Medical Records keeps the obscure reissues coming with two new releases on this week's list, this one a singles collection from a UK group called Play, which features a member of Drinking Electricity, also reissued on Medical, and recently reviewed here, and the sound of Play is not that different, a bit poppier maybe, more a sort of gloomy electro pop, spare and minimal, with deep crooned vocals, and softly swirling synths, with the occasional bit of angular guitar. We're reminded a lot of the Fixx actually, and of course New Order, Depeche Mode, Human League and the like. Our favorite tracks are the more post punk sounding jams, like "Deeper Than Blue", which is all spidery guitar and squelchy synths, but tracks like the brooding "In My Mind" (and the cool, even more twisted remix), with its ominous intro that blossoms into some seriously new wave poppiness , push all our eighties new/cold wave buttons. Red Movies gathers all the group's various singles, a compilation track and a handful of bonus tracks. The sort of sound that so many bands continue to mine these days. Folks who dig Dark Entries, should also be following Medical, and everyone who's been digging all the retro-synth action on Sacred Bones and Captured Tracks, none of those bands would exist if it weren't for bands like Play...
As always, super limited, and fantastically packaged, the original cover art reproduced, and the record itself super heavy weight, and pressed on split red/blue vinyl! Cool!
One of six records which were originally part of a multi part release from local label Time Released Sound, whose releases are initially presented as deluxe hand crafted art editions, which we carry when we can, but in the case of this series, dubbed the 'chocolate box' series, which found each record pressed onto 3" cd-r's and packaged in a mini chocolate box, every box hand assembled, and every one different, the set had a seriously hefty price tag, and sold out super quick anyway, so while we weren't able to get our hands on the deluxe versions, thankfully the records were also available as proper cds in more modest packaging. We already reviewed the first two installments on the last New Arrivals List, Taskerlands and David Newlyn, and this week, we have the other four.
One of which is this one, from the oddly monikered Pleq / Spheruleus, a duo whose music sounds right at home on TRS, a mix of delicate haunting abstract folk drift, and minimal avant electronics, woven into a brooding sort of ambience, laced with swoonsome melodies, moaning strings, dark minor key melodies, all wreathed in fields of crackle and buzz, static and hiss, sort of like Rachel's remixed by Philip Jeck. There's a definite chamber music vibe for sure, but a modern minimal classical vibe as well, minus the various bits of cackle and the electronic filigree, this would be some simply haunting string music, but fused to the strange otherworldly ambience, it becomes almost like the hauntological mesmer of the Caretaker, the same sort of mysterious faded memory melodies, and old Victrola production, the strings adding a bit of timelessness, and the soft noise patina making that these timeless sounds feel like they were at least first conjured up in a very different and distant time. Imagine the funereal violin music we once carried set amidst a staticky field of Tim Hecker like shimmer, sprawling into a Godspeed like majesty, but instead of building to an explosive climax, the sounds ooze and drift, a haunting melancholia under a grey clouded sky, the soundtrack to rainswept vistas and wide open expanses, one can almost imagine sitting in a tiny cabin, perched at the end of the world, looking out into the great nothingness that seems to extend forever, this music the soundtrack to such a lonely pursuit. Lovely.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
The latest release from aQ beloved label Time Released Sound, whose releases are as much art as music, an insane amount of time and energy put into the packaging for every release. This one comes from an artist called Plinth, whose strange and wondrous music is created using a collection of calliopes and Victorian music boxes, antique sound makers and wheezing creaking mechanisms from way back when. Sadly, we were unable to carry any of the super deluxe version, which in fact came in a fancy box with an actual music box, inside, those were $100 and super limited and sold out in a heartbeat. But as TRS sometimes does, they released the record in a more affordable version, so for those of us unable to plunk down $100 for a cd-r could still enjoy this dulcet sounds.
And dulcet they are, haunting and mysterious, chiming melodies are laid over the whir of strange machines, it's almost like the soundtrack to some strange mechanical workshop, a steam punk wonderland, where all the sounds are created via gears, and automatons, a Rube Goldberg like world of contraptions that create melodies, unfurling whirring textures, and the clicking and creaking of clockwork music boxes, the sound of the machines as much a part of the recordings as the music the machines are making. Dreamy and otherworldly, every song here like some old timey lullaby, broadcast via wireless from another dimensions, the sound of faded memories and lost childhoods, soundtracks to dreams and visions of what once was, bells and chimes, tinkling melodies, all wreathed in static and crackle, as if captured directly off the Victrola, or straight out of the music box, recorded onto a wax cylinder and played back by candlelight in the parlor. So lovely.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!
Another disc that somehow slipped under our review radar, which we're only getting to now, even though it's been in the shop since the beginning of the year. James Plotkin should really need no introduction, nowadays he produces and masters pretty much every weird, dark, doomy, heavy, drone record, but has of course played in Khanate, Phantom Smasher, Flux, Romance, O.L.D. and more...
For his entry into Utech's Arc Series, Plotkin has crafted two extended dronescapes, the first recorded live in 2007, hushed and muted and darkly beautiful, deep blackened shimmers, soft rumbling swells, a low end sprawl that over the course of 40 minutes (!) sheds its glassy darkness and reveals a hissing whirring blur underneath, but even then, the sound is smoothed out, blurred, smeared, subtly melodic, not even really ominous as much as mysterious and hauntingly tranquil.
The second track, performed and recorded in 2006, is a whole different beast, a chopped up assemblage of malfunctioning electronics, swirls of glitch and buzz, fractured melodies, damaged streaks of FX, swirling metallic shimmer, dense clouds of collaged high end skree, deep whorls of tangled crunch and moaning bass tones, all tangled and mangled, twisted into uncomfortable shapes and shot through with shards of grinding high end, wrapped in gauzy layers of warm sepia toned whir. While not as simply beautiful as the first track, within the second lurks much melody and beauty, all tangled up with the constantly twisting and twisted buzz and crunch of Plotkin's blackened soundscaping.
Gorgeous packaging, metallic gold and black fold over sleeves, with striking photography by Max Aguillera-Hellweg. Probably super limited, we've had these for a while, we have a decent amount, but once we run out, not sure we can get more....
Another solo release (a reissue of a long out of print cd-r with a twenty+ minute bonus track!) from the mighty James Plotkin, member of Khanate, OLD and Phantomsmasher / Atomsmasher, as well as producer of all sort of dark and heavy music. For Kurtlanmak / Damascus, Plotkin used mostly guitar (along with drums, trumpet, and gongs), run through electronics and processed via laptop, to create two vast expanses of skitter and skip, rumble and whir, the first, a dark droney landscape of warbly backwards melodies, shimmery warm reverberations, deep cavernous dark ambience, shot through with ghostlike melodies and some steel string clang. The strings get chopped and processed into buzzing snarls that eventually get smeared into more dreamlike drones, with the guitars eventually emerging as a skipping hiccupping angular riffic rhythm, before winding down in a slippery swirl of acoustic guitar pick, strum and slide. The second track begins with a refrain of the first, a collage of backwards guitars that quickly dissipates into a super minimal low end drift, which gradually thickens into a warm glacial hum, densely layered and slowly shifting, before bursting into a cloud of glitches and electronic skitter, only to simmer down into a soft focus dreamstate, floating softly into the ether. An amazingly expressive, and deftly delicate solo sonic exploration from a man who has spent the last decade musically pummeling the crap out of us. An unexpected soft side that we've gotten brief glances at over the years, but now given the chance to luxuriate in Plotkin's dreamy dronescapes, without the fear of that impending pummel, this might just be our favorite Plotkin yet!
Fans of Fennesz, Geoff Mullen, Hrvatski and other digital guitar wranglers should definitely check this out.
Packaged in a gorgeous textured fold over paper sleeve, printed with skulls and a barely visible gold filigree, wrapped in a gold metallic, printed obi.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!
Back in 1994, Mr. Plotkin recorded a guitar track and handed it Brent Gutzeit (of TV Pow) in 1995. Mr. Gutzeit destroyed it with homemade instruments, a boom box, and a 4-track. The ensuing recordings were passed back and forth between the two over the past 4 years and finally ended up on Kranky! Solemn, spacious drones and dreamy passages of ambient noise.
KHANATE ALERT!! ULTRA LIMITED CD ALERT!! ARCHIVE RECORDS RELEASE ALERT!! THIS DISC IS ALREADY OUT OF PRINT SO THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE ALERT!!
