Attention music geeks, music-tech nerds, cool gadget obsessives and espeically anyone who freaked out over the amazing Buddha Machine! We've got another far out musical gadget that will have you all in a tizzy.
Tristan Perich is a name we had never heard before. Turns out he's a musician and inventor, who has released this record, his debut we think, of 1-bit music (more on that in a moment) in its own self contained jewel case player. What's that? A gorgeous little electronic sculpture, made up of a plain old plastic jewel case, and a handful of colored wires and chips and tiny dials, completely self contained, a headphone jack in the jewel case offering you entry into Perich's crunchy minimal electronic sound world.
As many of you know, 8-bit music is the sound of '80s video game music, all your arcade favorites, super simple electronic sounds crafted into equally simple harmonies and melodies, so get rid of seven of those bits, and you're left with just ONE bit, the smallest increment of memory and sound. So Perich has taken these super minimal tones, and constructed some amazing electronic music, that is crunchy and raw, the sound all buzzy tones and staticky clicks, ranging from playful lullabies to grinding dense tangles of squelch and squiggle. Some of the tracks definitely sound like they could be some lost video game music, but others are drone-y and weirdly layered and textured smears of crumbling lo-fi bleep and buzz, through headphones it sounds amazing, but through your speakers, it sounds like someone is in there pulling your speakers apart with rusty blunted shears. This would destroy a dancefloor, add some booming beats and you'd have some Daft Punk jam of the year, all grinding minimalism, in fact one track sounds like Fischerspooner via your Atari 2600, while some of the others sound like a much more playful and lo-fi Ryoji Ikeda, the sound of someone playing Pac Man turned into a 1-bit techno jam, and like the ultra minimal little brother of Skweee (that Scandinavian electro we've been so obsessed with lately)!
But the music really only is half of it. The player is so striking, the whole record contained on a tiny chip, soldered to the jewel case, a battery in its little holder, two tiny volume controls, a mini on/off switch, a button to skip tracks, wires leading to a tiny headphone jack, the only liner notes a printed piece of paper that comes off with the plastic shrinkwrap, and a transparency with Perich's name and the name of the record. Before any of us had even heard the music, we all new we had to have one. It's a tiny musical sculpture, a piece of art that functions as a piece of sound art as well. Anyone who bought a Buddha Machine will want one of these. And if you were wondering what to get that weirdo music freek friend of yours, we'd be hard pressed to think of something cooler than this!
Be warned. We got ONLY 50 COPIES!!! They are super labor intensive and hand made. Perich is currently trying to sort out a way to make more, so when we run out, it may be a while before we can get more, so if you want one, and we can't imagine how you wouldn't, then act fast!!!
Cool music gadget (and minimal lo-fi 1-bit videogame glitch crunch record) of the year!
Music nerds may get obsessed with records all the time, but they also get pretty into musical gadgets, as evidenced most recently by FM3's Buddha Machine, which we've sold about a billion of, and most folks we know own more than one. And heck, that's just a little plastic box that plays short little loops. We didn't think anything would be able to trump the coolness of the Buddha Machine, which appealed to music geeks and tech nerds in equal measure, but then along came 1-Bit Music from a composer named Tristan Perich. Not only was 1-Bit Music Perich's debut record, it wasn't a record at all, instead it was simultaneously a piece of sound art and a miniature sound producing gadget, a collection of tiny wires and chips and switches and a watch battery, all affixed to the inside of a plain old cd jewel case. The result, a super striking looking little gizmo, but one that produced some weird and amazing 1 bit sounds. But what exactly are 1 bit sounds?
Well, most folks are familiar with 8 bit sounds, all your favorite vintage arcade game music is 8 bit, and all the modern purveyor of Casio core or Nintendo core, they're using those crunchy lo-fi 8 bit sounds to make awesomely retro music. So one bit, is the smallest increment of memory and sound, and Perich composed his music using just 1 bit sounds, the result, beyond being small enough to fit on a tiny chip, and that chip along with some switches and wires in a jewel case, it also made for some alien sounds, like video game music, but as if imagined by the roster of Raster-Noton, a series of clicks and beeps and tangled squiggles of squelches and primitive melodies, almost like some ultra minimal toy techno or something. And while in headphones the sounds were intense and loud and raw, through speakers, they were INTENSE, super destructive and brutal, the sort of sounds, no matter how playful and simple, that DESTROY speakers. So awesome.
Sadly, Perich and his crew had trouble keeping up with demand, as each of the releases, were hand made, every wire and switch, glued into each jewel case one at a time. So eventually that 'record' was discontinued. But now, we have Perich's latest release, no longer simply 1-Bit Music, now, it's a 1-Bit Symphony! And it is in fact more complex, with the various tones and beeps and squelches woven into lush tapestries of sound, rhythmically complex, and harmonically lush, at times sounding almost like M83, sometimes like Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing on a primitive toy Casio keyboard, other times like some lost old school video game, the sounds panning wildly from speaker to speaker, the melodies tangled and intricate, the overall sound so hypnotic and mesmerizing, the compositions sprawling and epic, ranging from 5 minutes, to nearly ten minutes to infinite, the final track a gorgeously lush chunk of distorted fuzzed out minimal buzz, that manages to sound all moody and shoegazey, warm and woozy and crunchy, an endless loop, that we really could imagine listening to endlessly.
But like 1-Bit Music before it, the music is really only half the equation with 1-Bit Symphony, the packaging, which IS the record, is so striking, a gorgeously arranged series of wires and switches, a battery, a volume knob, a button to switch tracks, an on/off switch, a headphone jack, all affixed to a clear jewel case, with a simple stick on the front, and the booklet in the plastic sleeve on the outside of the jewel case, adding a spare white background to the visuals, but also including liner notes, not to mention an intense and fantastically confusional poster featuring what appears to be the composition presented as it was programmed, which also manages to be visually striking and a work of art in its own right.
This one is not so nearly limited as the last one, but probably safer to not risk it, cuz if you're at all into weird music, and weird music related thingies, you are definitely gonna want one of these, and you'll probably want to give one to all the music nerds in your life as well. And like the first Perich 1-Bit release, this one too, is no doubt destined to be the cool music gadget, and minimal lo-fi 1-bit glitch crunch shoegaze squelch symphony record of the year!
There's a seriously thriving noise scene in San Francisco, shows all the time, tons of tapes and cd-r's, performances in warehouses, street corners, micro labels popping up all the time, the one bummer, for us at least, is we're not all that into noise. Well, Allan is into Japanese noise, the rest of us like things that are noisy, but prefer our NOISE to be pretty, or droney, or in some way not all that harsh. Soft noise some folks might call it.
But we're not noise prudes, our ears are made of stern stuff, and there's plenty of thick, buzzing caustic skree we love to cuddle up to. Like this, the debut full length from local duo Perineum, made up of two members of other aQ faves, Ben from local black metal horde Horn Of Dagoth, and Derek from local kraut / drone outfits Horseflesh and Ozmadawn.
Two tracks, appropriately enough titled "The Nail" and "Key". "The Nail" begins with a wall of crumbling caustic distorted heaviness, a swirling buzzing churning swirl of processed tapes, effected vocals, tons of fractured effects, all ground into a roiling black cloud, but something strange happens about three quarters of the way through, the noise abates, leaving a ghostly smear of backwards melodies, delicate crystalline shimmer, soft resonant swells, all layered and fused into a dreamy warm drift that gradually grows quieter and quieter.
"Key" begins as a whispered bit of hiss and whir, like a collage of amp buzz and muted record crackle, smeared into a fuzzy prickly bit of soft white noise, within which is buried subtle rhythmic variations, slowly shifting textures, gradually growing more and more corrosive, the sound decaying and crumbling, bits of feedback beginning to show through, the sound like a Wolf Eyes / Blue Sabbath Black Cheer mashup, eventually within all that hiss and buzz, deep moaning melodies become barely visible, jagged shards of high end surface like chunks of black ice a winter sea, and the sound grows white hot, before fading and gradually disappearing completely.
Packaged in a cool mini dvd style plastic case, with printed and collaged inserts, and the inside of each case hand painted with some mysterious and arcane symbol.
A little over a year ago, Frans de Waard left Staalplaat and dedicated himself fully to his own Korm Plastics imprint. De Waard's presence had actually grown to be synonymous with Staalplaat, despite the fact that he didn't own the shop / label. So his departure made us wonder what might've happen to Staalplaat. We need not fear for Staalplaat is going strong and continues to press up more Muslimgauze CDs than you can shake a stick at. Ignaz Schick is now one of the people who has been filling de Waard's shoes (or at least he's the guy we order our Staalplaat gear from).
