We won't go into too much detail with these as we only got a tiny handful of each. Latest batch of ultra limited lathe cuts from New Zealand label CMR. Each one packaged in a super striking, simple cardstock jacket, most with printed inner sleeves, Limited to 60 copies, of which we got the remaining stock. Once these are gone, they are gone forever.
Two brief blasts from AQ fave Pumice, aka Stephan Neville. One side delicate and ephemeral, gorgeous disembodied guitar melodies, drifting in a wide open field of static and distortion, drifty and spacy and so lovely. The other side clattery free noise jam, with junkyard percussion, atonal melodic buzz, bits of low end growl, everything angular and abstract, stumbling and chaotic and strangely catchy.
Super limited tour only split featuring a serious arsenal of awesome underground noise makers. The names alone should have loads of you diving for that click-to-buy button, but on the off chance some of you are unfamiliar with any of these outfits, here's a quick breakdown.
Pumice is NZ musician Stephan Neville, who often crafts delicate outsider folk, Jandekian guitars, keening sadboy vocals, all bathed in lo-fi 4-track ambiance, but can also kick up a serious skree. Both sides are represented here. A soft folk opener, followed by a blast of serious Dead C-like clatter, immediately followed by another delicate drift, this time, a haunting guitarscape wrapped in some strange strange buzzing crackle, finishing up with a brief nylon string lullaby that sounds like a lo-fi Hawaiian folk song interpreted by Jandek.
Next up is Ghosting, who have gotten AQ customers into quite a lather with their massive ghostly dronescapes. This track adds some tribal percussion to their bag of tricks, resulting in a sound like a much more blissed out laid back No Neck Blues Band!
GMS is Gabe from Yellow Swans, who offers up a strangely minimal solo guitar piece, that drift dreamily along for almost 10 minutes before the hammer falls and a distorted guitar gets locked into a super hypnotic ultra blown out loop before drifting back into gentle tangles of acoustic guitar. Really nice.
Finally it's Bonus, another band that folks around here have been loving BIG TIME. 17 minutes of ultra ultra minimal drone. This is definitely headphone music. A low level sonic event, spread out over a vast expanse of open space. Like the sounds of your home or office, isolated from the world around them, the air conditioner, the refrigerator, placed in a vacuum, allowing us to hear the microscopic music that is all around us. Wow!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES! Packaged in cool hand screened cover, includes a photocopied insert, and housed in a thick vinyl sleeve.
Seems like there have been a surprising number of vocal oriented releases lately, Lichens, Grouper, it makes sense though, the most intimate and personal music making device there is. This most recent exploration of the human voice comes from the strangely monickered Pump Kinn, a vocalist named Michelle who channels the spirit of Diamanda Galas, but adds a heaping dose of effects and stereo panning to send our heads spinning and our ears into a confusional tizzy. The first track sounds like water running, a shower, the soothing white noise slowly shifting from the right speaker to the left speaker and back again, a soothing, slightly dizzy sensation, before the vocals appear on track two, a soft faraway cooing, swinging from right to left along with the fuzz of the running water sound. Track three is a strange world of creaks and cackles, screams and shrieks, lots of reverb and delay, a world of alien bird calls, and cooing alien infants. Track four finds the voice turned into rhythm, careening from speaker to speaker, truly haunting and disorienting. The next five tracks drift from haunting ethereal ambiance, to swirls of high end shriek to dreamy drifts of distant harmony, like a feral Joan LaBarbara or an outer space Fursaxa scampering wildly between your speakers. Truly far out. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Packaged in a super striking custom, full-color, 6-panel fold-out slowly undeveloping faux-Polaroid cover. Really cool.
The Pump was the first project of Nigel Ayers, Daniel Ayers, and Caroline K, which morphed into the Nocturnal Emissions around 1981. Nigel Ayers hand-dubbed all of the tiny editions of The Pump's cassettes on the shittiest tapes he could find in a local market; and when he learned that Rough Trade in London quickly sold through a run of 30 copies, he made a point to find even worse grade tapes for The Pump's recordings. Crap tape, cheap electronics, stop/start editing techniques, and overdriven distortion run throughout The Pump's recordings, which have more of an art-damaged aesthetic in keeping with the likes of the Storm Bugs or the Homosexuals, but don't you worry, there's plenty of Throbbing Gristle to be heard within The Pump's anti-songs. Ayers claims that he released four or five cassettes as The Pump, before shifting into Nocturnal Emissions; and this disc collects various tracks from various cassettes, although nothing is annotated as to where anything originated. It probably doesn't matter, as those cassettes had probably all disintegrated from their structural shittiness. Anyway, The Pump loosely splattered electronic noise and distortion upon cheap drum machine programs, slapped on asynchronous basslines which lurch through the treble crashing production, and even displayed a surprisingly sophisticated use of dub collage techniques to provide some ghostly flourishes of voice, media samples, and scratchy guitar noise amidst the dishevelled sound. This is Industrial Music in the way the Industrial Records released Industrial Music, by way of Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire all circa 1979; but they also seemed to run parallel to the fucked-up, heroin-splattered noise of Destroy All Monsters as well. It should be noted that there's way more material from The Pump on this disc than found on the Nocturnal Emissions 4lp boxset Lest We Forget from Vinyl On Demand. A gritty free for all from way down deep in the British underground.
Pure has also recorded for Disko B and Tension as Ilsa Gold, and does not make any proclamation for the death of the 12" in favor of digital media. Actually the title refers to the source material of this album being the runout grooves on vinyl, being amplified and processed into digital clicks and ominous drones reminiscent of Ryoji Ikeda or possibly Nurse With Wound's Thunder Perfect Mind.
WOW, did this record pretty much immediately blow us away! We had never actually heard these guys (this guy actually, he also plays in Birds Of Maya), but had always thought Purling Hiss was a pretty awesome name, so not expecting too much, we threw this on and then BAM, we were sold, smitten, obsessed even, finding ourselves playing this to death, getting these songs stuck in our heads, and not just the songs proper, but even the weird little recording anomalies and random bits of musical glitchery. For a record that sounds, and is maybe meant to sound, so lo-fi and tossed off and just sort of half assed, a druggy murky muddy home brewed pop record, it's impossibly catchy and well crafted and AMAZING.
A heady mix of classic pop songsmithery, blown out psychedelic drift, abstract tape experiment fuckery and fragmented bedroom 4 track alchemy, Public Service Announcement plays at times like some classic rock record that's been dubbed a million times and then played back in your crappy car stereo, the one with only one speaker and no bass knob, and at other times like some inspired Guided By Voices mini pop epic, and occasionally like some super baked, basement psych jam blowout, wasted and lazy and drifty and divine.
The record opens with "Run From The City", which within 5 seconds establishes itself as some impossible instant classic, with a totally killer guitar lick that IS the song's hook, the track sounding like some lost punky pop gem from the seventies or eighties that somehow got left off of every compilation since, the verses crunchy and muddy and melodic, those guitar leads just sealing the deal. In fact, we could barely get to the rest of the record cuz we just wanted to keep playing the first track.
"Porch Dude/Slight Return" offers up our first glimpse of Purling Hiss as wasted and stoned psych jam drifters, shuffling drums, swirling flanged guitars, everything hazy and wreathed in pot smoke, little spidery leads surfacing here and there, bit otherwise a blurred and bleary drift, the slight return of the title being the revisited melody from the album opener.
And then there's "Don't Even Try It", the other song we can't seem to keep from just playing on repeat, with it's folky guitar and vocal intro, the tape speed constantly shifting, the sound warped and warbly, like someone with their finger on the record as it spins, and then the chorus comes in, with it's "woo ooo ooo" refrain, and the song suddenly reveals itself as some pretty perfect pop. Lo-fi yet lush, vocal harmonies, guitar melodies, a hook to die for, all hazy and sun dappled and catchy as all get out.
After a brief (but AWESOME) minute long Van Halen loop, that manages to be totally twisted yet totally catchy, the record slips right back into fuzzy lo-fi pop, more oooh's and aaah's, summery steel string strum, dreamy harmonies, and sweet pop hooks, before unfurling some serious psychedelia in the form of "Gypsy", a sprawling droned out chunk of druggy spaciness, and at that point if you're not already under the record's spell, you bliss out and drift off and let the record carry you wherever it will, whether it be to "Zor" a thick buzzing, swirling, yet still dreamily melodic bit of dark drone, or to "Beautiful Earth Creature" which is another perfect chunk of jangly pop, replete with those warped speed fluctuations that end up becoming irrevocably part of the song, or to the heady spacepsychjam freakout of "Malice In Wonderland" or to the twisted Ariel Pink-ish warbly fuzzy FM radio pop of album close "1976".
Warped and wonderful and definitely one of our new favorite records.
We got a whole bunch of tapes from our pal Jason's Ormolycka label, one of our favorite tape labels going, and certainly one of the coolest and weirdest, with an insanely varied roster that evades any sort of easy classification. There was the tape version of the Liturgy record (which featured a remix by our very own Andee!), as well as the Death Grips Exmilitary tape (relisted elsewhere on this week's list), which speaks to the label's obsession with fucked up weirdo hip hop, as does this one, by a 'band' called Pushups, written with a little infinity symbol before the bandname, but it's a seriously cracked slab of super distorted radio style hip-pop, more of a mix really, a dizzying mashup of soul, hip hop, pop, electro, a relentless barrage of booty shaking grooves, the sound super blown out and in-the-red, as if it was being blasted from a booming system with blown speakers. There's a serious footwork vibe too, with loops repeated over and over and over, stuttering samples, maddeningly mesmerizing, some of it totally bumping, some of it cheesy and fun, all of it ruling and while it may be Sommer Jammz for 2007, they'll sound pretty good this Sommer too!
