Folks went nuts for the PHT full length we reviewed a few weeks back, so here we have two new slabs of murky, muddy, downtuned sludge drenched power violence. Both tracks are gloriously crusty and filthy and so so so heavy, and would have fit perfectly on the full length.
One side features a massive lurching riff over machinelike drumming and howled vokills, pounding and relentless but strangely hypnotic almost like a sludgier Geronimo. The flip side is even doomier and more spaced out, with crushing low end, squiggly streaks of feedback, all wound into a lumbering grinding slow motion behemoth, with glass gargling vocals all beneath a thick layer of buzzy grit.
The weird part about this 7" is that both tracks, each side, features essentially an entirely different lineup! There's only one guy who plays on both sides and on one he plays drums, while on the other he plays bass. We knew they were a sort of collective and this seems to prove it. Especially considering that both sides definitely and distinctly reek of that filthy blackness that could only be Pig Heart Transplant.
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Latest chunk of blackened heaviness from aQ faves, Pig Heart Transplant, who we just discovered are now aQ neighbors! Not sure most folks would be all that thrilled to discover these guys were your new neighbors, not once they feasted their ears on this stuff. Downtuned pounding sludge, Godflesh style, or maybe Swans, metal laced with industrial pummel, massive grinding guitars, monstrous drumming, harsh vox that slip into deep bellowed croons, some sort of churning, chugging avant noise rock doom, like some impossible hybrid of Swans/Wolf Eyes/Godflesh/Eyehategod, or something. The track has a rad outro of abstract buzz, laced with strange bursts of metallic clatter, washed out and eerily hypnotic.
PHT are up against Juhyo, who we've never heard before, but after hearing this are way into checking out more. A glitched out electronic buzz gives way to something much more haunting and droney, deep sonic swells beneath processed reverbed samples, the vibe super cinematic, the track drifts and drifts until it's swallowed up by a wall of SuUNNO)))-like thrum, pelted with streaks of sine wave high end, before melting down into a droney creepy sample heavy drift. So good.
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After a couple of fantastic full lengths, and a handful of equally impressive singles, comes the latest long player of washed out psychfolk from this East Coast duo, whose sound, as on past records, continues to slip between moody broody Portisheady lope, and fuzz drenched hazy dreamfolk, often meshing the two, adding murky drum machine pulses to swirling ethereal steel string drift.
On Liasons, Pigeons sound even more deliriously druggy and dreamy, the downtempo trip-hop elements now relegated to the occasional electronic rhythm, instead their sound moves further into much murkier sonic waters, more soft focus and fuzzy, infusing their already gauzy sound with swaths of Galaxie 500 like slowcore shimmer and blurred Bongwater-esque Shimmy Disc fug. In fact, for those of you who remember Bongwater's gorgeous cover of Roky Erickson's "You Don't Love Me Yet", much of Pigeons' Liasons plays out like variations of that lilting lo-fi, drugfolk avant pop sound, spindly steel string guitars, whirring organs, occasional bits of programmed rhythm, loads of delay and reverb, and of course those angelic echo drenched vocals.
Liasons is definitely the group's slowest and prettiest and most introspective record yet, a dark languorous drift, almost all of the way through, although the band do throw in a Serge Gainsbourg cover, and finish off with a track that's way more abstract and druggy, psychedelic and OUT, with woozy billows of soft guitar, stretched across an expanse of hum and whir, while the vocals soar and trill and keen, evoking some dark surreal late night otherworld. So nice. Psych folk(s) will dig for sure, but anyone into that Best Coast / Dum Dum Girls sound, looking for something darker and dreamier and druggier, might get into this as well...
Pigeons are a Northwestern husband and wife psych folk duo, augmented by members of No Neck Blues Band and other NNBB offshoots, and this is Pigeons full length number two, released appropriately enough on the always kick ass Olde English Spelling Bee label, and this is indeed a gorgeous chunk of psychedelic folk, dark and heavy and hypnotic, big simple motorik drumming, distorted psychedelic guitar leads, simple acoustic guitar strum and heavenly ethereal vocals, not to mention various keyboards, and bits of percussion, total Wicker Man seventies style acid folk, but definitely modernized, imagine a young hippy folksinger in the UK in the seventies, suddenly transported to now, hooking up with the new breed of lysergic bedroom folk pop alchemists, well, this is the most likely result, at its core, pure lilting dream folk, but all wrapped up in strange swooping backwards guitars, fluttering flutes, detuned doomy riffs, skittery percussion, glitchy electronics, buzzy swaths of processed effects drenched psychswirl, wild spidery melodies, tons of reverb, and strange little bits of sonic detritus, all blurred into gorgeously lush lysergic acid folk, at once timeless and classic sounding, but also weirdly modern, almost like a Karen Dalton or Vashti Bunyan for the warped lo-fi garage pop set. Which is just as good as it sounds.
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We will be the first to admit being skeptical of records comprised of ambient tones and poetry, but the Piiptsjilling collective has produced a beguiling and beautiful record that never forces the issue either through the spoken word or through the contemplative, cinematic abstractions they produce. One of the principle soft-noise makers in Piiptsjilling (which we've been instructed to pronounce as 'peep-chilling') is Rutger Zuydervelt better known as Machinefabriek. Alongside him, the ensemble is fleshed out by Jan Kleefstra, Romke Kleefstra, and Mariska Baars, but for all of the members in Piiptsjilling, the quartet is to be noted for their restraint. Quiet loops from the various guitars slowly build over the course of each extended track, with elegant, emotionally pregnant phrases of half-melody / half-shadow worthy of a Stars Of The Lid track messed against the minimalist tension of those early Main recordings and dappled with the scrabbled guitar work that Blixa Bargeld managed on the understated Neubauten record Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala. The poems come by way of Jan Kleefstra, who quietly utters everything in Frisian, an obscure language spoken in the northern corner of the Netherlands, and his voice is just a hair above a whisper. So even if we could understand Frisian, the soft-spoken nature of his delivery further pushes the words as faint, ghost-like utterances. The Machinefabriek aesthetic can certainly be felt in Piipstjilling, although the compositions he helped build here are far more serene and spacious than anything he's produced before. Fans of Machinefabriek should definitely take note of this! That also goes for those keen on Oren Ambarchi and Celer.
Here's some fucked-up, lo-fi collage music composed from 1968-1972 by two New Zealand artists, neither of which seem to have much in the way of a history before these recordings or even afterward. All we are left with is this head-scratching document loosely contextualized by an anonymously penned piece of academic writing that pretty much tells us this is fucked-up, lo-fi collage music amidst the five dollar wordplay. Appropriated snippets from the Apollo 11 lunar landing communications, and the Beatles' Help poster on the cover are the smallest of entry points to this album of murkily recorded potato mash of free-noise improvisation, varispeed tape manipulation, gritty vinyl abuse, and tonal smear. These primitive excursions in free-noise unhinged from various sources were contemporaries to the Canadian performance art / sound collage project Intersystems (albeit without any of the authoritarian vocal delivery from Intersystems' Blake Parker) and closer to home, looks forward to the advent many years later of New Zealand innerspace weirdos Sandoz Lab Technicians.