The inner workings of Staalplaat may be unimportant to most of you, but the context of Ignaz' employment begins to make sense once you realize that he's the force behind the under-represented improv / electro-acoustic ensemble Perlonex. In many ways, Perlonex follows an AMM line-up of relatively commonplace instruments used in very non-traditional means for the manufacture of sound. Schick principally performs on turntables and tape machines, Jorg Maria Zeger has his guitar, and Burkhard Beins takes after Gunter Muller and Jason Kahn as a very non-percussive drummer. Peripherique is Perlonex's second CD and concentrates on a very complex interplay of trio's gestural sounds. It's a far cry from most improv skronk, which revels in its own mastery of the equipment; rather, Perlonex respond to each other in a slow and curiously sensitive march towards incendiary noise. A very impressive document!
This is the second collaboration between the stalwart minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine and the electro-acoustic ensemble Perlonex, who may be Germany's answer to AMM. Yes, the title is an allusion to the Gershwin tune, since the name of the club where these recordings took place in Vienna is called Porgy & Bess - the opera from which that song is taken. The division of labor for these sessions found Perlonex on sinewave generator, turntable, guitars, motors, and percussion, mustering huge swelling arcs of drone, texture, and controlled chaos, with Palestine taking up piano, vocals, and cognac glass, which he's presumably emptied a number of times throughout these sessions. Palestine cycles through rather graceful notes on the piano, building the intensity alongside his German compatriots. Each of the three extended pieces is a variation on a theme of restrained electro-acoustic explorations with slow-burning dynamics and with Palestine offering a gravelly Beefheart-like vocal extemporization of the lyric "it ain't necessarily so" - at times nasally thin, at times a plaintive spoken delivery, at times a thick bellow, at times a raving lunatic. With the arrangements here taking up the more subdued sounds of Supersilent / AMM through scrapes and drones, Palestine's vocals stand in stark relief. Limited stock.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Latest chunk of murky sonic misery from this Oklahoma one man ultradoom outfit, and while many of the releases on Black Horizons would most definitely qualify as doomy, calling PoM a 'doom metal' band might not seem like a good fit, as this is not any doom metal band, PiM's weirdly distinctive sounds is more murky creepy crawl that churning crush, the guitars are blurred muddied thrums, the drums a weirdly programmed beat that sounds like it might be more at home on a Scorn record. The vocals slipping from distant demonic howl, to haunting croon. The sound rife with strange buried samples, streaks of feedback, spidery minor key melodies, the sound, a lurching tarpit creep, a little bit skittery, an electro-doom ballad, abject and miserable, but strangely motorik and mesmerizing, and just blurred and droney enough to be tranced out and near meditative.
The B side even moreso, a strange landscape of glitchy processed low end, all murky throb and smeared crumbling bass, melting and oozing, the drums a barely audible pulse way down in the mix. It's like a weird home brewed take on Skepticism, as if you were listening to them play in the house next door, the sounds leaking through the walls, losing all definition, and instead, transformed into a strange series of impressionistic pulsations, and rib cage rattling throbs, beneath some harsh vokills, and a shimmery patina of high end skree, but again, all melted down into one oozing viscous blackdronedirge mass.
Like all Black Horizons releases, the packaging is incredible. The tape features a silver metallic label and along with a printed insert on green metallic paper, is housed in a thick obi-style sleeve, which in turn is wrapped in a black cloth patch, everything them wrapped in a silkscreened silver on green metallic O-card. And of course, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Latest blast of twisted druggy slo-mo heaviness from this Oakland outsider doomlord, whose sound seems to have reached some sort of bizarre apex with Confessions, the first song alone tells the tale, plonked funeral piano, all manner of sampled voices, the vocals a demonic shriek, the riffs blackened and buzzy, what sounds like crickets, beneath spidery minor key melodies, it's haunting and harrowing, almost like a more 'musical' Gnaw Their Tongues, the same sort of sprawling cinematic vibe, the sound weirdly industrial too, an ominous creep, that in places reminds us of Wolf Eyes.
And the whole record pretty much follow suit, like some twisted soundtrack, the sound a bleak, miserable drift through various horrifying tableaus, the voices croon, weep, howl, the piano seems to underpin it all, some mysterious bit of miserable melodicism, underpinning the grinding, buzzing blackness above, the sounds coalescing into riffs here and there, laced with spidery acoustic guitars, occasionally splintering into metallic shards, clattery and cacophony, blown out and blackened, all the while, strangely melodic, utterly haunting, definitely noisy, but muted and muddy, as if these sonic horrors were being viewed through a dirty blood smeared window, in a dilapidated old house, or through a crack in the wall of an old musty cellar. And it's almost as if all of these sounds, and all of this music, was fighting some unseen black force, an invisible hand reaching from the beyond, the music in a constant state of struggle, of anguish, the sound of a tortured soul, a sonic glimpse into the blackness that lurks beneath the everyday, a sound desperately clawing its way heavenward, while some grim force forever drags it right back down into the depths�
WAY recommended for fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Bunkur, Celestiial, HQO, Loss, Monument Of Urns and other purveyors of bizarre bleak blackness.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
Third (duh) issue of this fanzine done by notorious Nordic noisician Lasse Marhaug (Jazzkammer, etc.). Super nicely put together (it looks like a "real" magazine), but definitely a fanzine in its enthusiasms... Marhaug and a few friends go one-on-one in in-depth interviews with such interesting contemporaries/colleagues as Svarte Greiner, Pumice, Phill Niblock, Graham Lambkin (of The Shadow Ring), Moe, Will Guthrie, Carl Michael Eide (of Ved Buenes Ende fame!!) and more...
96 pages or so, squarebound, color cover, color interior (with lots of cool photos/graphics - the Pumice piece is actually done in the form of a comic strip), on a nice matte paper stock, kinda like a double-size, Marhaug-curated edition of The Wire, but the content is ALL interviews (well, and ads, which are interesting too - the back page is a full page ad for an upcoming Reynols 20th anniversary 7 cd box set on Marhaug's Pica Disk label!!!). And the interviews are quite interesting. And go in some strange directions, indeed...
Still new fave 'zine, heartily recommended to anyone into experimental drones, noise, black metal, cool artwork, and other weirdness. Only five bucks more than a copy of The Wire and well worth it.
We heart Bo Anders Persson! What a hero. Still going strong well into (and beyond?) his sixties, leading a band that's been around in one form or another more or less SINCE the sixties - we're talking about the those joyful psychedelic heavies, legendary Swedish "krautrockers", the timeless Trad Gras Och Stenar, and the group's prior incarnations as International Harvester, Harvester, and Parson Sound. The amazing archival release of Parson Sound's Terry Riley inspired drone-psych, circa 1967-'68, was until now the earliest music we'd heard from Bo Anders. But what was he up to even before that? We know that as a guitar player, he was hugely influenced by seeing Jimi Hendrix. But this new disc of his earliest, previously unreleased recordings, brought to us by the same label that did the Parson Sound set, shows a different side to Persson, being a portrait of the artist as a young academic composer. Persson has tape machines in hand, not an electric guitar. It's some wonderfully droney, avant garde 20th century classical music, from before Persson heard Hendrix and got into more rock-oriented music making. The experimental nature of these compositions however is in keeping with the adventurous direction of Parson Sound, et.al., later on.
These pieces, recorded when Persson was a student at the Royal Academy Of Music In Stockholm, from 1965 to '67, constitute a mixture of eerie drones, minimalist electronic loopscapes, and, at times, what we might describe as beatnik sci-fi exotica. There's a female singer on much of this who provides wordless, abstract vocal acrobatics (she's good - this type of singing requires a lot of control), her delicate cries variously accompanied by fluttering flute and unidentified electro-acoustic noises, jazzbo hand percussion and equally jazzical contrabass, as well as the ever-present shivering electronic atmospheres. It's all very out-there, but still quite listenable, even as it sometimes gets darker and more dramatic, almost claustrophobic in its subtle intensity. We kept being reminded of some of the music from the original Star Trek TV series soundtrack! Also, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio, composers like that. We're no experts, but this sounds pretty good to us, and we'd guess Persson could have continued on with a highbrow career as an arty musique concrete composer, if radical hippie communal psych sounds hadn't become his thing.
Our favorite track may be the last, the disc's longest at over 24 minutes - a rhythmic abstract dronescape constructed from a short sampled bit of speech, that as it's looped and layered becomes more blurred and burbling, turning into a mesmeric mumbled murmur. Nice! Dronophiles will want this for that track, "Proteinimperialism", alone.
Includes a booklet, with vintage photos & graphics and extensive liner notes (in the form of an essay entitled "The Utopian Dreams of Bo Anders Persson") Note: there's a much more expensive double-lp vinyl version of this as well, currently on backorder, but we will be able to get more eventually if you're interested, let us know!
