A welcome reissue of an early tape by legendary composer, engineer, musician, dronologist Colin Potter (who in the past has worked with Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Skullflower, etc). Originally released as a two track cassette in 1990, this cd reissue sees the addition of an extra, massive 24 minute track that fits in surprisingly well with the other tracks almost 15 years its senior. Self described as 'music for hibernation', these three extended tracks are gorgeously serene, seemingly unshifting, barely pulsing rivers of static low end. No rumble or rough edges here though, this is smooth and crystalline, soothing late night new age for the avant set. Music for hibernation indeed. Been lulled to sleep by this for the last couple weeks!
The latest from this long time aQ fave, comes in the form of a super limited tapes from the UK cassette label The Tapeworm, and features two sidelong tracks displaying two sides of Potter's sonic personality. The A side is a dizzying field of mathematically complex loopage, rendered in a seemingly perpetual state of decay and gradual disarray, beginning with fields of looped cascading electronic bleeps over distant pounded piano, and bleary smears of background shimmer, the piano becoming more insistent and jagged, almost maddeningly mesmerizing, all underpinned by a throbbing murky pulse, over which shifting rhythms collide and careen, sounds glitch and crunch, layers undulate, drones drift and swirl, the sound lurches and hiccups, lopes and churns, locking into weird sprawls of robotic hypno-groove, laced with what sound like cartoon bite sounds, and heaving black clouds of ominous rumble, a dizzying collision of black cinematic ambience, and kinetic, rhythmic skitter. The twisted backgrounds and the delirious dada-ist surrounding soundscapery, definitely point to Potter's longstanding collaboration with Nurse With Wound, but here those sounds are wound up tight, and let loose in a noisy, chaotic, carnivalesque funhouse, that at it's most intense sounds like a robot orchestra come to life, and running rampant, a barrage of buzz and hum, torrents of tangled rhythms, all bleeding and oozing into one thick viscous wall of pulsing pulsating sound, the eventually melts down to a cool droned out field of staticky skitter, and softly percolating grey noise drift,
The B side is a live recording of a rehearsal for a performance, and in some ways sounds like a more minimal, deconstructed, and sort of underwater version of the A side, softly noisy cascade pour down over beeps and bloops, splattery percussion is wreathed in warm swirls of echo and hum, the vibe murky and washed out, but building to occasional white noise squalls, the sounds a slow undulation, prickly and caustic in places, warm and shimmery in others, a field of slow moving drones, that splinter into shard of jagged sound, before sinking to the bottom, replaced by another thick layer of syrupy swirl. Dense and tense, but darkly dreamy, the sound eventually settling into something akin to old Oval, but replacing the muted shadowy swirl, with something a bit more abrasive, heavin swaths of industrial crunch, and jagged spears of high end skree, all wound up into slithery, prickly tangles, that eventually begin to unwind, the edges wearing off, the harsh surfaces burnished and glowing, the sound melting into a softly shimmering sprawl of hushed haunting thrum.
As with all Tapeworm tapes, extremely limited, this one featuring original cover art by noneother than Savage Pencil.
The first couple of minutes of this live recording seemed to have been designed to get the blood boiling and the heart pumping. Colin Potter (the technical foil to Steve Stapleton's macabre psychedelia in Nurse With Wound) opens with an agitated set of electro-bleep rhythms which double upon each other into a squiggling dervish. After these few minutes though, the sidereal ambience and barren dronescapes which Potter has brought to the recent NWW productions slip into focus. Ghostly fragments of echo and reverberation glide around chiming drones from harmonium, gongs, field recordings, and bowed strings, all displaying Potter's polychromatic, oil-slick production which has such a peculiar, funhouse warble modulating each and every sound, ever so slightly. Some 15 minutes into the piece, there are a series of metallic bangs and ominous metallic clicks, puncturing a bed of low-end frequencies. One of these repeating bangs is quite similar to the ones used on John Duncan's River In Flames. Along with the signposts of Duncan and the NWW Shipwrecked Radio series, Potter's live set from the 2007 Resonator Festival in Preston, England also resembles the late period Zoviet France albums InVersion and Digilogue. Limited to just 100 copies, and certainly will not last for very long!
A couple of years ago, we championed a cd boxset of the early cassettes and unreleased material from the British sound alchemist Colin Potter. Nowadays, Potter is a constant foil within Nurse With Wound and Monos; but he has quite a history of his own recordings that ran the gamut from abstracted electro-pop to elegant, hallowed minimalism to kosmische electronica. During the heyday of the DIY cassette underground, Potter released a considerable amount of tapes through his ICR imprint, which continues to this day albeit transitioning to the compact disc. Two Nights was originally pressed up on ICR back in 1981, and made its way on that aforementioned Ancient History boxset (which is currently out of print). This set was easily the best material from the Ancient Material box, and on its own stands as 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. Limited red & green translucent vinyl whose colors are exposed through the die cuts in the artwork. Not long for this world!
A super limited edition CD-R of live drone material from Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound, Monos, Ora, etc.) and Paul Bradley (Monos). Dark ringing drones, breathy gasps for air, cathedral reverberations, and haunting scrabbings set against a monolith of subtly shifting tones. There's only 200 of these things, and we just got a few of 'em; so when they're gone, they are gone!
Colin Potter - the sound conjurer par excellance for Nurse With Wound, Monos, Ora, etc. - teams up once again with the academically inclined multi-disciplinarian Phil Mouldycliff. They had worked together on the APM project with Chris Atkins and produced a couple of a collaborative projects on Potter's ICR imprint. Mouldycliff has long been partial to field recordings, and he brings plenty to Potter's studio to get worked over. The album begins with an urban soundscape of banal conversations in an outdoor marketplace broken up with the chime of church bells, whose chorus gets trapped in a series of loops that Potter and Mouldycliff slowly pull apart into sinewy, vibrating digital fields of time stretched artifacts and serpentine drones. As this digital ambience collapses into a softened grey mass, tactile abrasions that sound almost like pieces of styrofoam being scraped against each other pop to the foreground, gradually overrun by the unsettling noise of dental drills squealing the distance. Even some 40 years after the fact, Marathon Man is still the dominant reference for such sounds. The subterranean dank which Potter and Mouldycliff surround these high-powered motors also serves that reference well. The drones and shadows continue throughout the album, only to find Mouldycliff and Potter returning to the same set of field recordings from the marketplace which opened the album.
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Fucking brilliant. Yeah, you should expect that these two high calibre sound sculptors would manage something great; and they do not disappoint. As for the obligatory introductions, Colin Potter may be best known from his ongoing contributions to Nurse With Wound over the past two decades, but has been privy to some of the finest in British dronescaping thanks to his work in Ora and Monos. The Hafler Trio is the creation of Andrew McKenzie, a sound research project which has been investigating the impact of sound upon the body, mind, and spirit through the lens of a byzantine gnosticism. A couple years back, Potter had the good fortune of witnessing the Hafler Trio's "How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread" performance in Preston, England; after the show, Potter and McKenzie struck up a conversation, whence McKenzie suggested that the two collaborate. Shortly thereafter, McKenzie sent Potter a collection of the source material from that very performance as the foundation for their collaboration. Potter stated his intentions clearly, that he wanted to preserve the shape of the material while pushing it into another space. It's an understatement to say that Potter merely achieved his intention; as A Pressed On Sandwich ranks as one of the best things that he's worked on, on par with his work with Steven Stapleton on the existential void of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. Yeah, it's that good! Of course, McKenzie ultimately stretched out his own material of monumental dronings over a whopping six discs on the twin set of triple cds also entitled "How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread;" so Potter's redux is a bit easier to digest, but certainly no less an album! You'll encounter the drone supreme here on A Pressed On Sandwich with electrified tonal vibrations, undulating phase patterns, and oceanic gasps of sublime expanses. The album starts off with a very cold, shivering feel but eventually transitions into a dynamic interplay of tones that simultaneously capturing the solemness of church organ droning (with all of the overtones of holy symbolism) and the unnerving purity of feedback (with all of the allusions of technology on the brink of collapse). We mentioned it before, and we'll mentioned it again: fucking brilliant.