An extremely pretty, moody, mellow droney solo album from Italian electric guitarist Stefano Pilia... we neglected to list this when it came out some months ago but realized a) it's great and b) he's a member of recent AQ Record Of The Week scoring group 3/4hadbeeneliminated, so some of you just might want to know about this! Healing Memories was previously released a few years ago as a cd-r by Last Visible Dog, but now LVD have updated it with extra tracks and issued it as a real cd. As it should be, since it's quite nice indeed. Constructed mostly with tones and textures from an electric guitar, with some synth and electronics, tape loops and turntable. Slowly unfolding instrumental soundscapes that shiver with sensitive beauty. Restrained, relaxed, gorgeous. For fans of the likes of James Blackshaw, Steven R. Smith, and Giuseppe Ielasi.
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If the Dead C did an electronic album, trying to replicate via electronics their trademark humid feedback dinscapes (the kind that tentatively waver between song and squallid chaos), you'd be pretty close to what Australian electronic scavenger Paul Gough (aka Pimmon) does. This is a limited cd-r release from the Freedom Form label, and follows Pimmons outstanding work for Kraak and Meme.
Pimmon is the work of Australian soundsculptor Paul Gough, who released a fascinating album on Meme a while back. His sound of electronics fused with processed field recordings falls between the sterile glitch music of Noto/Roel Meelkop and the evocative drone work of Organum or Andrew Chalk. "Kinetica" swells in full pendulum swing between order and chaos, with unpredictable slabs of radar blips and granular distortions giving way to ghostly melodies and drifting ambience.
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Paul Gough who records under the moniker Pimmon has been one of the more prolific exports from the Australian sound art community. His work deals specifically with sonic abstraction using the tools of the digital age to expand the practices of '60 academic composers such as Parmegiani's chaos-theory constructions or Xenakis' stochastic models. Yet Pimmon's work never comfortably sits in the space of modernist thinking towards 'art for art's sake;' there is a filmic theatricality and clever use of playful motifs that run throughout his work. This is particularly true for "XXXX" where little toy piano melodies spin in tandem with devilish air raid mantras whilst everything has been shattered under the hammer of digital signal processing. Such contradictory sounds, which run rampant through all of the Pimmon recordings, are not at all ironic, but speak of an acute understanding of metaphoric complexity. Pimmon's use of laptop trickery is quite unique, as it tends to focus on thick chunks of looping sound rather than the minutae of granular synthesis. If Autechre continues towards rhythmic antithesis, they'll probably end up where Pimmon started.
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In contrast to the *O record on Meme (a record of unparalleled, um, well... soundlessness), Pimmon's "Waves and Particles" actually registers quite nicely within the noisy ambient field of Aquarius. Paul Gough has recorded two albums as Pimmon, the first being a fairly well distributed CDr (though it didn't make its way over here) which garnered immediate attention from Fat Cat, Static Caravan, and Meme. It's easy to see what those avant-electronica labels found so captivating in Pimmon's work; an unholy marriage of old-school analogue sound production and intricate digitized patterns of repetitive spaces, phasing in and out of painterly dissonance.
Pimmon is probably one of the best know artists in Celebrate Psi Phenomena (other than Birchville Cat Motel) and here offers more unique Australian 'electronica.' Rumbling and gurgling low end, haunting and atmospheric with rhythmic crackle over found sound
Hurrah, we have a double dose of Richard Pinhas for you this week!
We've just stocked and reviewed the latest album from this French prog pioneer (Metal/Crystal, his collaboration with Wolf Eyes and Merzbow. Check out what we had to say about it elsewhere on this aQ List!), but we've also just gotten a reissue of a stellar album of his that we've never carried before! L'Ethique was recorded back in 1982 and orginally released in 1991. The ten tracks (the original nine plus one bonus cut) enshrouds your headspace with immensely atmospheric and propulsive French prog. Some here found it to closely resemble that of Magma as well as his own band Heldon (such as on "The Western Wail Pt. 1"). The latter isn't really all that surprising since his Heldon bandmates contributed a good deal to the proceedings. This album covers a lot of territory - moving through stretches of both glorious beauty (such as on "Melodic Simple Transition") and reelingly ominous aggression (such as on "Belfast" and the bonus track"Southbound"). Heavy with electronics, analog synthesizers and processed electric guitars, this is sure to satiate any cravings for the dark, heady and dystopic. Yes, highly recommended!
Thee prolific master of Japanese noise, Merzbow, once again teams up with French '70s synth-prog veteran, guitarist Richard Pinhas of AQ faves Heldon. Their first collaboration, the double disc Keio Line from 2008, was quite a success, Merzbow's electronic noise tempered into more of a sci-fi synth enhancement to Pinhas's glorious pulsating psychedelic guitar drone. The two made such beautiful music together, that they continued the collaboration on another double disc, with Wolf Eyes (!) joining in as well. Now, here Merzbow and Pinhas are again, with a cd -and- dvd package, documenting a live duo performance (Merzbow: laptop(s), Pinhas: guitar and "loop system") at the Sonic Circuits Festival in our nation's capital, September 2010. The five tracks on the hour-long cd ebb and flow with shimmering glitch and stutter, it's a fuzzy warm bath of distortion/drone that's loudly blissful, and on occasion even melodic! Meanwhile, the dvd disc features video excerpts from the same performance, so you can see just what these two are up to on stage.
Lovely stuff, for fans of Pinhas in particular, and the not-so-harsh side of Merzbow.... As one reviewer has said, they're like an updated version of Fripp & Eno, and that's not far off the mark.
Though it's 2011 already, turns out there's still some cool 2010 releases we haven't yet gotten a chance to list. We try to keep ahead of the curve, but we can't always get to everything of course. Here's one we don't want to overlook, though. A couple years ago, veteran French guitar/synth maestro Richard Pinhas (of Heldon fame) teamed up with infamous Japanese noise maker Merzbow for a fantastic double disc entitled Keio Line. That combo of '70s cosmic prog-rock electronics and harsh noise/drone was a winner. Here's the sequel, another double disc this time teaming Pinhas not just with the prolific Merzbow but also everyone's favorite underground American noise mavens Wolf Eyes!! Good lord. Batten down the hatches, people! And not only that, but Pinhas cohorts Antoine Paganotti (Magma), Didier Batard (Heldon), and Patrick Gauthier (Heldon, Magma, Weidorje), among others, also contribute on several of the tracks here... of which there are six, sprawling across the two discs.