It seems like every time there's a new Peste Noire record we make it Record Of The Week. Which only seems strange until you actually hear it. And hear how fucked up and totally bafflingly brilliant it is. With every record Peste Noire seem to move further and further away from the grim black metal that birthed them, but to be fair, no one in Peste Noire has spent much time playing what anyone might consider 'typical' black metal, especially mainman Famine, now rechristened La Sale Famine De Valfunde, who used to play in Alcest. Though we should note he took extreme umbrage when we suggested that Alcest / Ameseours mainman Neige had anything to do with the music of Peste Noire, which is also surprising considering that one member of Alcest and one member of Ameseours are also members of Peste Noire and we assume do contribute musically. But really, none of that matters as much as the very very strange sounds these folks create, and the fact that metalheads still dig it. In fact, we're constantly perplexed by certain bands that for no good reason remain beloved to even the truest grimmest metalheads. To be fair, Peste Noire, for all their twisted sonic proclivities, are still masterful black metallers, it's just that those blasts of brilliant black metal are often separated by strange accordion driven French folk music or some twisted bit of confusional psychedelia. Which brings us to L'Ordure A L'Etat Pur, the latest, and yes, perhaps greatest from these French misanthropes. And as always, it only takes the first track, a shot across the bow, to reveal their true intentions, as twisted and unlikely as they may be.
The sound of wind and rain, of crashing surf, distant foghorns, underpinning some reverbed clean guitar, riffs ringing out over these sounds of the sea, a second guitar adds some melody, and there seems to be a wolf howling, or a voice imitating a wolf, there are tolling bells too, and the beginning of what sounds like it could be a jig, or some sort of gypsy folk, maniacal rambling vocals surface, the guitars growing more distorted, the sound tense and dramatic and growing moreso, before no not launching into furious black buzz, but instead some sort of shuffling post rocky groove, the vocals unhinged and maniacal, wrapped around a chugging riff, and some simple propulsive drumming, not so much metal as rock, and then the sound does erupt into a kind of blackness, soaring and droney but before full blackness is achieved, it returns to that sort of sea shanty that opened the proceedings, and the howling wolf returns. Some double kick drumming ups the ante, and finally, the song lurches into more metal territory, but again, more sort of blackened rock, like Khold than Darkthrone, with some seriously catchy riffs, and then, HORNS, moaning ominously, adding some cool texture, and giving the song a sort of "Tusk" vibe, until the metal peels away completely, leaving just horns and acoustic guitar, a sort of oompa oompa polka, with a trombone playing the main melody. Oh yeah, and some accordion. We're in full on French street music territory now, and then the metal guitars swoop back in, as do the vokills, but now they're playing a killer metallized version of that polka, with some strange trilled vocal harmonies and some weird droned out guitars, which suddenly stop, leaving just the sounds of what sounds like sword fighting, and the song shifts gears again, bursting into an almost ska sounding punkish sprawl, only to moments later shift again into a gnarled bit of noise rock, and it's right back into the oompa oompa metalized ska, the vocals transforming into a sort of goregrind gurgle, the music stopping briefly to reveal the sounds of a barnyard, all chickens and roosters, then when the music kicks back in, the vocals simulate the sounds of chickens, Famine singing variations of "Ba-kaaaw", before finishing off in a killer mathy tangle of dynamic chug and pound.
And that's just the first song. And fear not, we won't go through every song here part by part, although we could, and reading this without listening would make this new Peste Noire sound like thee most bizarre record EVER, and heck, maybe it is, but impossibly, it also sort of works, in a dizzying, whatthefuck sort of way.
The rest of the record does offer more surprises, as well as some more traditional black metal, but even at its most buzzy and blasty, the sound will splinter into some strange super distorted can-can, guitars will suddenly unfurl wild squiggles of high end, the sound suddenly devolving into a sort of effects heavy progged out swirl that then transforms into a pounding almost industrial crunch, wreathed in more moaning horns, or a fight will seem to break out in the middle of the song, shattering glass, sirens, all while the song continues to chug and churn, the sound slipping easily from dark, gnarled crusty pound to woozy meandery clean guitar post rock and then to glistening soaring sonic majesty, only to have a chorus of weirdly chanted vocals surface and totally change the vibe to more of a stein hoisting sing along. The blasting buzz here tends less toward the grim blur of classic black metal and more toward a sort of goofy gallop, but one that suits the band more than the other ever would, and amidst all this weirdness, PN can whip out a stretch of impossible beauty or extreme blackened bliss, the sort of parts you want to go on forever, but in the ADD world of Peste Noire, those moments are fleeting, and will soon be subsumed by some new, stranger sound. Elements of power metal abound, but like all of the other musics bastardized here, it becomes just another twisted / fractured facet of Peste Noire's bizarre musical universe. All culminating in the beautifully mournful slow core doom of closer "La Condi Hu", a creeping lament, heavy and distorted, but darkly melodic and melancholy, laced with clean hushed vocal harmonies, but then you couldn't have expected that to be all, in swoop some sad sad strings, some chugging guitars, building to a minor key bit of blackened post metal, and unlike the rest of the record, nothing gets super weird, the band remain heavy, the music tense and dramatic and emotional, continuing to build, the sound intense and moving, laced with mysterious proggy sections, cool female vocal harmonies, dense intricate drumming, there's even a cool wild sort-of-drum solo, with the drums spitting our an avalanche of beats, beneath spoken female vox, which leads right into a super gorgeous stretch of minor key, slithery bass driven heaviness, that any band would kill for, but these guys leave for last, letting the sound wind down, and displaying without a doubt, that there is some sort of method to Peste Noire's extreme and utter musical madness.
Petals is the long germinating shoegaze electronica project of former aQ-er Cameron "Edge Of Sanity" Octigan, a dark, dolorous set of songs that owe as much to the blown out noise pop of groups like My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus And Mary Chain as it does to the blurred bliss pop ambience of Gas and other minimal electronic technicians. The opening track here is very reminiscent of Gas, all hushed minimal melodies, a heartbeat like techno pulse, a muted throb buried in the murk, everything wrapped in a thick patina of gauzy whir and bleary shimmer, which quickly gives way to the first song proper, a warm murky dirge, thick swaths of crunchy low end, buried melancholy melodies, like a shoegaze jam stripped down to its bare components and recast as minimal electronica, hazy almost choral voices seem to drift in and out, give the track an almost witch house vibe. Eventually the drums get a little bit busier, the melodies emerge from the murk, the sound seeming to crystallize and coalesce into an almost proper pop, and then the song splinters into a weird bits of synth pop, all careening dubbed out rhythms, squiggly synths, and those spectral voices, epic and so beautiful.
The rest of the tape is surprisingly varied, while managing to all link together as a strangely cohesive whole, "In Gathering" is a bit of blissed out woozy IDM, given a sort of dream pop makeover, those haunting vocals making a but here processed into haunting high end melodies, all over a whirling soft focus almost house music rhythm, "The Longest Mirror" is the first really beat heavy jam, with a hand clap rhythm draped over a thick buzzing bass, and some hazy dreamy synths, a twisted bit of house-y electro pop, that leads directly into the brief "Only A Thought", which also has a bit of a witch house feel, echoey handclaps hovering in fields if warped synths and electronic glimmer, the sound just drifting and gradually slowing down to a warbly dreamlike drag, until the tape closes with "Everyone's Longest Summer", another primo slab of washed out electro-gaze, but with a haunting ominous undercurrent, strange disembodied voices, a super skeletal high hat rhythm, the whole thing bleary and blissy, and gradually shedding various elements, until just that minimal beat, and then finally, that slowly fading low end buzz...
So great! We really can't imagine Petals will remain a secret for long, in fact, we're sort of shocked this tape is the first anyone will hear, and it's a bit of a tease at 17 minutes, but it has been getting massive repeat plays and definitely has us hankering for more!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Why the hell would you call your band Peterlicker? And even if you did give yourself such a terrible name, why would you keep it after you broke up over 20 years ago, especially when the band in question hardly even managed a couple of practices and maybe one gig? These are the important questions we ask here at aQuarius, and perhaps we can feel justified in asking these questions, since they themselves admit theirs is a stupid band name following the tradition of the Butthole Surfers and Throbbing Gristle.
So, with that discussion out of the way, here at last is the debut LP from Peterlicker, a monstrously good electro-doom-dirge-noise-rock quartet featuring Peter (Pita) Rehberg. While Pita's brain-drilling power electronics are a component of the crawling noise structures in Peterlicker, it's clearly not just his project. F. Hergovich is the vocalist in the band, whose ominous deepthroating vocalizations loom over the entire production, timestretched into undefinable gaping bellows and monstrous Lustmordian howls. C. Schachinger takes his cues from Swans' stalwart guitarist Norman Westberg, in his bent atonal screeches, gritty crackling of white-hot distortion, and dive-bomb arcs of noise that settle upon the ever crawling post-doom basslines of G. Weissegger. Pita and Weissegger fill in the gaps with plenty of crunched noises that buttress the grim arsenal of crusty noise. Imagine Godflesh, if Broadrick forgot to bring his drum machine to the studio, or Swans (circa Cop and Filth) with Gira even more amped up on amphetamines and taking his vocals on a really fucked godhead trip. Needless to say, Nicht is pretty fucking brilliant, regardless of what they chose to call the band.
