mesmerising and truly mysterious. Think somewhere between Eyvind Kang, the Sun City Girls, Kronos Quartet, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and Jack Rose. All that and more is filtered through Padden's slightly skewed musical mind's eye.
The Danish composer Else Marie Pade's compositions of scintillating electronic minimalism and sprawled musique concrete were born nearly sixty years ago, but it wasn't until 2000 or so, when she reached the age of 74 that any of her work was actually published. Her history is an intriguing one, as she was an active participant in the Danish resistance during WWII, was arrested for her acts of sedition, and began composing in her head during her imprisonment. After the war and upon her early career as a radio producer, she discovered Pierre Schaeffer's ideas for musique concrete; and in 1952, she travelled to Paris to study with him. By the mid '60s, she had spent several summers at Darmstadt studying with Stockhausen. Her first compositions began in the early '50s and she continued to work up until the '70s when her personal life dictated that she put music aside. Throughout the '80s and '90s, Pade had all but disappeared from the public eye, with Denmark holding little regard for avantgarde composition even if were by a pioneering Dane; but by the turn of century, the academic imprint Dacapo collected Pade's work for the first time. Slowly, her work was being rediscovered, eventually leading to her breakthrough album Svaevninger with Jakob Kirkegaard.
This anthology mostly centers on the earliest works of Pade's career, though the vocabulary she has developed over the decades is remarkably consistent - sinewy lines of electronic tone, perpetually fluctuating granular synthesis, and eerie clusters of melody. The "Faust Suite" from 1962 is a suitably brooding piece of electric miasma dotted sporadically with echo-delay patterned snippets of narration from the Goethe classic. Pade was not interested in creating a radio-play out of the text, instead focusing on an impressionist mood engineering of internal friction, angst, and emptiness. "Syv Cirkler" from 1958 marks the earliest work from this anthology, as a commission from the 1958 Expo whereby she crafted a celestial work of ringing tone colors and satellite-chirp sequencing that's very ahead of its time. The 1995 piece "Illustrationer" is remarkably similar to all of the work she had done earlier on, though she does layer prepared piano and aqueous field recordings into the digitally rendered work. The anthology concludes with "Glasperlespil" - a composition of stately loops and monochromatic passage with enough poetic austerity that inspired Stockhausen to include the piece in his lectures about electronic music from the '70s onward. A fantastic, enterprising collection! (NB. also available as a rather more expensive triple vinyl lp set, we'll have those back in next week.)
A drop-dead gorgeous album of pure tone minimalism from two outstanding Danish composers. Jacob Kirkegaard is a familiar name around these parts, thanks to his impeccable recordings for Touch, channeling quite literally radioactive field recordings and even ear-piercing tones captured from inside his own ear; but Else Marie Pade is a figure who actually towers over her fellow countryman as she's been working with analog electronics and electroacoustic minimalism for close to 60 years. She was quite the bad-ass in her youth, fighting in the Resistance during World War II as an explosives expert (fuck, yeah!), ending up a prisoner of war from 1944 until the end of the war. During that time in the P.O.W. camp, she composed hymns to lift the spirits of the fellow prisoners. Upon release, she began studying piano; and by 1954, she quickly moved into the nascent realm of electronic music and musique concrete, becoming what many have cited as being the first Danish composer of both media. Her sensibility is one that is not dissimilar to that of Eliane Radigue in terms of long-form programs, although Pade seems more interested in tonal slippages akin to somebody like Roland Kayn. This collaborative work is a picture perfect example of what two great artists should create when given the chance to work together. The album is sourced both from Kirkegaard's 'otoacoustic' recordings (those aforementioned recordings of inner-ear frequencies) and from Pade's vault of analog electronic recordings. The six tracks of Svaevninger appear as portraits to cloud formations, an apt metaphor to the ephemeral slippages, crystalline phase-patterned hypnosis, and glassy-eyed suspended tone-floats these two produce. Think Chalk, Derbyshire, Oram, Niblock, Nilsen, Coleclough, and any number of the great electronic drone-artists / minimalists we've championed. A marvelous album!
