The Way Things Go is a very impressive electro-static drone anthology documenting a bunch of barely released material from the Texas gear junkie Rick Reed. This is a man who's been tinkering with vintage synths, shortwave radio, and sinewave generators for well over 25 years, woak from the classic progressive electronic sound of the likes of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, through the nihilism of the post-industrialists (e.g. MB, Arcane Device, John Duncan, etc.), and into post-noise constructs of liquid psychedelia from Emeralds and all of their satellite projects. In so many ways, this could have found a nice home on John Elliott's Spectrum Spools imprint, but Reed stays with the ever impressive Elevator Bath.
There is some overlap between this collection and the self-published Celestial Mudpie album that Reed issued a couple years back. In particular, there's Reed's very evocative and chilling soundtrack to the Ken Jacobs film Capitalism: Child Labor that is an intense piece of tonal vibration, slipping from Andromeda Strain styled pulses upon rotating layers of a atonal hums, arching drones, and nervous lines of analogue static. Another high profile soundtrack is "Hidden Voices Pt 1." which was composed for the Hermann Nitsch gallery exhibit "The Orgies Mysetries Theater" in Houston back in 2005. This track contains the bloodcurdling atonality that Nitsch composes for his own aktions, but Reed twists the stratified dissonance with deep space blorp, shards of Birchville-esque distortion, and shortwave SSB detunings. The whole album follows suit with muffed static cracklings amidst radioactive clouds of analogue fired tone float, sulking at times into a melancholy atmosphere but always immensely complex. Very highly recommended stuff, and yes this does come with a download card. Nice.
A really lovely tape from the anonymous Reedbeds who seems to be a one-person pastoral ambient project for guitar, synth, and looping pedals. It's pretty easy to confuse some of these tracks with those from Mark McGuire's earlier cassettes and albums, in the delicate interplay of drone-strum and repeating melancholy melodies that gradually evolves over the long arcing passages cast in hues of sodden blues and damp greens. Through the four tracks on this 44 minute cassette, Reedbeds maintains an unhurried and understated pace to their work with plenty of space for the repeating patterns to wrap their tendrils around other loops, keeping true to minor-key ambience and glum romanticism of these mesmerizing blissout guitar jams. Just 100 copies from the Hooker Vision imprint run by Rachel and Grant Evans of Motion Sickness of Time Travel and Nova Scotia Arms separately, or Quiet Evenings collectively.
An old drum kit. Homemade amps. A dented old trombone. A bucket and a handful of firecrackers. The Reeks make a sound that is otherworldly. Dark and stumbling, folk-flecked basement blues. A mix of woozy slide guitar, swampy trombone, sparse and erratic percussion, tape hiss, amp buzz, shortwave interference and dark doomy brilliance. Like a ghostly, indie rock New Orleans funeral jazz band or Roland S. Howard fronting the Dead C. Haunting, mesmerizing, gorgeously raucous, dreamily creepy and absolutely unlike anything you have ever heard.
For years the Reeks played all up and down the West Coast, in basements, back porches, living rooms, pizza parlours, with only a 12" record and a battered old suitcase full of hand dubbed cassettes to their name, spreading their warm cloak of pulsing, droning creepy crawly throb over anyone lucky enough to be packed into the same sweaty space. At once jubilant and danceable, but at the same time, dark and lugubrious, ominous and somnabulent. Lovers of weird music couldn't get enough, but eventually, even dyed in the wool indie rockers began to embrace the Reeks, having perhaps found something that still smacked of their beloved indie rock, but was a little darker and a whole lot weirder than they were used to. But by then it was too late.
The release of Knife Hits is truly bittersweet. After years of recording and re-recording, mixing and remixing, when Knife Hits was finally ready to be released, and the rest of the world would finally get to hear the Reeks' amazing off kilter avant indie funeral folk, tragedy struck. Orion Satushek, Reeks mainman, guitar player, instrument builder and one of the nicest guys ever, was hit and killed by a drunk driver. The personal loss, is indescribable, a deep sting everytime we think about him, his band, his music, his friendship. And the loss to music, to the music community, is immeasurable. Years of playing, and practicing and rocking and sweating in tiny cramped basements and doing with a crappy old drum kit and a couple of homemade amps what most bands can't do with all the equipment in the world is somehow all crammed onto this single disc. These ten songs. The passion, the playfulness, the dark moodiness, the spaced out droniness, the wild sweaty chaos, the sheer joy of making an unholy racket. This record is not only a totally unique chunk of damaged outsider rock brilliance, but it's also a fitting tribute to the loss of a very special friend.
We miss you, Orion.