By now you should definitely know the drill. Archive records, who in the past have released the triple live Boris cd (now out of print), the live LSD-March (also out of print), the Khanate live cd (you guessed it, out of print), the live Growing cd (this too, out of print) and a live Earth double cd that ended up being so limited we never even got any, now offers up this newest ultra limited gem. As far as we know, by the time you read this review, this disc too will be out of print and we'll have the last 40 or 50, so, needless to say, ACT FAST! But why should you care? Well, howabout the fact that everything Archive releases is beautifully packaged, this release being no exception? Or howabout the fact that if you don't get this from us now, it's off to eBay with you! OK, the main reason to pick this up is it's 50 percent of mighty doom sludge behemoth Khanate. Guitarist James Plotkin (who you also might remember from such past glories as OLD and Phantomsmasher / Atomsmasher) and his rhythmic partner in Khanate, drummer Tim Wyskida. But, don't expect any downtuned slow motion doom and gloom here. There are some sludgy moments, even one track that sounds like a single guitar track plucked from a Khanate song, but for the most part it's a lot more abstract, with Plotkin coaxing all sorts of sounds out of his guitar, from scaping angular riffing, to scarbbly percussive skitter to shrieking high end skree, to warm muted warble, and even one track of delicate moody drift. Wyskida is right there along side him, offering up subtle little shuffles, simple plodding thuds or wild octopoidal squalls, depending on the mood and what best will balance Plotkin's guitar action. Cool stuff whether you're into Khanaate or not.
Packaged as gorgeously as always, a three panel fold out, adorned with simple text and abstract blurry shark photos, the cd affixed to a small plastic nipple on one of the panels. Comes in red and blue, the color you get will be totally random.
And we hate to belabor the point, but this is VERY LIMITED and almost for sure already out of print!
The Holy Mountain label has been forging a new trajectory as of late into the kosmiche realms of new composition. We last reviewed M. Geddes Gendras' Modular synth solo debut, Test Leads, and following that we now have local San Francisco composer, Henry Plotnick, channeling the big three of minimalist composition, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, in his delightful debut release Fields, a composition in nine parts. Plotnick, using digital synthesizer and piano, begins with a piece built from simple repeating melodic phrases that bloom into interlocking repetitive and exploratory filigrees, sometimes with orchestral strings or tinkling bells and gamelan sounds, rising in terrifying intensity or diluting into gorgeous gaseous clouds of vapor. The whole collection exploring the boundaries and limits of a simplified strategy, but one done with an intuitive sense of play and structure that is both hypnotic and tantalizing.
An auspicious debut - oh, and did we mention that Plotnick is just 11 years old??
Pocahaunted have become quite the household name these days, and rightly so. After releasing somewhere close to five LPs in a single year, the Olsen twins of drone, as they are so aptly nicknamed, show no signs of slowing down. And we can thank Troubleman for getting hip to these lady droners just in time to release their most promising effort yet. The duo teem up with the famed Bobb Bruno, as well as Cameron Stallones, a member of Magic Lantern and the man behind Sun Araw, to summon up a darkened slab of ceremonial drone that proves to be our favorite material from the band to date.
Imagine Popol Vuh getting tribal with Brast Burn, throw in a touch of the mysterious voodoo vibes of Valet's Blood is Clean, and you pretty much have this album. Less dubbed out and much more focused then their last lp Chains, Passage is ghostly and unsettling. We can't help but notice how much this outfit has matured over the last few records. Seems like they really laid down some solid ideas on this record. Voices calling from the deserted plains as the sky grows heavy with menacing clouds, the distant clanging of gongs and bells growing louder and louder as the dry earth begins to crack. The pair's signature vocals are deep and melancholic, trance inducing and hypnotic as they sulk in apocalyptic lament. But there is a kind of astral freak out vibe hidden in the dark grain woodwork here, with flaring organ licks and fuzzed/reverbed out electric guitar that fades in and disappears. At times it kinda sounds like some New Agers channeling a Native American ceremony, only to realize they've conjured up some angry force that swallows them whole. Slow building, contemplative and, dare was say, dooooomy, we're definitely into it. And this time around, the band takes a break from their usual collagey album art aesthetic and opted for the more refined look. With a simple, vintagey cover complete with stark pictures of the female droners looking quite dashing, we have to say we're really impressed with the whole package. Don't miss out on this incredibly impressive release! Completely and sincerely recommended!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.Peyote Road, Pocahaunted's second offering from the Woodsist/Fuck-It-Tapes camp compiles two funereal dirges, one from the studio, while the other is a vibey live cut from the bands spate of dates supporting Sonic Youth's rekindling of Daydream Nation last summer.
The former, "Divine Flesh," begins with a dirty and thick guitar phrase that is repeated sludgefully through the duration of the song. The guitar work is embellished with some spry bongo work, what sounds like a sitar ringing sympathetically on the periphery, and eventually the snaking and syllabic vocal meandering's of Amanda and Bethany, the band's two core members.
The B-side, "Heroic doses," is a more clouded, and less melodic affair, quite possibly a result of the live recording techniques employed. It comes across as a sort of subterranean fugue, with more circular dynamics, and less track separation. Peyote Road's pace is more contemplative than previous Pocahaunted releases and performances, erring on the side of mournfulness, and stopping well short of the ecstatic catharsis that put this LA band on the map this past year. This is not a bad thing however, as it lends a bit of space to the listener. Despite its density, there is a loamy and diffuse quality that makes what is ostensibly heavy music by virtue of its palette and repetition, somehow spacious and inhabitable. Call it the bearable lightness of Pocahaunted; eschewing black superlatives for a dark grey sonic tapestry. Further, as their name would indicate, there is an embedded playfulness in the bands approach that sets them apart from many other contemporary drone/psych outfits. The vocals, despite being darkly minor, have an oddly pre-pubescent bounce one might expect to hear coming from a 3rd grader discovering their goth proclivities, and we again mean that in a good way. Certainly anyone well familiar with the band will be exceedingly pleased with this offering, and anyone who has yet to tap into the Pocahaunted/Robedoor/NotNotFun locus would be doing themselves a favor by taking a dip in the pre-natal drone slurry that's been drifting up the coast for the last couple of years. It is special. Warning: already sold out at label and we only have exceedingly few, so sorry, be prepared to be disappointed...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Elsewhere on the list you'll find the latest from freaky druggy noise rockers Burnt Hills, with their latest, Stoners Pot Palace. Another eyebrow singing blast of chaotic kraut flecked space rock garage stomp. But at least one member of Burnt Hills has a soft side, and they let it shine as Pog, a gorgeous rambling sonic sprawl of lo-fi murk and melody, sounding much more like some slab of foresty Finnish Folk than the work of one of the Burnt Hills. Employing a mighty (and mighty bizarre) arsenal of noisemakers including bongos, floor drum, triola, acoustic guitar, kiddie accordion, broken kiddie electric guitar, cello, piano, electric guitar, kick drum, electric mandolin, wah wah, giant metal tweezers, pocket rocket and a little big muff, all recorded on random old dusty tape decks boom boxes and dictaphones and it sounds like it. Everything warbly and murky, the production a muddy blur, rendering all the sounds soft and smeared and slightly out of focus, which only adds to the dreaminess vibe of Mitote.�
Strange wheezing melodies flutter and shimmer amidst streaks of foggy ambience, notes are wreathed in dusty halos of reverb and delay, it almost sounds like some strange calliope music transmitted via shortwave and broadcast through a tiny transistor radio. Strings moan and drift, pianos plink and plonk it expansive fields of murky shimmer, full on rock riffs are muted and smothered into strange rhythmic series of thumps, every sound Pog creates is lovingly wrapped in all manner of lo-fi detritus, warm swirls of tape hiss, thick sheets of blurry FX, rendering everything soft and billowy and effervescent. Definitely fans of Avarus and Anaksimandros and Kemialliset will dig this a bunch, as will most cd-r fanatics into lo fi murk and dreamy drone-y drift.
Packaged in handmade gatefold sleeves, with various artwork and photos affixed to the inside and outside, as well as a pop up flower on the inside, LIMITED TO 99 COPIES, each disc hand numbered, the cd-r's cool faux 'vinyl' discs complete with inner label.