As with all Hafler Trio releases, sorry no sound samples...
Taking an electronic work first realized in 1972 by Belgian avant-garde composer Henri Pousseur, Sub Rosa have arranged for new mixes to be done by three of today's most talented electronic experimentalists: Robert Hampson (of Main fame), AQ-fave turntable specialist Philip Jeck, and Markus Popp of glitchsters Oval. It's not technically a *re*mix project, it seems, as Pousseur's original piece allowed for multiple, equally valid mixes (or studies). He did eight of 'em himself back in the day (released as a four cd set, now unavailable, on Sub Rosa two years ago) and contributes a new one, done digitally this time, as the first track on disc one here. Hampson, Jeck, and Popp follow with their varying takes on the same material/composition, Popp's maybe being the prettiest, all of 'em very blippy and bloopy -- the original piece(s) having a kind of sci-fi spaceship/upset stomach sound. But of course, Jeck's mix is our favorite, as it brings in some of his trademark warm and crackly, antiqued vinyl-y sounds (adding such is apparently in accordance with Pousseur's open-ended concept for this piece).
Henri Pousseur is one of the lesser known European avant-garde composers, and has been active since the '50s embracing most of the various trends within the 'academic scene' (dodecaphonic, serial, electronic, aleatoric, etc.). "8 Etudes Paraboliques" finds
Fans of abject, chaotic, doomed-out noiserock/industrial heaviness a la Zeni Geva, early Swans, IIIrd Gatekeeper era Skullflower, old Godflesh, Splintered, and Lewd, you're gonna want to batten down the hatches and cuddle up with this!!! A super limited edition (300 copies only) double vinyl reissue of a cd originally released by this Dutch band in 1997 via the Supreme Tool Supplies label, pretty rare & obscure - we had never heard of it, and we were pretty into this sort of stuff back in the day. And it's really good. Six long tracks, each one a harrowing descent into feedback-laden, pounding sludge madness, with churning, clangorous rhythms, headcaving riffs, and anguished vokills that would give even the ultradoom stylings of Alan Dubin in Khanate some competition. On each song, a monster has been stirred from slumber, a nightmare given "musical" form, sorrowful screams coming from all throats and instruments all at once. So sickened, seasawing, distorted and distressed! The 1997 date almost seems too late, this really sounds like something that would have come out on Pathological in like, '89. Agonized, abrasive, cathartic, and car-crash compelling. Would you also believe catchy? Well, maybe, once you're in its dismal, lurching, heavy embrace!
Big thanks to the fine freaks at Israel's Heart & Crossbone label for bringing this black hole of intense industrial rock to "light". Remastered by, yep, Khanate's James Plotkin, who was probably thinking, damn, my kind of shit! Us too. Recommended!!
(Turns out, the singer/guitarist in this band, had also been in Lewd, who did a split with Zeni Geva once upon a time... see it all makes sense.)
Who would have thought that an Atari 2600 would be the instrument of choice in the new millennium, but as technology moves forward in leaps and bounds, seems like the most forward thinking sound makers are reaching back, WAY back. Souped up Gameboys, home soldered circuit boards, old school analog synths, even the recent Tristan Perich release which did the 8bit-ers one better (or more precisely seven better) by creating a suite of music assembled from ONE bit sounds, as low as we can go. For now.
But for our generation, there's just something about the sound of 8bit buzz and crunch, the video games of our childhood, the strange alien computer soundtracks, it may push lots of nostalgia buttons, but you didn't have to grow up in the early eighties to dig that sound.
So here we have the first release from Ken Fec, one of the folks responsible for the tripped out bubblegum electro pop dreaminess of Black Moth Super Rainbow, who for his alter ego as Power Pill Fist, seems to have gone back to his childhood home, pulled all the boxes out of the basement, and plugged every video game and antiquated game console from his youth into a 4-track, run it through his fractured pop sensibilities, a bank of damaged effects, and voila. The cool thing is this is not a 'noise' record. There are some seriously noisy moments for sure, but at its core Power Pill Fist definitely has a glowing pulsing energy crystal pop heart. Albeit a pop that is way more freaky crunchy fuzzy trippy and whatthefuck than most. And it's flecked with bits of skittery electronica, downtempo hip hop, and whatever else Fec had up his sleeve or in his head at the time.
Originally this was touted as a record that was almost a straight recording of Fec PLAYING an Atari 2600, which would probably have been amazing, but this is way more musical and composed. There do seem to be some guitars, and some extra percussion, lurking within and beneath all the crunchy fuzzy buzz, but it's that buzz and crunch that defines the record. Give this thing BIGGER beats and you can almost imagine Daft Punk or Justice rocking some of these tracks in a DJ set. The disc opens with a murky bleep filled jam, the warbly melody and scratchy rhythm buried beneath thick layers of hiss and whir, wrapped around a simple way-down-in-the-mix guitar strum. It somehow manages to be lo-fi and lush all at once, some weird krautrocky Nintendo jam. The follow up is all big lurching drums and warbling blown out synths, that sounds like something Beck would jump all over. Some of the other tracks are much noisier, but even then, soft melodies, and haunting song fragments lurk below the surface. Then there's songs like "Chuckanut Drive" that sound like they could have been, should have been, heck, maybe actually were the soundtrack to some super obscure video game, bits of �other games-, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, etc. cannibalized and recontextualized into some new old game, but liberally sprinkled with dizzying synth squiggles and an extra layer of stuttering buzz.
In between all of these blown out, almost-electro fuzz drenched 8bit jams, lurk subtly simple, bedroom recorded interludes, the strangely metallic minor key minimal strum of "Contours Gaining Shape" or the washed out low end droning whir of "R4eactor", and sometimes Fec will offer up a bit of abstract synth / 8bit experimentation or a more arcade-centric soundscapes like the straight video game field recording sound collage of "The Meat Tree" (sounding quite a bit like one of those Arcade Ambience discs), but it's always right back into another awesome grinding buzzy video game electro pop adventure.
Imagine Pan Sonic produced by J Dilla run through a Colecovision. Or think Donkey Kong meets Rastan, chopped up and reassembled by the Flaming Lips. Or Autchre recording a new record using only a busted up old acoustic guitars and the guts of a Sega Genesis, or some crazy psychpop jam session, but with Intellivision consoles instead of guitars. Weird and warped, fuzzy and fun, heavy and crunchy, poppy and druggy and just fucked up and freaky enough to keep our ears buzzing and ringing non stop.