Longtime readers of the aQ list and fans of Andee's tUMULt label are no doubt familiar with the late great Bellingham Washington band Reeks And The Wrecks, their Knife Hits record on tUMULt still amazes and confounds, but will forever be tainted by a tinge of sadness, as Reeks guitarist Orion Satushek was killed by a drunk driver right before the record was released. Knife Hits stands as an amazing tribute to the man and his talent, and few bands have managed since to create something as wholly original.
Recently PRND were in town, which just so happens to feature another former Reeks member, and in addition to their amazing cd-r (which we have reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), he had copies of the 'lost' first Reeks lp, so we took a whole bunch cuz odds are most folks even big fans have not heard this, and it's a doozy, chronicling the band at a very early stage when they were equal parts dark stumbling funereal folk blues and wild chaotic math rock, a strange combination, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
Our description of Knife Hits pretty much applies to these recordings too: "An old drum kit. Homemade amps. A dented old trombone. A bucket and a handful of firecrackers. The Reeks make a sound that is otherworldly. Dark and stumbling, folk-flecked basement blues. A mix of woozy slide guitar, swampy trombone, sparse and erratic percussion, tape hiss, amp buzz, shortwave interference and dark doomy brilliance. Like a ghostly, indie rock New Orleans funeral jazz band or Roland S. Howard fronting the Dead C. Haunting, mesmerizing, gorgeously raucous, dreamily creepy and absolutely unlike anything you have ever heard." Hard to resist, huh? Well, don't. You won't be sorry. The sound is gorgeous and chaotic and mournful and weirdly full of life and energy. And those sounds are balanced on this lp by the other side of the band that seemed to fade as the band moved forward, loose chaotic post/math rock blow outs, angular crunchy guitars, wild octopoidal drumming, the moody funereal side definitely dominated, but when the band exploded into those heavier parts, it only made them sound that much heavier.
Also, the pressing of this lp is a weird old one, the records themselves are a bit weird, so it's SUPER noisy, not sure how much of it is the pressing, and how much is the awesomely ramshackle lo-fi recording, but whatever it is, it suits them, with the sound erupting into weird squalls of surface noise, lots of hiss and buzz, the band were total DIY, they even had a song that included setting off firecrackers in a bucket, which means, embrace the noise and the low fidelity, and uptight vinyl nerds KEEP AWAY.
One of the greatest bands EVER!!! And this record RULES.
R.I.P. Orion.
Comes in a super swank silkscreened red ink on brown cardstock sleeve.
We like a label that is totally upfront about their intentions, no beating around the bush, a label like 100 Copies, who are simply and succinctly letting us know, that this is in fact, a drastically limited release, and once we run out, we will not be able to get more. So be warned, we tried to order a ton of these, and ended up with a little more than a dozen. So why should you care? Well for the 12 or 13 of you who are quickest on the BUY IT NOW button, the work of Mahmoud Refat is a series of soundscapes crafted from the sounds of daily life in Egypt, conversations, calls to prayer, street musicians, portable power stations, the sounds of children playing, the bustling market, all woven into fuzzy glitchy dronescapes, some dark and lugubrious and barely moving, others skittering and looped sounding, while still others are funky jazzy Autechre-ish jams. Chopped up voices, sampled instruments, soft indistinct drifts of ambient sound, ultra minimal abstract glitch and rumbling cavernous whirs all woven into a gorgeously mesmerizing whole, from the distinct sonic threads of people's lives, halfway around the world.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES (duh) and we have less than ten...
We knew pretty much nothing about this band, other than Rock Is Hell put it out. So of course we were sort of expecting some wild, angular skronky psychedelic damaged art rock, but nothing could be further from the truth. And truth be told we're far from disappointed. In fact, this record has been kicking our asses big time.
Another guitar and drums duo, but instead of Lightning Bolt style freakout or Godheadsilo pummel, these guys spit out an incredible, dense and tangled and ultra heavy 18 minute math rock epic. What sounds like 5 or 6 songs sewn together, the band kicks out the jams like we wish more bands would, channeling the spirit of nineties math rock through a more modern metal perspective. Heavy, groovy, hypnotic, complex, we hear lots of Dutch instrumetallers Gore, as well as long time aQ faves Fuehler, the drums are incredible, relentless, and precise, but with just enough wild abandon to keep things on edge, the guitar is crunchy and thick, the riffs hooky enough that vocals are not at all necessary, going from tangled and thrashy to sludgey and doomy, the band lurching and grooving and pounding and grinding out some of the most bad ass heavy metal instrumental math rock madness we've heard in ages.
The packaging is pretty stellar too, a thick folded over sleeve, revealing most of the record itself, the lp pressed on thick clear vinyl, one sided, with a striking image of an angelic woman silkscreened on the flipside. Nice!