Back in the early 80s, Points Of Friction emerged out of the longstanding friendship from a handful of art-school misfits attending the Los Angeles Pierce College, as a means of unorthodox experimentation with consumer electronics and cheap
Swiss "cracked everyday electronics" improvisers Voice Crack team up with avant-percussionist Gunter Muller and French turntablist Erik M, in the group Poire Z. This disc documents their live performances at recent new music festivals in Zurich and Wels. "Tense and vibrating improvised electronic / electroacoustic music." Yes. There's almost every sort of hiss, rumble, crackle, squiggle,
International experimental supergroup Poire_Z return with a third disc of improvisational electronic / electroacoustic music. Featured on "+" are three live documents in which the quartet -- featuring the Swiss experimentalists Voice Crack (Norbert Möslang
We were first turned on to Poison Ring by the guys in Sutekh Hexen, and managed to meet the man responsible on a recent trip to Seattle. We were initially not sure what to expect. The tape packaging, while beautiful, evokes something else entirely, something maybe more gothic, and Mr. Poison Ring himself is quite elven, in appearance and attire, but instead of some gothic renn faire flutter, we were treated to something much more intense, dark and atmospheric, a hazy, faded landscape of woozy soft focus murk and buried melodies, a sound that definitely had us thinking of Philip Jeck and The Caretaker and Tim Hecker. While it's impossible to tell exactly what's producing these ghostly sounds, it does sound like a handful of dusty old turntables, spinning lazily in some giant abandoned ballroom, a series of gauzy melodies, and slowed down samples, layered and woven into softly undulating blurs, melancholy and mournful, imbued with a introspective otherworldliness, the perfect haunting lullaby for nights beneath pitch black skies, devoid of stars, a gorgeously abject drift into some other/underworld, laced with moments both sinister and ominous, but those moments seem to always eventually unwind, the sound eventually and inevitably diffusing into another stretch of blessed out somnambulant ambience.
On some of the tracks, the source does seem to be obviously old records and broken down turntables, and yet, instead of taking away from the mystery, it simply adds more color and depth, often some sort of disembodied rhythm, reminding us again of Jeck, but also Strotter Inst, especially in the stretches anchored by electronic squelches and distorted pulses, like some alien, haunted house music, an industrial creep that manages to evoke a strange tension, while still remaining otherworldly and lovely. The flipside spends much of it's time lysergically loping through fields of murk and pitch shifted melody, an achingly wistful sprawl of dreamdirges and waking sonic feverdreams.
Housed in a beautiful handmade slipcover/sleeve, with a built in mini booklet, printed on vellum, each copy hand numbered, LIMITED TO 89 COPIES!!
Two tracks, one - "Zwei" - off the album and one - "Eins" - exclusive to this 12".
First we've heard from this French instrumental math / post / noise rock combo, and holy shit, these guys push all our musical buttons, channeling the spirit of Polvo and Pitchblende, all droned out atonal guitars and wild mathy rhythms, mesmerizingly hypnotic metallic grooves and soaring layered sonic sprawls, the perfect post / math rock hybrid, fusing loping super melodic mesmer with gnarled dense near metal crush, but somehow managing the near impossible, making all of this weird mathiness insanely catchy, the sort of rare band that can conjure up swirling intricate landscapes of chugging and churning and soaring and droning, all manner of shimmer and crunch, pummel and pound, into something that you may find yourself humming hours later. Fans of outfits like Psychic Paramount, Dazzling Killmen, Laddio Bolocko, Phleg Camp, Don Caballero, Bastro, Breadwinner, Drive Like Jehu, Rodan and the like will flip. A new favorite band for sure!
It's been ages since we'd heard from these French math/noise/post rockers, but thankfully very little has changed in their sound world, still trafficking in a style of music woefully underrepresented these days as far as we're concerned. We'd still cite the same list of bands we did in our review of their first cd-r: Dazzling Killmen, Don Caballero, Bastro, Breadwinner, Rodan, Drive Like Jehu, Laddio Bolocko, you get the drift. Each song here is dizzying in its scope, sometimes locking into tense tightly wound grooves, other times obliterating structure entirely, the guitars churning and chugging, jagged and sharp, flitting easily from chiming melody to skull caving bombast, before unexpectedly unfurling weird bent notes, or strange detuned melodies, the drums don't hold everything together so much as make it even more frenzied, a constant cascade of wild, loose limbed fills, sometimes even slipping into total blastbeats, the guitars following along, the instruments doing some wild dance, lurching and stumbling, leaping and swaggering between styles and sounds, but somehow, the whole goddamn thing holds together like some musical math problem made flesh. It's short too, just 4 songs, but they cram as much into these 4 songs as most other math rock bands manage in their whole life span. Super limited too, and we get them direct from the band in Europe, so when we run out, it might take us a while to get more.
Everyone's favorite Austrian guitar-gone-electronica experimentalist Christian Fennesz again shows up on a release wherein he dabbles in the European free improv scene. So if you are buying this album simply because Fennesz is involved, you might be in for a surprise, as his contribution in collaborating with the New Music / Improv Jazz ensemble Polwechsel is only part of the whole, and it's hard to tell who's doing what -- Fennesz isn't the only one on hand operating electronics, computer, or a guitar. Polwechsel is the quartet of John Butcher (saxophone), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass, guitar, computer), Michael Moser (cello, computer), and Burkard Stangl (guitar, electronics) who have been exploring free improvisation and composition based around the European models of jazz for nearly a decade now. Fennesz, with computer, synth, and acoustic guitar, joined this quartet for a three day recording session in January of 2002. The results: a quiet, slow evolution of sound within the tonal parameters of the instruments in question, with bits of granular synthesis and timestretched, glitchy samples situated in the background. The dynamics of this album come from the spartan 'solos' taken by each of the players. These are not freak-outs by any mean, but delicate scrapes across the stringed instruments or a bleak tentative bleats from the saxophones. Quite subtle, and nice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
There is an odd little manifesto/rant on the back of this 3 track single: 'They despise physical contact and love media, technical communication, and the realm of reproduction and simulation in general. They are enthusiastic collectors and manipulators of useless artifacts and informantion. They are an underground, but not opposed to the system. They change, manipulate, and subvert ready-made products, but at the same time are the apotheosis of consummerism and an ideal workforce for capitalism... a somber picture of isolated, solipsistic men and women, who lose themselves in post-modern tides...' Apparently, this all has something to do with issues Pomassl has with Wired magazine (quite deservingly) and these issues are perhaps addressed in these two lengthy compositions made up of cyclical repetitions and off-kilter sequencing, and sounding like a sample of Test Dept's 'Unacceptable Face of Freedom'. Regardless, I can't quite understand how these two almost identical audio trax are the synthesis of Pomassl's original concept. Please help... can't assimilate data...
One of our favorite far out noise records, from Israel! Back in stock, but probably not for long...
Noise is always a tricky proposition. Some folks just want that harsh, brutal, paint peeling, speaker shredding white noise aural assault, while others (like us) like their noise with a little bit of structure, and texture and -gasp- maybe even some melody and dynamics. Our favorite noise records tend to be those that do something special or original with noise. There's plenty of Merzbow we could do without, but a handful of his discs are truly innovative blasts of gorgeously crafted corrosive sound. Gate's Golden is another example of a 'noise' record that manages to be as pretty and mysterious as it is harsh. And there are a bunch of noise(y) discs that completely kick our asses, records from Hijokaidan, Hototogisu, Hanatarash, Gerogerigegege, Incapacitants, Nerve Net Noise and more, sure we love us some full bore NOISE!!, but typically, of that stuff, the discs that gets the most play, are the ones that aren't just a straight wall of noise.�
We recently reviewed a killer disc of remixes, various artists reinterpreting and recontextualizing tracks from�Kurdish Melodies On Zorna by Zadik Zecharia, a pretty solid AQ fave. The Zorna is�a traditional Kurdish instrument like a longer more narrow trumpet or Scottish bagpipe, and Zecharia got work magic with his, weaving dense tapestries of joyful sound. The highlight of the remix record was Israeli noise unit Poochlatz's mix, turning Zecharia's playful Zorna into an instrument of doom and gloom! It definitely had us hankering for more.�
So�here it is, the latest release from Poochlatz, a single nearly twenty minute track, and it's pretty caustic. Harsh and bleak and distorted and blown out and indeed very very noisy. But there's a lot going on, within the noise and beneath the surface. The whole track exists in a black cloud of squealing feedback, moaning slabs of downtuned guitar, jagged slabs of glitched out electronics, everything muddy and murky and crumbling, but beneath this wall of abject brutality, hover strange barely audible majestic melodies, what sounds like snippets of songs buried way way down,�howled blackened vocals, distant demonic roars, streaks of sound all tangled up with smears of disembodied percussion, some almost black metal riffing pulled apart into weird blurry buzzes. On first listen, it's like sticking your head in a hornet's nest, but once your head is firmly lodged in there, the buzzing and constant stinging begins to feel soothing, almost tranquil, you head begins to swell, your ears swollen shut, all sound reduced to thick slabs of whir and shriek, so intense and strangely alien. Think Whitehouse versus Skullflower versus Wolf Eyes versus Prurient with some strange shoegazery pop ambient referee trying desperately to keep the fight fair and failing miserably. A beautifully brutal slab of dreamy (nightmarish?) noise. Recorded live too!