The first track, disc one, entitled "Bi-Polarity (Gold)", is nearly 16 minutes of rhythmic spaced-out stoner-funk, with skittering drums and plenty of shimmering guitar widdle amidst much glorious hiss, feedback, and distortion. Groovy. Track two, "Paranoia (Iridium)" is almost as long, at 14:21, and is a searing, soaring, synthy soundscape, kind of like an extreme version of Fripp/Eno. Neither of those first two tracks features Merzbow or any of the Wolf Eyes, and that's just fine. Track three, "Depression (Loukoum)", at last brings those guest stars in, giving 'em plenty of space (the track clocks in at about 29 minutes), for a piece that's kind of a combo of the first two tracks. More free jazzish drumming, layered with droning pulsations and washes of shimmering guitar and electronics. It's sorta like Frippertronics meets a spacey Acid Mothers Temple jam, real nice! We are sure a lot of you, who like the AMT and the Necks and the more abstract Circle stuff, will dig this.
Disc two continues the collaboration, with two more epics from the full Pinhas+Merzbow+Wolf Eyes ensemble, "Hysteria (Palladium)" and "Schizophrenia (Silver)", both each almost 30 minutes. The harsh noise/power electronics element is definitely upped on "Hysteria", which starts off like a field recording from a mad scientist's laboratory and by the end gets quite destructively distorted; very Merzbowian indeed. Awesome and satisfying. "Shizophrenia" is rather like "Depression", but rocks out much more, in a psych prog freakout kind of way, before its over. Wow. And finally, the disc finishes up with a solo, seven minute Pinhas piece, "Legend", a calming coda after the intense ensemble action that precedes it.
Gotta hand it to Pinhas, after 40+ years of music making, keeping yourself challenged and on the cutting edge can't be easy, but this is definitely one way (a great way) to do it. Meanwhile, Merzbow and the Wolf Eyes guys must have been floatin', to get to jam with one of the fellows who helped pioneer much of the music they love. Maybe next time Emeralds, Kawabata Makoto, or Oneothrix Point Never can pay their respects. Recommended, even (or especially) to those who are more used to buying releases on, say, Not Not Fun than Cuneiform.
Yes, that's right. Japanese noise maestro Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, teamed up here with guitarist Richard Pinhas of pioneering '70s French synth-prog act Heldon in a Tokyo studio last year. An unexpected collaboration, perhaps, but a successful one - two action-packed discs worth! Here at AQ you could call us Merzbow fans - one of us even dutifully reviewed EVERY SINGLE FREAKIN' DISC in the 50-cd Merzbox that came out a few years ago. He's not only pretty much thee originator of Japanese noise but we still find him to be one of the genre's most interesting practitioners. But since Merzbow is, almost by definition, so prolific, we can't get excited about every single release he puts out (the obi blurb here claiming "He has recorded and released nearly 100 cds" may be the understatement of the century... isn't it more like 1000??). This one, though, we are quite excited about. 'Cause Pinhas is another AQ fave. We love Heldon, and also enjoy much of his solo work since the '70s, right up to 2006's Metatron.
So, what does the Merzbow-Pinhas summit sound like? It's plentiful and varied, but the basic impression is that of Merzbow's fried electronic noise zips and zaps like someone shooting down spaceships amidst Pinhas's glimmering, glorious Frippish guitar drone. Merzbow is credited with EMS Synthi A and "all noises" though Pinhas, with his guitar and "loop system" isn't exactly quiet. As Merzbow's machines emulate the sound of a sparking, arcing live electric wire, electricity shooting sparks in sizzling patterns, Pinhas keeps the pleasurable pulse of his guitar going and going. There was obviously much mutual admiration here, between "Merzdon" and "Heldrow" as one of the track titles puts it, Merzbow thrilled to play with one of his '70s heroes, Pinhas quite aware of how he paved the way for further extremes of experimental, electronic music, but not resting on his laurels at all. They bring out the best in each other, easily making this one of our favorite recent documents from either artist. Pinhas sure can't wimp out here, and Merzbow keeps his contributions psychedelically listenable.
This is available as a double cd on Cuneiform, or a deluxe triple vinyl set on the Dirter Promotions label. Expensive, but quite fancy.
Raucous, wild n' wooly noisy jazz jamming in collision with an equally noisy indie rock aesthetic... a heavy and freaky blowout with squealing horns, hard frenetic drumming, all manner of electric guitar and analog synth keyboard textures, droning violin, and sometimes some hoarse, throwaway vocals. It's all massively chaotic but, perhaps, carefully composed and even catchy at times. What the heck is this? It's Sam Coomes of Quasi getting his "jazz" on, sorta, in cahoots with a bunch of accomplished Bay Area improvisors -- Kyle Bruckmann, Gino Robair, Scott Rosenberg, and John Shiruba -- who, conversely, all take this as a chance to seriously rock out. The demented, diverse results sound something like Italy's Zu meeting up with Captain Beefheart in Tom Waits' junkyard. With both John Zorn and Melvins on the sidelines, getting drunk and cheering them on. It sounds like they're having that sort of fun. Kinda crazy and pretty darn cool.
Note: not to be confused with the similarly-named Pink MountainTOPS... that's a totally different band. We hear though that the two groups have been in correspondence and are even planning a split single maybe.
Note also: Pink Mountain will in fact be playing a show with Zu (and Citay) in SF pretty soon, Monday June 19th at the Bottom Of The Hill.
Killer new split tape from these two Seattle outfits, up first is Pink Void, who unfurls some low slung bass thrum, all reverbed and echo drenched, and laced with samples, a minimal slowcore doom creep, pocked with bits of electronic glitch, and rhythmic pulsations, slowly building to something more metallic, a heaving wall of blackened sound, that morphs into a swirling field of guitarnoise that instead of splintering into Merzbowian brutality, swirls and shimmers hypnotically, quickly settling into a murky background for another set of strange samples, the whole thing very harrowing and haunting.
Knifecream counters with a sidelong sprawl of his own, opening with a bunch of clatter, almost as if some caveman is trying to figure out how to get the cassette in the tape player, you can hear voices, breathing, it's pretty creepy in its own way if not strictly musical, it's not really until about 3 minutes in that it gets, well at least MORE musical, with some string scraping, some mutated melodies, but still all wound around that weird plastic on plastic scraping, those sounds more agitated and intense, eventually it all comes together into some weird bit of parlor music, suddenly all those bizarre sounds seem like they were in fact just some alien mechanism being wound up or stretched out and now the machine, or instrument, is let loose to warbly and woozily unwind, some sort of clockwork automaton made from the guts of a piano, and the strings of an old guitar, all manner of working parts plucking and bowing and scraping, the vibe of this imaginary machine strangely mesmeric, think like Strotter Inst or Pierre Bastien, but with the machines now the masters, or better yet, hundreds of years from now, some unsuspecting explorer discovers these dusty machines, winds them up, and then falls back aghast at what manner of sonic oddness he's brought to life, soon fluttery flutes enter the fray eventually. the vibe almost like some alien cyborg folk, like Avarus or No Neck Blues Band made of machines, it's chaotic and frenzied but then when the singing comes in, it's even creepier, the clattery cacophony a dementedly beautiful backdrop for some seemingly out of place crooning, the mix doesn't seem like it should work, but it somehow reveals itself as some damaged sort of clockwork torch song, that is dementedly beautiful in its own, odd, and frightening way.