Latest analog blast of abstract hypno skree from this French one man band and it's a beaut. Looped high end shimmer, distant industrial grind and creak and a creepy whispered mantra are smeared into a gorgeously woozy blur, eventually joined by some random woodpecker percussion. Strange but really quite beautiful and mesmerizing. The flipside is another mantra-like loop based drone, lots of tape hiss, and lo fi rumble, tape warble and stuttering fragments of hiss all drifting on a swirling sea of crumbling low end, and peppered with bits of crackle and crunch. Weird and wonderful.
Amazingly packaged, a green and yellow hand painted tape, in a full color sleeve, inside a full color insert and a folded up short story printed on super nice textured paper. LIMITED TO 68 COPIES!!!
A super limited and insanely packaged triple cd-r, highlighting, well, just like the title says, the Birth Of A New Rural Europe, a sonic world of free noise, free folk and abstract ambience. Three full length discs, one from each band, the Reggaee, Sawaadyja and Valerio Cosi.
French free rock outfit The Reggaee offer up 52 minutes of clattery, rambling, drift, harmonicas wheeze, nestled in a soundscape of field recordings and distant percussion like the chirping of crickets, doomy folk with detuned guitars and ghostly vocals, reverb drenched tribal freakouts, dreamy dreary mumbly ambience, buzzing steel string serenades and every stop in between.
Sawaadyja, aka Danish sound maker Mikkel Andersen, contributes a similarly varied disc, starting off with huge thick washes of distorted guitars and buried psychedelic melodies, like a more lo-fi Sunroof!, and quickly drifting into gentle forest folk, with simple childlike melodies over spare tribal drumming, dreamy Appalachian style steel string fingerpicking, a bit of raga like buzz with snake charmer melodies and some spacious abstract shimmer.
The final installment comes from Italian sound artist Valerio Cosi, whose disc is maybe the droniest and dreamiest of the bunch. The opening and closing tracks are lengthy slow moving near static shimmers, bookending track two, a nearly half hour long festive percussive free form sonic ritual. Fluttering flutes, clattering pots and pans percussion, buzzing kazoo melodies, thick reverb, like being lost in some bazaar in the center of some foreign city. Cool.
LIMITED TO 35 COPIES!!! WE GOT 12 OF THOSE!!!
Each copy is super elaborately packaged, each disc, hand painted, in its own sleeve with a printed insert, all three discs held shut with wire and affixed to the inside of an oversized, wire and bamboo sleeve, like someone dismantled a tiki hut and cut the walls into squares to make cd sleeves. Also inside is an insert that is hand numbered! Weird but cool.
What do you get when you cross weirdo Spanish noiseniks Billy Bao with filthy Swedish garage sludge punks the Brainbombs (and by extension, weirdo noise rock minimalists No Balls)?? Apparently you get Regler, a twisted, extremely noisy, high concept, SUPER group, who deliver some seriously difficult listening. Two distinctly different stripes of difficult listening, in fact.
The A side, as is further evidenced by the graphical representation on the jacket, is straight up D-Beat blasting, for the entire side. That's right, furious noise drenched riffing, and frantic, relentless drumming, locked in a continuous frenzy for the entire A side, the result is by turns mesmerizing and infuriating. Folks looking for 'songs' or 'music' (why would you be looking for those on a record like this in the first place?) will definitely be disappointed, but if you're after some dense, heavily layered, modern minimalist metal, this might just push those buttons, cuz really, after a minute or two, it's easy to get lost in sound, much like the trance inducing properties of black metal, the sound here is relentless and totally hypnotic, with the sound changing subtly throughout, the sonic shifts much more dramatic once you're locked in and listening close, the drumming too, seems to phase weirdly, producing still more off kilter weirdness. Needless to say, not for everybody, but for us, we're pretty into it. and that's at 45rpm, slow it down, and suddenly it's a bit more Brainbombsy, still tranced out and repetitive, but sludgier and murkier filthier.
The flipside might even be more frustrating for most folks, the sort of thing that might have been right at home on the recent Sounds Of Silence compilation we made Record of The Week a while back, what we're assuming, is an edit of all the NON-musical elements in the recording of the A side, lots of silence, some blurts of drum freakouts, some weird chordal fadeouts, it's literally like someone grabbed the bits of tape before and after every take and edited them into a single weird near silent it of conceptual sound art. Some breathing, little bits of music here and there, lots of tape buzz and hiss, super weird, but actually very cool. Headphones are required, and then cranking the volume too (although the occasional blast of sound, might freak you out), but then if this wasn't meant to freak you out in the first place, we'd be pretty surprised.