You don't have to be a music theory nerd to enjoy the results of LA guitarist Rod Poole's explorations of "just intonation" or "pure tuning", a system of tuning quite different from the current Western standard of 12 pitches to the octave "equal temperment". It's been used in the music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley among others. Just intonation simply lends itself to tranquil, droning, meditative music, it would seem -- and Mind's Island, a disc of vaguely Eastern-sounding (non-Western anyway!) guitar/voice improv, or "spontaneous composition" as the artists put it, is a great example. The droning blend of Poole's acoustic guitar and the wordless singing of "avant-world" vocalist Sasha Bodganowitsch is both blissful and exotic-sounding. We've heard only a few recordings by Poole previously (there are only a few) and always want to hear more, so this is a quite welcome release.
Along with composing the scores for some of Werner Herzog's greatest films, Florian Fricke was as much a musical pioneer as were his contemporaries Faust, Neu and Cluster. Unlike his contemporaries, Fricke's music is informed as much by music from arounds the world as it was rock and classical composition (in which he was schooled). Sitars, pan flutes and assorted ethnic percussion have as much a place in any given Popol Vuh album as moog synths, guitars, bass and drums. One only need look at his choice of a band name, taken from the title of a sacred Mayan text, to see where Fricke's affinities lay.
Recorded in 1971, In Den Garten Pharaos is Popol Vuh's second album. Like Affenstunde, it contains minimal arrangements -- in contrast to the film works Nosferatu and Aguirre -- and the compositions within are more centered around texture and timbre than melody. The album begins with creepy moog and organ drones, some of which would turn up on Aguirre the Wrath of God, evolving into semi-improvised chords and melodies played on rhodes piano along with hand drums. The second track features super heavy and dark church organ drones with cymbals and howling voices and more hand drums. Along with the original album tracks, this reissue comes with two previously unreleased ten minute tracks "Kha-White Structures" parts one and two which are solo moog improvisations by Fricke. All tracks are quite beautiful and haunting. Very nice!
One of four new releases this week on the always impressive The Tapeworm label, this one from pianist Andrew Poppy, who offers up a handful of lovely piano sonatas on the A side, stately and subtly cinematic, a mix of modern classical and baroque elegance, mesmerizing and not so minimal, every track in constant motion, lush cascades of notes over hypnotic almost looped and near rhythmic arrangements, haunting and cyclical, a little Satie, a little Reich, dark and brooding, but with flourishes of sun dappled melodicism.
But it's the flipside that most folks will probably find the most exciting, a 'dub' version of the pieces on the A side, entitled "Infernal Dub Furniture", which casts all the melodies and arrangement in a new, soft focus, woozy, dreamily druggy light. The sounds smeared into an almost Caretaker like blur in some places, a dizzying barrage of careening fragmented melodies in others.
Repetitive and less 'dubby', than just sort of fucked up and tripped out, but definitely dubby in the sense that it adds lots of texture and rhythm, even a little groove that wasn't present in the standard sonatas, a gloriously lysergic sprawl of dizzying collaged sounds, whirling washed out piano shimmer, and gristly melodic buzz. Some seriously droned out abstract drone-dub piano-noise bliss for sure.
If you turn the title of this piece into an Acronym, it may seem that Andrew Poppy has been thinking far too long about Dr. Who (T.A.R.D.I.S. - the phonebooth that enabled time / space travel). Anyway, Poppy is an electro-acoustic composer who spent his time in the '80s as an in-house composer/engineer for ZTT (the label responsible for Frankie Goes To Holywood - though I don't think he had anything to do with them) and arranged a number of minimalist chamber ensembles. Inspired by the patterned abstractions of Steve Reich and Terry Riley as well as the sci-fi imagery of time travel (specifically Dr. Who), Andrew Poppy composed this piece, which calls for pointilist plucks from a solo violin to be asynchronously re-inserted into the score after being electronically treated. The overall sound is synthetic and sublime (much like Coil's early use of the Fairlight sampler) unlike the detacted electric treatments of Feldman or Marchetti.
Listen closely to all the recordings by Mark Gergis, and you'll discover a very interesting, subversive thread running through all of his work. Whether it be in his impeccable contributions to the Sublime Frequencies series (i.e. Choubi Choubi, Cambodian Cassette Archives, I Remember Syrai, Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan), the gleeful recreation of Thai Pop in Neung Phak, or his media reclamation projects Mono Pause and Porest, Gergis delights in what mainstream American culture discounts as alien, invalid, or profane. On occasion, this delight has been tempered with a political animosity, as is most evident in Gergis' curatorial choices on the Choubi Choubi collection of Iraqi pop songs; but through his experiments in media sabotage through Mono Pause and his solo project Porest, Gergis' recontextualization is spiked with searing dissent. Mood Noose is the second outing for Gergis as Porest, and it's a bit of a detour from the Negativland / People Like Us like collages of his earlier work which relied so heavily on black humor in its juxtaposition of sound. Nevertheless, Gergis has constructed an impressive and wholly decentered album in Mood Noose. Opening with spy-thriller horns marching on top of crunchy electronic rhythms, Gergis presents Mood Noose as something of a splattered electronica album full of rewired circuits, hypersaturated granular synthesis, Geiger-counter pinpricks, and slabs of digi-noise. At times, the album seems more in keeping with the Dada-electronic works of Stilluppsteypa or even a fragmented version of some of Bruce Gilbert's solo projects. But these references don't hold much water by the end of the record, as the compositions take wildly divergent paths, as collages of barking dogs and warbled moans crash into Russian pop songs. The most disturbing segment to Mood Noose is the violent argument between a couple as read by two computerized voices, offering a dispassionate delivery of "ouch, Tom, you're hurting me." This is one of those records that will certainly haunt you well after you've stopped listening to it.
In the great tradition of Negativland, People Like Us, Tape Beatles, Evolution Control Committee and Stock, Hausen & Walkman comes Porest (a.k.a. Mark Gergis of Mono Pause). Porest dis-assembles the world, leaving no cultural and musical stone unturned, to create a twisted, irreverant, post-folk ethnography. We visit a psycho-sexual homicidal Austrian engaged in making "fist dumplings", reciting his quaint and surreal story a la Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". We're taken on a journey into a world where plastic sheep have been raised the same way for thousands of years, a world where Dan Fogelberg is an avant garde yodeller and where our heroes died for our syrup. Sprinkled throughout are instrumental numbers of equally dis-membered cultural origin, on par with Stock, Hausen & Walkman. Brew yourself a hot cup of Oolan tea, slam several shots of hard NyQuil and let Porest lead you on a journey through musical un-history.
Let it be known, that Tourroists! is a difficult record, and those with a stubborn lack of cultural objectivity will be wise to avoid this album. You have been warned!