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We really weren't sure what to expect from this, a reissue of a lost collection of 'musique concrete' from warped pop weirdo Ariel Pink, when he was in fact, still Ariel Rosenberg, and long before he would perfect his damaged pop-out-of-time style, fusing lysergic seventies beholden FM radio damage to classic pop music tropes all filtered through some woozy drug addled WTF/ADD sonic experimentation. That said, on first listen, these early tracks, from when Ariel fancied himself a "20th century composer", don't sound all that far removed from what would later become his signature sound. Which is not a bad thing at all. The whole 'musique concrete' tag just smacks a bit of pretentious artworld bullshit, lots of comparisons to Pierre Schaeffer and Xenakis and Luc Ferrari, and sure, some of the techniques here are definitely borrowed from those masters, much of Thrash And Burn assembled from varispeed tape loop experiments, abstract collages, processed primitive loops, home made electronics, all fashioned into a sprawling twisted minimalism, but one that to be fair, definitely looks forward to the warped outsider pop in Pink's future. In fact we'd opine that most ambitious underground music makers tend to employ musique concrete techniques, having grandiose ideas and a limited budget with which to realize them. Fucked up 4-tracks are the modern equivalent to the 20th century composer's tape machines. And if this is Ariel Pink's musique concrete record, then hell, 20th century composer Lou Barlow should get some serious kudos for his musique concrete masterpiece The Freed Weed! Cuz there's some seriously warped, tape damaged, fucked up avant garde sound art experimentation going on all over that record...
But really, fans of Ariel Pink, ourselves included, will find much to dig here, a sprawling collection of damaged, minimal lo-fi abstract art pop, much of it in sketch form, as it seems these were culled from piles of busted up old tapes and scratched cd-r's, recorded in the nineties, only recently found on the floor of Pink's Beverly Hills bedroom, the detritus of a crazy prolific composer, and it's easy to see how some of these could have become proper AP tracks, but here, in their super raw and skeletal form, they definitely display another side of Pink, and they perhaps do reflect his interest in 20th century composition, but it's all all filtered through his funhouse mirror warped pop aesthetic. Many of the tracks are really gorgeous, minimal and rhythmic, layered and textured, psychedelic and hauntingly austere, others are like AP pop songs, stumbling programmed rhythms, warbly organs, wavery crooned vocals, everything wreathed in hiss and hum, and still others definitely display an early form of that VHS tape/retrokitsch/eighties Z-movie score sound that folks like Pink and James Ferraro among others would transform into a modern genre. So yeah, all pretension aside, this is a fantastic glimpse into the early years of one of our favorite modern outsider songwriters, it's woozy and warped, dreamily druggy and fantastically fucked up, it's also abstract and minimal, and experimental enough, so that perhaps to certain ears, it could be cast it in a different light, less a weird pop record with experimental tendencies, and more an experimental record with pop tendencies. Either way, whichever you prefer, we like it a lot!
Johnny Pinkhouse's collection Bad Acetate: 50 Fabulous Years in the Soleilmoon Lounge is a nostalgic document of the home recordings made on acetates. Completely devoid of any context -- like a stranger's photograph found on the street -- the CD provides an embarrassingly uncomfortable, yet perversely enjoyable, listen to the bad jokes, sexual faux-pas, Bugs Bunny impersonations, and rambling banality from the 1940s upper middle class. Rumor has it that these recordings were made by the original founder of Soleilmoon recordings, Seymour Crouchly, and were discovered by his grandson Johnny Pinkhouse, who (in between sips of his never-ending pink martinis) sifted through the recordings in hopes of presenting them with digital clarity.
We knew nothing about these guys when we first heard them, we were definitely intrigued by the band name, and the song title, "Tell Her I'm Dead", and then when the music started, thick, buzzing, almost synth sounding guitars (or maybe actual synths, hard to tell), with big booming drums, sound like some sort of metal / cold wave fusion, and when the song proper started, that only furthered that idea, the churning distorted bass line, soft focus synth swirl, churning propulsive rhythm, and super dramatic crooned vox, when all of a sudden, the song exploded into a burst of furious blasting, a sort of black metal cold wave, accompanied by some strange sci-fi squiggles, and as soon as it started, it was right back into that gorgeously miserablist mope rock. The second time that burst/blast surfaces, it's accompanied by hellish shrieks, and then explodes right into a crazy drum/synth jam, with the drums pounding wildly in a field of swirling new wave synths, a twisted hybrid that somehow is something we always wanted to hear, but never knew it. The song continues to confound, with creepy falsetto vocals, over a synth heavy doom creep, before finishing off in a squall of FX swirl and psych wave weirdness.
Holy shit, one song is all it took, and the rest of the tracks here are just as good. A little digging revealed that Pinkish Black is in fact a group with roots in an old aQ favorite, the late great Texas prog-psych outfit Yeti, and suddenly the sound of PB made a lot more sense. After Yeti, came The Great Tyrant, and it seems like every band these guys were in, endured all sorts of personal tragedy and loss of life, the sort of thing that would most definitely inspire the sort of gloom and doom Pinkish Black traffic in, and while based on Yeti, it's hard to see just what may have influenced the actual sound here, the last record from The Great Tyrant found them delving into similar territory, super gothy and dramatic, but not so fully realized, PB sounds like where The Great Tyrant might have eventually ended up, the whole record held together with that impossibly distorted buzz, be it synth or bass or guitar, it's a constant presence, whether churning malevolently, or droning blissfully, it's what gives the sound of PB its heft, it's grim black energy, and it's the drums that drive everything else, the playing dense and intricate, powerful and mathy, by turns metallic and brutal, deft and almost krautrocky, those two combined are the framework, over which all manner of soundtracky synth melodies drift and squiggle, and the vocals, a dark soporific croon one second, a washed out almost shoegazey reverbed bellow the next, the songs slipping from dense driving gloom rock to tripped out psych-goth space jams, often some dizzying mix of the two.
After Vaura's recent aQ Record Of The Week, we might not have been surprised to find this being released on Wierd Records, cuz for all its metallisms, and its punk/metal pedigree, this is essentially a super dark, super heavy new wave record, the synth melodies especially had us imagining what a Gary Numan record might have sounded like had he been making his first records 30 years later, and we definitely think they might have sounded something like this. Instead it's on the limited edition Handmade Birds label, run by the guy from Pyramids, who always bring us interesting stuff.
Haunting and heavy, brooding and brutal, imagine some sort of black metal / new wave hybrid, or perhaps a sort of noise rock / goth rock fusion, fans of all that Goblin / John Carpenter worship who might be into something much darker and heavier should check this out, but really, everyone who digs gloomy heaviness will dig this big time, and and if like us, the thought of a sort of metallic new wave gets you all riled up, then this just might be your new favorite record. It is ours!