So yeah, while we endeavor to get sufficient copies of the new Brainbombs 2lp, maybe this will tide you over. But really, it probably won't. Recommended for anyone into arty noise, modern minimalism, warped metal experimentation, field recordings, and willful sonic provocateurs of all stripes. Cool cover art, no download, and LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
Peter "Pita" Rehberg and Ramon Bauer betray all of Mego's artsy mythologies of being a completely serious project, by opening this album with a lame speedfreak MC introducing Rehberg and Bauer at some festival in Australia, with the nonsensical outburst: "Oh
Considering that Rehberg and Bauer follow this act of puerile behaviour with a stoicly quiet piece for muffled cable hums and pops, this introduction, at best, is irony through contradiction; at worst, is self-congratulatory arrogance. The rest of the album picks up considerably with their trademarked dense layers of digital grit, harsh noise, and occasional motorcyclical melodies.
Brilliantly packaged by Jon Wozencroft, after all it's on Touch.
While people are wandering around with freak folk stars in their eyes, soaking up the hippie good vibes of Joanna Newsom, Brightblack Morning Light, Vetiver, Devendra, and other fringed folkies, they run the risk of overlooking some lesser knowns, that are making music equally as compelling and beautiful, if not more so. Enter one James Reid, whose first (as far as we know) record has found its home on the always reliable Barl Fire label, who in the past have focused more on drone music and sort of avant free rock, but for their first foray into folk this is most definitely a winner.
Reid will undoubtedly get compared to Nick Drake, which is obviously not a bad thing, and in Reid's case is pretty spot on. His dark melancholic steel string guitar and warm honey vocals deftly woven into lush tapestries of dreamy moonlit folk.
But there are bits of modern (and not so modern) production fuckery that make Like A Buzzard Chased By Crows more than just a straight up folk record. Reid employs a strange technique where he seemingly records vocals or flute and then plays them back live into the microphone during the recording. So on one track, the background is a lush garden of swirling steel string guitar, while the vocals are played back on a crappy old tape player, the vocals stopping and starting with the kachunk of the play/stop button. Another track has a flute that sounds all weird and warbly as it is played back at various tempos, so at the beginning and end of each phrase you can hear the tape speed up or slow down. Really weird but it somehow sounds perfect. Those moments though are utilized with restraint, surfacing here and there, but overall, this is just a really beautiful, dark and lovely, moody and slightly ominous folk record that all you Devendra / Newsom / New Weird America obsessives should not miss out on....
We'd been digging the Religious Knives for a while now, but only just realized that RK featured two guys from aQ faves Double Leopards, which suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.
Don't be expecting the same sort of blown out abstract dronemusic as Double Leopards though, the Religious Knives are a whole 'nother proposition. The sound is more of a retro spacerock groove, druggy and stoned, laid back and psychedelic. Think Spacemen 3, Velvet Underground, Wooden Shjips, that sort of washed out groove, fuzzy and trippy and grooooovy.
This set recorded at Big Jar Books in Philadelphia, finds the band in almost straight rock mode, unfurling a lazy sun baked drugrock jam, all warm glowing guitars, simple shuffling drums, and reverb drenched vocals. Slightly twangy, a bit of a Dead vibe, some Neil Young, not super avant or experimental, more sort of just solid stoned drug rock. There's even a cover of ? And The Mysterions "96 Tears" transformed into something much murkier and muddy, less of a focus on that main keyboard lick, letting the song become more about the buzzing guitars and the propulsive rhythm, the vocals swathed in effects and buried in the mix, buzzy and gloriously laid back. The final track is a 14 minute psych groove, that eventually builds to a super looped cyclical climax, locked into a relentless hypnorock groove like a more mellow Circle or something, definitely makes to get high, sit back and let the music carry you off into the heart of the sun.
Definitely for fans of any of the above mentioned bands. And like all aRCHIVE releases, super limited, ONLY 600 COPIES! And of course exquisitely packaged. A four panel oversized foldover sleeve, the front panel shortened to reveal the disc face, which is etched around the edges with what appear to be shapes or characters. Cool.
The folks who run the Heavy Tapes label also do time as Religious Knives, and this is their most recent release, a two song 12", each side sprawling and laid back and psychedelic. The A side is all drifting ambience, wheezing chords, warm whirring guitar swirl, tinkling chimes, super spare drumming, all over a muted rumbling like an idling car in the distance. Dazed and druggy and drone-y, a plodding spaced out dirge. We were sort of expecting to be instrumental, but then about half way through the vocals came in, a laconic Velvet Underground sort of drawl, perfectly suited to the cough syrup shuffle of the music beneath it.
The flipside is a bit like an amped up version of the A side. Thick peals of corrosive guitar, howled vocals buried way down in the mix, tons of reverb and delay, repetitive tribal drums, the whole thing a dense and thick, sprawling psychedelia.