We would be the last ones to deny the fact that we are easily swayed. Or at the very least, easily intrigued. Band names get us every time. A killer band name and we're halfway there. Album title, artwork, it all lures us in, has us already loving bands before we've ever heard them. Sure, once in a while we're disappointed, but for the most part, sometimes you can judge a band by their cover. Needless to say, we were pretty intrigued by a band called Prehistoric Fuckin' Moron(s), the optional plural added an extra bit of mystery to the whole thing as well, even more so when we realized it was indeed a single moron. And as if that weren't enough, all it took was a quick gander at the description of the music and we were well beyond sold: "Take one moron, feed him copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, throw him a bunch of old turntables with some effects and watch him smash the shit out of them. Totally weird, absolutely insane." Almost sounds like we wrote it. And heck, we would have, if they didn't already, cuz this is in fact totally weird and absolutely insane.
Imagine Christian Marclay and Philip Jeck, both dosed with LSD, having some sort of lo-fi DJ battle, the entire thing run through a bank of effects pedals and recorded on a busted 4-track. The weird thing is, this isn't as noisy as you might imagine, at least not all of it. The opener is dark and muddy, a super dubbed out spacey drift, reverb and delay wrapping everything in a thick coat of fuzzy blur, the sounds allowed to drift into oblivion. Very dreamlike and tranquil. But the second track is anything but. A cacophony of industrial clatter, and murky vocal snippets, huge ch-chunks from the needle skipping, but emerging from the cacophony are some strangely dreamy loops as well as some jagged shards of distorted noise. The rest of the tape is schizophrenic in that way, flitting from speaker shredding chaos, to strangely serene loopscapes, often times both simultaneously. It's all very chaotic and fucked up and freaked out and messy, but it's such a glorious mess. Fans of Jeck and Tetreault and Marclay and Strotter Inst and Bastien with an ultra lo-fi bent will be in skipping scratching scraping stuttering turntable heaven.
Wow, did this throw us for a loop. We were always fans of the Sea And Cake, every record was breezy and dreamy, soft and poppy, maybe too much so for some folks. And then When Prekop struck out solo, his records seemed to be even breezier and softer, continuing to craft smooth and sleepy, dreamy jazz flecked pop. So that's sort of what we were expecting from Old Punch Card, but that couldn't be farther from what this actually is. An homage of sorts to early pioneers of electronic music, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Raymond Scott, Nuno Canavarro, David Behrman and the like, almost entirely produced on analog synthesizers, with no vocals, no beats, virtually no guitars, mostly improvised, a gorgeous abstract collection of primitive audio experimentation, a symphony of bleeps and bloops, stretches of gorgeously rhythmic pulses and squelches, swirling squalls of analog freakout, lots of glitch and hiss and whir and hum, wondrous expanses of abstract ambient haze, playful music box like melodies, woozy atmospheres, delicate cascades of crackle and static, pulsing sci-fi synths that sound like the music from some seventies after school special, fuzzy blurs of glimmer and twinkle, scattery bits of lo-fi percussion, a constantly shifting world of low fidelity analog sound. Some of the tracks sound almost like Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, bleary eyed gauzy expanses of otherworldly drift, others sound like a bit like a more primitive Oval, collages of electronic glitch and clipped tones, while still others sound like modern electronica, albeit channeling the retro sounds of yesteryear, and a handful sound like academic electronic experimentation, but they all sound fantastic, weird and wondrous and really really cool.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Boston super nerds Prelapse are a Naked City cover band performing unrecorded Naked City compositions plus some of their own stuff. Zorn was so flattered that he released this album on his Japanese imprint and makes a guest appearance. By the way, Andee (Tic War, ex-A Minor Forest), Tiber (Lowercase) and Jay (Lesser) are starting Rich Girl, a Hall & Oates cover band. Seriously. The apocalypse is here. Hopefully Daryl Hall will be flattered enough to release the results!
Yum. Held together with a political, not musical, theme (anarchism, I guess), Presocratics have made a wonderfully enjoyable schizophrenic ep. The first piece ostensibly takes a split second heavy metal guitar sample or two (so short they're practically
The minimal aesthetic of Table of the Elements' packaging doesn't provide much information about this, the debut album from the Presocratics. All we can gather from the "liner notes" is that the band is from Seattle and a guy named Lance Ledbetter provided some VLF recordings. The opening track offers a hazy analog drone that could have easily been pulled from the Steven Stapleton bag of studio tricks, sounding like Nurse With Wound's "A New Dress" or a more abrasive "Soliloquy for Lilith." The Presocratics continue the album with avant-bluegrass arrhythmia similar to that found on the best Gastr Del Sol albums. This album has a lot of interesting fracturing of sound and song...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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NOW ON VINYL!!
What might you expect from a match up between Mr. Joe Preston, he of Harvey Milk, Thrones, High On Fire and a million more, and Mr. Daniel Menche serious noise maker in his own right? Well definitely not this, although safe to say we're surprised but most assuredly not disappointed.
Cerberic Doxology is a single 25 minute piece, for just vocals, a glorious primal, ritual of chants and longform vocal tones, which at first, and only for the briefest of seconds, sounds a bit odd, maybe because we were expecting to be blasted out of our seats, but within moments, the voices grow much less distinct, the sound around them gets hazier and blurrier, the floor drops out and the listener is suddenly suspended in some whirling otherworld, the low voices become fuzzier and buzzier and soon become thick undulating drones, the higher vocals, soar and shimmer, and offer up soft smears of melody. It's like Ligeti or Part filtered through SUNNO))) or Earth, a totally immersive and nearly suffocating soundscape of layered thrum and throb. With headphones, at about the halfway mark we forgot what we were listening to, but it had totally transported us, and we found ourselves gloriously lost in a seemingly endless vocal drone.
Flip the dualdisc over, and play it in your dvd player, and not only will you be treated to enhanced sound, a super hi fidelity rendering of the music from the flipside, but you'll also get to see the accompanying images, slow shots of deserts and mountains, of wide open skies, smoldering volcanoes, strange stone monoliths, dark clouds, crashing surf, all shot in blacks and greys, and with some subtle yet strange effects, where the image will blur briefly, or the same few seconds will lock into a barely discernible loop, but always returning to its slow haunting drift.
What might you expect from a match up between Mr. Joe Preston, he of Harvey Milk, Thrones, High On Fire and a million more, and Mr. Daniel Menche serious noise maker in his own right? Well definitely not this, although safe to say we're surprised but most assuredly not disappointed.
Cerberic Doxology is a single 25 minute piece, for just vocals, a glorious primal, ritual of chants and longform vocal tones, which at first, and only for the briefest of seconds, sounds a bit odd, maybe because we were expecting to be blasted out of our seats, but within moments, the voices grow much less distinct, the sound around them gets hazier and blurrier, the floor drops out and the listener is suddenly suspended in some whirling otherworld, the low voices become fuzzier and buzzier and soon become thick undulating drones, the higher vocals, soar and shimmer, and offer up soft smears of melody. It's like Ligeti or Part filtered through SUNNO))) or Earth, a totally immersive and nearly suffocating soundscape of layered thrum and throb. With headphones, at about the halfway mark we forgot what we were listening to, but it had totally transported us, and we found ourselves gloriously lost in a seemingly endless vocal drone.