We're pretty sure that Drucifer (Aq pal, turntablist DIe Elektrischen, head of Dielectric records, etc.) named his new band, a laptop duo with Dielectric labelmate Carson Day, ahem... Pussyfinger, just so we'd have to keep saying it out loud, inevitably causing the speaker, and the speakee, to either wince or giggle or both. It's been a running joke around the shop. "Hey did we get more of that new Dielectric record, you know, the one with Drucifer and Carson...you know... um..." We've come to embrace the name now. Pussyfinger. See? PUSSYFINGER! So besides the provocative monicker, what's all the fuss about? Well, Pussyfinger is the scientific laptop duo of Drew Webster aka Drucifer (see above) and Carson Day, who have melded their individual approaches to music and the laptop in particular and come up with something skittery and electronic enough to keep Boards Of Canada fans in a tizzy, but fucked up enough to keep em seriously confused. Pussyfinger's sound is an organic clatter, it IS glitchy laptronica, but it's arranged and presented like songs, you know like real songs. The elements are distinctly organic, but chopped and sliced and diced in a totally inorganic way. Strings resonate and buzz, but are processed into weird ambient smears of sound. Vocals are all over the place, but they are so fucked with they end up sounding like just another random sound element. The core sound is still electronica, IDM even, there is an Autechre streak a mile wide running through Chew And Swallow, and that's definitely not a bad thing. Things do get noisy at times, thick washes of digital feedback and some full on harsh noise, but there are also some truly lovely moments of tranquil ambience that sort of balance the equation. Ultimately it's the skittery shuffle that is the framework for Pussyfinger's electronic world, think BoC, Autechre, a little Aphex, a bit of Chris Clark, Pussyfinger would not be at all out of place on Warp, but they would definitely bring a bit of black humor and some serious sonic dissent along with them.
Beautifully packaged, with truly horrific, but somehow strangely striking cover art, the perfect complement to Pussyfinger's oh so problematic sobriquet!
The return of Pussygutt, a male/female duo from Idaho, who traffic in slow brooding black ambience and ultra doom, and whose last two records have been huge favorites around here, which makes sense as we really can't get enough of sidelong tracks, and sprawling expansive stretches of slow rumbling drones, and minimal slabs of blackened doomic crawl, and gathering Strengths does NOTHING to disappoint, offering up a single two part track, spread out over two sides, beginning with what sounds like oboes or some sort of woodwind (it's in fact a clarinet), long layered tones, emitting endless overtones, laid atop a barely there bit of low end rumble, strange melodies emerging from the constantly shifting layers, eventually joined by mysterious strings, chiming bells, super cinematic and soundtracky, and yet another instance of 'why don't these guys score movies', the music sublime and emotional, not what you'd expect necessarily, slowly building in intensity, until finally, the hammer falls, and a black cloud of rumbling doom descends, hardly overwhelming, but instead wrapping around those keening strings, creating a haunting otherworldly bit of black doom chamber music.
The flipside starts off a bit folkier, shimmering drones drift over simple hand drums, the melodies simple and melancholy, a muted firelit psychfolk, smoldering and dreamlike, eventually building to something much more epic and intense, never exploding into a frenzy of doom, or exploding at all, instead, just hovering, and ratcheting up the tension, again, totally cinematic and dramatic, like some timeless ritual being performed by cloaked figures gathered before a fire, while in the background cities crumble and the sky turns to ash.
Intense, and intensely beautiful. LIMITED TO 550. Each one hand numbered, and housed in super striking, silkscreened heavy sleeves.
A mysterious duo from Idaho, here expanded to a trio, offer up 4 sidelong tracks of damaged and mysterious outsider doomdrone on the always reliable Olde English Spelling Bee label. We weren't too sure what to expect, and we missed their performance here a few months back unfortunately, but just have a gander at the list of instruments: bass, violin, crystal goblet, tractor, forest samples, clay pots, tubular bells, organ, synth, gong, drums, bowed cymbals, guitar, sound manipulations, electronics, LEAD guitar, amplifiers and feedback. Those last few are your first clue that this isn't just any old drone record. Although the first few minutes had us fooled. A gorgeous expanse of shimmering low end, glistening harmonics, and a soft distant doomic plod, little bits of static and hiss, a slow slithering blackness, which eventually builds to a stumbling groovy doom jam, with big boomy practice space drums, some seriously downtuned riffage and thick swirls of Hawkwind-ed FX, that lopes and lurches until it fades out into a long slowly unwinding smear of softly buzzing bass.
The second side is a sprawling heavy industrial soundscape of collaged sounds, wind, that tractor mentioned above, all looped and layered, clanging percussion, everything constantly shifting and changing shape, a dark meandering journey through a black forest of sound, a bit like Nurse With Wound meets Wolf Eyes, a chunk of surreal dark ambience, haunting and ominous and while not heavy per se, still distinctly doomy...
The second lp begins with creepy gypsy violins (one of the band members is a classically trained violinist) over a back drop of creaks and moans, a sort of haunted house mood music, beneath abstract riff fragments and random bits of effects building into a slowcore crawl, a mellow doom, each note ringing out and drifting off before the next one hits. Doomy, funereal, soft focus, with those strings a constant presence, super dark and emotional, adding a weirdly cinematic element to Pussygutt's sound.
The final side is another doomy crawl, distant drums, massive slow motion slabs of downtuned guitar, very simple and hypnotic, dark and creepy, not so much heavy as moody and intense, finishing off with a harrowing Hitchcockian string outro which gives way to the sounds of the forest, birds and wildlife, all coming to life beneath the full moon...
LIMITED TO 550 COPIES. Each one hand-assembled copies. Packaged in heavy-duty gatefold sleeves with four spraymounted panels that were custom offset-printed on silver stock with two coats of black ink for extra darkness, so much black ink in fact that, it almost makes your eyes water. Maybe a few huffs inside the sleeve will better prepare you for the mind altering weirdness inside...
A brand new single-track of sprawling blackness from this mysterious Idaho duo, offering up their own version of the template laid down by Earth way back around their album 2. Which as you probably already know means, metal riffs slowed down to tarpit tempo, the various notes struggling to move forward through a field of crumbling distortion and near static buzz, the riffs allowed to ring out and fade away almost completely, before the next one comes lumbering up behind it.
The strange thing is that live, Pussygutt are a full on band, much more traditionally heavy, with a drummer and everything, even on their last record the epic double lp Sea Of Sand, the band was a lurching doomic behemoth, bordering on the industrial at times, but here, their sound is stripped way way down, and it suits them. They're able to evoke all sorts of moods with their carefully constructed downtuned ambience. This is some seriously sinister shit for sure, sweeping and darkly cinematic, the soundtrack to the eventual collapse of the universe, the sound of dying stars, or of some long slumbering beat awakening after millennia, or maybe Goblin at 16rpm, some haunted house music way too scary for any haunted house you'd ever want to visit.
It's not all heaviness though. Long stretches of sound dip into hushed shimmer here and there, while elsewhere the low end slips away leaving a creepy string section do drift spectrally, like some secret Satanic classical music, but even these moments are always tense with the knowledge that right around the corner, could be lurking another churning black wave of slow motion doomdrone crush. Really fantastic, and more than most of this stuff, infused with a deep otherworldly beauty.
Definitely require listening for folks whose cd racks/record crates/iPods' are packed with Earth, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, To Blacken The Pages, Hum Of The Druid, Expo '70, Nadja, Vulture Club, Hjarnidaudi, Monument Of Urns, Fear Falls Burning, Half Makeshift, Tunnels, Seconds In Formaldehyde, KTL, Light Of Shipwreck...
We can never get enough Boredoms. But unfortunately, there's never enough Boredoms. We hate waiting years between releases. Thankfully there are plenty of side projects and offshoots to hold us over. One such Boredoms related outfit is Puzzle Punks, featuring Eye from the Boredoms, along with his PP partner Shinro Otake. We carried the limited picture disc of this release years and years ago, but for some reason were never able to get the cd. We recently discovered that there is a NEW Puzzle Punks record (we're not sure if it is indeed new, or just a new collection of old material, but we'll hopefully have it in time for the next list) and at the same time we discovered we could finally get this, the cd version of the Puzzle Punks' 2nd album Budub.
And we forgot just how great this stuff was. Even after a decade the sounds on Budub sound fresh. Weird and fucked too (it is Eye after all) but fresh enough that you could be forgiven for thinking this was some weird Excepter record or No Neck side project. Which just goes to show you how much influence Eye and his gang had and still have on modern music.
The sound of Budub is less caustic and spastic than the first Puzzle Punks records, or the Boredoms records released around the same time. Instead it's a series of experiments in rhythm, maybe hinting at the direction Eye would take the Boredoms on late albums.
Imagine some impossible jam session between the Boredoms and This Heat, or a lobotomized Hawkwind left to jam with the infant versions of the No Neck Blues Band. Or even a room full of musical toys, possessed and allowed to run amok. Dark and deliriously playful. Sometimes creepy and dark, but more often sort of strange and hypnotic. And always some bizarre world of rhythm and rhythmic wonder. Every track a strange sonic trip: analog synth squelches over dreamy chimes and tinkles, processed fuzzy krautrock grooves beneath strange chanted and muttered vocals, murky percussive plod and thud, over which a tiny sped up voice drenched in reverb mews and warbles, haunting vocal and percussion duos, very tribal and mysterious, thick washed out expanses of fuzzy spacerock FX and distant feedback, skittery almost techno shuffles, with bizarre vocalizations, deconstructed melodies played on a toy guitar, accompanied by a slowly wound jack in the box, a grinding wash of super thick distorted throb, a wall of low end whir, a murky world of jungle sounds like a lo-fi Perry And Kingsley and every random rhythmic stop in between.