Wow, the perfect garage kraut blues for a generation of post-everything youth hungry for something to rock out to. One part free and trippy and one part industrial and weird, here is a band that represents the East Coast jam band effortlessly. Michael Bernstein and Maya Miller, members of the noise/drone outfit the Double Leopards, team up with Nate Nelson (Mouthus) on drums and Todd Cavallo on bass, for a stripped-down session of head-nodding jammers. The Door pays homage to the alchemic aspects of krautrock while setting forth a new chapter in the noise-rock agenda. Stripped down rhythms driving beside ripping guitar licks, lush '60s organ flutters, and mumbly apathetic vocals that don't sound too far off from the vocals of producer Thurston Moore. The door is catchy in a strikingly weird way, like listening to a '60s pop record through a fucked up underwater amp. Any fans of creepy damaged pop will not want to miss this killer record!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Funny name, Renderizors. But it makes sense when you know that this New Zealand outfit is actually a conglomeration/collaboration of two AQ faves: The Renderers (NZ underground downer pop) and the Sandoz Lab Technicians (NZ underground freeform drone)!!
To quote from a previous review of ours, "Sandoz Lab Technicians may be the most fucked-up and most freeform out of all of the mind-expanding, free noise New Zealanders that we have championed in the past (i.e. Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Omit, Anthony Milton, etc.)." Meanwhile, The Renderers are much more in the indie-pop, song-oriented camp, combining post-punk dissonance with bleak depressive melody. Together, you get something that's a very very lovely best of both worlds. Haunted howling winds of gentle feedback quietly accompany the so sweet and so weary female singing from The Renderers' chanteuse Maryrose Crook. Spooky drones both threaten and cajole. Lethargic balladry struggles stoically amidst storms of psychedelic electric distortion, with nihilistic, nasal male mumbling also sharing the mic with the more breathy vox of Ms. Crook. At times we're reminded, maybe mysteriously, of everything from the Velvet Underground to Bardo Pond, Slap Happy Humphrey to Richard Youngs, Pumice to Doodles... and even the echoey '60s dark psych pop of obscure AQ faves Gandalf... though really we'd hope that saying "imagine a mix of The Renderers and Sandoz Lab Technicans" would do the trick! Recommended.
You'd never know from listening to Porcelain Opera, that the man behind Rene Hell is also the man responsible for the noisy weirdness of Secret Abuse, and is a member of crusty dirge punks Deep Jew, cuz Porcelain Opera is a whole different world of sound. One that fuses the muted minimal electronic pulse of Basic Channel, with the tripped out psychedelic synthscapes of folks like Emeralds and Oneohtrix, but it's so much more than that. The sound definitely dips liberally into that eighties retro soundtrack vibe of folks like John Carpenter and Goblin, but filters it through a mysterious post industrial electronic aesthetic, creating thick swaths of garbled vocal synth tangle, laced with shards of strange glitched out crunch, and crumbling distorted buzz, voices surface and swirl, twisted and tweaked, a haunting alien robot electro, that will quickly give way to a glimmering pop ambient drift, all shimmering motes of sonic light, floating on layers of ethereal thrum, total sun dappled new age kraut synth bliss. The whole record is like some sort of sonic feverdream. Warm wisps of blurred glitch underpins squalls of processed vox, and propulsive new wave synth crunch, pulses thump beneath a glimmering sky of chiming overtones, and strange softly warped fuzz, murky burbling electronics smolder and sprawl into blackened synthesizer dronescapes, peppered with short bursts of white noise static, and jagged shards of cut up vocals, eventually, building to a deliriously warm wall of shoegazey buzz, before finally finishing off with a swirling blur of intertwined synth melodies, like some sort of retro prog smeared into something much murkier and more washed out, bleary eared and ephemeral.
A weird record for sure, but one that should definitely appeal to fans of Emeralds, Oneohtrix, Expo 70, and other modern kosmische space kraut weirdos, but Rene Hell definitely takes that sound, and makes it all his own, exploring the way out, outer fringes of modern electronic synth kraut psychedelia...
Full length number two from Rene Hell, aka Jeff Witscher, is, according to the man himself, a bit of a departure from the sound of his first record, the aQ beloved Porcelain Opera. The Terminal Symphony, is as the title suggests, Witscher's stab at creating a modern minimal classical music record, using the same sounds and tools as he did to create his first record, but here, reimagining those sounds in a different context. The songs tighter, more controlled and composed. The opener is a thick caustic corrosive drone, the synth sound super buzzy and distorted, dense and pulsating, wreathed in effects, and pelted by blasts of static and industrial crunch, seemingly random rhythms careening back and forth, very dark and meditative, before giving way to the sci-fi synth pulse of "Quiet Detail Muse", murky effected vocals riding atop the undulating synths.