Five compositions by video artist Nam June Paik. Long before he became famous for his work in the visual arts, Paik had travelled to both Japan and later to Germany (along side Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Westdeutsche Rundfunk's Studio For Electronic Music)
We won't go into too much detail with this one, it was limited to 100 copies, is already sold out, and we got a mere 10, sold 3 or 4, so by the time you read this we'll have 5 or 6 left, and will NOT be able to get more. Gnaw Their Tongues obsessives will NEED this, three new tracks of GTT's fucked up and brilliantly brutal industrial symphonic cinematic black doom, all buzzing guitars, crashing percussion, twisted strings, warped vocals, twisted samples, black ambience, all woven into something freaky and creepy and unlike anything else you've heard.
We had never heard Painforged before, but they are most definitely a worthy matchup for GTT, a similarly abject bit of abstract blacknoize and metallic ambience, processed sounds throb and skitter and pulse over monstrous vocals, strange samples laced with super spare programmed doom-ed drumcrush, swirling black ambience and thick swells of rumbling buzzing doomdronedirge low end, laced with deconstructed and decaying riffage, slowed down cookie monster vox, and spidery atonal guitar squiggles, all melted down into a noxious and black sonic stew.
Packaged in a dvd style case, nice printed covers, almost sold out, so cross your fingers and add to cart...
4 cds collecting the almost-complete works (plus some previously unreleased pieces) of the collaboration among 3 of the biggest egos in contemporary music: John Zorn, Mick Harris, and big bad Bill Laswell. Nicely presented, with all the original (banned-in-England in one instance) artwork. Includes "Guts Of A Virgin," "Buried Secrets," and "Execution Ground" (with the bonus live in Osaka disc from the import Japanese version, featuring guest Eye Yamantaka of Boredoms). And then there's the previously unreleased track with Keiji Haino on guitar (doing a Jacks cover!). Makigami Koichi also guests on vocals.
JZ's 50th was/is a never-ending party it seems. The cds just keep on coming. We haven't managed to keep up at all with 'em all. But we did have to take a moment to check out this, a new Painkiller document! Painkiller being one of our favorite John Zorn ensembles, wherein he teamed up with grindcore drummer Mick Harris (Napalm Death/Scorn) and ubiquitous bassist Bill Laswell for several extreme explorations of heavy-duty, jazz metal improvcore back in the early '90s. The "Collected Works" four-cd box set on Tzadik remains quite recommended (especially for the band's best work, the dubby death ambient double disc set called Execution Ground), and includes guest appearances from the likes of Eye Yamantaka and Keiji Haino.
So what's the deal with this live, September 2003 birthday Painkiller reunion, then? Well, first off, although Laswell is (of course) on board, Mick Harris isn't. Does he even still play drums? His replacement is Chicago jazz percussionist Hamid Drake. And, the special guest at this show was Mike Patton, always a suitable stand-in for Eye. So this isn't quite the same Painkiller, being rather, um, "funkier" than we remember 'em being. It's also certainly exuberantly noisy. Well, maybe the darkest Painkiller stuff wouldn't really be right for a birthday party, after all! The three tracks here, two of 'em quite lengthy, were all composed and/or improvised by the Zorn/Drake/Laswell/Patton unit. Patton contributes plenty of distorted screams and jib-jabbery glitched out electonics n' vocals, while the Laswell/Drake rhythm section generally grooves along, and Zorn switches back and forth between both camps, blowing like crazy to keep Patton company or playing "jazzier" stuff to swing with Laswell and Drake. Zorn, Patton and yes indeed old Painkiller fans will all find this of interest. It's not quite the Painkiller of the Mick Harris days, but there's still plenty of dubby, mayhemic skronk here that's at least really "Painkillerish".
We've fallen behind - like, WAY behind - in keeping up with John Zorn's output in recent years. (Sorry JZ!) But we are fans of the downtown NYC avantgarde saxophonist/composer, if not to the obsessed extent of certain people we know. And when we found out about this, we had to get it in! One of our favorite of Zorn's many projects, Painkiller is an extreme jazzcore power trio, originally featuring Zorn, bassist Bill Laswell (whose discography is also pretty hard to keep up with), and drummer Mick Harris (Napalm Death, Scorn). Painkiller's first recordings of deathjazz improv came out on grindcore label Earache, natch. Later on, they got more dubbed-out and ambient (illbient?) on the amazing Execution Ground set.