Petit Mal is the work of Berkeley musician Jim Kaiser, who improvises through a post-Industrial context to arrive at deep hypnotic ambience marred by vocal samples, broken effects, and metallic scrapings. Dark murky drones dominate "A Sense Of Closure," often recalling the densely processed sounds of Troum or Cranioclast. Yet Kaiser is often much looser in his compositions than either of those references, allowing for distortion, misfirings, and analogue errors to accumulate within the overlapping washes of sound. "A Sense Of Closure" is at its best when Kaiser picks up an acoustic guitar to splutter textured strumming not unlike the groundswell of damaged avant-folk (i.e. Neil Campbell, Avarus, Dead Raven Choir, etc.) within the omnipresent dark ambience.
Absolution is another missive of blackened ambience extracted by Bay Area denizen J.Kaiser (aka Petit Mal), once again mining his trusted electro-acoustic set-up of bicycle wheel, shortwave radio, tape loops, and effects. On the first cut "Passover," Kaiser begins with a subterranean gloom, built out of an excess of reverb applied to the metallic scrapes of his bowed bike wheel and incidental noise elements which grate against this mournful bellow that loops out of his reel-to-reel tape deck. Out of this sour atmosphere, Kaiser builds a menacing slab of noise through a series of concussion bomb blasts, thrumbing static from shortwave radio, and squealing divebombs of pierced feedback. The whole piece drips with leaden reverb that further sinks this malcontent set of noise into a depressive, apocalyptic dirge. The much shorter "Other Fields" is also much prettier, although most anything would be pretty next to the ashen bleakness of "Passover." Somber piano notes hang in space against a clatter of wooden objects being randomly tossed in an abandoned warehouse with some tape manipulation in the distance of undefined captured dialogue. File somewhere between Lethe, Anenzephalia, and The New Blockaders. Super limited.
Ascetics is probably the best thing we've heard from Jim Kaiser's Petit Mal project or any of the various collaborations he's done with like-minded Bay Area improvisers and noise tacticians. There's long been a dourness to his junkyard concoctions, but that attitude really seems to click on this short program 3". An overlapping drone from what could be generated from Kaiser's ever-present bicycle wheel, which he has bowed and banged for many years now. The strategy here seems to be less banging and more bowing, or at least extracting the resonant hues from that commonplace object and working those sounds into a thickened drone. On the first piece, Kaiser couples this with a downtuned acoustic guitar strumming, which harkens back to those few records on which Zoviet France sent acoustic guitar chords through their mottled bank of tape delay mechanics. At the same time, there's something sorrowfully doom-y about this track. The second piece lightens things up, but only a little bit, as the predominant tone is of an oppressive haze congealed out of tape hiss, distant amplifier destruction, and traffic noise. On top of this, Kaiser situates a melancholy slow-motion score for piano for a much grittier re-interpretation of Brian Eno's classic Thursday Afternoon. Fantastic stuff here, and super limited to boot!
This live recording from the East Bay denizen Petit Mal (aka J. Kaiser) is much better once removed from the performance space in which it was recorded. Not that there's anything wrong with the Luggage Store per se, but that these dark subterranean rumbles, distance bits of radio transmission, and echoes persisting in a damp gloominess contradict the Luggage Store gallery's crisp white walls and huge windows overlooking San Francisco's Market Street. It's better to consider this performance some apocalyptic ritual recorded out in the industrial wastelands elsewhere in the Bay Area, maybe out near Suisun Bay where the US Navy sends its old World War II era ships to slowly leach their heavy metals into the water and soil.
As on many of Kaiser's projects (NF Orchest, French Radio, and his collaborations with Angela Hsu), the sounds are generated through a reel-to-reel tape, a shortwave radio, and his well-worn bicycle wheel which he plays with a violin bow, achieving similarly dissonant bellows that Organum produced through an ensemble of bowed cymbals. Kaiser's work is more Spartan than Organum's, though with these mournful tones which emit through the metallic shimmer, drone, and scrape, resonating really as if they were transmitting through the hull of one of those rusting ships in Suisun Bay. Limited as is always the case with Kaiser's series of 3" discs.
In recent weeks, Bay Area experimentalist Jim Kaiser offered us a couple of collaborative discs with violinist Angela Hsu; and now's he gotten around to releasing his own work under the moniker Petit Mal. As with his collaboration with Hsu, Kaiser's principle instruments for Petit Mal are the reel-to-reel tape machine and a collection of found metal. There had been a handful of obscurely published albums of mysterious drones and growling electronics that Kaiser issued as Petit Mal, but this is the first we've seen in quite a long time. Sensory Deprivation begins with a crawling rhythm of tape machine noise that seems to share a similar technique as Terry Riley's time lag accumulation devices, although Kaiser's roughly handled noises have the same brutalism as found in Wolf Eyes or Esplendor Geometrico. The next two tracks contain murky depressive drownings of sound, as if Kaiser's tape loops were pulled from the bottom of tar pit and forced through his machines, muck and all. Snippets of conversation pull away from the general torpor, with interjections of varispeed warbling and iron-clad screeches of bowed metal downcast in billowing clouds of sonic decay. Limited edition, of course!
Perhaps it's the most unlikely place to see a performance or an art installation, but the Chapel Of The Chimes in Oakland is a columbarium (an institution that houses cremated remains) that has developed a reputation for hosting artist's installations and sound art events within the dignified, if Byzantine architecture of the space. On the 2005 winter solstice, a handful of Bay Area sound artists performed at the Chapel Of The Chimes dedicated to the "friends in New Orleans," presumably in rememberance of Hurricane Katrina victims. Jim Kaiser (aka Petit Mal) was one of the participants at that winter solstice event, presenting a semi-improvised droned-out atmosphere to meander through the numerous rooms of the Chapel Of The Chimes. Using an array of bowed metals, broken electronics, and effects, Kaiser (who has also recorded extensively as French Radio and NFOrchest) accumulated a variety of fluttered vibrations and scraped tones into a spectral minimalism which parallels the eccentric drone extravangazas of the Taj Mahal Travellers and the obscurant British post-industrial ritualists Metgumbnerbone. Kaiser's drones manage a wraithlike quality without appearing ghastly or terrifying, rather they solemnly hang as a poignant if bleak rememberence to one of the great disasters witnessed by this generation.
Here's one of the 2 new releases from beloved experimental label Utech that we're listing this week, the other being by Suzuki Juzno. Now, before we heard this one, we expected it to be good, 'cause it's on Utech after all, but knowing it was by eclectic French composer Philippe Petite, we didn't know WHAT exactly to expect in terms of sounds - was it gonna be glitchy laptopped electronica? Noisy avant-rock? Droned out soundscapery? Something else? All of the above? Petit has done a lot of things over the years, running both the Pandemonium and Bip-Hop labels, most recently playing in dronesters Strings Of Consciousness... And this is perhaps the heaviest, harshest thing he's been involved with yet, and "all of the above" does just about cover it.
The very first track, "Murmurs", is a collaboration with Justin Broadrick of Jesu/Godflesh/Final/etc. infamy, and that sets the super dark, distorted tone for the whole disc, which consists of 45 minutes of groaning, grinding, grainy, atmospheric instrumental industrial sludge spread over 5 tracks, made with guitars, organs, turntables, percussion, electronic processing, backwards effects, etc... In other words, delightful! That is, if your taste in abstract abrasiveness is at all like ours, partial to passages of subterranean rhythmic skitter mixed with moments of sheer Merzbowian intensity.
The centerpiece of this "Symphonia" is the 16+ minute "Fear Has Fallen", with its martial drumming buried under a sinister miasmic muzz, but the whole disc is quite noisily satisfying throughout. The black clouds of the sleeve art are highly appropriate imagery. Highly recommended!!
Another Italian experimental composer (in league with the likes of Christa Pfangen, 3/4hadbeeneliminated, and Giuseppe Ielasi, who mastered this disc) presents an album on the always-intriguing Die Schachtel label. This belongs to their "Zeit" series documenting contemporary sonic artists and is packaged in a typically handsome digipack (thick matte cardboard, embossed cover design). The title Sintesi Da Un Diario means "abstract from a diary" and that does describe this somewhat: Petronella's music is certainly quite abstract (to use a different sense of the word), and his extensive use of everyday "field recordings" is suggestive of the "diary" angle. It's a detailed, mysterious sound bath indeed, featuring much in the way of rustlings and rumblings, electronic bleep and shimmer, tinkling percussion, obscured talking voices, children playing, clicks and crackle, and more... Petronella is credited with "acousmatics", a term that a little research tells us was coined long, long ago by Greek philosopher Pythagoras to mean "sound hidden from its visual source". Several 20th century composers in electroacoustics and musique concrete, like Pierre Schaeffer and Francois Bayle, have since talked of their work being "acousmatic", and the definition has developed in several directions, one of them having to do with the concept of "reduced listening", wherein the listener processes sound without making any mental/visual references as to the actual source, allowing that sound to exist in and of itself, heard only as timbre, texture, etc.... hmmm all very interesting. We'd have to say that while you certainly can't always tell what's making the sounds found on this particular disc, it's hard to keep your brain from trying to supply some ideas. We need more reduced listening practice! This would certainly be a pleasant way to go about that... or heck just go ahead and use your imagination to make pictures from these sounds, that's fun too.