"Cello Suite #3" is most definitely not, instead it's a dizzying collage of random voices, bits of glitch and hiss, a looped high end melody, flurries of fragmented effects, the result a sort of creepy electronic ambience. "E.S. Des Grauens In Fifths" sounds classical, but more like alien kosmische new age krautdrone synth classical, percolating melodies, buzzy and fuzzy over sweeping swells and lush layered shimmer, the sort of soundtrack that must accompany watching an alien star emerge from some distant planet. "Baroque Ensemble Coda" too is a strange little cloud of swirling electronics and intertwined melodies, looped and rhythmic, and in its own way strangely psychedelic, the track soon shifts gears and becomes a landscape of rubbery pulsations and layered shards of buzz and hum.
The whole record, for all its classical aspirations, manages to be dark and droney, softly chaotic and lushly layered and looped, and without the background on the record and its genesis, one might not notice anything 'classical' about it, playing out instead as just a super melodic, fantastically varied, and surprisingly dreamy experimental minimal electronic record, bloopy and bleepy one second, a frantic avalanche of overlapping melodic loops the next, warped and atonal outer space psychedelia one second, blurry, bleary sun dappled new age synthscape the next.
Fans of The Porcelain Opera will definitely dig this, and again might quite possibly not notice a dramatic difference, but then does it really matter, the sounds are divine, and to some they may sound more 'classical' to others they may just sound like more of the same, either way, we're digging it.
Fantastic split from aQ faves Rene Hell, and until now unknown to us Three Legged Race, both 'groups' paying homage to early electronic music, experimental tape music and science fiction outsider bedroom private press weirdness.
Rene Hell offers up a 4 part series of zoner synthscapes, lush layers of buzzing rumbling electronics, buried, barely there vox, haunting and cinematic, with distinctly pop music melodies, but here suspended in charged fields of squelch and whir and buzz. As the songsuite progresses, the sound shifts to something more new agey and washed out, total Tangerine Dream style kosmische bliss out, swirly and hypnotic, space-y and sun dappled, total trance-y synth age drift, which again changes tone and drifts into something a bit more ominous like the opening track, more cinematic creep, slow, low tones, mysterious and atmospheric, subtly rhythmic, soft swells over buried pulses, finally moving into the closing track, which manages to fuse those two sides of RH's sound, the fluttery super nova synthkraut bliss and the brooding minimal electronic flutter, darkly dramatic, rife with dense chordal swells, swirling black ambient atmophere and more of those muted murky voices.
The flipside is similarly dark and mysterious and electronic, courtesy of Three Legged Race, aka Robert Beatty, who starts his side off with an unexpected chunk of woozy, lo-fi Scott Tuma like loner folk guitar haze, all murky and spidery, underpinned by a soft field of hauzy crackly thrum, glistening melodies drifting in the ether, hushed and lovely, until... in swoop some super twisted processed robotic vox, heavily effected and distorted and crunchy, totally at odds with the rest of the song, but it somehow sort of works.
After a brief swath of Radiophonic Workshop style electronic percolations, raw outer space shimmer, sixties sci-fi sound effects and hauntological bleep and bloop, the record blossoms into a sprawling stretch of glitched out primitive analog electronics, sounding a bit like Bruce Haack, but way more fractured and distorted and processed, a malfunctioning starfield of sound that manages to be weirdly melodic and subtly rhythmic, the background growing louder and murkier and more ominous as the track progresses. So good. Both sides are incredible. Way recommended for fans of the burgeoning new wave of spaced out sci-fi synth drone, especially folks who might be on the hunt for something darker and weirder and slightly more cracked.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!