Flip the dualdisc over, and play it in your dvd player, and not only will you be treated to enhanced sound, a super hi fidelity rendering of the music from the flipside, but you'll also get to see the accompanying images, slow shots of deserts and mountains, of wide open skies, smoldering volcanoes, strange stone monoliths, dark clouds, crashing surf, all shot in blacks and greys, and with some subtle yet strange effects, where the image will blur briefly, or the same few seconds will lock into a barely discernible loop, but always returning to it's slow haunting drift.
On the same Italian label that brought us that lovely Luciano Cilio disc in 2004, here's more import-expensive but totally worth it amazing archival material (in ultra-nice digipackaging to sweeten the deal) from the Italian '70s sonic art underground, specifically Roberto Laneri's Prima Materia vocal drone ensemble. This is some heavy stuff here -- and heavy can mean a lot of things, AQ list readers have come to realize. In this case, it's heavy the way that Tibetan Buddhist Rites From The Monasteries Of Bhutan double disc reissue we listed last year was heavy (so said our distro rep when we ordered this, and he was right!). And this mesmerizing, yogic drone-fest does have a monkish sound, being produced entirely by live human voices, gargling and moaning and droning. Though if you didn't know that, you might think it was in part electronic. It's the sound of wind and weariness, sorta spooky and haunted, wavering and weaving, building and building, with overtones galore, a howling of souls into the Universe. Like a bunch of Tibetan monks or Tuvan throat singers wordlessly saying woe is me... and we're pretty sure that one of 'em at least sounds a heckuva lot like Elmer Fudd!! Seriously, though, it's really good and intense and magical... if you're a trance/drone fan (maybe digging stuff like Grouper, that has a vocal component), you should listen to this!
We're told that "the musicians of the group Prima Materia individually researched and developed unusual vocal techniques (originally used in Tantric rituals in North India, Mongolia and Tibet), based upon the use of overtones coupled with a special state of inner concentration, which was the essential condition for both the emission and control of long-sustained and complex vocal sounds. Their capacity to sustain a note for what seems an eternity, and then continue to provide endless variations generated a continuous and sustained drone of sound, in which the overtones are clearly perceived." We believe it.
The Tail Of The Tiger LP was originally released in 1977 as a private pressing by a small label run by Laneri, Alvin Curran and Giacinto Scelsi. Now, this digitally remastered cd reissue features the 33 minutes and 30 seconds of music from the original LP plus another 42 minutes of live performance recorded in Berlin in 1974 and Rome in 1976. And it's packaged not just with a booklet of liner notes but also 16 pages of "visual overtones", beautiful full color prints on tracing paper. Yup, nice! And it case you're still unsure, the blurb on the cover sticker contains high praise from none other than Terry Riley, who knows his drones.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Field recordings of hallucinogenic plants. Really, that's quite literally what this is. And though it wouldn't be the type of thing I'd expect hallucinogenic plants to sound like, or what I would choose to listen to while imbibing hallucinogens, it's a great recording. Prime uses the minute voltages of bioelectrical impulses from Cannabis Sativa (pot), Amanita Muscaria (shrooms) and Lophophora Williamsii (peyote) to control battery powered oscillators and then mixes them with the ambient sounds in their locations. The results sound much like a cross between Noto, Stephen McGreevy and Chris Watson. Oddly enough, the sounds of hallucinigenic plants are also quite similar to those of Douglas Quin's Weddell Seals (also on this list) and the two recordings make a fine companion set. And as always, if you have the Sound Of North American Frogs cd, or the Conet Project, then this is for you.
Warren DeFever of His Name Is Alive. Really really noisy.
Dutch experimentalist "captures" and manipulates radio, and TV output organizing static into complex systems using live electronics and percussion.
Full length number two from these Bellingham Washington psychedelic spacekraut hypno rockers, and as we mentioned in our review of their first cd-r, PRND features one of the members of late great weirdo ramshackle doom blues outfit The Reeks And The Wrecks, and while some of that ramshackle blues vibe does find its way into the new band, the sound is much more low fidelity, still loose and improvised sounding, but darker and more driving, rhythmic and spacey and droned out, and more along the lines of other modern krautrock revivalists like the Moon Duo.
In that same framework of slow burning extended jams, with wild squalls of blown out guitars, motorik skeletal rhythms, and long stretches of layered ambience, PRND make that sound even more abstract and tripped out, letting the guitars buzz and rumble and howl, often blurred into extended smears of almost SUNNO))) like glacial dirgery, but just as often, they dial back the buzz, and let the sounds shimmer and skitter and creep. Just take the sprawling opening track, which begins with a long stretch of blurred riffage, and woozy spidery melodies, a sort of slo-mo almost Barn Owl sounding twangscape, haunting and cinematic, the guitars in-the-red, but muted and shaped into dark swells, the sound eventually getting louder and louder until the guitar sounds seem to crumble, and the meters peg, and that blown out distortion becomes like another instrument, pulsing and throbbing, while the band weaves a dreamy psychedelic swirl underneath. It's not until about 7 minutes in that the drums first show up, and like the first record, the rhythm is some rinkydink Casio keyboard preset (or at least sounds like it) and is also super distorted, locked into a shuffling looping groove, that the band then wrap in wild squalls of heart-of-the-sun Hawkwind style soaring swirling guitar shreddery, loping and hypnotic and sorta heavy, which is sort of how we pictured the whole rest of the track to go, but then band switches gears again, shedding the wall of guitars, and leaving just that skittery rhythm, some wheezing keyboards, and little melodic fragments, and bits of twang and buzz, drifting in the surrounding space. There are strange reverbed sonar like chirps, moaning chordal hum, the song creeps and slithers dreamily before finally fading out.
And so goes the rest of the record, each of the tracks a dreamily propulsive skeletal rhythm, locked and looped, the band unfurling warm tangles of muted melody, and lush layers of buzz and hum, sometimes loping and meandering, other times churning and almost doomy, sounding glimmering and crystalline one second, murky and dirgey the next, always spacey and psychedelic, finally finishing off with a nearly ten minute abstract space jam, that is all sputtering rhythms, echo drenched organ stabs, stunted fragmented riffs, super abstract and almost ambient, and very very dubby. Killer stuff for sure. And like the first cd-r, absolutely recommended.
SUPER LIMITED, each one hand numbered, and gorgeously hand painted.
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This new trio was born out of the ashes of late great Bellingham combo Reeks And The Wrecks (whose record Knife Hits was released on Andee's tUMULt label, and whose lost first lp is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) and trades in the Reeks's ramshackle doom blues for something way more psychedelic and krautrocky, spacey and hypnotic, in fact before we get lost in the gushing wordy description that's about to follow, we thought we might head off some of you 'skimmers', by saying that all you folks who dig Moon Duo, and other similarly stripped down modern psych/kraut combos, will most likely go nuts for these guys too.