Boredoms freaks who never picked this up NEED THIS BAD. And all you modern free folks and random rock weirdos into No Neck, Excepter, Sunburned Hand and the like might just dig this a lot!
The Boredoms were always about rhythm, even if it wasn't overt, theirs was a sound based on rhythm. From the splattery chaotic hardcore of early records like Soul Discharge, to their later incarnation as a modern hippy drum rock jam band, every bit of their music was concerned with pulse and throb, it was propulsive and hypnotic, looped and cyclical, sometimes herky jerky and chaotic (but still precisely choreographed), other times serene and abstract, but always with some internal mechanism that tapped into all of the rhythms of life, which is precisely what made the Boredoms' music sound so alive and vibrant and often completely brilliantly baffling.
Last list we reviewed Budub, the 2nd album by Boredoms offshoot Puzzle Punks, which was the duo of Eye of the Boredoms and artist Otake Noboru. A fascinating very Boredoms-esque concoction of cracked rhythms and krautrock grooves, but super spare and stripped down. A garage rock This Heat maybe, traversing an abstract soundscape of loops and broken drum lines, pulsing and plodding, weaving skeletal song frameworks, and just leaving them like that, barebones and full of space. And the result was divine. Hypnotic and dreamlike. Some weird space rock broken down to its base rhythmic element, would up and allowed to stumble and lurch on its own.
Puzzoo was supposedly recorded right after that record, in secret, and recorded almost as you hear, not culled from hours and hours of jamming, rather a wholly realized organic musical happening, captured alive and kicking. Puzzoo finds the Puzzle Punks expanded to a trio, with the addition of an extra guitar, and includes some guest performances from two of the other Boredoms, one of them being Boredoms / OOIOO heartthrob Yoshimi. The result is like a much more beefed up Budub. A little more aggressive, a little more propulsive, but still stripped down and tripped out.
The opening three track salvo is worth the price of admission alone. A solid 40 minutes of damaged abstract spaced out krautrockiness. In fact, just the opener "Puzoo Lunch", a seventeen minute outer space tribal space jam was all we needed to hear. one of those tracks we wish would go on forever. And if the technology existed, we guarantee we'd spend the next 2 weeks listening to the extended 336 hour version, staying home from work, phone off, lights off, drapes drawn, just sort of drifting off in some body rhythm trance. But as it is we'll just have to continually press repeat on the cd player, and just imagine all that other stuff. But what kind of sound would have us in such a frenzy? Some some super bizarre seventies prog rock all tangled up in an alien percussive temple worship ceremony, like a roomful of deranged wind-up toys each given a little tiny set of drums and cymbals, rocking out in miniature to some acid fried psych rock guitar drift. The guitar weaves a deconstructed lo-fi garage rock, with angular no-wave riffs that drift over a motorik clangscape of clockwork thumps and a cacophony of tinkling bells and chimes and cymbals. Above it all hovers some blown out fuzzy blues guitar, weaving lazily in and out of the tangled rhythms. A dense swirl of warbling melodies and strange little sound effects wrap the proceedings in a mysterious spaced out conic cloak, the various guitar lines and melodies constantly mutating and shifting pitch. An impossible alien krautrock groove, an improbable junkyard space rock symphony, like some stripped down garage rock super jam with members of the Boredoms, This Heat, and No Neck Blues Band. Phew. And that's just the first track.
Track two, "Puzoout" follows a similar blueprint, but wraps its rhythms in fuzzy clouds of 8-bit video game sounds, whorls of primitive lo-fi synth and damaged guitar, all over a dizzying splatter of simple shuffle and propulsive skitter. Like a (more) outsider Acid Mothers Temple, but recorded on some sort of children's tape recorder. Track three, "Puzzub", the final part in the unbeatable one-two-three punch, is another druggy rhythmic workout, this time even more stripped down, a blissed out slow burning tribal jam, the main element being mouth harp which gets distorted and twisted, and stretched into a raga like buzz, in the background simple tablas and primitive metallic percussion, all wrapped in a super thick fuzzy veil of staticky haze, and warm warbling shimmer.
The final four tracks, ranging from under three minutes to a little over five minutes, are stunning little fragments of what must be (or could have been) monumentally epic lo-fi space jams, each one a dense little assemblage of deconstructed rhythms, melodic shards, fuzzy ambience, motorik propulsion, machine-like whir and druggy psychedelic atmospheres. All of them could have been stretched into hours instead of minutes without losing any of their mysterious power.
The sound of Puzzle Punks is very reminiscent of groups like No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, but especially the Finnish contingent of the neo-tribal forest drone folk sound, Avarus, Kuupuu, Kemialliset, Anaksimandros, but infused with a distinctly Japanese xxx, as well as a gloriously unhealthy obsession with krautrock, space rock, This Heat and all of the various permutations of the word Puzzle (Puzunk, Puzzdozer, PuZZ-Top, ZZ-Topuzz) So dementedly recommended. As is the previous disc Budub, which we still have a few copies of...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
It is a red letter day for us here at aQ, in that we finally actually get to write about and sell you a Pye Corner Audio release instead of lamenting the fact that our supplier for PCA recordings only sent us a fraction of what we had initially wanted - or is more often the case, that it sold out completely before we could get our hands on ANY. To be sure, over the past couple of years, a few of Pye Corner's releases have slipped in and out of the shop, leaving just an ectoplasmic stain of picture-perfect electronic retro-futurism on our collective minds; and it also seems fitting that Pye Corner Audio released an album of his hauntological disco on the Ghost Box label, which again we've never gotten enough of to list. But now, hurrah, we have this!! As the title specifies, this triple cd set collects the first four volumes of Pye Corner Audio's Black Mill Tapes, which were originally released on vinyl as a couple of double lp sets which are (as noted) long gone.
Pye Corner Audio is the work of audio wizard Martin Jenkins, who is one of the in-house engineers at Miloco Studios in London where he works alongside the likes of Alan Moulder, Flood, and Trevor Jackson - yeah, top flight producers for sure. It's obvious that the work of Pye Corner Audio did not develop in a bubble, as there are very clear ideas and a fully formed sound language that is very savvy in its references to Delia Derbyshire's sci-fi electronics, the autobahn precision of Kraftwerk's songwriting, John Carpenter's bold synth melodies, and the bad-ass swagger of Detroit techno. In a rare interview, Jenkins described the working methods of PCA as being quickly sketched-out variations onto quarter inch tape and even four-track cassettes with a couple of no-name Japanese monosynths and a drum machine. He continues that "I definitely embrace imperfection. In my days as an engineer, I spent so much time polishing performances and correcting mistakes that I realised it made for pretty sterile recordings. I also felt extremely liberated after coming to the realisation that there is no absolute final version of a song. There are just alternative interpretations. Once I stopped chasing that elusive perfection, things eased massively."
Through those monosynths and simple step sequencers, Jenkins builds a unique, forgotten sound of alien ambient passages made foggy through an almost Basinski-like approach to tape disintegration punctuated with crackingly good Italo-disco jams. These rhythms are where Pye Corner Audio really shines, presenting a whipcrack / leather-glove seduction that comes straight out of the Throbbing Gristle playbook for "Hot On The Heels Of Love", but if those four somehow had an imagined electronic music summit with John Carpenter at the other side of the table trying to score a soundtrack for Cronenberg with none of those super-egos getting in the way of each other. Yeah, this stuff is timeless. Just fucking timeless.
Not much needs to be said about this in the short term (you probably know if you want it, based on if you have Volumes 1 & 2). But do not fear, we will be spewing buckets of grandeur about the FULL set of Pye Corner Audio's complete Black Mill Tapes, when it gets compiled on to a massive triple cd compendium in a few weeks. Until then, we've got less than FIVE copies of the vinyl for Volumes 3 & 4. You may notice we never got around to reviewing Volumes 1 & 2; for the same reason, it's a super fucking limited vinyl edition. Here's the shorthand description of Pye Corner Audio - brilliant retro-futurism synthesizes the analog electronic horror of John Carpenter, the hard-drive dreamspace of Autechre's first couple of records, and the cold, sleek sexiness of Italo-Disco aloofness.
We've yet to get enough copies of ANYthing from this mysterious one man band, Pye Corner Audio, aka a mysterious man behind the curtain called the Head Technician, and this Tapeworm tape is no different. We tried to order 20 copies, and instead got 5, too few to list, but figured we'd give you tape nerds a chance to snag one, so here it is, a super limited cassette from this strange electronic audio alchemist, whose sound is equally mysterious, from sci-fi futuristic soundscapery, to blurred slomo Caretaker-ish drift, from home brewed IDM style skitter, to crackle drenched hum and psychedelic zoner bliss out. Fans of Demdike Stare, the Modern Love, Pre-Cert and Dead-Cert labels, odds are you'll dig this a LOT. And again, be warned, we only have FIVE copies, it's already out of print and sold out, so once these are gone, that's IT.
We've been exploiting the writing talents of Jewelled Antler's Loren Chasse a bit lately, and now Glenn Donaldson (Thuja, Skygreen Leopards, Blithe Sons...) wants to get into the action too, volunteering to write something about this here disc, an archival release on Last Visible Dog of the clanging and banging of the pre-Avarus outfit Pylon (which is NOT to be confused with the Athens, GA Pylon of the early '80s). Or, to be accurate, he offered to let us use what he wrote about it on the Jewelled Antler email-list, as follows: "Damn, another breath of fresh air blowing over from the Finnish cloudfort. Pylon sends echoing flutes & ram's horn trumpets over fragmented folk & space-rock marching junkshop drums. Maybe there's a detuned guitar flailing along or a fuzzy Casio organ, someone beating out a Morse code on an oven tray or a an old typewriter. Muffled abstract vocals are performed with earnest by muppets, zombies & monks & are shrouded in effects pedals. This shares something in common with related-groups Avarus/Anaksimandros/Maniacs Dream, but with just two members there's more space around each clang & groan. With its joyous clatter, pylon seems to be urging us to dance with goats & green maidens, run wild with robots & monsters." Pretty much sums it up, thanks Glenn!