Previously recording under the moniker Brume but now choosing to work under his given name, Christian Renou has spent 17 years home-taping, obsessed with re-created the electro-acoustic elements from French musique concrete. "Fragments and Articulations" is a archetypal album for Renou (or Brume for that matter, as he's not really changed his attitude with the intentions or attitudes with the change in his working name), reprocessing various recording through tons of electronic effects, computer algorithms, and tape splicing techniques. Not so much an album but a collection of three distinct compositions, Renou thematically links these pieces as various strategies to re-organize fragmented sound. The first piece finds Renou returning to a old recording of a drum solo, when he was in the "mutant jazz rock" group Uria back in 1982, and transforming those skittering percussive stabs into a tinny set of textures processed with an erratic flapping oscillation sort of like an electronic equivalent of a singing saw. He counterpoints these densely processed flanges and pointillist marks with a thick electrified drone from malleable sinewaves. The second track is far more calm, transforming a field recording (possibly of rain?) into a deep space floe of spartan tones, not unlike Richard Lainhart's bowed tam-tam excursions. The final piece is particularly abrasive to the point that SF sound artist Randy Yau amicably described it as "power electronics." Renou has processed recordings made from a homemade radio receiver that may not have worked very well, but none the less provided a wondrous array of jarring noise and swirling tonalities. The digitized chop job adds to the dramatic conflict of raw sound. Altogether, the album is quite alien.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Probably the second most talked about Residents album, and some would argue their last great effort, is the brilliant Commercial Album. The concept was to craft 40 pop gems (in true Residents fashion) each spanning exactly 60 seconds (to match the time of the average television commercial in 1980). With the help of some of their friends: Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Andy Partridge and of course Nessie Lessons and Snakefinger, the Residents crafted some truly beautiful, surreal and poignant tunes; each one completely trimmed of any excess fat. A classic Residents album wouldn't be complete without a jab at the Beatles, included here as the "Simple Song". Other songs take on psycho-sexual topics, dream-like narratives twisted love songs and down right non sequiturs. This special edition comes packaged in a hardcover booklet with lyrics to the songs and new images from videos the Residents have been working on to complete the entire song cycle of videos they started in the eighties.
Lyrically The Residents have always had a darker side, a subversive voice from the underground. This is their post-9/11 album, a procession of tales of bleakness, despair and questioning set against garish black-lit neon hues and unsettling wit. Needless to say, considerably more sobering and subdued, direct and intimate than most other Residents releases, but no less wryly tweaked.
If there's one Residents record that is the one Residents record that people who aren't necessarily Residents fans own it is Eskimo (their sixth release, from 1979). There's good reason for this album being in so many libraries, if for no other reason than that it's one hell of a concept album. And if there's one thing the Residents do well it's concept albums. For Eskimo the Residents partially impersonate a Folkways ethnomusicological document from the 60's and a Firesign Theater record. The album is presented as a recreation of "not only the Eskimo ceremonial music, but also a living context for its existence". And so included is a booklet of stories illustrating the daily life and ceremonies of the Eskimo with which you can read and follow along with the music. The music is a combination of likely, but miscellaneous percussion instruments (Chris Cutler of Pere Ubu, Art Bears, Henry Cow fame is credited for his "precision drumming" here), analog synths, and chanted vocals. It's all about as convincing as genuine Eskimo music as you can imagine coming from the eyeballed wonders, and that's definitely part of its charm. The vocals themselves you can take as non-sensical made up words, or listen closely and you might be able to hear some familiar phrases here and there: "Coca Cola adds life" and "we want Coke, oh yeah!" are definitely in here. How much other subliminal marketing the Residents slipped in here is up for debate. Some people hear more than others. This handsome digipack edition comes with the original cover art; a classic image of the Residents on wearing tuxes, tails and eyeballs on a deco stage setup out of the 40's.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of a string of concept albums by Bay Area mysterious geniuses The Residents! God In Three Persons was originally released back in 1988, but still drops jaws today. Steeped with themes of religion, morals and sexuality, the drama centers around a pair of siamese twins who possess healing powers and is narrated in first person by the main character Mr. X with support from a female chorus. The deceptively spartan yet weighted electronic compositions offer the spoken-sung narration and near-operatic interjections ample berth. Oh and the opening credits are sung too! Yes, like an old tyme circus freak show, this is ever so strangely fascinating.
Meet The Residents, a truly fucked up psychedelic masterpiece if ever there was one, was originally released in 1974. As a recording, half of it sounds like it was taken from cassettes that had been baking in a thrift store window display for several years before being dubbed to multi-track with overdubbed toy pianos. The deranged arrangements are impossible to decrypt. There's obviously some good players involved here, but there's a great deal of clumsy, high school band dropout playing as well -- and that's what really makes this album intriguing. The album kicks off with a quite intentionally terrible version of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Were Made For Walking" with the previously mentioned "high school band" playing accompaniment, but we're fortunately left off the hook from receiving an abused cover and instead the song loops over the final phrase of the chorus before degenerating altogether. The balance of the album is a reflection of this degeneration, with songs knit together by shifting from one small repeated element into entirely new pieces. Meet The Residents is noisy, rough and brutal. Full of fucked up tangos, jerky rumbas and twisted waltzes. This is very much not the same band that produced God In Three Persons some 13 years later. These Residents had never even heard of a synthesizer, let alone a sequencer; every instrument on here is painfully detuned by hand. This is garbage psychedelia at its best and an absolutely essential album for anyone who walks that crooked line between fucked up experiemental noise and pop music!