Demo 1 is the debut release from a New Orleans one man band called Phantom Feel, who traffics in a sort of black metal, but a strain far removed from the grim buzz and black blast of most BM, instead, the vibe is much more woozy and washed out, the opening intro is all lush, smeary swaths draped over skeletal skitter and programmed pulses. The track blossoms into mournful almost shoegazingly melodic sweeps, shimmering dreamily over murky muted riffage, and clouds of soft focus hiss, the sound tied together by spidery minor key guitar melodies keening way off in the background, and cool crooned vocals. The vibe is almost cold wavey, a little gothy, much more like a blackened M83 actually. The second track definitely gets a bit more grim, the buzz more to the fore, the sound a bit more bleak and melancholy, the vocals more tortured, but even then, the sound continues to be more pretty and psychedelic than black and malefic.
But flip the tape over, and the sound slips right back into PF's woozy warbly soundscapery, this time strange processed sampled voices, buried beneath a creeping almost Portishead-y style dirge, warm and liquid, lots of thrum and buzz, all blurred and bleary, the black metal riffage here smeared into hazy distant streaks, while in the foreground the haunting sonic haze roils and churns. Gorgeous stuff for sure. And really only barely black metal. In fact, much of this is WAY too weird for meat-and-potatoes metalheads. Much likelier that if you're into strange dark drone music, psychedelic ambience, creepy slowcore, abstract blackened electronica and other twisted sonic strains, then this is for you.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, and each copy with a hand painted/stamped sigil on the front.
Phantom Limb is a Brooklyn based drone-noise exploratory project that shares some of its members with the clattery improv noise-rock ensemble Peeesseye. It's also one of those projects that claims to channel the creativity all of its members even if they are not present during the recording sessions. Very transcendent, eh? On this production for Gill Arno's art label Unframed, Phantom Limb (here adding the "and Earth's Hypnagogia" to the name) finds just two of the members (Jaime Fennelly and Shawn Hansen) actually recording in the studio, with the absentee members adding their own two cents presumably through astral projection or maybe just heavy drug use.
Fennelly Hansen employ two sets of instruments for this piece: a pair of sine-wave generators and a pair of Farfisa organs. During the first 30 minutes or so of the piece, the two slump over their sine-wave generators which are tuned to an exquisitely body rumbling set of harmonic frequencies. Ones that would make the elder Niblock very proud! When the Farfisas enter the mix with a certain jolt to the narcotic vibe of the sine-wave drones, the mood shifts dramatically towards a sparkling arpeggiation much more in line with the classic Terry Riley pieces of old. Recorded in a single take in a warm sounding room, with all of the rustling and knee shifting that keep the legs from falling asleep. Beautifully designed by Mr. Arno and exquisitely printed by Ben Owen on his letterpress with die-cuts. Limited to 400 copies.
East meets West, two electric guitars meet two organs, a fuzzed out rumbling abstract epic. Phantom Limb just so happens to be 1/2 of Brooklyn noise terrorists PeeEssEye (PSI) who met up with legendary Japanese axeman Tetuzi Akiyama to jam and hang out and the result was this 30 minutes slab of divine droning drift.
Starting out with super spare clatter and rumble, the quartet quickly up the ante, the swirling buzz transforming into huge grinding walls of guitar crumble and amp frying crunch. But this is no simple guitars-against-amps Sunn-drenched dirge. No things get way more interesting. As the guitars start unfurling strange little riffs, repeating and slowly shifting, the organs releasing dense clouds of chordal warmth and ear piercing sine wave skree, everything swaying and shimmering as various internal components twist and transform, gorgeous melancholy melodies appear here and there, haunting angular licks surface, as do strange squeaks and creaks, all the while, a huge soft focus swirl of sound wraps it's fuzzy tendrils around everything. This is definitely noisy, but it's that thick sort of super listenable noise, soothing and dreamlike, more dense and droning than harsh, all the sharp edges rubbed smooth, still explosive and intense and LOUD as hell, but surprisingly blissed out and so subtly serene.
SUPER LIMITED!! ONLY 500 COPIES! We got a bunch but they won't last long...
We first discovered Phantom Limb on the now out of print collaboration with Japanese guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama released on aRCHIVE a few months back. Phantom Limb aka one half of East Coast noisemakers PeeEssEye, brought to the table a cacophony of whirring organs and grinding guitars, a blown out expanse of buzzing drone and strange swirling guitar ambience.
For this disc, Phantom Limb have teamed up with Bison, who as far as we can tell plays contrabass clarinet, and between the two 'outfits' manage to creep and crawl through two half hour slabs of far out drift and roar. the first track see's and saw's back and forth between, blissful tranquility, minimal synthesizer buzz, warm chordal whir and huge grinding slabs of angular low end scrape and squeal, spending more time in the soft than the loud, but the loud bits are extra loud to make up for it.
The second track is one long drone, that works its way through various textures and timbres, it's here that you can really discern the presence of a clarinet, but just barely, this is no free jazz skronk fest, instead, it's a sort of Niblockish war of overtones, slabs of sound beating against one another as tones gradually shift and subtly interact. Dense and deep, layers continually being added and transformed, other layers constantly being peeled away revealing some other strange subtle sonic alchemy underneath. Nice.
Limited to 200, each disc hand numbered.
Packaged in a cool card stock sleeve with printed sticker with liner notes and artwork.
San Francisco's Eric Haney is the man behind the powerdrone project Phantom Pains, which has been popping up in a few gritty warehouses around the Bay Area with a few cassettes under his belt as well. Obelisk is the first tape we've been able to check out, but it's definitely piqued our interested for more. The fuzzy droneshot of guitar/synth/pedals/whatever comes across at first like unkempt variations of the electroid-psychedelic smears of Grasslung or Pulse Emitter; but Phantom Pains stratifies such toneshift with a good chunk of muffled distortion and puretone feedback suspended above a deep and distant roar of jet-engine noise. Despite all of fuzz, hiss, and crunch, Obelisk is quite placid, glacial in movements in and out of the these chunks of activity that slide past each other like stealthy icebergs at midnight. Elsewhere, bell tones coagulate around tape noise into a glistening track not all that far from Peter Wright's guitar drones accelerating through the layers of murk, ash, and grit only to be engulfed by a gasping drone of flanging reverb and Maeror Tri industrialized shadow.
Monorail Trespassing continues to release amazing cassettes of unknown and obscure acts from the US underground of floorcore noise and gnarled drone, and this one from Phantom Pains is certainly one of their best.
Perhaps you remember (and/or have in your cd collection) the Atomsmasher cd released by Hydra Head last year? Lead by avant/ambient guitarist James Plotkin (formerly of weird Earache metal band OLD), and featuring drum god Dave Witte (Human Remains/Discordance Axis/Melt Banana/etc.), with processed "AudioMulch" vocals from DJ Speedranch, Atomsmasher got a pretty enthusiastic recommendation from us at the time, as a unique blend of live (but inhumanly played) drums, avant-noise-sampling guitar, and computer-created chaos. Grindcore electronica?
Well, after a ridiculous legal wrangle with some uptight, clueless pop band that apparently had the rights to the name Atomsmasher (and absurdly accused this Atomsmasher of intentionally 'stealing' it), the Plotkin/Witte/Speedranch project changed their moniker to Phantomsmasher. (I think they should have just called themselves Atomsmashersmasher.) Now they've come out with a new cd, on Mike Patton's Ipecac label. At first listen we weren't sure, and thought maybe the original Atomsmasher cd was superior. This one seemed a bit too...post rock. Not quite like Tortoise or Gastr del Sol though, more metallic (but by no means actually metal) and aggro, kinda like Don Cab. Witte's drumming sounds more real, less computerized than before. There's still insane blasting parts, but also some more straight-ahead boom bap. And Plotkin's thick bass slabs get almost funky. From the get go (track one, "Bishop Hopping"), with Speedranch's weirdly child-like Mulched vocals, it reminded us of a Ruins or Hella record, but thrown in a blender on "high". Cool, but not nearly as out-and-out insanely intense as the noisefest of their first album, though still pretty nuts. But things get more interesting as the Phantomsmasher disc goes along. The chaos coalesces into something more like actual songs, not totally random rhythms and noise-eruptions. In its own, densely complex, distorted, and noisy way, it's kinda catchy! Definitely different from the debut, but they've chosen a worthwhile direction to explore.