Up until this album, Mark Gergis, the man behind Porest (as well as Mono Pause / Neung Phak), has been quietly mapping out his own course of ethnomusicology that hinges upon the complex layers of cultural perception between the US and the third world. Neung Phak stands as his Thai Pop ensemble, in which he exquisitely explores the particulars of SE Asian pop music complete with re-creations of radio dramas and the eccentric hybridizations of eastern and western idioms; he's also been responsible for some for some of the best collections from the Sublime Frequencies series (i.e. Choubi Choubi and Cambodian Cassette Archives). Porest is Gergis' media-manipulation project, and Tourrorists! will undoubtably go down as his most inflamatory and most provocative work. Tourrorists is a scathing political record that unabashedly takes on the themes of 9/11, Guantanamo, Arabic conspiracy theories about Israeli secret police (Mossad), and Christian missionaries. However, unlike the politically charged works of Negativland, Gergis refuses to center the album from a particular political or cultural institution (whether that be atheism, socialism, anarchism, etc.); instead, he challenges the listener to question his or her own politics and cultural perspective about any of the topics. Case in point, "Let's Roll" recontextualizes various media snippets from the 9/11 hearings as well as Jihadist rhetoric through computerized voices that emulate the inflection of an American woman, an American man, and an African-American man. There's something intrinsically disturbing about these dispassionate spoken texts, not to mention the wildly contradictory banter between these three characters. Similarly, Gergis collages a particularlly banal public service announcement into a matter of fact "Soilent Green is people!" declaration. Gergis also gives an English translation to the classic collaboration between Aaviko and Kabar on "Eye of the Leopard" originally sung by the only known escapee from Guantanamo. Alan Bishop from the Sun City Girls also makes a stunning cameo on the summery groove of "Hoyda." None of this speaks of the intricacy of Gergis' musical productions which run from mangled electronics, plenty post-SCG Syrian pop numbers, and canned bossanova rhythms; but, it's the ideological content that renders this album a pipe bomb. Tourrorists! is bound to piss you off or offend you in some way shape or form; and we mean that as a very high compliment.
Woah. Somebody somewhere just had a fantasy come true, and it's got nothing to do with the bondage photos that often adorn Merbow releases. It's Japanese noise master Masami "Merzbow" Akita jamming with American stoner rock outfit Porn, who feature none other than the mighty Dale Crover of the Melvins on drums. Also Tim Moss on guitar, and heaviness engineering guru Billy Anderson on bass! Add in the Seldon Hunt art/design and this promises to be quite heavy, or noisy, or both. Definitely both, though it sounds much more like a Merzbow record than anything else. Shrieking electronic skree all over the place, with some plodding boombastic drums and heavy guitar riffs struggling through the dense muzzzzzz. Kinda what you might expect!
There are a dozen Roman numeral numbered tracks, each one individualized with Merzbow's noise dynamically varied and vibrating, from crinkum-crankum glitch to high pitched whine to howling, whooshing zapping. Porn's contributions (occasionally) add more structure and momentum. Distorted (natch) vocals surface at one point, the drumming speeds up.... or at other times, despite Porn's presence, the Merzbovian brutal harsh noise simply takes over entirely.
There's certainly precedent for Merbow to mix it up with "rock" music. His Hard Lovin' Man album some years back featured samples of Deep Purple, ferinstance - and of course let's not forget about his couple collaborations with Boris!! Maybe, like those, Porn + Merzbow will be a "gateway drug" for some stoner/doom fans to get into the total noise thing (note however that Merzbow here is far more extreme than his relatively subtle performance on Rock Dream with Boris).
Also, as (in principle) Merzbow fans, but ones often overwhelmed by his prolific output, we're quite partial to his collaborative efforts, giving high marks to recent discs he did with Keiji Haino and Richard Pinhas, juxtapositions like this one which somehow enhance the effect of Merbow's noise aesthetic.
- MPEG stream: II
- MPEG stream: VI
Latest solo outing from former aQ-er Jon Porras, one half of dronefolk desert doom duo Barn Owl, and the man behind Elm. This is only Porras' second record under his own name, and shares space on this week's list with the new tape from Painted Caves, the latest solo project from his Barn Owl partner Evan Caminiti. And like Painted Caves, Porras on his own doesn't stray too far from the dusky sonic soundworld the two have conjured up on past Barn Owl records, the basics are definitely the same, washed out and woozy, twang flecked and atmospheric, evoking burnt orange sunsets over wide open expanses of barren scrub, of slow moving stars in a pitch black sky, a little bit Earth, a little bit Ennio Morricone, an abstract alien Appalachia wedded to slowburn psychedelia. But Black Mesa, instead of reinventing a sound, that really doesn't need to be reinvented, simply pulls it apart, Porras strapping on his guitar, newly acquired synth under his arm, and moves deeper into this lost blackened landscape, slowly sinking deeper and deeper, a swirl of echoing chords left in his wake, or alternately, slowly drifting heavenward, held aloft on lush billowing clouds of chordal swirl and smoldering psychedelic drift.
The drone element, as always is paramount, these tracks like soft focus, slo-mo country ragas, if anything Porras' mastery of the form becoming more complete, able to fuse delicate crystalline shimmer, to heaving blackened churn, even adding simple skeletal rhythms, and heavily effected vocals, the sound on Black Mesa at once more melodic, but also strangely more malevolent, but very subtly so. Some lost soundtrack, a cinematic score to an endless wander through burnt black wastelands, Porras' sounds illuminating only so much, leaving much of the world cloaked in shadow, but as that light flickers, various bits of this lost world are gradually revealed, in some cases only to be lost again to the ether, but in others, revealing to the listener a new path, a less trodden course that leads even further into the unknown. With nothing but these haunting otherworldly sounds to guide us.
Another gorgeous, dark sonic gem. Fans of Barn Owl, Elm, Earth, Six Organs, and other purveyors of smoldering psych and black drone drift, will feel right at home here...
Light Divide is the newest full length from Porras, who is likely better known to most folks as 1/2 of drone-doom duo Barn Owl (or to many of you as a former aQ-er), and on his solo records, as well as on recent Barn Owl records proper, Porras has seemingly been distancing himself from the twang flecked smolder of the earlier BO records, a sound that won them great acclaim, but found them permanently aligned with their sonic forebears in Earth, both sharing a similarly washed out, deserty sonic palette. But as Porras began to experiment more with synths and electronics, and even beats, his sound blossomed into something much more his own, eventually arrive here, at Light Divide, which takes the psychedelic witch house murk of Porras' solo project DVVLLXNS, and melds it to a dreamy, pulsing drift, not all that far removed from Kompakt's Pop Ambience, in fact, opener "Apeiron" would have sounded right at home on any of the Pop Ambient compilations, as as longtime readers of the aQ list know, there's hardly a higher compliment.
And if you can imagine a sort of witch house / Pop Ambient hybrid, that's definitely shorthand sonic band math for Light Divide. The aforementioned opener is all soft focus synth swirl, dense ominous drones underpinning the ethereal shimmer, the track flecked with tinkling high end sonic sparkles, laced with distant percussion, and instead of a beat proper, it's like the sounds are being subtly twisted and shaped into gristly pulses, and lush chordal swells, a blackened kosmische drift, that's heady and hypnotic, a gorgeously haunting late night sonic sprawl that manages to be both cinematic and expansive, claustrophobic and introspective.
"Recollection" takes the same template, and manages to make it even more skeletal, creating a crystalline latticework of click and thrum, of hiss and static, lots of reverb and echo, hazy and amorphous, like the digital dub of Pole pulled apart until there's barely anything left, a hazy, somnambulent dream-drift. "Divide" piles on multiple layers of hum and thrum, all softly undulating, lush and lustrous, tonal colorations gradually leached from the sound, leaving just thick rumbling swells and shadowy smears of melody, pocked with soft shards of static, and all blurred into a slowly shifting cloud of softly psychedelic shimmer.
"New Monument" might be the most kinetic of the bunch, gnarled melodies all tangled up below fields of hazy and smoothed out crackle, laced with whip crack percussion, single bursts swaddled in reverb and sent drifting into the ether, gradually blossoming into what sounds more like some sort of slow motion gothic ambience, a mutated 4AD miserablism, stretched out into a strangely percussive bit of wistful drift, before bleeding right into the closer "Pleiades", which finds the previous track being swallowed whole by lush billows of low end thrum, the result a drowsy, shadowy slo-mo dub, that halfway through is transformed into something much more kinetic, bathed in a soft sonic glow, the percussion and buried pulsations roiling below the surface, the sound closer to something like Vessel or oOoOO, which makes us think the next Porras solo joint could end up on Tri Angle or Blackest Ever Black. Fantastic stuff.
Orilla Oscura is the latest solo record from Jon Porras, former aQ-er, and one half of dronedoom duo Barn Owl. It's Porras' second release this year (along with Black Mesa), but this one takes Porras's signature sound, all smoldering twang flecked drift, and haunting droned out mesmer, and applies it to something much more high concept, and the results are pretty fantastic.