Just check out the opening track, after a few minutes of abstract psych guitar drift, the a simple, skeletal, propulsive rhythm surfaces, and the band lock into a sort of post Spacemen 3 / Jesus And Mary Chain chunk of psychfuzzkrautrock that is totally mesmerizing and hypnotic. The rhythm is locked in, looped endlessly, pounding away, while above, the multiple stringed instruments, unfurl epic swaths of sound, wild spidery leads, fuzzy pop-like jangle, crunchy angular riffage, layered drones, a lush tangle of melodies and textures, the result totally divine. Drugged out and dreamy. And the rest of the record plays out in a similar fashion, that minimal machinelike beat driving sprawling expanses of psychkraut bliss, the sound shifting from blissed out and sun dappled to darker and driving, from ethereal and blown out to slithery and almost bluesy (which is when the Spacemen 3 comparison seems particularly apt), finally culminating in the gorgeously hazy slow burn ballad that finishes things off. We obviously love Reeks And The Wrecks, and love Frozen Cloak (another post-Reeks band, reviewed elsewhere on the aQ site, their sound blacker and buzzier, and we actually have it back in stock, just ask), so you can add PRND to the list of incredible Reeks-born Bellingham bands, that should be WAY more popular than they are. Easily one of our new faves...
SUPER LIMITED, each one hand numbered, and gorgeously hand painted.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Limited to 200 copies, each hand numbered, already out of print at the label. We only got a handful...
Latest bit of black mystery from this mysterious one man band from Santa Cruz, who constantly blurs the line between gorgeous black ambience, and blissed out buzzing blackness.
Deathwanderings finds PC in a contemplative mood, eschewing all buzz and blast, and instead offering up some hazy soft focus dronemusic, channeling folks like Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, through his blackened sonic filter.
Most of the tracks here are reinterpretations of pieces by Chopin, Satie and Schubert, stretched and blurred and smeared into soft streaks, gauzy shadows, hushed whispers, the music of breezes and flowing streams, organic and fluid, each track a hazy outline, the actual sounds within fluttering and fleeting, transitory and barely there.
Weird to hear such gentle beauty and subtle sonics from someone capable of kicking up a serious black buzz, but this is fantastic, utterly understated, and completely mesmerizing.
Nothing else to say really, other than metalheads steer clear. This is for the drone obsessed out there, those fascinated with the mystery of and majesty of minimal murk, explorers looking to delve into the heart of the drone. This is it. Right here.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
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Procer Veneficus are another band we've dug for a while, but are only now getting around to reviewing. A one man band from Santa Cruz of all places, PV, over the course of a handful of releases, has wandered between buzz drenched psychedelic black metal fuzzscapes a la Velvet Cacoon and dark lugubrious murky ambient acoustic folk, a gorgeous and bleak black soundworld, equally mysterious and hypnotic, whether in the form of tranquil drift or buzzing blast.
Ghostvoices is the former, all acoustic, just guitars, vocals, everything wreathed in a murky, muted black atmosphere. The vocals are hushed, like harsh ghoulish whispers, the sibilance drawn out into another layer of shimmering ambience. The acoustic guitars sound like they're playing slowed down black metal riffs, pulled apart until they more resemble some sort of hellish Appalachia. Or an incredibly sinister Loren Connors. Notes drift, often coalescing into swirling tendrils of dark drone, the background ambience is full of creaks and rumbles, haunting whirs and distant barely audible melodies, everything lit by the light of some black moon, greys fading to black, heavily shadowed and indistinct. It's almost like some acoustic black metal pop ambient record...
A perfect slab of dark and lonely, blackened, blissful late night drift...
A brand new, sprawling collection of celestial darkness and buzzing black ambient drift from this black metal / black ambient master. As we've mentioned in the past, more often than not, PV will dedicate a whole record to either side of his sonic personality, sometimes it's a disc of swirling and dense blackened black metal buzz, other times it's gorgeously bleak and minimal ambient dronemusic, but in both cases, the man behind Procer Veneficus is able to conjure up gorgeously sinister sounds and nightmarish atmospheres, be they buzz or drift, blast or shimmer.
How The Heather Moonlit Shivers, is, as the legend on the back of the record makes clear, "Dedicated to Her", and judging from the black sonic mystery within, the 'Her' in question either broke his heart, or is the object of a seriously grim obsession, or both. Extended stretches of layered black drift, Philip Jeck style crackly loopscapes, muted subterranean pulses, thick swaths of distorted crumble, processed ghostly vox, swirling soft focus effects, minor key steel string folk dirges, keening streaks of fragmented melody underpinning slowed down voices, haunting reverb drenched avant Appalachia gives way to abject post industrial black ambience, which gives way to dense clouds of low end bellow, laced with melancholic finger picked acoustic guitars.
Elsewhere thick walls of guitarbuzz dirge lumber and throb, but are infused with subtle bits of melody, transformed from brute force crush into something moody and soothing and beautiful, while spidery guitars wrap their tendrils around long stretches of layered voices and alien harmonies, while here and there, fragments of voice, or a bit of guitar, will be doused in reverb and echo and delay and sent spinning into the aether, creating a dizzying looped out dronescape.
The record closes with a 10+ minute interpretation of an Amber Asylum song, complete with strings, the strings along with languid steel string guitars, and swirling ambient background shimmer create a sort of droney, depressive otherworldly chamber music. There's also an Espers cover (a cover of a cover oddly enough), which is equally beautiful, but a bit more tripped out, a sort of druggy heavily effected space folk, but both covers fit perfectly amidst the equally evocative and hauntingly beautiful PV originals.
Folks who ONLY like the black metal side of Procer Veneficus, may be disappointed, but anyone into mysterious dark soundscapes, cinematic blackened drone music, and creepy sinister black folk, will be immediately and inexorably ensorcelled.
Packaged in a super swank and thick matte finish gatefold jacket, pressed on thick red vinyl, LIMITED TO 406 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
TWO brand new releases from this Santa Cruz psychedelic black metal one man band, one a haunting slab of oceanic dark ambience, the other a mesmerizing collection of drone drenched buzzing blackness.
Over the course of 10+ full lengths, Night, the man who is PV, has explored both sides of his sonic personality, the buzz of raw depressive melancholic black metal, and the drifting shimmer of ambient and dronemusic, often blending the two, into hazy blurs of blackened soundscapes and moody buzz and blast.
Unlike the heavy buzz and blast of Convoy, Saltwater & Glassmoon is all ambient, a bit of a concept record about the sea, the sound meant to emulate a submerged orchestra, to evoke the epic undersea kingdom, and the mystery of the deep.
The whole first half of the opening track is built on the sounds of crashing surf, gradually layered with gentle tinkling chimes, whirring wind, subtle processing and effects, before finally, a shimmering moody low end melody emerges from the deep, haunting and sorrowful and slow motion, drifting like dark shapes just below the surface of the sea, truly haunting and mysterious, and quite beautiful. The follow up sounds like the first track, only with the hiss and buzz of the crashing waves stripped away, leaving just strange minor key drones and barely there melodies, lots of swirling low end, suspended in wide open expanses of distant rumbles, very minimal, but still deep and ominous.
Most of the rest of the record sounds like movements of that same piece, a slowly sprawling world deep dark dronemusic, pretty and delicate, but always with a slightly sinister edge, the only dramatic deviation being the nearly 12 minute "Amaranth And Liqueur", which lets that slow smoldering drift build and build into a glacial wall of muted low end, a black cloud of SUNN-like shimmer, before once again, dissipating, laving ghostly traces and barely there shadows.