Well, now Painkiller returns, with this recording. Zorn and Laswell of course have kept up their chops, but Mick Harris probably hasn't touched a drum kit in a while, so he's been replaced. They've found a suitable substitute, however, making us maybe even more excited about this: Tatsuya Yoshida of Japan's amazing Ruins!!
So yeah, we'd be happy to hear all three of these guys simply solo for hours, and, well, that's basically what you get here. A thrilling onslaught of drums, sax and bass, soloing separately and all at once (which technically isn't soloing, but you know what we mean), it's quite a ride. There's of course some moments of relative calm, it gets melodic even, and groovy, but intense is pretty much the word for it. There's three tracks, the first, "Prelude", not much more that two minutes long, and when it ends it's a bit disconcerting to hear audience applause already ('cause this was recorded live on tour in Europe, in 2007) but then they launch into track 2, the title track, and that one's over an hour long, so you forget about it being live, you forget about everything, except insane squealing sax skronk, eight armed drum damage, and how-low-can-you-go, wah-wah'd bass warble! This tour-de-force is followed by a brief "Postlude", and then it's time to spin the disc again because when it stops suddenly silence seems crazy and Painkiller's music is now what sounds normal to your ears. Maybe.
It's here! Not Here Not There is the first release from Painted Caves, aka Evan Caminiti, one half of psychedelic dronefolk duo Barn Owl, and while Painted Caves, like many of the Barn Owl offshoots, definitely exists in a similar sonic plane, one of sprawling smoldering guitar thrum, and shimmering soft focus guitar ambience, Not Here Not There finds Caminiti getting way more abstract, mixing some ethereal synth drift into the dense swells of chordal thrum, a gorgeous expanse of guitar/synth exploration, with subtle electronic manipulations, all blurred into a gauzy softly billowing whole. The tape begins very much like past Barn Owl outings, a sort of twang flecked, sun dappled whirring cloud of warm guitar swirl, but after a spell, the sound grows downright malevolent, expanding into churning sonic stormclouds before dissipating into another hazy washed out ethereal atmosphere, underpinned by a
smoldering chordal fog, wreathed in a murky shimmer that soon gives way to a brooding softly undulating soft-psych thrum, and eventually finishes with the dreamily wistful final track, a hauntingly melancholic smear of muted prismatic buzz and hum, almost like a more psychedelic dronedrift version of the Caretaker, with buried lost memory like melodies, and a glimmering field of soft focus crackle and cosmic haze.
This is the first release on Caminiti's Dust Editions imprint and is LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Includes a digital download as well.
Surveillance is the latest release from Evan Caminiti, one half of aQ beloved drone/doom duo Barn Owl. And displays Caminiti's gradual shift away from purely guitar based ambience, toward something more dark and dystopian, and beat driven, shedding much of the twang flecked duskiness, in favor of murky fragmented rhythms, and gristled textures. Barn Owl too has displayed a similarly dramatic sonic shift over the last few releases, introducing drum machines, and synths, and similarly Caminiti's partner in Barn Owl, Jon Porras, has expanded his solo sonic palette as well, occasionally shoegazey, but also dabbling in witchy electronics, most notably as DVVLLXNS. But Surveillance might be the closest either have come to crystallizing such a distinctive, and distinctively entrancing sound, one that channels seventies and eighties soundtrack music, abstract electronics, modern minimalism, minimal house music (a la Chain Reaction), and who knows what else, into something stunningly mesmerizing, hauntingly bleak, and strangely alien. Yet somehow, still quite beautiful.
Surveillance does play out like some sort of soundtrack, with a few moments touching on the Carpenter/Goblin sound that seems to be so prevalent these days, but those moments definitely don't smack of any sort of bandwagon jumping, instead existing as just one sonic element, deftly woven into a much more sprawling and epic whole, with most of the tracks blossoming into something altogether stranger, lurching, pulsing, revealing mysterious arrangements, unfurling constantly shifting textures, rhythmically mesmeric one second, a creeping tar pit ooze the next. "Event Boundary", sounds a bit like a futuristic Muslimgauze, a simple skeletal rhythm, drifting atop a whirring raga like buzz, and wreathed in soft melodic swirls, heady and heavenly hypnotic, gradually growing more and more sinister, the electronic buzz sounding almost like processed horn bleats, the strange tangle of electronics dense and tense, haunting and harrowing for sure. "Leningrad" is similarly bleak and barren, with another field of buried pulsations, beneath arcing fields of tones, and soft focus synth sweeps, not to mention some dubbed out beats, all in a softly psychedelic haze. "Flesh On Tape" is about as close to the current Carpenter craze as it gets, but even then, the sound is much more minimal and softly glitchy, the Chain Reaction influence in full effect, maybe Carpenter on Chain Reaction is good band math, and it sounds just as good as you think it would.