Using old tapes as the basis of Orilla Obscura, Porras slowed down and manipulated the source tapes, adding effects and various textures, and then approached the compositions as if the guitar was a tool with which to explore these ghostly sounds, the haunting mysteries revealed by these old tapes, do in fact make the perfect background for Porras' haunting sonic ruminations, so much so that in many places it's difficult to tell what's guitar and what's tape, the various sounds bleeding into one another, long passages of somnambulant drift, give way to some soaring, almost shredding (at least the barn Owl / Porras version of shredding) distorted guitar blissout, lush distorted layers of guitar aimed heavenward, quickly drifting back to earth and settling into another sprawl of slo-mo soft psych drift. The tapes seem to provide texture as much as anything, adding plenty of hiss and hum, giving the sound a rough around the edges feel, and a mysterious warmth. Divine and dreamy, and beautifully ghostly.
To be fair, the sounds here are not hugely removed from Porras' other solo work, or as Elm, or even his work with Barn Owl, but it is a stunningly subtle progression, as he continues to push the boundaries of his own explorative guitar ambience, continuing to delve deeper into the dark and dusty corners of abstract psychedelia, and with each record further refining the sonic essence of shadow and light, rendered here in lush, sweeping epics of spectral guitardrone and heaving swells of warm chordal shimmer. So nice.
Housed in a super heavy full color gatefold jacket. Includes a download coupon as well!
Initially sold exclusively on the recent European Barn Owl tour, now finally available at aQ, here's Revisitor, a dvd-r of super 8 films and original music from one half of Barn Owl, former aQ-er Jon Porras, released on his own Dolores Press imprint. It's a hazy washed out collection of haunting grainy black and white images set to a score that is quite different than what we're used to hearing from Porras, in Barn Owl or solo, especially considering that there are no guitars here, all electronics and electronic sourced sounds. Long stretches of hazy grey ambience, of industrial whir and hushed minimal thrum, tons of space surrounding abstract swirls of whipping-wind shimmer and deep sonorous echo drenched pulses, blurred metallic layers slowly unfurling in clouds of soft focus effects, a series of minimal soundscapes that slip easily from rich and lustrous and lovely, to haunting and ominous, one second a gauzy softly psychedelic smear of dreamlike chords, the next, a rumbling sinister sprawl of low end blur peppered with strange percussion and some downright doomy sonic swells. The visuals are equally stunning, strange hooded figures performing strange rituals, rolling hills and the silhouette of trees against a slate sky, a stormy coastline, the crashing surf, the lens dappled with rain drops, the sunlight glistening on water, birds flitting through thick clouds, and plenty of more abstract images as well, strange lights, plenty of shadows, textures and mysterious moving abstract shapes, random reflections, impressionistic images of candles, and instruments, hands and hidden faces, all lost in deep fields of rich black.
Originally limited to just 30 copies, now available in a slightly less limited run, housed in a printed origami style sleeve, each disc hand stamped.
Both the Barn Owls have solo records on this week's list, elsewhere there's Evan Caminiti's new single on Trensmat, and then there's this, the long awaited new solo record from the other half of dronefolk duo Barn Owl, Jon Porras. We'd been hearing about this record for ages, Porras' long in the works heavy shoegaze record, but this is no MBV/Lovesliescrushing worship, nope instead, Undercurrent is a logical offshoot of the dark twang flecked drone and drift of Barn Owl, a bit less murky and more crystalline, prismatic, the opening track emerging from a cloud of swirling layered thrum, blossoming into something more more melodic than usual, spidery melodies, draped over a smoldering backdrop of rumble and drift, of hum and shimmer, the sounds a blurred chorale, building to a dreamdrone climax, epic and majestic and powerfully emotional.
The whole record reveals itself as a sort of hazy psychguitar gem, Porras deftly layering darkness and light, wreathing pop in shadow, infusing churning darkness with pop warmth, "Seascape" is a gauzy blisscape, but is underpinned by ominous roiling black sonic clouds, which build and build and eventually swallow the rest of the track, the drama in the melodies struggling to escape the pull of this black hole, haunting and ominous and so intense. "Shore" is another strange melding of hazy drift and rumbling blackened drone, only in this case, the blackness is driven back, revealing the warmth within, the song's second half unfurling all reverby and abstract, while that blackness whispers in the background.
The clean guitar sound is definitely reminiscent of Roy Montgomery, the same sort of softly effected shimmer, but it's that sound combined with the more dense and dark guitarscapes, that create Porras' distinctive Undercurrent, "Peering" another example, wreathing those soft smeared swells of sound with dark grinding slabs of blurred blackness, and roiling riffage. The record closes with "Gaze", a pulsing sprawl of washed out woozy guitarscapery, again a beautiful bit of atmospheric drift, disguising the darkness that lays beneath, but again, light triumphs over darkness, and the record unwinds with a stretch of super spare wide open ambience, the guitars letting lose tendrils of melodies, wrapping them in reverb and letting them float delicately in space, as they fall gently to earth. Eventually piling up into a gorgeously layered final soft squall of bleary and blissful psychedelic haze...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Joining the likes of AQ fave M-bands Mogwai, M83, and Magyar Posse (and they've also even been compared to a few S-artists Ulrich Schnauss, Stafraenn Hakon and Sigur Ros), This Italian group ever so gallantly and gracefully toss their finely crafted musical hat into the ever-expanding global atmospheric postrock arena. Port-Royal's sprawling 78-minute long Flares is a soft, hazy blissed-out dream of an album filled with shimmery ambient washes of glacial guitars peppered with occasional wisps of electronics and samples. Each and every time we've played this in the store, it draws many enthused queries. Really really calming and really really pretty. Positively sigh-inducing.
When we first got an earful of Aftertime, the debut solo release from Roly Porter, who was/is one half of the dubstep duo Vex'd, we were pretty surprised. We had been expecting something more along the lines of that duo's lush dark beatscapes and swirling skeletal stutters but instead were treated to something entirely different. The beats almost entirely jettisoned, bar the occasional squall of rhythmic splatter, or super spare muted pulsations. The vibe is much more abstract, and droned out, a sort of dark cosmic mimimal modern classical? But somehow filtered through the grim industrial crunch and crumble of groups like Wolf Eyes. The sounds at times caustic and grimly grinding, but more often then not, woven into a sprawl of sweeping musical melodrama, lush, soaring string like shimmers, underpinned by gristly buzz, and dubstep style bass warbles, but sans the 'step'. The dub vibe too, minimal, but still pervasive, imagine if you can, the lush, hushed, cinematic ambience of Stars Of The Lid crossed with the blackened industrial crush and sculpted noise of past Record Of The Weekers Cloaks, it's almost like the most dense, and bleak, sonically sinister intros to the darkest dubstep jams, expanded into whole tracks.
But these are not just glorified extended intros, Porter crafts roiling landscapes of abstract ambience, a series of sonically harrowing epics, the opener sets the stage, all moaning tones and extended drones, very symphonic, but again, rough around the edges, as if the sounds are slowly decaying, the soundtrack to some otherworldly post apocalyptic wasteland, which leads right into the first track proper, which sounds like an alternate soundtrack to The Conversation as imagined by Organum. Dense sprawls of metallic rumble, laced with buried electronic squiggles, sonar like pings, all wreathed in a layer of gauzy, crackly, washed out sonic grime, and the whole thing wrapped around a weirdly dreamlike melody, drifting hauntingly through this heaving cloud of soft black noise. Eventually, the sound blossoms into something even more intense, blasts of electronics, shards of noise, all somehow fashioned into a dizzying barrage of almost beat-like buzz.
The record gradually introduce more and more melody, Porter's dense electronic blurscapes balanced by lushly melodic stretches of layered string like shimmer, a definitely modern minimalist vibe, but then of course, those bits of melodic tranquility, seem to sink into Porter's crumbling distorted electronic morass, sometimes completely, leaving just roiling expanses of buzz and hiss, glitched out crunch and keening electronic bleat, but just as often, striking some seemingly impossible balance, lacing this heaving sonic hostility with something totally at odds, soaring strings, lush chordal swells, which transforms the sound into something else entirely. Later huge demonic foghorn like low end rumbles moan ominously, adding a weird almost demonic drama to otherwise near tranquil drift, that low end constantly expanding, into black, gristled drones, woven into the aforementioned string sweeps, but often drifting into the background, leaving gorgeous bits of hazy minimal drift, mournful piano, swaddled in soft swirls of lush thrum, even at one point bursting into what might be the most moving moment on the record, with a soaring minor key melody, achingly melancholic, driven by a strange super distorted, crumbling almost metallic sounding 'riff' that mostly adds texture and heft, and reminds us of another longtime aQ fave Tim Hecker, as well as the recent record from Seirom, a more blissed out offshoot of Gnaw Their Tongues.