Quite dark and lovely, minimal and moody, might be of more interest to the cd-r experimental drone crowd than the black metal massive, but as far as we're concerned recommended to both!
Hot on the heels of the recent double disc box set from Santa Cruz based black metal alchemist, comes this ultra limited cd-r of, as the liner notes describe it: "Music for summoning ghosts in the dead of night." And in case you're still not sure of what you're getting into, these tracks were recorded "after the clock struck twelve" and the liner notes also offer this sage warning "In the shadows you are followed by ghosts."
It all sounds strange and mysterious and creepy, but it all makes sense once you're familiar with the haunting and hushed sonic world of Procer Veneficus. His discs are evenly split between, blissed out shoegaze-y black metal buzz, and gorgeous smoldering, super minimal black ambience, sometimes both on the same disc, but just as often a whole disc dedicated to one or the other. The aforementioned box set, featured a disc of each, accompanied by some incense and dried leaves (he is from Santa Cruz after all).�
We won't go into too much detail on this one, as it was strictly limited to 100 copies, and we only got a handful, which will be gone in no time... Fans already know they need this, and probably haven't even bothered to read this far, instead clicking on the add to cart button and moving on, that's the sort of fanaticism this band elicits, the music is so emotional and personal, so spiritually charged, that once you're inducted into PV's sonic tribe, it's for life, and you find your self hunting for more of this soothing sonic balm, as well as the more abrasive blackened buzz, which is also in its own way quite soothing. The Cold Gloaming sounds like exactly that, the distant shimmer of cold wintery winds at dusk, the dark whisper of nightfall, a world teeming with life, lurking just out of sight, just out of earshot, a gorgeous expanse of warm whir and muted grinding guitars, echoing the the sound of the surf, the pull of the moon, the cycle of life and death, light and darkness. A dark midnight ritual, the nature of sound, a lost world of drone and drift, slowly fading away as the sky brightens and the darkness retreats. So totally gorgeous.�
And as we mentioned, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Each disc hand numbered. Packaged in a gorgeous full color sleeve...
Originally self released as an ultra-limited cd-r, The Ghost Of Orion, a dreamy slab of haunting spaced out isolationist sound from Dutch dark ambient explorer Procyon-X, gets a proper expanded releases by the fine folks at UK label Paradigms (one of two new Paradigms releases this time around, the other by AQ faves Gnaw Their Tongues, see elsewhere on this list).
Four tracks, clocking in at just under a half hour, each of these mini epics is super evocative, and could very well have drifted on forever. Long spiraling loops of abstract melody uncoiling in weightless slow motion, glimmering and glistening in the glow of distant stars, haunting transmissions from some far away alien civilization, intercepted and spread out like a mysterious sonic map. The sound is expansive and immense, deep resonant smears, wooshing synthesizers, glittering clouds of effects, in the distance, dark sonic swells, ominous and mesmerizing.
Minimal and skeletal dronemusic, with brief sections bordering on the lush, abstract and delicate, very much like drifting alone, surrounded by blackness, millions of miles from home. Total seventies ambient kraut worship for sure, with a bit of Goblin creepiness mixed in. Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Neptune Towers, Heldon, Eno, you get the drift, but Procyon-X took that krauty ambience and launched it into the deepest regions of the cosmos, into another galaxy, these are the transmissions sent back hundreds of years later. Mysterious and beautiful.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Housed in a white dvd case, with full color artwork and printed heavy paper insert.
A while back we made the record World, by Aussie noise rock / shoegaze outfit The Bunyip Moon, our Record Of the Week, a gloriously blown out, chaotic sonic gem, that even now we have trouble keeping in stock. So were were psyched to discover that one of the guys from The Bunyip Moon had a new solo record, a tape in fact, under the name Pronoun, and like World, it's weird and wonderful.
But UN-like World, Faux is not all bombastic noisiness and buried blown out melodies, instead, it's a darkly moody, lush, almost cinematic creep, right from the get-go, we're sucked into some mysterious soundworld, that to our eras exists right between the epic with house of Salem, and the soundtracky synth bombast of M83. So if that sounds good to you (and why the heck wouldn't it?!), then there's much to dig here.
The opener unfurls as a brooding plod, all primitive drum machine, over processed strum and thrum, before majestic synths swoop in, faux strings, the whole thing epic and stirring, but with just the right amount of distortion and noise, gristly, and staticky, and distorted and psychedelic, but even at it's most explosive, it's still lilting and lovely, it's a tough one to describe for sure, but it's pretty stirring stuff.
The whole record expands from that sound, with some of the tracks a bit more garbled and chaotic, darkly noisy and murky, sounding a bit like a way more abrasive Caretaker (which is most definitely a good thing), while others, slip into a more kosmische haze, all swirling chordal thrum and deep, lustrous sonic swells, and on at least one track, the sound slips into some strange, tripped out avant shoegaze new wave, although the best moments of course are when those disparate sides collide, which they do often, resulting in blissful noisiness, and noisy dreaminess in equal measure, culminating in the strangely gristly garble of crunched static and crumbling decaying distortion of the closer, which ditches pretty much all poppiness in favor of a strange sprawling field of grinding textures, and the sporadic sputter of alien transmissions from the ether.
Fantastic, and so so so recommended. The packaging is pretty ace too, totally over the top. The tape housed in a sleeve, housed in a second embossed outer sleeve, then housed in yet ANOTHER sleeve, hand silkscreened and ink splattered, a weighty arts/sound object, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered. Includes a download code too...
From the same label that released the two lps from Mist, Mist being the John Elliot fronted Emeralds side project, comes this, the debut from noisy droney duo Providen, featuring members of Swords Of Heaven and American Jobs, whose sound is well removed from the spacey sci-fi of Mist, and instead is a fantastically confusional jumble of processed vox, malfunctioning synths, deep rumbling drones, heavy sludgey trudge, psychedelic zoner folk, woozy melodic warpage and home brewed psychedelic whatthefuck, all woven into some sort of fractured no-fi abstract minimal psychdronedirge weirdness.
After a stretch of chanted electronic ambience, a sort of ominous buzz drenched into, the duo launch into a lurching Dead C like noise rock death march, all crumbling distortion, simple drums, and dramatic, almost gothic sounding crooned vocals, resulting in some sort of noisy coldwave dirge pop, way to short at less than 90 seconds, before leading directly into the chaotic and crunchy title track. All skittery distorto beats, howled vox, and malfunctioning electronics, another hypno noise rock dirge, a pulsing meditative trudge, wreathed in streaks and shards of electronic crunch and fractured melodic flutter.
And so it goes, the tracks alternatingly exploding into sheets of white hot, blown out supernova buzz, or collapsing into super minimal, detuned dronepsych bedroom folk, Jandekian and abject, or building into super dense lumbering electronoiserock dirges, like some sort of SUNNO))) / Six Finger Satellite mashup, in-the-red, crunchy and corrosive, but still weirdly trancelike and mesmerizing.
This is definitely the sort of thing that might be a bit too much for the spaced out sci-fi new agers into all that Expo 70 and Emeralds stuff, instead, this is something altogether more tense and intense, noisy and distorted, for fans of slow low blown out rhythmic heaviness like Mammal, Geronimo, Psychic Paramount, SUNNO))), Rusted Shut, etc... who also dig tripped out lysergic exotic doom folk like Amen Dunes, Amps For Christ, Steven R. Smith, Suarasama, Six Organs, Jandek, Daniel Higgs and the like.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, housed in nice thick cardstock sleeves with paste on front cover artwork, and a printed insert (on either cardstock or transparency).