This is a doozy of a release, and one that seems custom made for aQ. Weirdo black metallers Pyramids sent songs and sounds to a bunch of bands to rework, reinterpret, remix or reimagine in any way they saw fit. The list of bands alone should havemost aQ folks frothing: Tenhornedbeast, Fear Falls Burning, Windy & Cark, Wereju, Burial Hex, Yen Pox, Josh Lay, Black Seas Of Infinity, Encomiast, Bones Of Seabirds, Nicholas Szczepanik, Rise Of Because, Jeremy Bible, Amber Asylum, Bass Communion, Hoor-Paar-Kraat, Light Of Shipwreck, Mamiffer, Ulan Bator, Across Tundras, At The Head Of The Woods, Blood Fountains, Oakeater, Neuntoter Der Plage, Rabbit Girls, Wicked Messenger, Sigullum Dei, Black Roller Crop Rotation, 9922, Exit In Grey, The Spirit Dies, Luasa Raelon, Wyrm, Sin Of A Higher Strain, Drowning The Virgin Silence, Paradin, Bjerga/Iverson, Fences, Le Knell, Andrew Weathers, Mystified, Nils Helstrom, True Colour Of Blood, Teeth Collection, Great Falls, Hiroki Sasajima, Offthesky, Ala Muerte, Romance Of Young Tigers, This Will Destroy You, Ghoul Detail and Lunar Miasma. Phew. Instead of going through the whole collection song by song, group by group, we'll let you suss it out for yourself, the sounds are all over the map, noisy, heavy, pretty, ambient, rhythmic, brutal, psychedelic, some of the tracks sound like remixed Pyramids, others you'd never know, it's an epic and sprawling collection, that for the most part is pretty fucking great. The packaging is incredible too. SIX HOURS of music of FIVE TAPES, the tapes red, printed in silver, all housed in one of those plastic clamshell cases, like for language courses, but his one has a custom stamped placeholder in the otherwise empty sixth tape slot, and is covered in a full color printed glued on cover. Inside is a black on silver metallic printed insert, and all of this is housed in a red cardstock slipcover, sealed with a metallic silver wax seal! WOW. Limited to 300 copies, we're taking pre-orders for this, we're only getting as many copies as we get orders, so if you want one don't dawdle...
As much as we love that Hydra Head sound, huge churning riffage, pummeling drums, crushing metallic dirges and all things heavy heavy heavy, we're becoming more and more obsessed with the releases that don't fit so comfortably on HH, don't necessarily embody that classic Hydra Head sound. Although that's not necessarily fair, as the more bands HH sign that sound different, the more diffuse and varied that HH 'sound' becomes, which renders this whole theory moot. But whatever, stick with us for a second, there is a point. It's sort of how we were with Sub Pop, sure we loved Green River and Soundgarden and Mudhoney, THAT sound, but we got crazy obsessed with stuff like Rein Sanction and Hardship Post, the stuff that stuck out, that sounded WEIRD, maybe almost more than the regular Sub Pop stuff.
It might be just that for a band to kick someone's ass SO much, that they're willing to release a record by them, even though sonically it's a whole different ball of wax, means that the record in question is that good, that fucked up, that unique, or could be that we just like to be contrary. Either way�
Whatever. We love Isis and Cavity and Pelican, but lately, we, like a lot of you, have been obsessing over Jesu, Hayaino Diasuke, Austerity Program, Torche, Pet Genius and now Pyramids, who hail from Denton Texas, and who sound like nothing on Hydra Head. If we had to pick one band, it might be Jesu, but even then, the similarities are minimal. Pyramids are blissy and fuzzy and gauzy and pretty, almost ambient at times, drifting dreamily, their sounds shimmering and glistening, everything blurred and washed out and totally fucking gorgeous, BUT, they do have some surprises up their sleeves. And it's those surprises that make this record such a mind blower.
But let's start at the beginning. The first three tracks here are totally lovely, guitars are wisps, vocals are fluttery shadows, melodies are delicate and fragile, the production is warm and sun dappled, rhythms are muted shuffles, effects swirl and sway, here and there, the sound thickens into something almost heavy, but never quite gets there, remains on the pretty drifty side of heavy. It's like a more avant freaky version of Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500, that same sort of windblown washed out blissy vibe. Until the fourth track.
Beginning with some minimal guitar buzz, amidst a whirl of chiming harmonics, shortwave interference, and blown out buzz, the drums kick in, and the riff locks into an insectoid buzz, and suddenly the Pyramids are some sort of black metal band, still bleary and blissy, but with pounding drums and buzzing guitars, eventually vocals come in and it's like a metalgaze Sigur Ros, which is most definitely awesome.
The next track too offers more of the same, a sort of swirling chaotic shoe gaze-y black metal, and in fact the rest of the record continues on in that vein, each track a twisted convoluted take on blissed out black metal, sometimes grinding and furious, but even then swathed in a warm sonic glow, sometimes more poppy and swirly, like a more abstract Swervedriver. As you can tell, it's pretty hard to describe. Not sure it's really black enough to appeal to black metallers, it's more like some shoegaze ambient metal pop band just borrowed some black metal tropes and wove them into their gorgeous blown out soundworld.
There's a second disc too, of remixes, by the likes of Jesu, James Plotkin, Loveliescrushing, Birchville Cat Motel, Blut Aus Nord and more, and we would have assumed that remixes by those folks, of this sort of music, would just render them more blissed out, but instead, at least the first two, transform the songs into furious blown out black jams. The first, remixed by Toby Driver of Kay Dot, Ted Parsons of Prong and Swans and Colin Marston of Behold the Arctopus, begins all soft and swirly, but by the end has added super distorted drums, and all manner of fried buzz. The Plotkin remix up next, strips away most of the bliss, and leaves a seriously fucked sounding lo-fi in-the-red black metal blast. The Jesu remix sounds just like you might imagine, a gauzy slowcore drift, with the vocals jacked way up, soaring through the ether, a fluttery falsetto. The two Loveliescrushing mixes bring out the soft blurred ambience of the originals, making them even more tranquil and serene. Birchville turns his mix into a virtual BCM track, using bits and pieces of the original, creating a thick slow growing drone, that builds to a buzzing crescendo before fading back into a dark moody drift. Blut Aus Nord is the most fucked up remix. Not sure if they added tons of stuff, or just did some crazy mix, but the guitars groan all dizzy and woozy and angular, the drums, pounding and machinelike, the vocals a hissy evil howl, the whole track a lurching black lope. All the mixes here are amazing, utterly transforming the originals, but in doing so hewing to the spirit of the original record, which was already pretty schizophrenic and all over the amp as it was.
Way way way recommended. A new aQ favorite for sure...
Killer combo for sure, blissed out doom metal shoegaze duo Nadja, and sort-of-black-metal Hydra Head weirdos Pyramids, we weren't sure what to expect, heavy? Spacey? Trippy? Would it be more Nadja? Or more Pyramids? Having listened to this a bunch now, we can safely say, we have no idea.
There are definitely elements from both bands, but the two entities seem to have merged into something wholly new. Which seems ideal, why bother starting a new band just to sound like your old band. Four long tracks, each one a slow burning, gradually sprawling experiment in blown out sound, the opener definitely more toward the blissed out and ambient side of things, with ethereal vocals, huge sweeping sheets of shimmer, sun dappled and psychedelic, until three quarters of the way through, when the team up gets HEAVY, and suddenly we're in Nadja territory, a slow billowy lumber than pushes all out Jesu buttons, the vocals buried beneath an avalanche of swirling buzzing sound.
The second track starts off a bit more aggressively, with some crunchy FX laden guitars, only to drift off, the sound thickening, some skittery rhythmic splatter, some keening melodies, moody and ephemeral, the beats get a bit more caustic, almost jungly, super clipped and jagged, while underneath the soft sounds continue to swirl, and then vocals, LOUD vocals, way up in the mix, total keening indie boy croon, dreamy and heartfelt, before a big heaving swell of low end, and then a gradual drift to silence.
The 22 minute "Sound Of Ice And Grass" seems to be the centerpiece of the record, beginning with delicate piano, deep rumbles, ghostly vox, and swooping backwards effects. Dark and hushed, until those vocals return, sounding more choral this time, and laid over big distorted doomy guitars, reverb and delay pushing everything closer to chaos, before a blast beat erupts, but way down in the mix, the rest of the song continues to plod and drift, the vocals soft, the ambience muted and minimal, while the drums thrash wildly beneath, a strange juxtaposition, but cool sounding for sure. The second half of the song is a series of string laden, effects drenched chordal swells, and fractured melodies, gauzy vox, and all manner of buzz and crackle and whir, eventually building to a wall of grey sound.
The record closes with what sounds to these ears the most like a distillation of the two bands' sounds, beginning with layered melodies, Animal Collective like vocals, layered drones, downtuned guitar buzz, thick slabs of rumbling riffage, and some blasting metallic drum action, again muted and washed out until it's almost textural more than rhythmic, but the stretch with the bast beats is divine, dreamy, ethereal and gorgeous, eventually exploding into a full on Nadja+Pyramids drone / shoegaze / post metal / dream pop blow out. Cool!