An utterly gorgeous collection of minimal electronic soundscapes, grim buzz laden modern chamber music, and black drone ambience, a record we've been wanting to make our Record Of The Week for over a year now. So glad we finally can. Absolutely recommended, and of course, most definitely for fans of Ben Frost, Stars Of The Lid, Tim Hecker, Cloaks, etc...
Life Cycle Of A Massive Star is a pretty ambitious title for a record from post-dubstep beat junkie, but if Roly Porter's last record, Aftertime, which we made a Record Of The Week, was any indication, a lot has changed since Porter's time in the dubstep duo Vex'd. Not that we didn't love Vex'd, we definitely did, their brand of dubstep was way out on the fringe, dark and dour, warped and skeletal, washed out and hazy, but none of this is to imply that Porter's post Vex'd output would in anyway be classified as dubstep, BUT some of the soundscapery that made Vex'd so interesting is definitely in full effect, even more so on this new one.
Aftertime was a sprawling experimental epic, more sound design than anything, abstract and ambient, like the score to some mysterious abstract art film, reminding us of another aQ fave, Ben Frost, and like Frost's albums, it was most definitely a record that had us wondering why this guy was not in Hollywood, crafting music for big budget sci-fi blockbusters and twisted art house flicks. So we were actually expecting more of the same, but Life Cycle Of A Massive Star threw us for a loop, the opener "Cloud" does actually sound like a Vex'd jam, a pulsing, pulsating Field like melodic stutter/loop, with some clipped vocal fragments, you can almost imagine the drop coming at any time, a barrage of rib cage rattling bass wobble, and percussive machine gun stutter, but it never does, instead, it locks into a super hypnotic cycle, that has a bit of a kosmische vibe, a sort of synth-age mesmer, but the main pulsating melody is surrounded by dark swirls of keening minor key shimmer, giving the whole thing a super tense, and intense vibe, at least until the last couple minutes, when the loop peels back, revealing an ominous, majestic symphonic score, that could have been lurking below the surface the whole time. And even then, slowly devolves into a creepy stretch of abstract ambience, and post industrial soundscapery.
The rest of the record tends toward the sound design of Aftertime, but with some of the newly revisited Vex'd audio of the past. Deep subsonic rumbles, buzzing Eastern melodies, groaning and creaking machine like clatter, clouds of crumbling static, soaring swirling strings, moaning cellos, operatic vocals, that track, sounds like a Vex'd opera, melancholic strings, deep dramatic vocals, peppered with little bursts of percussive skitter, and a 'beat' of sorts, that's more like the opening looped stutter, again a la the Field, but here, wed to the stately operatic majesty, the result is like some post modern electro-opera symphony, super ambitious, and absolutely epic. After a gorgeous track of hushed ambience, the final track gets seriously cinematic, opening with some ominous drones, some blurred barely there melodies, a little bit of orchestral shimmer, creepy chordal swells, distant clang and clatter, like the sounds of an abandoned space station, lovely and cosmic and subtly harrowing, a fantastic bit of sound design evoking images of being lost in space, trapped millions of light years from home, in a huge metal obelisk, floating in starless black, all complete with a gorgeously intense symphonic score.
Portion Control were always an obscure proposition despite their longevity. This British trio started in the early '80s crafting a hyper minimal form of claustrophobic electronica that proved to be a huge influence on the work of Skinny Puppy and Depeche Mode; but their influence on these acts never trickled down to bring them greater acclaim over the duration of their career. During the '80s, they issued a handful inventively reductivist / muscular electronics girded by proto-techno rhythms and fleshed out through filtered and flanged electronics. The monotone barked vocals have been hyper compressed and shoved way in the back of the mix are pretty much the same technique that Nivek Ogre brought to Skinny Puppy a few years later. Portion Control were never intending on making poptunes of the shock-horror model or angsty youth model that those bands they influenced became so known for; instead, Portion Control's skeletal, hard rhythms thrusts immediately to the foreground with the metallic-flanged vocals, idiosyncratic / disjointed sequencing, and unidentifiable police scanner activity muffled at the background. When a melody comes along as on the strident "He Is Patriotic" or on the jittery death-dub of "Mass Disorder" or the proto-acid squelchiness of "Fiends", it can be quite a shocking juxtaposition given the calculated minimalism throughout the rest of this work. Imagine an even more stripped down DAF or Liaisons Dangereuses, with those Skinny Puppy vocals! The Portion Control back catalogue has gone through various reissue campaigns, including a ponderous 7lp boxset on Vinyl On Demand; and an even more comprehensive 5cd boxset, with I Staggered Mentally featured prominently on both sets. But here, we get another excellent reissue from Dark Entries, who give it a great remastering job, a booklet with tons of information, and a bonus track!
Killer live record from this Northwestern trio who play bicycles. Not play ON bicycles mind you. But actually play bikes, as musical instruments. Plucking spokes, bowing rims, striking frames, scraping seat posts, every part is played, the result a gloriously cacophonous symphony of clatter and clang. Imagine a stage, with punk rockers seated on stools behind upturned bikes, positioned like harps or cellos, the players poised with sticks and bows, or bare handed, ready to coax all manner of sounds from those bicycles. It's a pretty amazing sight, and the sound is pretty kick ass as well.
Captured live in Japan, this set features all sort of re-CYCLE-d sounds, buzzes, clicks, scrapes, whirs, hisses, grinding crunches, singing steel, bits of rhythm, sometimes it sounds like a pipefight, other times like some super abstract music concrete, and still other times, something magical happens and the metal seems to sing, high clear bell like tones, growling groaning low end, woven into the otherwise clattery clangy softly abrasive soundscapes. Pretty fantastic, like a reimagining of old school industrial music, transformed into something more akin to clattery free folk or weird free noise. Super cool stuff.
Beautiful paste on sleeves, LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Most of us here at AQ are avid cyclists, in fact Andee's ladyfriend even owns her own bike shop. San Francisco is a great place to ride bikes. But apparently Portland is even better. And not only do they ride bikes, but they play them as well. The Portland Bike Ensemble, flip their bikes upside down, attach contact mics, plug into amps and go to town! A strange and wonderful world of clicks and scrapes, moans and creaks, a percussive wonderland, metal bits are struck and rubbed, bowed and plucked, spokes are played like a metal harp, frames are rung like bells, a gorgeously abstract junkyard percussion cyclescape.
This lp collects the Ensemble's first two performances, as well as a side long track originally released on a super limited Jyrk cd-r (so limited in fact that we never got any). LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one is hand painted and includes a photocopied insert with liner notes and stuff.
Deeeeeeep spiritually-charged drones from this supergroup of Bay Area heavy experimentalists. You are going to want to just hammer the "Add To Cart" button when we list all the members involved: folks from Barn Owl, Date Palms, Tarentel, En, Higuma and The Alps! The Root Strata All-Stars, basically, though this is on Important. Three tracks, the first, "D" is a side long affair, delving into the most harmonically aligned keys of the western scale utilizing both electric and acoustic instruments including violin, harmonium, tamboura, koto, sine wave oscillator, bass clarinet, tapes, shruti box and electric guitar in rich layered tones and frequencies. Side 2 begins with the all vocal meditation, "Sa" reminding us of David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir's cathedral amplified minimalist hymns before unleashing the deepest and heaviest track here, "Gong", which focuses on the shifting and shimmering metallic reverberations of the titular instrument. A beautifully honed study of harmony and frequency within a wonderfully attuned collective and collaborative spirit.
Housed in a hand screened heavy stock foldover jacket. LIMITED TO 500 copies, so act fast!
It's hard to believe it's now been more than a decade since the original release of this fantastic little slice of indie electronica, a collaboration between Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello (the electronics and production) and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie (the bitter sweet indie jangle and that voice!) a project they called at the time The Postal Service (with a little bit of protest from the actual USPS!). Since then, their sound has served as a template for a million other bands, mining much of the same territory, sad boy, mix tape break up indie jangle pop, but all wound up in percolating beats, and warm lustrous electronic shimmer, not indie club music by any stretch, it still had that sort of homebrewed 4-track bedroom vibe that made (and makes) music like this so relatable, but it expanded the typical indie pop sonic palette, and resulted in a serious of glistening, dreamily propulsive, nearly anthemic electronic pop, that does indeed sound just as good now as it did when everyone was freaking out about it the first time around. This tenth anniversary collection, gathers up the Give Up album in its entirety, along with two of the eps from around the same time, as well as some unreleased gems and rarities, and houses it all it a big fancy package, that incorporates the various iconic album art as well as lyrics, liner notes etc. Here's our slightly updated/revised review of these records from the first time around.