We've said it before, we'll say it again. If there was anyone capable of dragging us kicking and screaming over to the darkside, it would be Dom Fernow, aka Prurient. And by the dark side, we mean umm... well, loving noise music. We already do sort of dig noise, most of the music we love is in some way noisy, and we do love some 'noise' artists, but most specifically defined noise music, well that stuff can leave us cold. Wait a second, hold on. As we write this, we realize that pretty soon, the more reviews of 'noise' records we write, noise records that we LOVE, we're just gonna have to do away with these apologetic intros entirely, since it's becoming more and more apparent that maybe we do indeed just simply love noise.
And this record is indeed NOISE music. Heavy on the noise. Heavy noise. Gnarled, crumbling, buzzing, hissing clouds of white noise, of dense static, of blown out grinding chaotic sound. The root sound is in fact, pure noise, almost white noise, sounds you've heard on a million Merzbow records, but as with other Prurient discs, it's what you do with it, how you shape it, the subtle textures underneath and within. The shapes, the dynamics, the melodies (when you can find them), the musicality, while some groups will conjure up the noise, and leave it at that, Fernow uses noise the way a rock band uses the guitar, he plays it, he uses it to compose SONGS. It's hard to explain, and sometimes it's difficult to hear, but once your ears understand how to listen to Prurient's noise, it's like someone colorblind seeing colors for the first time, everything explodes, a prismatic burst of thick textured sound.
One interesting aspect of Prurient, is how big a role vocals play, some spoken, some howled, often distorted or processed, it expands the boundaries of noise, by not only introducing lyrics, but also by creating another layer of sound, something to play against the crumbling distortion and the white hot rrrroooar. Beyond that, Fernow also manages to introduce all sorts of strange soundscapes beneath the noise on the surface, sometimes it's warm whirring ambience, which makes those track sound like some supercharged Tim Hecker record, or Fennesz remixed by Merzbow. Other tracks chop up the noise into stuttering rhythms, the throbbing crunch creating almost-grooves, others are more dense and impenetrable, but even those tracks offer up fragments of melodies, bits of blurred drone, hints of some sort of song buried in the mire. This whole disc, while being fierce and fucked up, heavy and thick and noisy and brutal, manages also to be haunting and creepy and beautifully damaged. Fans of all that blissed out drone music we champion, who are looking for something a little more intense, who perhaps now realize that having to dig for beauty might just be more rewarding than having it handed to you, might do well to check this out. Another divine disc of brutal bliss and harsh beauty, and these days no one does it better than Prurient.
Killer packaging. Super fancy thick gatefold sleeve, two pockets, on one, the cd, and a booklet of photos, all of roiling water and crashing waterfalls, in the other pocket, a 5" vinyl single with two extra tracks!
Dominick Fernow who runs Hospital Productions, a record store AND label, has had to keep his main, mostly noise project, that would be Prurient, on the back burner for a while now, as he is now also a full fledged member of electro cold wave pop troupe Cold Cave, and what with touring and recording, it's seems like it's been quite a while since we've heard anything new. In the past, Prurient records could go one of two ways, blistering noise and caustic crunch, or dark thick brooding blackened dronemusic, often some mix of the two. But after all this Cold Caving, we weren't sure what to expect, but it definitely wasn't this. We did expect some of the CC sound to rub off on him, how could it not, but orthodox noise freeks will be very confused and disappointed, cuz this is essential a blackened synth heavy coldwave noise rock blowout, and it actually kind of rules! The liner notes instruct the listener to "Listen on headphones at night while driving through tunnels in Europe", and that is sort of what it sounds like, a few of the tracks like supercharged noise drenched versions of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn", while others like meaner more brutal takes on Cold Cave. Fear not, there's still plenty of noise, and howling hateful vox, but those elements are doled out judiciously this time around, and its the juxtaposition between those harsher elements, and the more synthy/krautrocky/propulsive bits that make this so goddamn good.
Opener "Many Jewels Surround The Crown" begins with a wild distorted shriek, and a wall of distorted crumbling blackness, but then in swoop synths, swirling strings, it almost sounds like it could be the soundtrack for some Tron like film, all sleek and reflective, but a bit decayed and decrepit, a futuristic post apocalyptic soundscape, a voice intones beneath pulsing kosmische synths, barraged by blasts of distorted crunch, and thick swaths of blackened bass. This is quickly followed by some pounding electro-punk, the vocals a gruff bellow, over thick driving synths and blasting programmed drums, all laced with warm whirling melodies, total new wave for sure, but sounding like Majeure or Zombi remixed by Alec Empire.
The rest of the record plays out like some beautiful and bizarre soundtrack, slipping easily from sprawls of crunchy droned out noise, to lush, swirling string laden shimmer, to lumbering bass heavy synthbuzz thrum, to total Depeche Mode-is electro pop, but again, that pop flecked with shrieked almost black metal vocals, which totally changes the tenor, while other tracks drift along blissfully, layering distant muted throbs beneath ethereal streaks of washed out synth and sweetly melancholy melodies, and finally finishing off with the epic "Sugar Can Chapel", a sort of noise drenched M83 slow build shoegaze psychedelic synth blowout, that manages to be darkly atmospheric and blackly blissed out.
Easily the most accessible Prurient record yet, and anyone who wishes that new wave of retro synth stuff had a lot more blackened bit to it, well, this might just be what you were looking for.
NB we got this on vinyl too, but not as many as we'd hoped, we might still have just a couple so ask if you're interested...
Noise is indeed truly a lost art form. Okay, well it's not really lost. Actually there are more noise bands and noise labels than ever. Maybe it's the sheer joy of hearing noise as music that seems lost. Not sure if it was the 345th Merzbow release (we're rounding down) or the millionth shitty show, with a bunch of guys sitting on the floor pounding contact mic'ed pieces of metal. But noise began to just sound like noise again. Annoying, irritating, well, ya know, NOISE. There are always exceptions, and Prurient just might be one of them. Maybe.
This is indeed noise. Serious noise. The first track is a 16 minute experiment in high end feedback, a squirming squeal that seems intended to test the endurance of your fragile inner ear. The rest of the record is no easier on the constitution. Muted percussion, some Whitehouse style synth sputter and some maniacal howled vocalizations. Sort of Z'ev meets Hanatarash. Squelching industrial grind over pounding drums. Pummeling abstract vocal / noise / percussion free for alls. It must be the drums that do it. That make Black Vase more, um, listenable. What would have been just a series of circuit frying, amp destroying walls of malfunctioning sound, take on some sort of songlike form, almost a groove at times, although the sort of groove produced by throwing a drum kit down the stairs and then pushing a battery of synths and plugged in toasters into a swimming pool. Imagine a sludge-noise Abruptum, or a lobotomized Boredoms, weird percussion frames anguished screams, the result of some unspeakable self torture, while a million amps feedback in the distance. In the foreground the ultimate pipe fight, clanging metal and clattery skree, evertyhing barraged by dog whistle sine waves and impossibly high end shrieks, all over simple pounding tribal drum figures or muted industrial clink and rattle. The sound of a thousand rusty iron gates, grinding open on squealing hinges, while a caveman pounds drums made from hollow skulls near by.