Gorgeous packaging too, a min lp style gatefold sleeve, adorned with lush landscapes of trees and forest and streams on the outside, a strange drawing of trees and an owl on the inside, with a printed full color booklet featuring more abstract foliage.
Super limited one sided collaborative lp from avant metal weirdos Pyramids and blackened noisesmiths Wraiths, featuring Clay Ruby from Burial Hex on piano. It's a sprawling 25 minute side long single track, that starts out all dreamy and drifty with female vox over pounding reverb heavy piano, before the song kicks in proper, big chiming distorted guitars, and martial drumming, which instead of launching into blasting blackness, devolves into some strange glitched out droniness, all crumbling distortion, and crooned almost chant-like vox, and that piano from the opening few seconds. The sound is almost liturgical, certainly ritualistic, and for the next 10 minutes, the track drifts woozily, those female vocals return, the piano drives the haunting ambience, a funereal dirge of sorts, that finally explodes again at about the 15 minute mark, the drums, the bombastic crashing chords, but again, the song quickly devolves, this time into a blurred blackened squall of smeared noise and crumbling heaviness, obviously the work of Wraiths, who pull the song apart into a roiling tangle of grinding heaviness and blurred blacknoise, the whole thing laced with weird effect-ed guitars and the occasional stray melody, before, settling into a weird outro, all distant feedback, blasts of feedback, strange electronics, minimal percussion, and that haunting female voice, intoning some strange incantation, as the noise gradually dissipates leaving only emptiness...
Pressed on clear vinyl and housed in a gorgeous vellum sleeve with super striking artwork from tattoo artist Simon Erl. LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!
We're getting to the point now where EM Records could sell us pretty much anything. We've come to trust them that much. Whether it's singing saws, some lost psych oddity, sixties symphonies made entirely from bird calls, space age bachelor pad music, or lost jazz funk artifacts, they have such a knack for unearthing true gems, and then lovingly compiling liner notes and photos and extra track so that the final product is almost as impressive an -object- as it is a piece of music.
The newset mysterious missive from EM is this long lost mysterious jazz record, originally released in 1976. We haven't been able to glean too much about The Pyramids, there are no liner notes (if that tells you how obscure this recording was/is) and a Google search turned up almost exclusively Japanese language sites. But don't let the lack of background keep you from enjoying this record, cuz it's definitely one of the most amazing rediscovered free jazz gems we've heard in ages. And it's not just free jazz, all wild swirl and skronk. Instead it's an exotic blend of Don Cherry's Orient, Funkadelic's Maggot Brian, some Art Ensemble Of Chicago, with wild Eastern sounding tribal rhythms, shuffling jazzy post bop, fluttering flutes and skronking horns, chanted vocals, droning buzzing ragas, seventies psychedelic free folk, propulsive krautfunk jams, some totally chaotic free jazz here and there, octopoidal drumming and wild shrieking sax, haunting percussive soundscapes, replete with strange creaks and whistles, and then before you know it transforming before your ears into what sounds like traditional African music with warm muted thumb piano melodies, chanted harmonies, bird calls, and sweetly melodic flute, rollicking bass heavy grooves under wild hand drums and carnivalesquee noisemaking. The final track, the 16 minute long "Black Man And Woman Of The Nile", is a mellow slow burning groove, with a throbbing bass riff, warm rich sax runs, shuffling percussion, the whole thing a laidback, sun drenched, barefoot funkjazz jam, warm and dreamy and hypnotic, with a short break in the middle for a brief skronky freakout, and then straight back into it, eventually drifting off into abstract ambience, softly moaning horns, dreamy melodies and barely there percussive chatter. Awesome!
This album has the word "synthesizer" emblazoned on its cover, in letters as big as either the artist name or the album title. And when you hear it, you will know why. This album is all about Pyrolator putting his several synthesizers through their paces. Inland was the debut lp from Germany's Kurt Dahlke aka Pyrolator (also a member of DAF and Der Plan), originally released in 1979 on his own Aka Tak label, and its synth-noise experimentation belongs both to the spacey electronic krautrock genre and to the (currently in revival) '80s minimal-wave scene. Think DIY Kraftwerk. It encompasses the abstract experimentation of someone like Asmus Tietchens, as well as other stuff that's much more melodic and Cluster-y. There's shortwave static, distant schlager transmissions, rhythmically buzzing glitchwerks, musique concrete tape edits, some blissed out white noise soundscapes... For folks who like difficult, mad scientist music, you've got squelchy distortion laced with whining, high end tones ("Inland 1"), and for the new wavers, there's trax with burbling sequenced beats, pulsing like something Zombi or Majeure might do today ("Minimal Tape 3/7.2"). Indeed, Inland is a veritable cornucopia of such ear candy for those of us enamored with the minimal coldwave synth sorta thing, the more experimental side of which, especially. You could file this with your Axxess album (that recent Record Of The Week) though a lot of this is scarier than that - Inland apparently intended as cutting edge "protest music" (those were radical days in West Germany, the Red Army Faction running rampant). But its claustrophobic character is abstract enough for us to enjoy today without any explicit political aspects made plain. Another good reference, perhaps, being Bernard Szajner.
The compact disc version of this reissue comes with 6 worthwhile bonus tracks. Oh, and Bureau B has another early but much poppier Pyrolator reissue we'll try to get to soon...
1997 solo project of Gary Ramon from British spacerockers Sun Dial. Ambient electronics mixed with krautrock rhythm structures.
Just who the heck is Israel Quellet? Somebody who sent a really cool home-recorded cd-r in to the Sub Rosa label that's who. The back cover of this digipack contains text all about finding Quellet's demo in their office slush pile, giving it a listen, and realizing, hey, here's something that really doesn't sound like anything else! And thus, it's now a Sub Rosa release.
Quellet's intimate and unique sound-world is built from simple sounds, generated by ordinary means like striking a metal oil tank, dragging a bucket across the ground, tapping a telephone keypad, or playing with a noise-making toy. Quellet's French-speaking voice, laughter and "throat sounds" also are heard to much mysterious and evocative effect. But actual musical instruments? Who needs 'em? About the only "real" instrument appearing here is his Swiss town's church organ, and even that still fits into his "field recording" aesthetic. (Oh, and there's also several percussion instruments here too: a bass drum, gong, timbales etc.)
As depicted on the cover, which features a photo of a stereo-mic'd electric sander, Quellet's REAL instrument is the microphone and with it he zones in on a level of a level of blown-up, microscopic detail that makes "saturation" (or distortion) another common and crucial element to his "music". He then mixes and edits these recordings of his various sound-ingredients, musique-concrete style, never adding too much, keeping it simple, focussing on just a few specific sounds and employing them to their fullest. Some tracks are percussively rhythmic, others distorted and droning, some simply bursting with joyous cacophony. All these pieces are carefully constructed, though, never randomly noisy. It's about method, not madness.
Something this abstract needs verve and vision to be a good listen, and this has all that to a fascinating degree. Always bold and surprising and alive. Recommended.
We're so happy to have been introduced to the idiosyncratic experimental sound-worlds of Swiss artist Israel Quellet, via his several releases thus far on Sub Rosa. This is his third disc for the label and is as fantastic as the first two. When the first one, Oppressum, came out in 2007, we were like, Israel who? But upon hearing it, we quickly became fans of his home/field recorded, non-academic "musique concrete", microphone-as-instrument compositional technique, Quellet's mysterious, percussive music being both intriguing and original. 2009's Soni Sclavus was also great, and now at last here's Rhythmes d'Etain, to which we say, yay! And yep, Rhythmes is rhythmic all right, in fact some of the tracks here, like "L'Ere des Anches a Sonne" ("The Age Of Reeds Is Upon Us"), bordering on a sort of DIY, accidental techno.
One of the few conventional instruments, as opposed to non-instrumental sound-producing objects, heard on Quellet's debut was his town's local church organ. A church organ plays a much bigger role here, along with human voices singing in Latin, giving this something of a liturgical feel - but not as much as you'd expect, perhaps, because the organ is used more as a source of sampled sounds, for its majestic drones and tones, rather than being played as an organ normally would; and the voices, while suggestive of monkish murmer, are almost always manipulated or processed in some way, "sped-up, slowed-down, doubled-up, played backward" as he explains. The use of Latin is meant to create an abstract wordless-ness to the vocals, deliberately without meaning, the singers not affected by any understanding of what was nonsense Latin text to begin with.
Along with the organ and the voices, Quellet has restricted himself to just one more significant sonic element on this disc's compositions - that being, of course, percussion. Listed inside the digipack are a host of symphonic and improvised percussion instruments, including tympanies and bell-like tubular idiophones; the toms, cymbals, and hi-hat from a "deconstructed" drum kit; a bass drum and large skin drum; as well as "brutally shut drawers, slammed doors" and other ad hoc percussive devices.
So you can be sure it doesn't sound like you're in a church, when the beautiful, glorious pipe organ is accompanied by the rhythms of slamming doors, etc.! Or at least it would be a very unusual sort of church, filled with screwed-and-chopped choirs. 'Tis true too, the clink-clonk of the percussion sometimes takes on a carillion-like character, as if ringing from the church tower. Often lovely, quite dreamlike and mesmeric, all these sounds layered and looping, Quellet comes up with tracks here sometimes dominated by the playfully active rhythmic elements, at others by the ominous drones of the pulsating organ sub-bass frequencies (Quellet recommends listening on appropriate headphones), or both at once. Despite the varied character of Quellet's carefully constructed tracks, the focus on organ, voice, percussion gives this a definite cohesiveness, often calming into head-noddingness amidst eerie atmospheres.