Latest in the super limited Type Records 7" series, that in the past has featured Goldmund, Machinefabriek and Paavoharju, which should give you an idea of the sound you can expect. Warm, glistening, shimmering, blissed out, sun dappled, These two tracks from Benoit Pioulard are all of those things, but unlike those other bands, Pioulard is a singer, and these two tracks are heavy on the vocals. He's got a lovely voice, deep and dramatic, not unlike Stephin Merritt, in fact these sort of sound like a more electronic Magnetic Fields. Acoustic guitars drift over electronic glitchery, bits of skitter here and there, but at its heart, some pretty pop music. Think Postal Service, Figurine, B. Fleischmann, Momus, Magnetic Fields, but filtered through the dusty lens of M83's fuzzy bliss. So nice.
Earlier in 2011, this Polish powerdrone artist delivered a blistering crescendo of metal machine music at 23five's annual Activating The Music festival. His blister popping frequencies and sawtooth noise offered a potent display of controlled chaos through his minimal set-up of hacked modular synths whose emissions sent more than a few people to the back of the room in search of earplugs and / or shelter from the barrage. But, with this accelerating churning, Piotrowicz was keen on building complex phase patterns and subharmonic rumblings that reflected a composer's touch. This was not merely floorcore pedal stomp action, but something far more refined. Lasting Clinamen was a record that was released a couple years back through the Polish label Musica Genera, but didn't get much in the way of distribution here in the US, and we managed to grab Piotrowicz' last copies while he was in the States.
The album opens with a track whose strategy very much resembles what he did live, with a slow-ramp assault of synthetic noise that really sounds more digital than analogue. Perhaps all of the digital noise technicians with their Max/MSP patches had been mirroring the circuitry of analogue gear all along. When this track snaps to a conclusion, a deadened tone settles everything back down for Piortowicz to build phasing tectonic drones which display a nice chromatic shift away from that crisp sound and into something resembling the smoldering amplifier rumblings that Bruce Russell and Campbell Keale would bring to The Dead C and Birchville Cat Motel, respectively. Piotrowicz saves the best for last with his loping track of mechanoid pulses evolving upon more sawtooth waveforms cast in a frightening atmosphere of pending electrocution, suffocation, and / or immolation. Take your pick. Certainly for fans of Kevin Drumm's more noxious moments, anything by Matthew Bower over the past 15 years, and Zbigniew Karkowski's recapitulations of Xenakis. Limited stock on this title...
Portland? This doesn't sound like Portland! Hey, this guy isn't even French! What gives?
Well, Benoit Pioulard is but a pseudonym for a young avant-folk tunesmith named Thomas Meluch, who now lives in Portland, Oregon yet grew up in Michigan. His gauzy dream-pop has much in common with those sounds that spilled out of Michigan with Windy & Carl, Fuxa, Auburn Lull, and even Veronica Lake beginning just over a decade ago. There is a decided craftsmanship that further distances his work from the shambolic affairs that dominate his current hometown, yet this album is not without its narcotic impressionism through his gauzy smears of ambience across his wistfully strummed acoustic guitar numbers. Temper is his second album released through Kranky, and that's a damn proper place for the man. Well, yes, Windy & Carl do release records through Kranky; but his work also fits along very well next to Stars Of The Lid and Labradford. The album's opening cut "Ragged Tint" is atypically urgent in its doubletimed elliptical fingerpicking which speeds past Pioulard's vocals which are sort of like mumbling Stephen Merritt if we could make that sound like a very good thing. A heartbreakingly sad glockenspiel melody tumbles into the chorus of the song, tempered with reverb and delay to match the hue of his dreamy drone-pop. The rest of the album is set at a languid pace, more in keeping with the first Iron & Wine record, complete with lo-fi bedroom recordings and sad little ditties strummed across his acoustic guitar girded with softened Boards of Canada rhythms. Each of his songs are effortless, beautiful, melancholic, and totally worth getting stuck in your head. He brackets each of his songs with softly treated field recordings made on a well-worn walkman that has never had its heads cleaned. So the rainstorms and birdsongs are cast in a mottled gray fog of thick tape hiss, which turns bleary and sad through Pioulard's treatments. As one customer who bought this record from us said, "it's too pretty not to buy!"
Ooh! The vinyl version of Temper also comes with his first album on Kranky, Precis.
Another release in the new batch of Ormolycka tapes, and all we can think with this one is how the hell had we not heard of these guys, a weirdo noise duo who make a fantastically unholy racket that sounds like some ungodly mix of Suicide, Merzbow and Spacemen 3, all run through old DHR records. Noisy, and dense, droned out and seriously psychedelic, the tracks here pound and pulse, swirl and soar, grinding crunch collides with near metallic mesmer, this is like Moon Duo super charged and dosed on PCP.
A super raw, permanently in-the-red, echo drenched sci-fi noise-kraut hypno-trance psychedelia, that is so goddamn fierce, and fucked up, and fantastic, feedback everywhere, beats buried under avalanches of white, and brown, and grey and pink noise, all of that noise somehow sculpted into heaving blasts of cosmic pulsation, the vocals delivered from on high, dripping in blown out effects, bellowed from beyond, the sounds locked and looped, anchored to murky pulses, a sort of blacknoise house music transformed into abstract hypno noise psych. Experimental, and abrasive, and caustic, and seriously chaotic, but totally and utterly mesmerizing. We're a bit obsessed now and want to track down every goddamn thing these guys have done. One of the best tapes on Ormolycka, and one of the best things we've heard in ages, period. Here's hoping someone does an even more comprehensive collection soon. WAY WAY RECOMMENDED.
Peter Rehberg, best known to the world as Pita, has rerouted himself in an unexpected new direction of dissonance. Rather than shoveling a fistful of sonic crud down your proverbial throat, Pita opts for a more roundabout approach, this time using only a finger or two and jiggling them around and slapping your cheeks before jamming a knuckle sandwich through your nose. His trademark onslaught of hard disk explosion has been restrained to wandering digital abstraction and heavy filtering and time lag processing. Not terribly exciting, though there are high expectations of a maverick leader in power electronics and twenty first century noise. Dare we flip the vinyl-only release to side two, we are rewarded with washes of rhythmic tones and pseudo-melodies -- however, at close examination, we speculate that the same processes are applied here as on the first side, though with an outcome more acid-drenched and dynamic. Are the outcomes of these pieces -- or more appropriately, experiments -- predetermined, or merely the result of algorithmic randomizations and mathematical surprises unforseen by their instigator? Whatever the case, "Get Down" is a fine listen in itself, potent in its exploration of sound, though we are weary of the artistic validity and intent of the approach and process. Good, but not great.