Our favorite Finnish hypnorock band Circle, and related offshoots, are always both doing the expected, AND the unexpected. Expected, in that in almost all cases, Circle hew to the repetitive, rhythmic, krautrock-inspired "circular" grooves from whence they get their name. Yet, while adhering to that basic concept, they've managed to put out umpteen dozen upon dozen albums that are all completely different... some spacey and pretty, some heavy and riffy, some with Gregorian style chant, some with operatic metallic vokills, and all brilliant (ask anybody, but especially us!). Pharaoh Overlord, one of the more popular and prolific Circle "side projects", with a lineup almost (exactly?) the same as Circle, has pretty much followed the same path. Originally, ostensibly a "stoner rock" version of Circle (which you can definitely hear on the live lp we recently listed), they got even more truly metal with their last album, #4, maybe the ultimate "NWOFHM" statement from the Circle camp.
That said, this new, 5th album from Pharaoh Overlord is way more unexpected than the expected, content-wise!! Totally different from #4 for sure. There's three long, instrumental tracks here, and each of them is quite different too. The disc begins with the 22:33 of "Vesitorni", a seemingly improvised piece that's extremely quiet, abstract, mysterious. Sudden skitter of the drums. Chiming glimmer of the guitars. Shimmering cymbals. Pulsation of the bass. It's almost "onkyo" in its sparse, low-key, quasi-jazz loveliness. Really nice, and really not at all remotely "NWOFHM".
Then, wham! Maybe we shouldn't even warn you. Track two, "Valujuhla" (12:47) erupts with a frenzy of loud, chaotic, freeform freaking-out. Here is where we wonder, is Siluurikaudella the record on which the PO/Circle guys go free jazz? Seems like it. And it kinda makes sense. Up until now, they've been famed for their motorik, locked-in, precise clockwork rhythms. With this, it's like those clockwork gears have come unsprung, gone completely haywire, and everyone's playing everything all at once, anarchy reigns! It had to happen, something had to give. But, then this track too quiets down, and we can tell Pharaoh Overlord still have it under control.
Following that, the eighteen minute "Piirros" takes over the final portion of the disc. It shares some similarities with the first track, staying mostly quiet and abstract. But it's definitely got more of a propulsive groove-shuffle going on underneath. And rather than abstract jazz... it reminds us of an abstract, creaky, cavernous blues. Super moody and dark and weird. Probably our favorite of the three.
So, PO definitely surprised us with this one. Took a short while to get our heads around. But now we're definitely digging it. And think that Circle, Doktor Kettu, Keiji Haino, Nels Cline, Tetuzi Akiyama, even Jandek fans will totally dig it too. Improvised, instrumental, eccentric! Oh yeah.
Pharmakon is the nom de guerre for death-industrialist Margaret Chardiet, who has catapulted out of nowhere into the spotlight thanks to this high profile release on Sacred Bones. There's no way that Pitchfork would touch a Sudden Infant album of fucked-up, Dada noise or some of that infernal terror of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. What the hell would they do with Caroliner, for fuck's sake? But Pharmkon's first proper album of blood-curdled screams, dehumanized martial rhythms, and blistered noise did get a rather glowing (if off the mark) review from Pitchfork. The thing is that Abandon is a pretty damn good record, and it would only be nice if the media outlets that claim to have the fingers on the pulse of musical culture would dig just a little deeper beyond Wolf Eyes, Prurient, and now Pharmakon to showcase just what is festering in the noise underworld. Of course, that's never going to happen. Avid readers of this aQuarius recOrds newsletter will certainly know that even what we manage to get in is just the tip of the iceberg. But here stands Pharmakon's Abandon. Dragging chains and muffled whispers scrape through the elongated scream of the opening salvo of Abandon. Her vocals have the demonic rage of William Bennett's throatripping, although Chardiet is not one to enunciate her poetry with the clarity of Bennett. When she switches to a Diamanda Galas deep vibrato moan on "Pitted" to match the flatline death-throe drone and slow, metal bashed rhythms, Chardiet gets at what all of those solo Jarboe records *should* sound like, with those harrowing vocalizations accompanied by a lumbering crawl akin to those channelled by Brighter Death Now. "Crawling On Bruised Knees" could be a lost SPK track circa Information Overload Unit, perfectly encapsulating the sound of industrial dread and horror circa 1981. Like we said, this is a pretty damn good album. The cd has a 27 minute bonus track!!
This is the first release from the French Trio Pheromone, released on Bruce Russell's Corpus Hermeticum label. This trio makes spare and expansive soundscapes using guitar, hurdy gurdy, electronics, contact mics and various electro-acoustic devices. This single piece (tracked as 2 tracks) was recorded live and mixed by Eric La Casa and Pierre-Henri Thiebaut at home. The band sets up in the corners of the room and surrounds the audience, while enveloping them in an abstract cloud of stuttering samples, rhythmic pulses, clicks and scrapes, hums and whirs, buzz and skree, strum and clatter that all seemingly follow some mysterious and non linear-narrative. Gorgeously difficult.
Dave Phillips doesn't give us a lot to go on here, but all of the clues point to this being the most fucked-up break-up record ever. Sure, there's plenty of emo bands and sensitive singer-songwriters who pine over their broken hearts with oh-so earnest lyrics and anthemic crescendos; but if you were to break the heart of a twisted Swiss aktionist with a penchant for violent noise outbursts, industrial-doomscaping, and slaughterhouse ambience, you get an album far more wracked with the depths of abject loneliness. Like we said, we can't be sure that this is a break-up record, but Phillips does state the album was recorded as a "therapeutic process during a period dominated by severe disturbances of loss, mental abysses and despair." And he does dedicate this album to Thala, who may have been his girlfriend at one time, but certainly had appeared in several rather disturbing performances with Phillips. Those performances involved a mattress wired up with numerous contact microphones and the two engaging in rather violent sex, with the noises of the groaning mattress tossed back at the audience through explosive amplification.
Of course, Phillips is a member of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe of Swiss aktionists, alongside Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and G*Park. He was also the man responsible for that Dead Peni record released in 2008 on Blossoming Noise, and was the drummer for Fear Of God, which was like the Swiss equivalent to Napalm Death way back when. In all of those references, this album with all of its fragmented noises, nocturnal events, funereal dirges from an accordion, and fatalistic dronescaping falls more on the G*Park end of the spectrum, preferring mystery through abstraction rather than scatological expulsions of bloodcurdling skree. A few brief interludes of softened white noise dappled with various forest-dwelling field recordings opens the album, snapping to a halt with a 12 minute uncomfortable track that seems to recycle one of those sexually explicit performances. Phillips clips and cuts the moans of a woman rapt in sexual ecstasy, matching that with a male voice which has been pitch shifted way down to a demonic growl. Yes, this gets into the same problematic territory that you get with Brainbombs or Whitehouse, but given how Phillips treats the male protagonist in this exchange (and especially, if he is the man behind that voice), it's very clear that there is to be no sympathy for him. The despair to which this album speaks is of his own making. At the conclusion of this track, Phillips turns to his accordion which sways between two dour notes and a series of nocturnal recordings. Clusters of notes hammered at the very low end of the pianos keyboard are struck and extended into Lustmordian passages of bleak ambience, and there are further examples of Phillips' Aktionist pedigree with a scream session rhythmically locked to a series of meat-cleaving blows. There is nothing pretty about this album, and it is really quite a depressing opus when you come down to it. Break-up record or not, it's utterly powerful and absolutely not for the squeamish.
Dave Phillips began his musical career when he was 17, co-founding the hardcore extremists Fear of God in 1987. As Fear of God developed into Switzerland's answer to Napalm Death or Carcass, Phillips began to see that their faster, shorter, noisier approaches to grindcore were merely a springboard for more psychologically challenging and physically demanding artforms. Soon after Fear of God's demise in 1989, he met up with Rudolf Eb.er of Runzelstirn & Gurglestock and joined the actionist Schimpfluch-Gruppe which has followed the traditions of abjection and transgression as dictated by the Viennese Aktionists (i.e. Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Otto Muhl, etc.). In performances punctuated with short sharp bursts of noise, the Schimpfluch-Gruppe quite literally plays with vomit, blood, and all of the fluids from bodily orifices. If it sounds juvenile, it is; but both Phillips and Eb.er also manage to make their gross-out sessions numbingly effective manifestations of the nether regions of the human psyche. Along with the official Schimpfluch-Gruppe actions, Phillips has performed with Sudden Infant, PK, and Ohne which had received a considerable amount of acclaim with their Mego debut of electrocutionist musique concrete.
On IIIII, Phillips recorded work proves to be just as absurdist, nihilistic, and nauseating as his performances. The noise comes quite sporadically, and when it does, Phillips clobbers you over the head with volatile sick tones and splattered distortion; but the bulk of IIIII waits with a tense silence until wooden hammerings, demonic growlings, blister-pricked ruptures, and unsettling screams shatter the empty spaces. As a result, Phillips' work is far more nervewrecking that maximalists like Merzbow or The New Blockaders. Even if you have a stomach strong enough for R.H.Y. Yau and Runzelstirn & Gurglestock, Phillips makes for very difficult listening.