Israel Quellet's 2nd album for Sub Rosa is not the unexpected surprise from an unknown artist that this Swiss sound-maker's debut disc was (for both us, and the label, read our review of it to see what we mean, we started off by saying "who the heck is Israel Quellet?"). But, that's because THIS time 'round, when we saw Quellet's had a new recording coming out, we were already eager to hear it. Much like its excellent predecessor, it's about compositions (improvisations? explorations?) limited to specific sound sources, each track featuring the use/abuse of a certain instrument or two, or perhaps a non-instrument, and to Quellet, his methods are his music, this is the focus, to the extent that the tracks are identified thusly... For example, track 1 is "for organ and percussion". Track 3 is "for fitness rower". Track 7 is "for footsteps and knocks on stairs, and vented carbon dioxide". He makes use of organ on here quite a bit, as well as percussion and less frequently voice, electronically treated (and in French). Actually much of this seems electronically treated, or in some way distorted, with "saturation" factoring into several of his pieces, occasionally achieving Merzbowian levels of noise (on track 6, "for percussions and saturation" especially!). All in all, this disc can be heard as one man's playful but moody, quasi-industrial homebrewed take on 20th (now 21st) century classical music. With so much somber organ and repetitive thunderous percussion, many of these tracks seem quite ominous, you can start imagining DIY Nitsch-style "aktions" happening in Quellet's backyard.
As with Quellet's prior album, this is varied and fascinating throughout, and surprisingly listenable. Truly experimental (and successfully so) music for curious ears made by someone with curious ears too. Recommended!!
Oh, and by the way, on our list this week there IS a cool Sub Rosa disc from a hitherto unknown (to us) artist, look for Pierre Berthet's Extended Loudspeakers, it's also AQ recommended.
Quickly becoming our go to guy for late night dreamy drones, Tim Hurley, aka Quetzolcoatl, offers up another gorgeous collection of slow burning drifters. Based in Ireland, and also doing time in modern day Taj Mahal Travellers Bonecloud, Hurley's Quetzolcoatl is one of the most consistently satisfying crafters of ethereal dronemusic going these days. Which is definitely saying a whole lot. This latest suite of untitled songs are all drawn from bits of piano, both short and long recorded over the span of several years, although except for a few places here and there you'd be hard pressed to pick out actual piano, instead the sounds have been blurred and smeared, twisted and layered, mixed with other sounds, vocals, field recordings, everything a gorgeously whirling collage of sonic ideas, that Hurley is somehow able to alchemically mold into utterly moving soundscapes, looped and hypnotic, long drawn out stretches of melodic whir, tinkling harmonics, slow smoldering chords pulled apart into long looping notes, stretched out over wide expanses of dark shimmer. Not sure what else to say other than this is absolutely lovely. And thus obviously totally recommended. And you probably couldn't get a better endorsement than the fact that the writer of this review has fallen asleep to this disc the last three nights in a row...
SUPER LIMITED as always. Packaged in an oversized sleeve with a printed insert, and the disc face is hand painted in swirly water colors.
Over the last few months we've been systematically going through our warehouse (read: not very big back room) and unearthing all manner of gems, limited cd-r's misplaced box sets, long out of print lps, and getting them back in the store, or if there are enough, getting them reviewed and onto the list. That way, even though we'd normally try to have 30 or 40 of something, at least a handful of you can get your hands on something instead of it sitting neglected on some shelf.
So here's another recent discovery, a cd-r from a long time aQ fave, Quetzolcoatl, aka Timothy Hurley, who also does time in Taj Mahal Travellers worshipping outfit Bonecloud, both hailing from Ireland. Released on Phantom Limb a while back, and limited, to, oof, 90 COPIES! Which of course means WAY out of print, and these are the very last copies.
The sound of Quetzolcoatl is dreamy delicate stuff, Warm washed out landscapes of high end tones, blurred into cloudy streaks, spread out over angelic voices and tinkling chimes, gritty buzz over distant percussion, and haunting ghostlike melodies, gentle swells of fuzz and hiss, sun dappled and ethereal, murky stretches of low end crawl, and majestic lo-fi chorales, smeared into long indistinct stretches of stained glass sound, glimmering and prismatic and so gorgeous.
Amazing packaging, a full color insert, with printed vellum sheets on either side, a small printed vellum insert, each one hand numbered, limited to only 90 copies. Again, already out of print, last copies ever�
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another mysterious disc of murky drone from the label run by the Ghosting guys. Elsewhere on this list we review a split record between Ghosting and an Irish group called Bonecloud released on the Yarn Lazer label. Bonecloud sound a bit like a more fucked up lo-fi Taj Mahal Travellers, well, Quetzocoatl happens to be one of the guys from Bonecloud and thus Sunlight Blossom Confusion travels a similarly murky and droney path. And we love it. How could we not really. Can you really imagine anything that sounds more appealing than a more fucked up Taj Mahal Travellers. We sure can't!
An hour long swirl of processed vocals, violin, organ, electronics, and found objects. Seven tracks, each a haunting excursion to the bottom of some brackish sea, or a trek through some desolate wasteland, murky and muddy, a thick fog of muted cacophony transformed into a gauzy dreamlike soundworld. Clatter and crunch are smoothed over and stretched out, melodies and pulled apart and mixed into the mesmerizing whirl, like watching sunlight sparkle through a window covered in a thick layer of ice, or like listening to the world around you through a thick concrete wall. So awesome!
Packaged in hand printed covers with a full color photo affixed to each, photocopied insert and all housed in a heavy vinyl sleeve.
LIMITED TO 90 COPIES, WE GOT ABOUT 20. ONCE THEY'RE GONE THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
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We have been going a bit nuts for this drone murk ensemble, an offshoot of another group we're pretty gaga about, Irish drone collective Bonecloud, so we grabbed as many of this super limited release as we could get.
These guys travel a similar sonic path as legendary Japanese drone improv outfit Taj Mahal Travellers, as well as sharing sonic similarities with some of their modern noiserock brethren like the Skaters, Birchville Cat Motel and the like.
Each track is some super obfuscated smear of sound, as if inside the tangle of fuzz and grit and whir and tape hiss and reverb and distortion was a little perfect pop song, or some dreamy vocal snippet, but we're peering at these sparkling gems through layer after layer of sonic murk, colors are muted and dull, like looking at a night time cityscape through an old broken and dirty window, a cracked prismatic swirl of constantly shifting sounds. Melodies or fragments of melodies surface and disappear, drift briefly into earshot then fade away. There seem to be vocals all over Triumphant, but they are so wreathed in fuzzy FX they become nothing more than disembodied melodic streaks, brief flitting blurs of sound. Reminds us a bit of Grouper, but less lush and organic and more raw and lo-fi and buzzy. Dreamy, fuzzy and lovely.
Packaged in cool hand watercolored sleeves and of course LIMITED TO 74 COPIES!!! Don't blink or they'll be gone...
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Now here's a tape label that knows how to do it right. Each tape, even though they're limited to only 100 copies, comes with super deluxe full color artwork, printed labels on the tape, each hand numbered, AND each tape is a different color to match the artwork. Nice!
The first release from Abandon Ship is the latest from one of our new dronedrift faves, Ireland's Quetzolcoatl, an offshoot of the equally cool Bonecloud, Quetzolcoatl are channeling the spirit of the legendary improvisers, especially Taj Mahal Travellers, with their slowly evolving sonic landscapes, abstract and epic, pure and organic, sounds drift and shimmer, layers upon layers of whir and warble, always moving and glistening. Dense but somehow super spacious and abstract. The sounds seem to float, weightless, like fog and smoke, although occasionally storm clouds gather and the sounds become more jagged and harsh, more dense and thick and corrosive, but always strangely soothing, with a minimal melodic undercurrent.
Not sure what it is about these guys, but they seem to be able to just sit down, close their eyes, plug in, and suddenly we're transported to some mountain top, some ancient temple, some deserted beach, some dense forest, some mysterious other-place, where the world is music, and the sounds are pictures and we can see the music with our ears and hear it with our eyes. So good.
Limited to 100 copies! Each tape hand numbered, we got about a quarter of the pressing but those will go fast so be quick...
We recently discovered a group from Ireland called Bonecloud, we raved about them on a past list and promptly sold out of their cd-r's, which are now unfortunately out of print. The same thing happened with Bonecloud offshoot Quetzolcoatl, so when we discovered a brand new full length cd-r we jumped on it and ordered a whole bunch, but of course this too is super limited, so don't expect these to be around for long.