Harsh for sure, -noise- is meant to be harsh, but there's some internal, almost musical logic behind the utter brutality, that allows Prurient to restore our faith in NOISE!
Prurient has always been the project for Dominick Fernow to do whatever the fuck he is doing at the time. Here, Dom shifts gears back to power electronics on Despiritualized after all of those notable explorations into electric rhythm. This was of course the place where Fernow began, with filthy feedback and distortion bracing scabbed noise-pulse frequencies and his pitch-shifted, commanding voice; and it's a place he will continue to investigate probably right up to the day he dies. The symbols of stalker creepiness, vaguely political overtones of political corruption, and socially maladjusted rage all haunt Despiritualized. The trenchcoat / true-crime aesthetics to this vein of Fernow's work come from the long tradition of underground transgression that sensationalizes the heightened states of sexuality and violence as the grand existential scream into the void. Fernow, like William Bennett and Genesis P-Orridge before him, have shrugged off the accusations of glorifying the ills of society for the use as shock-value. It is a questionable argument that work such as Despiritualized is done as an exercise of clinical detachment. In all of the coded aesthetics of schizoid rage and hypersexualization, Fernow does find pleasure as the sadist; and he's not particularly shy in expressing his thought. The four tracks of Despiritualized land in the mental minefield of some poor fucked on the verge of snapping over a jilted lover or even just a misheard word. The poetics of this dot the tortured grind of a classic power electronics context - gnashed feedback, morose Italian-styled looping noise, and deliberately obfuscated vocal bellowing.
This super limited 10" pressing is a re-issue of a 2011 double cassette (each tape just 10 minutes long, mind you), in a numbed edition of 250 copies. Restocks are doubtful on this one.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Prurient are turning out to be one of our favorite modern noise artists. At some point early on, Prurient, aka New Yorker Dom Fernow, realized 'noise music' wasn't all about volume or power or abrasion or violence or brutality, it was as much about texture and timbre and mood and dynamics and hell, even melody. The magic happens when you figure out a way to combine all of those into one single complex sound. And Prurient has been doing that since we fist discovered his Black Kite record.
This is one of four new 8" square lathe cuts released by alt.vinyl in the UK, run by the Jazzfinger guys, and finds Fernow moving into even more ambient and drift like territory. One side is all washed out buzz drenched crumble, a barren landscape of time lapse decay, cities falling to ruin, fauna withering, wildlife dying, the sky turning an ashen grey, the soundtrack to a gradual return to dust, the various sounds wreathed in a hissy swirl of tape drop outs and creaking mechanical whir. The other side is even more pretty, tranquil, ambient, like the first sighting of the sun after the dust clouds clear, and signs of life begin to stir, still bleak and haunting, but pretty and subtly hopeful. Wide open expanses of distant fragmented melody, mumbled barely there drones, with the surface noise of the record as much an element as the music itself.
And like all the releases in the series, this is a custom hand cut, Peter King lathe cut, 8", and it's SQUARE!!! Packaged in gorgeous square and triangular die cut sleeves, super fancy textured paper, with a paste on front cover and a printed insert, each insert hand numbered, each release LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!
We should say right up front, that Rose Pillar is probably the most beautiful Prurient record yet. Only tangentially 'noise', instead the sounds here are dark and brooding and evocative, haunting and heavy, thick and textured, drone-y and dense and so lovely. This limited release comes from the amazing Heartworm Press, and is a 10" housed in a massive, thick hardcover book. It's ULTRA limited, and very expensive, almost half of the pressing / press run is gone and it's only been out for a week or two, we can get as many as we want, but since it's so expensive, this is a PRE-order. If you want one of these let us know, we're happy to order one, but by ordering one you are definitely committed to buying one, and we'll be charging you a deposit for half of the cost, and because it's so heavy, it will have to ship and the higher multi item rate. But trust us, it's well worth it, believe it!
Based on the death of Prurient mainman and Hospital Records proprietor Dominick Fernow's uncle, the book is stunning, page after page of simple stark photographs, silver on black, with the facing page featuring a brief bit of text, more like lyrics, or poetry, a wandering narrative that seems to be focused on death, or loss, or loneliness. The book on its own is quite breathtaking, but then the record just pushes it over the top.
Beginning with a bit of warm warbly whir, all minimal and mysterious, the record slips into something a bit more familiar for fans of Prurient, some caustic vox, wreathed in distortion and drifting on bursts of hiss, but that noise element hovers amidst soaring majestic tones, almost martial sounding, strange muted industrial rhythms, delicate and dark, a cool and harrowing contrast, sounding a bit like a prettier dark ambient post industrial Whitehouse.
After that track, the noise component becomes secondary, with Fernow exploring all manner of dark low end mysteries, from thick blown out buzzscapes, all rubbery synths and thick layers of crumbling distortion, to thick warm, viscous flows of pulsing guitar melodies and pounding blackened rhythms. Super distorted and in-the-red, caustic and chaotic, all wrapped around muted minor key melodies, and at one point a gorgeous, almost new wavey loop, whispered vocals and off kilter, almost tribal sounding programmed drums. The record winds down with some slow burning downtuned guitars, draped over soft muted tones and stretched out into a loping sprawl, the only sign of the Prurient of old, is a smattering of crunch and clatter, sprinkled here and there, until finally, things finish with a brief bit of warped looped old timey melody, buried beneath sea of soft shimmer and long washed out drones. So gorgeous. And so haunting and melancholy. Perfectly matching the tone of the accompanying book. Speaking of the book, besides the photos and Fernow's text, it also features a super intense and moving piece written by Fernow's Father, about the death of his brother, heartbreakingly beautiful.
Again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Half are gone already. We are only ordering as many of these as we get orders for, and this list will be your only chance to order them. We'll require a deposit, so only order one of these if you really want it and intend to buy it. And needless to say, HIGHLY recommended!
Prurient does techno? Oh, yeah. And we have to wonder just how much input / influence recent aQ fave Silent Servant had on these recordings, as Through The Window sure does sound like a pretty solid response to Silent Servant's fantastic dark-techno album Negative Fascination which was released on Dominic 'Prurient' Fernow's Hospital Productions in 2012. That said, Through The Window did begin as out takes from the divisive Prurient album Bermuda Drain, noise-purists scoffed, but most everybody else was pretty taken by the EBM-rhythms and blackened synth propulsions on that record (us included). While the dark synth lines, horror-house melodies, and monstrous pitch-shifted vocals of Bermuda Drain are held over on Through The Window, the rhythms are pure minimalist techno with the production values polished for the dancefloor. Even in comparison to the grim gothicisms and industrial strategies of Sandwell District (the broader operation to which Silent Servant belongs), the atmosphere on Through The Window is utterly claustrophobic and ominous. Monophunk basslines lifted from any number of Autobahn techno bangers (e.g. Model 500's "No UFO's" or Konigsforst by Gas or anything from that aforementioned Silent Servant album) laced with metallic, flanging synths headed for a total death-trance trip. A four-minute crusted drone interlude breaks up the two lengthy techno workouts, which are essentially variations on the same theme. A damn fine album.