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Five years in the making, Illusion Is a Natural Condition brings together two of the finest noise artists the world has ever witnessed. Sure, Merzbow and Hijokaidan can hit you with their molten sounds of psychedelic excess; but San Francisco's Randy Yau and Switzerland's Dave Phillips achieve their tempestous recordings through a violent dichotomy between silence and sound. This sharp contrast effectively puts you on edge throughout the listening experience, as you never know when the next attack is going to arrive. In any given track, Yau and Phillips pack together recordings of their gutteral screams and dribbling gurgles of one of the actionists shoving something down his throat that just doesn't belong there. Occasionally, the sound of flies circle around the sickened vocalizations, as if investigating a hospital patient with a sucking chest wound. Pigs squeal. Demons roar. All of these sounds are compressed into track rarely longer than a minute, punctured by extended silences and ruptured by terse blasts of motorized noise and absurdly rendered ultra-violence that would bring joy (or is that pain?) to die-hard Wolf Eyes' fans. Recommended noise for those with a very strong stomach.
Tomas Phillips is a literary professor (currently teaching at NC State) and a lowercase electronic composer, whose work has been alternatingly brilliant and somewhat banal. Such is the dilemma in using minimal constructions and reduced sound sources as Phillips is wont to do. His 2003 On Dit album for Trente Oiseaux was an impressive album for sure, harkening back to the earlier musique concrete sensibility of Jim O'Rourke especially the album Scend. But since then, the albums have been rather polite but somewhat uninteresting. Fortunately, our skepticism ends with Les Mailles, an album Phillips composed with fellow North Carolinian Dean King.
The title translates from the French as 'the meshes' and specifically references Maya Deren's 1943 film Meshes Of The Afternoon, one of the earliest successes of American avant-garde film that worked through repetitively imagery to unveil an interlocking series of psychological symbols culminating in the protagonist's own suicide. Where that films is quite striking in its imagery even in its slow repetitions, the Phillips & King construct is incredibly subtle, maintaining a slow rumbling drone pocked with small renderings of digital artifacts, ghostly harmonic swells, and quiet field recordings of incidental sounds from enclosed spaces. At times, the album can be quite reverberant and achieve a similarly wintery paralysis that comes from listening to Thomas Koner's recordings; but out of these darkened passages, the two interlock distilled melodies (maybe from the digitally tricked out sounds of a piano?) and fizzing textures that align much more with the 12K / Richard Chartier ethos. Very nicely done.
A new brief blast of bizarre brilliance from AQ pal Ergo Phizmiz. The centerpiece of this EP is an Ergo-ized version of a song by another AQ favorite, People Like Us. The already silly, and chopped up musical metaverse of People Like Us gets even more sliced and diced, stuttering and hiccupping, like an outer space, junglized, countrified and funkified dose of acid fried exotica. The other two tracks continue in the demented exotica vein, with carnivalesque loops, kazoo melodies, burping faux horns, cricket like rhythms, and clankety clattery almost industrial chimes and percussion that mutate into slippery slide guitar and woozy melodiousness. Good stuff.
The best radio station in the world, WFMU, turned us on to young Mr. Phizmiz, a multi instrumentalist, writer, inventor, musician and all around crazy guy who makes some really weird cool music. Only 23, Ergo has already written several operas, recorded 20 albums, almost all of them unreleased, invented tons of musical instruments, created a 12 hour multi media project, done radio programs for Resonance FM and WFMU, recorded tons of soundtracks for TV and the stage as well as made hundreds of animated films and numerous sculptures and installations. Phew. So here it is. The first of those 20 albums to see the light of day. It's weird -- that's the first thing you'll notice. The opening track is a demented toy instrument cabaret, with mumbling vocals buried in the mix, wailing kazoos, warbling music box melodies and lots of maniacal shouting! The record unfolds a little more subtly after that, shifting from stuttery, hiccupping rhythms under toy xylophones and programmed beats to moody, almost Boards Of Canada-ish melancholy electronica to creepy crawly Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones-esque late night loungy murk, to strummy, whispery Brit rock balladeering. Weird but quite cool.
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The return of the truly genius and truly wild and weird Ergo Phizmiz. You may have read about him in the most recent issue of the Wire. Or you may have picked up one of his cd-r's that we listed here in the past, including a disc of interpretations of The The songs. Well, if you dug that one here's another one for you. Tweaked and twisted versions of songs by nu metallers System Of A Down! Fear not, the songs are barely recognizable, in fact a couple of times it made us laugh out loud these "versions" were so bizarre. Jungle rhythms, soaring soundtrack strings, skipping exotica records, creepy holiday music, and bleating trombones are smeared wildly over sliced and diced chunks of the original songs. Sounds like something that would be right at home on Tigerbeat 6 or Violent Turd.
Holy mission to Mars! What a fantastic discovery, the first we've heard from Phobonoid, a one man black metal / industrial / noise outfit from Phobos, and yep, that's one of the moons of Mars, and the music on Orbita is a high concept soundtrack to the end of civilization on Mars, as viewed from Phobos, and also BY the god Phobos, culminating in the eventual meeting between Phobos and his brother Deimos, on the scorched surface of the ruined red planet. And sonically, that's sort of what it sounds like, opening with a dense cloud of blacknoize, darkly billowing, ominous and sinister, eventually frenzied riffing begins to emerge from the blackness, a roiling sonic chaos, that instead of bursting into blasting black buzz, blurs and swirls into a grinding, almost orchestral buzz, a lurching doom-drone creep, wreathed in electronic fuzz and glitched out crumbling distortion, before erupting into a blown out Godflesh style industrial dirge, the sounds mutated and on the verge of collapse, electronic flecked heaviness, that buried blackness bleeding over the mechanized rhythms and the insectoid riffing. And that's just the first track! From there on out, Phobonoid paints a bleak sonic picture of Mars' ruination, achingly melancholy guitar buzz blossoms into blackened industrial blasts, the vocals a demonic rasp, the programmed drums relentless and robotic, inhumanly fast at times, but constantly slipping back into a monstrous, crushing plod, the sound almost psychedelic, dense and lushly layered, noisy and super distorted. Throughout the 7 songs here, the sound is in constant flux, a dizzying barrage of black tarpit creep, churning atonal blasts, mechanized metallic buzz, with one gorgeously austere stretch of blurred, almost blissed out industrial ambience, before one final blast, of majestically epic mechanoid black buzz. So good!
The Phoenix Cube is the latest blast of glorious underground weirdness from the always reliable UK micro-label Barl Fire, and offers up our first taste of The Phoenix Cube, a varied collection of beautiful sounds. Some folky and dreamy, some spacey and psychedelic, which makes sense when you realize that the man behind the Phoenix Cube is a writer for psych rock bible Ptolemaic Terrascope...
The first track pretty much sets the tone, dark and dolorous, spaced out dreamlike and unpredictable, a lengthy abstract collage of the opening track, all distant drones, fluttering flutes, tribal drumming, spoken word snippets, tinkling piano, murky swirls of FX which eventually and quite unexpectedly breaks into some sort of skittering rhythmic workout. From there on out, the record drifts from morose balladic folk, to blissed out Hawkwindy space rock, to crumbling expanses of dark ambience, to shuffling hippy strum, to warm whirring organscapes, to the creepy final track, all rumbling didgeridoos and simple hand drums, a droning and divine pagan musical ritual.
Packaged in a full color sleeve with a printed full color cardstock insert.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Ever wonder what a SUNNO))) record might sound like if instead of guitars and amps, it was just vocals? Well wonder no more. This new record on Ideologic Organ, a new label run by SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley, offers up an incredible collection of ritualistic Tibetan vocal music, from a Russian group called Phurpa, and is easily the darkest, heaviest, most intense and breathtaking record we've heard in ages.
Anyone who has heard Tuvan throat singers live, or experienced the chanted prayers of Tibetan monks, know the power of the human voice, the mysterious harmonies, and strange overtones, with Tuvan's adding an extra tone, each vocalist creating his own harmonies, or Tibetan monks creating specific overtones, much like the sounds captured here, but these voices while similar to classic Tibetan Buddhist rites, are actually unike any monastic chanting we've ever heard.
If you edited out the breaths, this could be some fucked up Lustmordian drone record, a thick near static wall of rumbling, reverberating sound, but the voices here are so organic, so pure and emotional, so much more intense and moving than any sort of synthesized sound, and with all five members singing, it creates this deep, lustrous, impossibly dark and downright scary, rib cage rattling harmony, a low end thrum that is so powerful, but not just sonically, these sounds connect on a much deeper level because of their pure humanity, no instruments, no effects, no amplification, this is some deep and primal soundmaking, similar sounds have been created and used for worship and mediation for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, it's the first instrument, the human voice, here pushed to its limit, creating a sound few can conceive of, a sound conjured up from the lungs, the heart, the soul, devastatingly powerful, and impossibly massive. The pieces here augmented with traditional Tibetan instruments, but usually only to introduce a song, otherwise, it's a symphony of rumbling tones and deep vocal thrum, the sound darkly meditative, and mysteriously mesmerizing, occasionally building into a sound heavier than ANY metal record you've ever heard, and when the chants finally stop, it's like a vacuum, all the air sucked out of the room, the utter and inevitable silence that follows such deep devotional sound.