"Shadow Gamelan" sounds like it was plucked from some obscure seventies Euro-art film, not hard to imagine this on a soundtrack for a movie like Possession, softly squiggly guitars, disembodied buzz, lots of echo and dreamlike reverb, hazy and soft focus, but underpinned by a subtle sonic malevolence, while "Loft Life" sounds like something on Kompakt slowed way down, and wreathed in shadow, before finally, the record ends with "Stalker" (an homage to Tarkovsky maybe?), which is a gently noisy, swirling psychedelic shimmerscape of keening high end, buzzing swells, buried pulsations and strange hissy vocal emanations, a stunning sprawl of harrowing cinematic soundscapery that again, like much of Surveillance, seems to effortlessly blur the line between hushed haunting loveliness, and brooding, blackened sonic intensity.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on 180 gram vinyl.
We love, love, loved the cd that Japan's PSF label released by Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, 2009's Haru No Omi, a disc of hushed hazy psychedelic semi-acoustic drones backing delicate female vocals, themselves often gently looped and layered. Although on PSF, and despite those vocals being in fluent Japanese, PPOPG is the work of Italy's Ramona Ponzini, joined by the ever-industrious Opalio brothers from My Cat Is An Alien, and is probably our favorite thing the Oplaio's have been involved with.
Now, we knew of an earlier Painting Petals album on Time-Lag, the vinyl long out of print, but had somehow missed out on this one, a 2008 release from the A Silent Place label. Well, as you may have noticed elsewhere on this week's list, we just managed to acquire an assorted quantity of A Silent Place "product", at a "nice price" too, including (yay!) a handful of these lovely discs. It's totally along the lines of the PSF release, being another album of gorgeous, near-ambient driftworks, apparently recorded in "mystic locations" in the Italian Alps, with Ponzini's dreamy vocals once again set amidst melodious shimmering drone, and tinkling bells... there's both wind chimes, and what sounds like field recordings of actual wind, along with guitars, glockenspiel, antique accordion, mini-keyboard, and harmonica. Utterly entrancing and relaxing.
So, if you liked the more recent Haru No Omi as much as we did, you should act fast and try to grab one of these. We won't be able to get more, and only have a few...
It'd be easy to mistake this beautiful, beautiful album for being Japanese... the title is in Japanese, the singing is in Japanese, and it's on the great Japanese psych label PSF after all, with an obi and everything! But actually, it's the work of Italian experimental chanteuse Ramona Ponzini, who is an associate of the My Cat Is An Alien collective (members of whom also being part of this project), and is obviously fluent in Japanese. Totally belongs on PSF though, worthy of being of the rare albums of Western origin appearing on that label, and we think it's one of the loveliest, regardless of where it's from. And it also lives up to its evocative name Painting Petals On The Planet Ghost, whatever that phrase might mean...
On the seven hushed tracks here, Ponzini's gentle vocals hover amidst even gentler hum and hiss, accompanied by sun-dappled, slow motion acoustic guitar melodies, minimalistic and melancholic, and droning synth. These songs are sometimes visited by chiming bells, or restrained, ceremonial-sounding percussion. There's an intimate, yet mysterious vibe to it all, one that's dreamy and drifting, Ponzini's singing at the center of these songs, the focus of the listener's attention, but at the same time, the soft-focus nature of these tracks as a whole also being the attraction, the delicate interplay of vocals, melody, and drone almost becoming a haunting, holistic oneness. Pleasantly haunting that is, a hypnotic late night listen, somnolent folkish lullabies given gorgeous drone treatment.
Doused in mild echo effects, with overdubs her sweet singing is vaguely layered and looped, or at least some ghostly suggestion is made in that direction, where she starts one vocal line, then it fades into a wordless hmmmmmm, as another one of her vocals is layered over what has become part of the warm background hum...