Quetzolcoatl, much like mothership Bonecloud, traffic in thick druggy soundscapes, various stringed instruments sending buzzing shimmering missives into a black and cloudy sky, roiling stormclouds raining down thick sheets of murky sonic mist, expansive stretches of murky melody obfuscated almost entirely by layer after layer of primitive buzz and fuzzy indistinct warble, all distorted and doused in damaged FX. Quetzolcoatl drift unmoored through a barren psychedelic landscape lit by a total eclipse, a strangely greyed sound world populated by vibrating strings, haunting disembodied reverberations, and all manner of psych rock shimmer, all tangled up into deep dreamy washes of warm chordal whir. Like spinning some unreleased My Bloody Valentine 45 with your finger as slow as possible, recording it on a microcassette recorder, dubbing it to an old VHS tape, playing that in some old broken VCR, recording that through a contact mic affixed to the speaker cone, dubbing it to a thrift store tape, and then playing it back on your shitty car stereo, so loud it makes you see stars and cloaks the world in a thick grey sonic mist. Nice!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another way too limited missive from mysterious Irish drone outfit Quetzolcoatl, this time in the form of a split cassette, with the until now unknown to us outfit Changeling. This ridiculously limited hand painted tape begins with AQ faves Quetzolcoatl, featuring member(s) of another AQ fave Bonecloud, who explore a gorgeously muddy and murky soundworld, long drawn out drifts of grimy gritty sound. Warm and muted, dark sonic swirls, plenty of hiss and fuzz and delay and reverb, with bits of percussion, vocals, keening feedback, all drifting and swirling way below the surface, a roiling miasma of thick sound. Dark and ominous and tribal, dense squalls of distorted guitar drift overhead like storm clouds. It almost sounds like that weird ambient opening to Kiss' "God Of Thunder" but slowed way down and dubbed on to some old thrift store tape. Taj Mahal Travellers is a name that always comes up when we're talking about these guys, and with good reason, while that legendary Japanese ensemble employed a wildly different approach to sound making, the actual sounds themselves are quite similar. The expansiveness, the epic quality, but Quetzolcoatl get a bit more aggressive, the guitars and drums buried beneath thick layers of buzz and grit. The flipside features Changeling, and if anything, they sound like they could well feature some of the same members, cuz the sound is slightly similar, but where Quetzolcoatl are dark and aggressive, intense and murky, Changeling are blisssful and dreamy, dark layers of sound, hiss and fuzz, rumble and whir, but here sculpted into delicate waves, and subtle swells, a little bit dark, but glowing with some sort of mysterious warmth, glistening sounds rich and resplendent woven into soft focus drifts of moody murk. Like rays of the sun through a dirty window. So nice.
Dronemusic is always tough to describe, especially trying to explain or even understand what exactly it is that makes one group so much more compelling than another. Maybe that something isn't meant to be described, some ineffable quality that is in the music, and can't be pulled out and examined, or understood. That's sort of the vibe we get from both these groups. There is a magical mystical quality to the music they make, a sound, or even something outside of the sound (or inside) that connects on some primal level. Something to let wash over you, to fill up your ears, to carry you off, something almost physical, something organic and pure, not something that can be understood or explained. So good.
Hand painted cassette tape housed in a hand painted cloth bag, with a printed insert. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, we got a bunch, but they'll be gone in no time...
Another gorgeous piece of kosmische electronica from the Quiet Evenings duo of Grant & Rachel Evans! For many years now, these two have embarked on an introspective take on the transcendent psychedelic electronics pioneered by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Cluster. For the most part, these two tend toward channeling those sounds through their solo projects - Motion Sickness Of Time Travel for Rachel and Nova Scotia Arms (amongst others) for Grant - but when they find themselves working together as Quiet Evenings, it can be magical. Impressions is one of the best things we've heard from them in any context, sporting two sprawling pieces for electronics, voice, and guitar. The first side "Blue Dream" settles upon a hypnotic bed of synthetic tones, out of which the pair broadcast fizzling arcs of warm static and revolving beacons of melodic phrases. As Rachel's ghostly voice settles into a narcotized sustained melody about halfway through the track, Grant picks up the guitar picking up the bittersweet, sodden vibe that Mark McGuire would occasionally create in the darker Emeralds tracks. Telepathic Heart is much more of a sci-fi excursion with its slow revolution through the sweeping ambient oscillation and twinking arpeggiations, as if they were creating the imaginary soundtrack to a documentary film about travelling through the heart of deep space nebulae. There's a considerable amount of hand-wrought melancholy that comes through Quiet Evenings productions, and this has always separated the Evans' from many of their contemporaries who are just aping a crystal dangled New Age wishy-washiness. Yeah, there's some teeth to these sounds, and we're much better off for it. Limited to 200 copies.
Georgia's answer to Emeralds? That's probably not too far off the mark. Quiet Evenings are the psychedelically laced ambient duo of Rachel and Grant Evans; the former is known for her beloved Motion Sickness In Time Travel project which recently unleashed several epic albums for Digitalis that match monochromatic electronica to the humid surroundings of rural Georgia and plenty of stoned gazes up at the satellites orbiting the earth. Grant has his own moniker, Nova Scotia Arms, which up until now has released a bunch of cassettes of impressively washed-out psychedelic drone-song. Their Quiet Evenings project is suitably blissed-out in their slow-moving ambient constructs. "Manna From The New Age" is about as perfect as title as Quiet Evenings could give to one of their side-long tracks on Intrepid Trips. Splashes of guitar plucked with spectral effects and sodden delay ripple through the brightly toned ambient swoosh coupled with Rachel's voice extended into a sustained chorale. "Radiant Endless" interjects all of the smeared paisley ambience of classic Tangerine Dream and Popul Vuh with subtle sequenced percolations, oceanic currents of glowing synth-tone, and delicately crackles of what might as well be rain on a contact microphone. It easily harkens to John Elliott's work over the years in Emeralds, Outer Space, Imaginary Softwoods, etc. This beautifully trance-enducing album is pretty damn limited, just a little over 300 copies were made. All on purple vinyl and certainly not long for this world.
Perhaps the most prolific couple in music today, Rachel and Grant Evans have been sprinting ever since 2014 began. Rachel, with her Motion Sickness Of Time Travel project, has recently completed the Ballade For A Moon monthly series; and Grant has kicked out a couple of fantastically guttural, scourge-noise albums (along with his curation of the occult-informed Vaald imprint); and here they've patched the cables from one side of their rural farmhouse to another to begin their pastoral dreamtime sessions for their Quiet Evenings duet. Other Windows is a beautifully bleary proposition layered from beds of kosmische ambient tones that suspend time at the crepuscular moment right after the sun fades in the evening while the sky traces with blazing colors and shadows pock the entire landscape. Layers of washed-out guitar from Grant (we're assuming) spills upon these electric drones, offering an eerie, Aeolian drift to the first side of the cassette. By the second side, Rachel (again, we're assuming) dials in a hypnotic synth-pattern of dark burbling tones through which the allusions to a stoned sunset collapse into comparatively tense, nocturnal coda with all of the right sci-fi filmscore references (e.g. Forbidden Planet, Solaris, The Fog, etc.). Super limited pressing on the Evans' impeccable Hooker Vision imprint.
Here's a really great split cassette between Quiet Evenings and Former Selves released by the hitherto unknown Constellation Tatsu label. Quiet Evenings is, of course, the husband / wife duo of Rachel and Grant Evans - the former better known as Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, the latter as Nova Scotian Arms, Crippling, etc. and both run the exemplary cottage industry micro-label Hooker Vision. Here, the Evans produce a gorgeous, blissout, lo-fi ambience with freefloating wordless vocals, natural sounds of twittering birds (Bush Tits, if you must know), fuzzed guitar drones that brainmelt in and out of languid synth melodies, all sprialing together into more of an end-of-an-era vibe - that the dawning of the new age of the '70s was not all that it was cracked up to be. It's nice to hear Quiet Evenings engaged in a more bittersweet / darker sensibility as those are the moments that work best for both Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and all of Grant Evans various projects.
As good as the Quiet Evenings side is, Former Selves may have upped the ante with this magically, twinkling piece of lo-fi electronica. The spacious synth pads gradually lock into subtle techno rhythmic underbelly with accumulated melodic patterns that arrives at a really fantastic amalgam of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II, Suzanne Ciani's crystal powered tonecolors, and even the early tape loop experiments from Terry Riley.
Some of you may not recognize the name Donovan Quinn, but long time readers of the AQ list and fans of all things Jewelled Antler, most certainly will. He's one half of psych folk combo the Skygreen Leopards, and this here disc, October Lanterns was recorded way back in 2003, but was thought to be lost until now. Released by Soft Abuse as an ultra limited cd-r, we only got a handful so we won't go into too much detail. You probably already know if you need this, especially if the words psych folk, Skygreen Leopards and Jewelled Antler set your psychedelic folks senses a tinglin'...
There's a definite Dylan thing going on here, Quinn's lazy drawl and insistent strumming is at times a dead ringer, but it's Dylan filtered through seventies British folk, with plenty of fluttering flutes, jaw harp, melodica, mandolin, shimmering high harmony vocals, the sounds are sometimes off kilter and lo-fi, like Avarus or other Finnish folkies, the sounds wreathed in a haze of druggy FX, but just as often, simple, naked and stripped down. Just the guitar and the vocals, and that's most definitely enough.
Dark and personal, subtly trippy, and quite lovely.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered, hand screened, with a paste on cover photo, and paste on liner notes inside. We only got 20 copies, and will NOT be able to get more...
Having witnessed an incredible live show by the French electro-acoustic composers Lionel Marchetti and Jerome Noetinger at 7hz in 2002, I can assure you that this live album is an accurate documentation of how it is distinctly possible to re-create all of the expressiveness of musique concrete on a table full of effects. The Quintet Avant features both Marchetti and Noetinger with fellow countrymen Jean Pallandre, Marc Pichelin, and Laurent Sassi. With dynamic stop/start triggers, painterly flanges, whipsnap collages, and agile control of feedback, this quintet has all of the panache of the best of the INA-GRM group (i.e. Pierre Henry, Michel Chion, Luc Ferrari, etc.), with the added flair of being able to pull it off live. So far, only released on vinyl.