So utterly gorgeous, totally and breathtakingly mesmerizing, consider this a should have been Record Of The Week. Absolutely a new favorite, and again, just about the most amazing sounds we've ever heard...
One of THEE most gorgeous cover designs we've seen from O'Malley yet, one that perfectly suits the music, a faded out image of a hand, holding some sort of mysterious ritualistic implement, an instrument perhaps, in front of a barely visible hooded figure, a truly haunting image, with Cyrillic characters printed over the top in a clear reflective spot varnish, the records housed in printed inner sleeves with stark black and white images of the cloaked members of the group, all seated on a stage, surrounded by their instruments, so completely visually breathtaking.
Huzzah! This hard to find import from '99 has now gotten somewhat better US distribution, and we're happy to have it. Osaka-based bizarre-beat DJ Pika Pika Pika is actually Eye Yamantaka, mastermind of the Boredoms. This mix cd comes housed in a translucent green jewel case overprinted with an abstract pink and orange design. The case's innards are nice too, with more of Eye's trademark colorful crazy collage art Eye's interest in both collage and sampling has been evident for a long time, from his involvement in the hiphop project Audio Sports, to his cut-up shennanigans on his noise band Hanatarash's 4 album, to the various recent heavily-studio-manipulated Boredoms releases, but here is his first ever recorded DJ set. And, unlike Hanatarash 4, on this one all samples are cleared, and clearly credited...so it's with full authority (no guessing games) that I can tell you you're gonna hear everything from minimalist composer Philip Glass to Bay Area turntablist DJ Disk to British electronica artist Twisted Science to the water drums of the Baka Forest People on Planetary Natural Love Gas Webbin' 199999! What ties it all together and makes it flow is the quirkiness of Eye's selections -- his deftness as a DJ notwithstanding, the segues are rather more playful than beat-driven. But there are plenty of beats, bubbly ones at that, it's just that they're accompanied by such weirdness that your typical club-going dancer probably couldn't deal with it. Eye is as likely to make use of the funky jazz breaks of Japanese artist Woodman as he is to throw in the sounds of the Wedell Seals from the AQ-fave Antarctica cd recorded by naturalist Douglas Quin (yay!). This weird and wonderful disc gives some interesting insight into the contents of Eye's eclectic record collection, for sure, and thus somehow can also increase our understanding of (or possibly heighten our confusion about) his work in the Boredoms, for those inclined to puzzle about such things.
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We haven't heard from Canadian outfit Picastro in ages, in fact, we sort of assumed they might be no more. In past reviews we described their music as having a "somber heaviness" which makes them a pretty good match for doomgaze duo Nadja, and indeed the two groups team up for this lp collaboration, and from the sound of it, the A side seems to be more of a Picastro record, with Nadja guesting, and the B side a Nadja record with help from Picastro. But both sides are pretty great.
Picastro's 'side' is a series of shorter tracks, a woozy sort of post rock, detuned twang, male and female vocals, plenty of weird distortion, there's a Tom Waits sort of junkyard vibe to a lot of the sounds here, which also reminds us of the late great Reeks And The Wrecks (whose lost first lp is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list). The sound shifts from creeping slowcore to a sort of jazzy drift, all shimmering strings and muted percussion, all wreathed in a folky ambience, the whole thing like some abstract dirgey drone folk slowcore, and the sort of thing that reminds us of Codeine and post Phleg Camp weirdo country combo the Reveries.
The flipside is a single sidelong track, which should be the first hint that Nadja are in the driver's seat. The second would of course be the thick swirling buzz, rife with acoustic guitar (Picastro?), the sound muted and washed out, before blossoming into full on distorted shoegazey dirge, blown out, heavy and hazy, but still melodic and darkly pretty, the two groups a perfect match, conjuring up a sweet bit of dreamy sorta folky doom bliss!
Includes a download coupon!
Another great archival electronic music release, Heliograms was recorded between 1976 and 1980 and it's one of the earliest examples of digital synthesis. Composed of four long tracks, Heliograms seems like a connective tissue from the prog-minded kraut of Klaus Schulze to the deep digital new age of David Parsons. Piche, a French-Canadian composer and video artist was among the first to employ emerging digital technologies to electroacoustic compositions. The resulting sound is one of deep cylindrical dronescapes and propulsive momentum that is at times either elementally heavy or blissfully airy. Side two is the airier side and the track "Rouge" has a percussive element that reminds us of Harald Grosskopf or Ashra, before settling into the drifting peacefulness of the title track. There, the cavernous dronescapes of the first side, open up to piano and harp-like textures that seem to levitate the tone of the record to a higher plane. Fantastic!
Our pal Jason's Ormolycka label puts out some of the coolest weirdest shit, all of it super limited, most so much so that we rarely get enough to list, in the past we've had the tape version of the Liturgy record (which featured a remix by our very own Andee!), as well as the Death Grips Exmilitary tape (relisted elsewhere on this week's list), and now this week we have a whole bunch of releases, finally in amounts enough to list, one of which is this tape, from Denver witch house / electro pop outfit Pictureplane, whose sound drags the woozy lo-fi drag of witch house into total bumpin' electro pop territory, big beats, fuzzed out synths, sexy vox, skittery rhythms, warped loops, soulful and synthy, funky and poppy, super summer jams for late night dancefloor bliss outs.
Recently remixed by the likes of Coldcut, Fatboy Slim, William Orbit and a bunch of French people, this is the ORIGINAL ballet soundtrack that Pierre Henry scored in the late 60s, a truly bizarre mixture of psych rock and musique concrete. Rare import, hence the price.
Two local Bay Area luminaries team up to may tribute to their dub / drone / minimal idols, Augustus Pablo, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman, and Sun Ra, a pretty tall order, but these two are well up to the task. Dax Pierson, you might know from playing in Subtle and 13&God, Robert Horton, for his many drone-y and drifty cd-r releases (a bunch we've reviewed here) and tons of mind blowing collaborations with all sorts of fellow sonic travellers. A chance meeting and a discovered shared love of the above mentioned musical visionaries led these two to collaborate on this disc right here. A score written by Horton, Pierson on the melodica (shades of Pablo) some cello, some vocals, all blurred and stretched out into some minimal abstract dronedub, heavier on the drone, that manages to be haunting and mysterious, spacious and spare, warm and emotional.
The dub element is subtle, here and there the cello switches from long bowed notes to rubbery pizzicato melodies, Piersons wheezing chordal clusters spiral off into sweet major key figures, but they always slip back into a swirling shimmering miasma of warm washed out whir and buzz. The first half of the record sounds more like a Sunroof! record than a dub record, all keening high end and warm metallic reverberations. The record slips into some weird dubbed out field recordings part way through, sort of like Jewelled Antler remixed by King Tubby, before once again slipping into another sun dappled dreamy ur-drone.
Not knowing the roots of this collaboration, or perhaps if the record had a different title, one might not necessarily hear as much of the various elements and influences, but they are most definitely there, deftly employed within a sound that on the surface might at first sound like a more 'traditional' abstract ambient drone cd, but even then, there seems to be something just a little different going on, something strange, and mysterious, a sound or a vibe that transforms this into a sonic experience much more distinctive and unique, a 'something' you don't need to recognize or understand or even really hear consciously to enjoy. Beautiful.
What might you expect from a band called Pig Heart Transplant? With a record called Hope You Enjoy Heaven? And song titles like "Prison / Fortress", "Crawling Through Hell", "Abject. Debased. Diseased" and "I Video Tape Your Diet"? What if the band featured members of Spazz, Silentist, Iron Lung, Despise You, Artimus Pyle, Gob, Brainoil and more? What if we told you they shared some splits with dirgedoomnoise duo Blue Sabbath Black Cheer? Yeah, you'd probably come up with something like THIS.
A punishing slab of slow motion power violence, crushing downtuned guitars, pounding drums, harsh hellish vokills, everything dripping with filth and murk, total Man Is The Bastard worship for sure. Low end all over the place. Some tracks the guitars are burning hot, the production way in the red, others are super creeped out murkscapes of industrial pound and processed vox, while still others are sludge-doom trawls through all manner of crusty low slung dirgemetal, and a couple are long buzzing drones, with howled vocals over the top, sounding a bit like a low end deathmetal Whitehouse. Maybe our favorite track though, is "Feeding From Your Trough", reminding us a bit of Geronimo, a fucked up mechanical sprawl of pounding crunch and hissing static, dripping with distortion and noise, locked into a stumbling lurching rhythm, with some chunks of grinding heaviness that sound like they could blow out your speakers, slipping from clipped robotic trudge, to hateful blacknoise dirge and back again. Some seriously harrowing shit for sure. Which as you probably know by now, means WAY recommended. At least for those in the mood for some murky and menacing musical punishment.