Peter "Pita" Rehberg is one of the founding members of the Mego Record label, which has developed quite a reputation for damaged glitch electronica and smug digital sleights of hand. Get Off is Pita's fourth album and continues along the same path that his previous albums Get Down, Get Up, and Get Out all took. There's plenty of beautiful sonic vapourization of ringing bell tones and rapturously tactile layers of lush distortion which form the bulk of this 35 minute album and make clear overtures to fellow Viennese laptop maestro Fennesz. Yet, Pita does not share Fennesz' sense of mystery and beauty and is compelled to disrupt his fizzing ambience with sharp blasts of digital noise and Ussachevsky-like electronic splatter.
In recent years, Peter Rehberg has been teaming up with Stephen O'Malley for the data-crunched doom of KTL; but Rehberg has began crafting atomic noise as Pita since the late '90s. His first album Seven Tons For Free won him the Ars Electronica Prize for innovation in new music in 1996; and by 1999, his second album Get Out emerged to global acclaim. After a few years absence, this classic has finally been reissued.
The album is almost entirely an exercise in laptop generated abstraction, with a ring modulation filter firmly bolted to every bit-splatter, pixelated squiggle, and jagged edge. Such DSP tricks were developed in a huge explosion of avant-garde electronics, with Pita leading the way alongside fellow Mego artist Fennesz, Ekkehard Ehlers, AGF, and Stephan Mathieu. Occasionally, Pita's fizzing digital static colludes with subtle rhythms, structures, and harmonies for some truly sublime pieces of electro-shock mantras. The bulk of the album enjoys a clownish randomness from dial twisting tomfoolery and fist-pump noise generation. This must have been an album that Autechre encountered and forced them to radically change directions, lest they become obsolete.
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Mego boss Pita offers a wildly fluctuating digital collage for his contribution to Fallt's Invalid Object Series (a HUGE, very limited series of 3" cdeps by an international variety of well- and less-well-known electronic artists -- we've had the whole series but not in quanities that we could list. Actually we only have 3 of this Pita disc at the moment, and probably can't get
While the music of Pita, aka Peter Rehberg, can tend toward the harsh and caustic, this archival release, a reissue of Rehberg's first ever solo composition, is anything but, a gorgeously hypnotic, dreamlike rhythmic dronescape that sounds more like Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker than Pita.
The latest in The Tapeworm label's ever expanding catalog of super limited cassette tape oddities and artifacts, Mesmer was originally released in 1995 as part of a compilation, for which the various contributors (including Ryoji Ikeda, CM Von Hausswolff, Robert Hampson, among others) were given a copy of an early vinyl recording, called Mesmer, released on Ash International, and tasked with composing a piece dedicated to Friedrich Mesmer, an "animal magnetist and hypnotist" from the 19th century.
Rehberg's piece is definitely hypnotic, a slow, softly churning, gradually evolving sprawl of muted hiss, smeared pulses, mechanical and industrial, but also warm and organic, a woozy, shimmery landscape of blurred textures and barely there propulsion, and as mentioned above, not at all what you might expect from Pita, plenty of static and buzz, a glowing sepia toned sonic patina wreathing the whole thing, if forced to guess the creator, we definitely would have been thinking Philip Jeck.
The flipside is the same piece, but in a drastically different form, an original dubplate of "Mesmer" that Rehberg used to DJ, presented here with nearly 15 years of accumulated clicks and pops, clouds of hiss and whir, the original even more blurred and washed out and hazy. So so lovely.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. With cool Savage Pencil cover art.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Newest album by this experimental string composer combining Eastern tuning with Western compositional structures. Using a variety of exotic string instruments (cumbus, mandolin and ukelin) with computer and electronics, Pitre along with a cello and a soprano saxophone player create two side-long suites that embrace a soundworld both contemporary and ancient. Similar in feel to the spatial string composition of his last full-length Feel Free, where the performers were given only loose instructions to create a more open compositional approach, this time around Pitre removes that randomizing element and exerts more compositional control, touching on sonic elements of accumulation and dissipation for a fluid composition that breathes with a light touch and a beautifully heavy resonance.
Duane Pitre, whom we were first exposed to through collaborations with Justin Wright from Expo 70, and his 2010 solo debut Origin on the Root Strata label, is a composer who likes to work with organizing principles. For Origin, he had a sextet of bowed guitars tuned to 'just intonation' and freed from any use of effects and overdubs to create tapestries of richly layered overtones and droning frequencies.
One might think from the title that Feel Free would suggest a freedom from such organisation, but it's actually a push toward a more systematic impulse, but one that allows an infinite set of variations. Creating the centerpiece of the work through guitar and electronics and filtered through a computer, he then asks a sextet of string musicians (harp, cello, contrabass, hammered dulcimer and violin) to respond to the work. The performers are instructed to "feel free" to respond to or ignore their fellow contributors. But in creating a rule-based system rather than one based on musical notation, the piece becomes a lattice work of rhythms and textures that sounds spontaneous and unpredictable, but never careens out of control. Reminding us of the resulting compositional strategies of David Behrman's On The Other Ocean, Christian Jendreiko's God's White Noise or even Terry Riley's In C in the way that there's a harmonic congruence from a randomizing system, Feel Free is a beautifully interwoven composition with hypnotically mesmerizing results.
Ultra limited new lp from guitarist and composer Duane Pitre, a collection of recordings featuring Pitre's bowed harmonic-guitar ensemble, six guitarists, bowing the strings of unconventionally strung guitars, all in 'just intonation', the sounds these players and instruments produce, free of any effects or post- or pre- production fiddling, all the strange overtones, and rhythmic variations, strange melodies and mysterious textures, are utterly divine, extended raga like drones, lush and layered, all the results of the natural interplay between the various notes and tones, and the acoustic properties of the space. All of which are considerable, considering the beauty and otherworldliness of these sounds, quite reminiscent of folks like Phill Niblock, Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, but with its own particular magic, the very Eastern sounding raga vibe is undeniable on some of the tracks, but others are far more abstract, unfurling alternating tones, letting the notes ring out, just the tail ends woven into each other, creating a gorgeous expanse of warm, but spare melody, until the notes grow gradually closer together and finally settle into one another. Some of the tracks sound choral, almost liturgical, while others sounds like an orchestra tuning up stretched into swirling near static drones, the final nearly 12 minute track being perhaps the most beautiful of the bunch, a symphony of metallic buzz, rising and falling swells, buried melodies, the sound slow shifting, but ever changing, dense, and dark, but somehow lush and lovely and glimmering, sun dappled and so serene...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, includes a download coupon as well.