We made the debut lp No Visitors from these Texas drugged out psych/doom/noise/kraut/sludge weirdos a Record Of The Week back June, and well, since these tracks were culled from the very same recording session that produced that record, you could very well consider this a sort of Record Of The Week part two, and really if you dug No Visitors, this is more of the same, blown out psychedelic heaviness, that sounds like a mashup up of the Butthole Surfers, Hawkwind and Shit And Shine, all filtered though AmRep nineties noiserock and Texas knuckle draggers Rusted Shut. Which if you're anything like us, is about all you need to know. But if you're new to Quttinirpaaq, or just need a reminder, give a listen to the first couple samples below. The brief sort-of intro, the sweetly titled "Diary Of A Pig Keeper's Wife", is all detuned trudge, crumbling slo-mo riffage, death march drums, weird, slowed down chant like vocals, this is some sort of wasted, psychedelic ultra doom, but it's on "Chinese Hercules" that Quttinirpaaq really get to flex their musical muscles, locking almost immediately into some seriously tranced out, heavy hypno-rock riffage, that weds super distorted drum pound to churning looped riffage, garbled vox and swirls of noise and effects into some heavy, space, psychedelic noise rock that takes everything we love about White Hills, The Heads and all the rest, cranks it WAY up, and drags it through the filth, resulting in some seriously next level kraut-sludge space-psych heaviness that KILLS.
And while it doesn't necessarily get better from there (not sure how it could really), it stays pretty epic and psychedelic, heavy and warped, tripped our and trancey, most of the tracks some weird sort of hybridized psychedelic krautrock and noise rock crush, the band locked into endless grooves that roil and churn mesmerically, while all around sounds swoop and swirl, streaks of feedback, blasts of FX, constantly shifting textures, buried melodies, all blurred and smeared into heaving, noisy, heavy psych weirdness.
Some of the tracks here get downright out there, some surprisingly beautiful, still noisy, but infused with surprising melodies, and crafted with a delicate touch, while others are just pure skull caving crush, and still others are almost electronic sounding, seemingly dabbling in the same warped outsider electronics as Shit And Shine.
Needless to say this RULES. Everyone who bought and loved No Visitors, is gonna want this too. And if you've yet to check these guys out, Let's Hang Out might just be your new favorite heavy / noise / psych / space jam. You have been warned.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, clear with 'blood red spray'. Comes with a full color insert, and it's LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
We got our first taste of these Texas weirdos on a split with psychedelic drone-drug-doom heavies Bong, and the virtually unpronounceable Quttinirpaaq were definitely a good match, countering Bong's longform sonic explorations with their own heavy psych / caustic noise / kraut-sludge pummel. What we didn't know at the time, was that Quttinirpaaq includes among its membership, members of former Record Of The Weekers Rubble as well as Shit And Shine offshoot outfit Same Sac! Which totally makes sense, as No Visitors is a serious blast of drug addled Southern psych, the opening 90 second blast a crumbling almost industrial sounding dirge that sounds like Brainbombs at 16rpm, filtered through some seriously Butthole Surfers style drugginess. Which if you're anything like us, had us sold pretty much right away. And while not all of No Visitors is nearly so noisy, it is all pretty goddamn great. From pulsing low slung krautrock style murk, like on "Malvert", which drapes the motorik mesmer with wild squalls of caustic guitarnoise, and creepy hissy whispery vocals, and what might be some detuned pianos, to slo-mo black noise doom-dirge crumble, like on "Ex-Batts" which literally sounds like the tape has been slowed down, so all the instruments rumble and crumble and moan, everything wrapped in sheets of wild squealing feedback, and near Merzbowian noise, all the while lumbering and lurching like some lost Buttholes jam played back on a broken boombox.
These guys exist somewhere between skull crushing noise rock, atmospheric noise drenched Japanese style psych and primitive caveman dirgery, the comparisons we've read mention Brainbombs, Skullflower and Les Rallizes Denudes, but we'd probably also include Drunkdriver, Twin Stumps, Violent Students, Rusted Shut, Burmese, Liquorball, you can probably figure out what sort of glorious, druggy noisiness we're talking about. Super heavy, ultra psychedelic, stumbling and crushing, tranced out and woozily hypnotic, massive slabs of churning low end, beneath crunchy, jagged, distorto guitars, wild streaks of feedback everywhere, the vocals yelped and yowled, sometimes bellowed, here and there delivered in a deeply dramatic, and sort of creepy croon, the sound constantly on the verge of collapse, but always seeming to eventually coalesce into some seriously demented, kraut-sludge heaviness that will have most aQ customers losing their shit big time. And hell, there's even some faux techno, check out the gristly pulsating "Golden Needles", that sounds like Shit And Shine on Kompakt. Fuck yeah!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
First vinyl release from this mysterious Belgian free music collective. Recorded in various locations, abandoned churches, old factories and the like, R.O.T. unfurl dark and murky soundscapes, clouds of electric skitter and rumbling outer space interference. L'Ecurei is a dark ambient trawl through some creepy, dimly lit soundworld of campfired crackle and feeding back guitars, transmitted through a thick haze of abstract murmur, clattering percussion, haunting whirs and random bits of rumble and low end hum. Sounds like a very stoned Starfuckers jamming at the bottom of an emptied swimming pool, or like an alien army of sentient music making machines left to hum and rattle and drone until their batteries slowly run out. Really cool.
Brand new, ultra limited, super deluxe lp from these architects of grim drone and black ambience, after a gorgeous Drone Records 7", and two full lengths, Astral Death and Cosmic Birth, both brimming with dark waves of glacial crush and blurred abstract shimmer, comes Archaic Techniques Of Ecstacy, another fantastic exploration into dark sonic depths and empty black space.
In the past we've compared these guys to Sunroof!, SUNNO))) and Wolf Eyes, and it's always worth noting that R.Y.N. includes a member of UK doomdrone heavyweights Marzuraan, but R.Y.N. are definitely their own beast, unafraid to deviate dramatically from 'their sound', or to take that sound and pull it apart only to reassemble it into something even darker and more abstract. Which is sort of what seems to be happening on Archaic Techniques Of Ecstacy, two side long tracks that creep and drift, that ooze and crawl, a haunting collection of muted clatter, and creaking industrial ambience, like a field recording of some abandoned mining colony in the middle of nowhere, the wind shifting bits of metal, the resultant clang and clatter, groan and hum strangely musical. Long streaks of buzzing whir, like an airplane passing overhead, way off in the distance, the shimmer of soft breezes, the various elements casting flickering shadows, moonlit and menacing. Eventually the sounds coalesce into something more dronelike, a raw, minimal, layered bit of lowercase rumble, but infused with all manner of smeared texture and deep subterranean hum.
The flipside is even more harrowing, a soft squall of dense tones and blackened reverberations, a whirling swirling black hole of sound, metallic buzz muted into greyed streaks, laced into and layered over an endless abyss of abject minimal whir, a roiling churning sea of slowed down chimes, or blurred vibrations, or melted tones, like a black sonic cloud eating away at the very fabric of its surroundings, a crumbling grim decay rendered in sound, fantastically haunting and totally mesmerizing.
As with all Equation stuff, the packaging is incredible, a cool 3 panel dark brown on light brown fold over jacket, with a super heavy stickered inner sleeve, as well as a handful of inserts on nice thick textured paper liner notes, woodcuts, and of course LIMITED to 233 COPIES, each one hand numbered. So nice.
We were pretty into the R.Y.N 7" we reviewed a while back on the mighty Drone Records label. But this is the first full length we've gotten our hands on (apparently there's another companion full length released earlier this year) and it's pretty amazing. Huge tectonic slabs of glacial doomic drone, equal parts Sunroof!, Sunn 0))), Wolf Eyes, deep grinding low end, shimmering black expanses of churning, washed out murk, blurred and smeared into apocalyptic dirgescapes. Deep dense and ominous, but strangely pretty as well. What we didn't know until quite recently, was that R.Y.N. features the man behind long time aQ faves Marzuraan, which makes sense when you think about it, as most of the R.Y.N record sounds like it could be the early stages of a Marzuraan album, or more accurately, a Marzuraan record with all the metal and pummel removed, no vocals, no buzzing downtuned guitars, just the blackened shadows beneath, and the guitars that DO surface, are blurred into long sheets of undulating washed out muted buzz, wreathed in sheets of feedback, often building to high end symphonies that threaten the very fabric of your inner ear, before slowly subsiding into something much more tranquil and dronelike. And these aren't simple tones either, these are rough edged crumbling sonic expanses, rife with metallic buzz, haunting overtones, layered and dense, a sound active and ALIVE, a burning buzz that often sounds like it's barely being restrained. Often slipping into something soft and smooth, drifting in the distance, lulling the listener before exploding into a sound much more fierce, white hot and glimmering violently like a collision between two sonic suns, with the tracks that follow, like the aftermath, long glowing streaks of sound, unfurling in an endless expanse of blackness, peppered with soft focus glimmers, and barely audible rumbles.
The sound of R.Y.N. manages to shift from krautrocky new age to post industrial black ambience and back again, often finding a sonic space right in between that we probably didn't think even existed.
By now, it should be obvious if this is your thing, but here's a few other names, that if found in your collection, probably speaks to the likelihood that you need this: Atavist, Hlidolf, Encomiast, Troum, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Fear Falls Burning, Expo '70, Half Makeshift, Sorc'Henn, Xela.
We love Drone records. And their series of ultra limited, hand assembled 7"s. There's even a forthcoming 2cd on Andee's tUMULt label collecting a handful of the early long out of print 7"s. We can only ever manage to get a tiny handful of these singles since they're so limited, but when we do we try to list them, and it's definitely lucky for the tiny handful of you who are quick on the buy-it-now trigger. Some of the best drone and dark ambient music around.
R.Y.N. deliver a thick machinelike whir, like a slightly more industrial Sunroof!, a mighty metallic drone, buzzing and reverberating like an army of metallic resonators, close listening reveals all sorts of sonic color and hidden melody. The flipside takes the industrial drone from the first side and submerges it in thick dark water, a glimmering, murky and gauzy underwater sonic journey. Nice.
First Edition. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Clear purple vinyl. Multicolored kaleidoscopic full color cover, with a black and metallic silver ink insert.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