For fans of Fursaxa, Grouper, Valet, and other female-fronted loner psych-folk-drone stuff, as well as of course certain Japanese artists, like AQ faves Nagisa Ti Te for sure, or Ai Aso with her cooing waifish vocals. Or, remember female Japanese duo Eddie Marcon's Shining On Graveposts disc (soon to be available again, at long last, by the way!)? This reminds us a lot of that wonderful album, but 'tis even more gauzy and droned-out... Packaged in a miniature LP-style gatefold sleeve, and highly recommended!
Geiger-counter-ish clicks, reveberant chords, and swooping zwooping synth blips herald the atmospheric beginning to this new disc (a considerably expanded cd edition of the limited & long gone Blackest Rainbow vinyl version from last year) from Italy's Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, an aQ-fave combo ever since we heard their release on Japan's PSF imprint back in 2009. Those sort of eerie, uncertain sonics continue throughout this disc, forming the backdrop to the haunting, echo-effected vocal rites of Ramona Ponzini, singing Japanese poetry as per Painting Petals On Planet Ghost tradition (this time, the words come from the works of Takamura Kotaro). Also in the tradition of their other recordings, this is quite lovely and mysterious! Ponzini and her two cohorts (the brothers Opalio of experimentalists My Cat Is An Alien) have conjured another gently damaged and droning psychedelic soundscape of layered prayerful vox in a mad scientist's laboratory of strange secretive sounds. Just be sure to turn it off before you go to sleep, or the "hidden" bonus track at the very end of this lengthy disc will disturb your slumbers, featuring as it does some sudden, startling loud percussion, in the form of gongs being struck and bells being rung.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Attention Finnophiles!! Another missive of forest-y free folk from far away Finland. This time in the form of a super limited lp from the group Paivansade, who happen to be made up of folks from Kiila, Rauhan Orkesteri and Lauhkeat Lampat who some of you may be familiar with. The sound is everything we've come to expect and love, plucked strings, wheezing squeezebox, chimes and rattles, very spare and spacious, like a Fahey record stretched out as far as it will go, with ambient bowed strings, very haunting. Once in a while the sound erupts into squealing, clattery, whistling frivolity, with deep throaty hand drums providing a clumsy rhythmic framework for a wild tribal gypsy folk workout. Fans of Anaksimandros, Kemialliset Ystavat and Avarus will obviously find this essential. Limited to 500 copies!
For a while, San Francisco seemed like some sort of black metal mecca, record after record and shows galore, all sorts of grim and kvlt hordes, Leviathan, Draugar, Crebain, Horn Of Dagoth, Elk, Necrite and more. And while some of those bands are still active, the recordings have seemed to dry up, more a trickle than a torrent. We know there is a Crebain record in the works, there's the forthcoming Mastery 2cd on tUMULt, a rumored Leviathan, but there are lots of new bands too, Botanist, Kerasphorus, and these guys, or rather this guy, Palace Of Worms, and finally a new slab of fucked up freaked out blackness from SF to obsess over, and believe us, this is well worth obsessing over.
Anyone into any of the above mentioned bands will dig PoW for sure, a dizzying blend of troo black metal buzz, and experimental post rock, which is evident from the first few seconds of the record, beginning with haunting majestic synths, then a brittle lo-fi blast of metal, that sounds like it was played on a mandolin, or pitched up, before the song proper kicks in with a wall of frenzied super saturated black buzz, croaked vokills, and buried in the mix blast beats, switching gears multiple times throughout the song, chugging doomic sprawl, to gnarled Deathspell style blackprog, with plenty of tangly guitar lines and lurching tempo changes, clean guitar, very reminiscent of another aQ BM fave Woe, the same sort of melodic sensibility fused into a seriously harrowing chunk of grim black aggression.
The rest of the record follow suit, dipping occasionally into ultra raw, old school black metal pound, weird almost industrial shoegazey ambience (sounding a bit like Nadja or Jesu), classic midtempo Burzumy blackness, awesomely creepy Eastern tinged black ambience, almost Katatonia moody sounding melodic blackness, but always returning to that furious heaviness, all lightning speed riffage, hellish vox, dizzying complex rhythms, soaring synths, but all infused with that strange, and subtle pop element that turns grim and black into something much more interesting, and makes Palace Of Worms another band to add to SF's black pantheon.