A first listen to this elicited the following quote from Andee: "It's annoying enough that I definitely want one!" Need we say more? Well, what's so wonderfully "annoying" (and therefore AWESOME) about this you ask? PIVIXKI is a duo from Melbourne, Australia, that combines blasting grindcore (the drummer) with avant-garde modern chamber music (the keyboardist). It's just crazy enough to work. On half of the duo, virtuoso pianist Antony Pateras, comes from a classical/academic music background; in fact, he's the composer-in-residence at the Australian National Academy Of Music, and we're not surprised to hear he has recorded for John Zorn's Tzadik label. The other half, drummer Max Kohane, plies his trade in the HC punk/grindcore scene, having played with a ton of bands, the one we know best being Agents Of Abhorrence, previously lauded by us for their technical grindcore frenzies! Thus the 11 instrumental tracks here are INSANE, maniacal typewriter-y piano plinking keeping pace with 1000mph octopoid drum battery. It's like Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music doing battle with a (human) drum machine. If Mick Barr played piano instead of guitar, Orthrelm might sound like this. A band it does remind us of, a lot, would be a stripped-down version of defunct Swiss art-grinders Alboth!, remember them?
Besides piano, Pateras plays the organ (including pipe organ) and analog synth as well, on occasion, lending a '70s prog aspect to the overt avant garde classical / grindcore collision. They also get some guests in on viola, vibraphone, and additional percussion in a couple places. So despite the impression we may have given already, there's a fair amount of variation here, PIVIXKI isn't ALL full on grind assault. The methods of their madness involve a number of techniques and textures. PIVIXKI make good use of minimalist repetition, free-improv ivory tickling, glitchy electronic manipulation ("Late Veins" ferinstance), dizzyingly dramatic crescendos, and even some downright pretty parts. One of our favorite pieces is the nervously moody "A Shrewed Manipulation Of The Facts", which (as other moments here do as well) reminds us of Carl Stalling cartoon music, David Shire suspense soundtracks, and/or a hybrid of Zombi and the Necks... Another artist we are reminded of at times is Tatsuya Yoshida from the Ruins, particularly the Ruins drummer's solo stuff where he's playing drums and keyboards simultaneously. (Some of the song titles also make us think of him as well.)
The handsome trifold cardboard packaging contains some interesting liner notes from Pateras, wherein among other things he discusses how he had to learn to adjust his playing/thinking to keep up with Kohane's drumming. You, in turn, may have to adjust your listening/thinking to keep up with this duo's music! Well worth the effort, though really, once you've taken the plunge (past a track or two), it's easy to enjoy. Especially if you like Xenakis, Radian, AND Discordance Axis. Recommended!
It's Stinking Lizaveta in... SPAAAAAACE?? Sort of. Named after a space age toy (the battery powered, made-in-Japan "Planet-Y" space station depicted on the cover, look for it on eBay maybe -- it's from 1968 and worth a pretty penny, several hundred dollars), this project features two guys using and abusing two (musical) space age "toys": the Casio DG-20 guitar synthesizer, and the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer. One's a plastic, futuristic-looking, guitar-shaped device, a product of the digital age (circa '88), the other a more vintage (circa '73), suitcase-sized item in a metal case with many colorful knobs and buttons. The DG-20, which really is rather toy-like, and has been put to recent humorous use by NZ's Flight Of The Conchords (try Googling it), is played by Yanni Papadopoulos, who is best known as the lead guitar shredder for the amazing instro-metal Philadelphia "doomjazz" power trio Stinking Lizaveta, whom we hope you're all familiar with as they're big AQ faves. On the Music Easel (more info: http://www.buchla.com/historical/music_easel/music_easel.html), is Charles Cohen, who rarely records but has been performing live improvised electronic music in Philly and environs for the past 20 years. Recently, though, in addition to this cd with Papadopoulos, he also has a disc out in collaboration with one of the dudes from damaged psych rockers Temple Of Bon Matin. He's also a participant in prog-folk Czech cinema tribute The Valerie Project, whose Drag City album was highlighted here last list.
For Papadopoulos, this is certainly a change of pace from his frenetic, fretboard-burning guitar heroics in Stinking Liz, but he's certainly up to the task, after all we've seen him crawling on the ground, pushing his guitar across the dirty floor of a club with his nose just to get interesting noises out of it (talk about "extended technique"!). Recorded live last November in Baltimore, this exploratory but surefooted improv session proceeds both playfully and tastefully, Mssrs. Papadopoulos and Cohen clearly knowing what they're doing, able to keep it going, keep it changing, keep it interesting for the full half-hour (well 28 minutes 45 seconds to be precise). It's like Subotnick meets Sun Ra meets Schnitzler... a totally sci-fi cosmic soundscape chock full of spaced-out drones (of course) and bleep-bloop-bleep electronic FX. It starts off with abstract alien chatter mind-melding into echoing mechanical rhythms over which the duo converse in utter outer-space vibrations, pulling delicate, eerie melodies out of the ether, amidst dubby plastic squelch and distorted atmospheres. For fans of '60s academic electro-acoustics, '70s kraut-tronica, Japan's Space Machine, even the recent solo work of Zombi keyboardist Steve Moore... Limited to 500 copies, fyi, this may be on eBay someday too like its namesake! From one of our current fave labels, Public Guilt, this comes packaged in a cardboard digi-sleeve thing that's better designed than most, with the cd's playing surface snuggly protected by a layer of foam.
Freakin' awesome steel stringed explorations through space and time with Dewey Mahood, guitarist of Portland's Eternal Tapestry! He's released a handful of tapes in the past, but Crystal Wizard is the first cd-r release from this psychedelic mystery man, and it's a doozy. Layers of bells, hazy vocal drones and colorful whips of delayed guitar adorn the steel-stringed compositions. Roots music meets psychedelia in a wild hoopla of acoustic trippiness. Super limited and complete with cosmic artwork by Mr. Mahood himself. Yes!
The UK's Blackest Rainbow brings us another offering of wispy acoustic guitar wanderings, this time from Dewey Mahood, guitarist for Portland's Eternal Tapestry, who recently rolled through the shop and dropped off a bundle of goodies. Mr. Mahood takes his solo endeavor to unexplored dim, gloomy territory with Visions of Otherness, a fog shrouded offering of deep drones layered under somber finger picked forestscapes. Creepy weirdo slide guitar and ritualistic percussion, flutes calling from the deep mountains, Visions of Otherness beautifully recalls the dense woodlands and foggy mornings of Portland. Super cool stuff if you're a fan of woodsy drone music and creepy acoustic downer-folk. And don't forget, this cd-r comes in a limited edition of 200 and will be gone before you know it, so don't miss it!
The final release in a seriously amazing first year for the UK's Paradigms label. Some labels manage to be just so perfectly all over the map and so goddamn eclectic without losing their focus, swinging wildly from genre to genre, but with each disparate release and artist possessing some ineffable something that links them all together. Paradigms is the perfect example. Black metal (Throne Of Katarsis, Utlagr), math rock (Woburn House), dream dirge sludge (Hjarnidaudi, The Angelic Process), psychedelic spacerock (Titan), drone (the Walking With Ghosts compilation), prog (Blueprint Human Being), chamber (Amber Asylum), modern classical doom (Hallvardur Asgeirsson), whatever it is that Jarboe does, and now folk. Well, sort of folk. Just like the above mentioned bands, Portland, Oregon's Plants transcend any genre tag you'd care to attach to them. While they may be a self described "psych folk duo", their sound only begins at folk, taking various folk like elements and spinning them into grand expanses of starry skied drone and fuzzed out otherworldly psychedelia.