The Give Up record originally took shape via tapes mailed back and forth between Tamborello and Gibbard. Each track is subtle variation of the following: bashfully boyish vocals, chiming music box melodies and soft jangly guitars that play off one another over a simple thumping or clicking programmed beat. Gibbard sings oh so sweetly in his melted ice cream voice while Tamborello delivers the delightfully pretty electronics and bounding rhythms. Pretty much exactly what you might expect from a project starring these two fellows. Plus there's an added aural delight here and there in the form of occasional lovely vocals by Jen Wood and Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis. The Postal Service's Give Up has a wonderful chemistry that swirls everything together perfectly.
The first single from that record, also included in this anniversary collection, is another gorgeous display of the Postal Service's effortlessly effervescent crushworthy tunes. And ah, such a sweet peep it is! A perfect accessory to the full length. The title track "Such Great Heights" is an instantly catchy gem that's sure to find its way onto friends' mixtapes everywhere (even still) and is most definitely the best song on Give Up. The rest of the ep is filled out actually by PS songs performed by two other bands - fellow Sub Poppers The Shins and Iron And Wine. The brief cover love ends with Iron And Wine's drowsy acoustic rendition of "Such Great Heights". And y'know what? It's definitely different, but in its own way just as good as the original. Beautiful! Each version is strong on its own and great in concert with one another.
Also included is the second ep, The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, the title track, arguably the SECOND best song on Tamborello and Gibbard's Give Up album, "The District Sleeps Tonight" is accompanied by an alternate, much more percolated'n'squidgy mix by DJ Downfall, as well as a much more languid yet still thumpin' John Tejada remix of the aforementioned album's *best* track, the previously mentioned "Such Great Heights", plus... there's also a very mellow cover of the Flaming Lips' "Suddenly Everything Has Changed"!
Single number three is here as well, which in addition to the album track, includes two dreamy mixes from Styrofoam and Matthew Dear. And in addition to all that this new version tacks on a bunch of unreleased and rare tracks as well, including more collaborations with vocalist Jenny Lewis, their awesome Phil Collins cover, which was originally released on the soundtrack to the movie Wicker Park, there's also a John Lennon cover, originally from an Amnesty International benefit compilation, a Nobody remix, originally an iTunes only exclusive, and finally a live on the radio track from 2003.
And as mentioned above, the cd is gorgeous packaged in an oversized booklike package, 8 full color panels, multiple pockets, two booklets, tons of rare photos and more!! The vinyl too, in a similarly over the top multi paneled / pocketed jacket, and while they last we have the Loser Edition (i.e. colored vinyl!)
When I (Jim) last ran into Colin Potter it was at the Brainwaves Festival in the fall of 2006. Colin drearily apologized that his next album would be a collection of his earliest work released by the German label Vinyl On Demand. While the handful of cassettes I had of his mid-'80s work had been made up mostly of gritty postindustrial ambience and raw experiments with analogue synths, I would have never expected that Colin Potter -- nowadays the engineer extraordinaire for Nurse With Wound and collaborator with the best of British drone artists -- had a new wave bone in his body; but here it is. Not surprisingly for someone as talented as Mr. Potter, he managed to successfully work within the grim and angular synth-based structures that also resonated with Fad Gadget and Normal. A Skeleton / Cupboard Situation has been culled from a bunch of self-released cassettes made at IC Studios (yup, the same masthead he uses today!) that date from 1979 to 1983 and lovingly remastered by the fine people at Vinyl On Demand. Potter's synth-punk ethos centers upon tinny drum machine marches, plenty of grim synth repetitions, and short-fused guitars. While Potter occasionally gets a little spry and cheeky in his exuberance with the possibilities of electricity, the bulk of the album is coldly robotic and surprisingly catchy at times. In the liner notes, Potter again apologizes "unreservedly for 'singing' and promise it will never happen again, unless someone gives me a very good reason and / or a very large sum of money." Well, that's a bit self-deprecating, as his vocal style certainly fits the music with a staccato delivery and emotional detachment to match the cold synthetic tunes. I won't say that I'll be the guy who'll throw down a ton of money to hear Colin Potter sing again, but I sure as hell will be wearing out the grooves on this vinyl.
We discovered Colin Potter many years ago, through his heady production and sound design in Nurse With Wound, Ora, and Monos; yet like so many pioneering electronic musicians in the '80s, he released a slew of cassettes overflowing with various sonic experiments and audio excursions. Ancient History collects four of Potter's tapes charting his output from 1979 to 1989, including A Gain, Two Nights, and Recent History Volumes 1 & 2. Back in this time period, Potter was working in a post-kosmische aesthetic with a small arsenal of synths, step sequencers, drum machines, guitars, and effects. He had yet to incorporate the heavy-lidded drone and field recording component which he's been associated with as of late; but those tapes positioned his sound not too far from the Moebius / Schnitzler / Schulze axis of progressive electronics with a healthy dose of Chris Carter's DIY aesthetic tossed in for good measure.
A Gain was released in 1982 through his ICR imprint and is a culmination of work dating back to 1979. The opening number to this album is a bright hypnotic piece for glockenspiel and synthesizer, which builds upon elliptical phrases on those instruments with greater and greater density and kaleidoscopic fervor, snugly situated between Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air and Cluster's percolating motorik electron-pop. Elsewhere on A Gain, Potter pulls out the guitar to augment the synth blorp and drive with some fine Manuel Gottsching-esque explorations. Two Nights from 1981 is probably the cream of the crop here, not to belittle anything else on the set; but this is a great piece of futuristic electronics that is a must have for anyone keen on John Carpenter and Goblin soundtracks! The two original side long pieces both extend from the cosmic swoosh into dynamic kraut-disco jams with incremental sequences accelerating through drum machine, neon-lit synth cascades, and more heavily phased guitar solos. Potter adds a third lengthy bonus track of similar material to round out this fantastic disc.
The Recent History discs compile various Potter projects from 1986-1989, and find him in more of a darker, somber mood with ritualized ambience drifting about his more earthen sounding sequences and sodden acoustic guitar melodies. While there's much of the same instrumentation, Potter's production also becomes far more complex with more of the shadowy, occluded techniques that he would later master during his tenure in Nurse With Wound. As such, these tracks tend to parallel some of the work of Coil and O Yuki Conjugate, and even predates some of the melodic aspects of the ambient side of IDM that would emerge five or six years later.
This is quite different from the song-based minimal wave album of early Colin Potter material released on Vinyl On Demand; but certainly showcases just how great all of those early tapes of his were and how well they hold up today!
Colin Potter is the proprietor of IC Studios -- a recording facility often frequented by Nurse With Wound and Andrew Chalk, both of whom Potter has collaborated with. While he has been moving in the more esoteric circles of UK music for quite some time now, And Then may in fact be his first solo recording. Certainly informed by the aforementioned collaborators, Potter generates oblique shadowy dronescapes through eerie post-concréte techniques and the manipulation of field recordings, which keep this from being a purely studio driven exercise. Potter breaks up the dark shimmering refractions of this album with a lengthy and comparatively aggressive rhythmic workout of flanging electronic pings that he charms with arabic flares. I may be in the critical minority by not unquestioningly gobbling up all of the recent Coil albums; but if any of Coil's recordings sounded as good as this one by Colin Potter, then I might have to start listening to them again.
There are times when lengthy reviews are warranted, necessary to make the correlative argument that the record really must be that good for us to slave away at such a monumentally long review; but then there are times when we really can't go on too much, because the available stock of the album in question is so small as to make a long review overkill for a release that will be gone in no time. For better or for worse, this Colin Potter double cd-r falls in the latter category as It Was Like This... was originally available for sale at the June 2006 Nurse With Wound shows in a tiny pressing of 100 copies. Of course, the bulk of the stock was sold during the feeding frenzy at the merch table at those two performances; but a few copies remained, and Colin didn't have any desire to lug 'em back to England, so Aquarius had the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time... Of those 100, we've only got a dozen or so. But what you'll get are two discs of exceptional live sets from the Nurse With Wound engineer par-excellence focusing upon his mutant electronics, rhythm box experiments, and glacial drones. As good as it is limited.