Some of our favorite records over the last few years have come from our customers. As in, recorded and released by, not just recommended by. I mean, it makes perfect sense, that folks into cool weird music, would be making cool weird music themselves, but nevertheless it's always a nice surprise. Whether it's the delicate dreamy folk of Ilyas Ahmed, or the crushing doom of Monument of Urns, it's always exciting to discover that the guy who buys all the weird cd-r's, or the customer who is always ordering super limited vinyl is in fact, making some strange and wondrous sounds themselves.
Such is the case with our Italian mailorder customer Francesco Paladino, who has teamed up with Opum (Paladino seems to prefer the collaboration, having joined forces with lots of folks in the past including dronesters Alio Die) for a record of epic and hauntingly cinematic low end explorations. Field recordings are deftly woven into huge sprawling drones, strangled falsetto vocals and growling grumbled voices drift ominously amidst the slowly swirling low end ambience. Chimes tinkle and random bits of percussion float restlessly above thick fuzzy synthesizers, all the while more and more strange animalistic vocalisations enter the mix. Birdsong and simple percussion are the framework of one track, while a pulsing synthesized throb another, FX swirl effortlessly over the sound of scraping stones, whispering wind, distant chanting. The vibe is strangely liturgical, one can imagine this disc as the soundtrack to some slow moving Italian giallo, Goblin handling the freaked out progged up horror parts, while Paladino and Opum handle the suspense, the dark shadowy corridors, a long walk through a moonlit park, the foreboding feeling that death lurks around every corner. Creepy and sinister and ominously beautiful.
Words of Ash, Walls of Smoke, Minds of Glass is the debut solo release by the Bay Area avant-rock denizen Gregory Hagan, whose languid violin and tempestuous guitar work was prominently featured in one of our favorite local outfits Common Eider King Eider. He's also active in the Thomas Carnacki performances / recordings as well as in the post-MX-80 project Grale. But as Pale Reverse, he sets down the strings in favor of analogue electronics and a four-track to build this elegantly creepy piece of nocturnal dronemuzik. A ghostly rumble introduces the 20 minute piece which slowly morphs into radiant, shivering oscillations of guilding tones suspended with hiss, mist, and fog. Subtle melodies flicker with beautifully singing overtones echoing throughout the electronics, eventually amassing into a holy crescendo of interlaced dronescapes snapping back to the industrial pall which opened the proceedings. At loud volumes, the tape detritus from multiple overdubs and erasures become all the more obvious and lend more than a few complimentary comparisons to William Basinski. But fans of the BJ Nilsen / Stilluppsteypa collaborations, the latter day works from The Hafler Trio, and even the Caretaker would be well served to check this out. Limited to 73 copies!
Pale Sketcher finds Justin Broadrick taking his post Godflesh project Jesu in an entirely new direction. Named for Pale Sketches, a collection of early Jesu demos and song fragments, unused parts and unfinished songs, which were presented on Pale Sketches as a collection of odds and ends, but here are reworked into a mysteriously minimal electronica. And to be totally fair, the sound, while on the surface seems radically different, really doesn't sound all that far removed from the sound of Jesu proper, sure the thick metalgaze guitars are stripped away, and the beats are a bit more skeletal and overtly electronic, but the lush shoegazey drift is still what it's all about. Thick swells of melancholy minor key shimmer, spidery melodies, hushed gauzey production haze, everything sun dappled and washed out and prismatic, it's not that hard to imagine that instead of this being a one time excursion, that this is in fact the direction Jesu was, or is, headed. Every record since the debut, Heartache, has consistently gotten less heavy, more and more mellow and dreamy, drifting ever closer to a sort of M83 style retro eighties shoegaze doom pop, so it would make perfect sense for Jesu to gradually be transformed into something warm and dark and electronic.
The sound here suits the songs perfectly, dreamy and minimal, moody and hushed, a little bit dubby, the heaviest parts are the swaths of buzzing dubsteppy bass that surface here and there, but otherwise this is like some spaced out soundtrack composed by Jesu, very cinematic, haunting and lovely, stripped down and abstract, the vocals ghostly and ethereal, in fact most all of the sounds here are ghostly and ethereal, allowed to drift and shimmer, held in place by muted pulses, and streaks of soft skitter, the whole thing ends up sounding so dreamlike, so otherworldly, the perfect next step in Jesu's constant evolution.