The opener "The Sky Above You Seeks The Below", is a nearly 14 minute epic, lush, thick organ drones, twist and shimmer and shift, peppered with piano plinks, and a gorgeous velvety torch song croon. Deep male vocals intertwine with angelic female voices, drifting ghostlike above the thick gritty drones beneath. Like a super lo-fi Charlemagne Palestine, a handful of keys held down, the overtones drifting into dense melodic clusters, while the voices weave dreamy minor key melodies over the top. Thick and fuzzy and ethereal. Like using your finger to manually spin an M83 single as slow as possible. Absolutely gorgeous late night drift...
The second track emerges from the first, thick fuzzed out drones intact, slithering and shimmering, before the band breaks into a dark and minimal percussive krautjam, simple rhythms, a looping repetitive riff, plodding along relentlessly through a swirling cloud of guitar buzz, sixties psychrock jangle, warm warbly organ, an utterly mesmerizing kaleidoscopic psychedelic jam that practically goes on forever.
The final track is all acoustic, steel string tangle, slippery slide, shimmering buzz, deep dramatic vocals, sort of Fahey via Comus via Incredible String Band, but with a murky moodiness, a slow moving, otherworldly Appalachia, menacing and beautifully creepy.
Double Infinity definitely puts most of the other free folk and psych folk we've heard lately to shame. Absolutely epic and amazing!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. And unlike most of the Paradigms releases, which come in cardboard sleeves wrapped in hand stamped, brown paper, this disc is in a white DVD case, with black and white printed insert (much like the recently reviewed Hallvardur Asgeirsson...)
This Portland psych-folk duo really take their band name seriously. Not only is the record called Photosynthesis. But check out the song titles: "Seedling", "Seedling Two", "Tumbleweed", "Roots", "Seedling Three", "Birdflowers"...
The last we heard from Plants was on their Double Infinity record, released on UK label Paradigms a while back, a gorgeous glistening slab of blissed out ambience, droney krautrock and abstract Appalachia, sometimes all at once. This latest disc begins a tranquil ambient drift, with fluttering flutes, warbly synths, shimmering strings, and a washed out backdrop of pitch shifted drones, constantly changing speed giving the track a wavery seasick vibe. The "Seedling" series, three tracks, parts 1,2 and 3, are subtle variations of the same theme. The first, an Incredible String Band style chunk of lilting dreamfolk, steel string strum, chiming harmonics, and intertwined male / female harmony vocals. The second, takes the first and smears it into a rumbling bit of ominous low end, the vocals (or are they flutes?) transformed into the subtlest of wisps, an organ wheezing out a rumbling backdrop of subtly shifting sonics. The third and final part returns to the dream folk, this time adding some hand drums, and retaining some of the ominous vibes from part 2, a bit like Comus, but not nearly as maniacal.
In between the "Seedling"s, the band visits some buzzing Appalachian twang, complete with what sounds like banjo and some swoonsome slippery slide, as well as some subtle distant organ melodies, a dense blur of high end shimmer, a wash of chimes and bells and whistles, a symphony of skree that peters out into the sounds of nature, wolves, running water, wind... and finally, the 7+ minute closer, an almost Christmas carol like soundscape of wintery bells, all glistening and sparkling, faraway upper register whir, little bits and bleeps of reverbed FX, drifting acoustic guitars, disembodied voices, culminating in a muted cacophony of backwards treated sound and soft focus clatter and clang, all smoothed into a bit of abstract drifting bliss. Gorgeous.
We won't go on to much about this one, of all the Small Voices / A Silent Place releases we managed to get our hands on (and are listing on this week's list), this is the one we have the fewest copies of. Which is a huge shame cuz, as much as we dug all the other PCS records we've reviewed in the past, this one is a killer. Not sure how we missed this one anyway the first time around, but beyond the usual spaced out psychedelia, and heady heaviness, the sound on Painted Shadows is way more low slung, murky and krautrocky, and to be fair, it's been a while since we listened to Plastic Crimewave, but this record has us thinking we definitely have to go revisit those other ones, as this one pushes all our druggy dreamy psych rock buttons, pulsing motorik rhythms, cyclical guitars, mumbled weary buried in the mix vox, lots of sitar like buzz, layered sounds all blurred and smeared into gauzy washes of dreamy drug rock, fans of Moon Duo will flip for the opening track, that sounds like it could definitely have been a precursor to MD's looped mesmer. The following track almost sounds like indie rock, still murky and fuzzy and druggy, but a bit more propulsive, with busy drumming and yowled vocals, all over some killer fuzz guitar and some serious drum pound.
And so it goes, a handful of tracks that should have most fans of modern psych wondering why the heck these guys aren't as hyped as Wooden Shjips and White Hills, just check out the closer, the 20+ minute title track, a slow build of tripped out psychedelia, cyclical krautrock like groove, and space rock pound, swirls of FX and wild swaths of buzzing guitar (not to mention what sounds like violin!), all wound into a serious heart-of-the-sun blowout.
Super awesome, but again, sadly, WE ONLY HAVE THREE COPIES, and since the label folded, these are indeed the last three copies we'll ever have. Alternate choices, please.
Richie Hawtin aka Plastikman was always a big deal in techno circles, but we never did (and still don't) get the whole house music thing. So it wasn't until his last record, Consumed, when we finally understood. It helped that Hawtin had stripped his house music down to the bare essentials, and wrapped it in all sorts of murk and grime, coming up with a beautifully grim and stark chunk of minimal throb, not entirely unlike the Chain Reaction label's heroin house sound. Consumed was one of the best chill out records ever, and perfect to drift off to sleep to. And Closer pretty much takes up right where consumed left off. Clipped clinical beats, throbbing and pulsing, like a heartbeat, in a dark expanse of fuzzy ambience. The only big change this time around is the addition of vocals on a few tracks. At first, the vocals were super distracting, but after a few listens the vocals seem to fit with the whole mood of the record, dark and paranoid, they're heavily affected, run through a vocoder and distorted to sound super alien and sexless, reciting strange mantras like "I'm just a voice in your head...".
It may not be as immediately classic as Consumed, but it definitely hits the same sweet spot as Chain Reaction, Basic Channel and Kompakt stuff.
A historical aside: the very first acid house single "Acid Tracks" by Phuture had a b-side entitled "Your Only Friend," a cautionary tale of the perils of drug use uttered by a disembodied voice, run through a vocoder and a pitchshifter. It's a haunting, numbing track that counters the physical rush of the 808 work out and insistant drums. This began a trend within techno toward a paranoid aesthetic, and where Richie Hawtin seemed to find a historical root for Closer.