Volume 017 in the "Korm Plastics Introductory Paperback" series of previously unknown artists discovered by the acclaimed Staalplaat label. Not surprisingly, there is not much background information provided on Retro A.K.A., though one guess is that this outfit hails from Iceland as Heimer from Stilluppsteypa contributes some production work on one of the tracks. Or Retro-A.K.A. perhaps is Dutch, 'cause the Stilluppsteypa folk live in Holland now. Some of the sterile laptop glitchiness characteristic of the Raster and Ritornelle labels appears, but Retro A.K.A.'s cavernous, windswept drones really resemble the haunted loops of Omit, resulting in organic noise overlaid with digitized blast and skitter. Cool.
Record number three from electronic/krautrock/spacedrone/experimental soundscaper Reuber, aka Timo Reuber, whose fifth and most recent record was an aQ Record Of The Week a while back, and whose second record we reviewed just last list, and now as we work our way through his catalog, we've got his 3rd record, and it's just as great and all over the map as the two previous ones.
Kintopp is German for cinema, and on Kintopp, Reuber creates mini soundtracks, twisted little electronic vignettes that range from playful to brooding, noisy to minimal, dark and haunting to twisted and abstract, and more often than not some dizzying combination of all of the above. A quick sampling would reveal: a strange bit of cabaret, rubbery basslines, looped mechanical rhythms, and a strange high end melody that sounds like it's being played by releasing air from a balloon, pulsing almost techno style throbs buried beneath a dubbed out expanse of melodic shimmer, a looped bit of bassy riffage, like some sort of spy theme, laced with backwards sonic swoops, and little flecks of melody and shards of glitched out electronics, that same sort of spy theme bass riff is wrapped around deep mysterious Tuvan style throat singing, hushed melancholy strings, soar over a deep expanse of rumble and thrum, a kaleidoscopic avalanche of pizzicato notes tumble like a hazy glimmering sonic waterfall, swirls of pop ambience spread out in clouds of gauzy blurred soft focus haze, a pounding almost industrial groove that sounds like a techno-fied themes song to some Miami Vice knockoff, the whole thing peppered with strange percussion, and wreathed in sweeping streaks of warm whirling sound, a weirdly looped collage of chopped and looped African folk music, wrapped in reverb and delay, a tinkling bit of piano driven cinematic ambience, like a more woozy, washed out Chariots Of Fire, all dramatic and epic and majestic, but slightly warped and warbly, and on and on and on.
A fantastically varied collection of beautiful but brief electronic soundscapes, woven together into a strangely cohesive whole. Oh and did we mention the cover photo, of Reuber (we presume), wearing a leather jacket, a cowboy hat, American flag pants, with his foot up on some sort of sports car, with a personalized REUBER license plate, holding a spear gun, standing next to a stuffed elephant, that has been speared, and appears to be bleeding spaghetti in tomato sauce. Woah.
Even though this is record number FIVE from Reuber (aka Timo Reuber), who is also a member of electronic duo Klangwart, Ring is the very first thing we've heard from him, and it immediately became one of our new favorite records, a dizzying assemblage of loops and samples and textures and effects woven into a series of super varied soundscapes, from hypnotic kosmische krautdrone, to hazy murky pulsing techno flecked electronica, to super frantic spaced out new wave, to murky electronic drone dirge psych rock to woozy minimal sci-fi techno, all of it rhythmic and hypnotic, lush and layered.
Self described as Reuber's "motorbike album", Ring finds Reuber trying to evoke a 'Reuber Principle' using a selection of sounds designed to sound different during each performance, depending on the venue, the audience and of course Reuber himself. All but one of the tracks are created using just two synthesizers, experimenting with rhythm and texture, creating constantly shifting collages of sound, all 'Ring' variations, the first "Ring Ring", the most blissed out of the bunch, a minimal electronic pulse, a slowly shifting melody, a deep buzzing vocal that sounds like Tuvan throat singing, a haunting bit of cinematic kosmische drift that ends way too soon. The upside being that it leads directly into the 17 minute "Ring", which takes the sound of the first track and explodes it into something much more celestial and cosmic, a supernova of sound, all blurred and washed out, hazy and shimmery, underneath which various bits of percussion pulse and pound, a buried rhythm that gradually moves to the fore, and the song transforms into a gorgeously hypnotic tribal psychedelic workout that sounds almost like modern day Boredoms. This tribal churn is laced with strange melodic bits, twisted effects, a roiling swirl of sound, that soon returns to the washed out cosmic shimmer of the song's beginning, only to again explode into some heaving crumbling rhythmic crush, and then slip right back into a hazy dreamlike outro.
"Ringer" offers up a swirl of looped repetitive synth, mesmerizing and cyclical, cinematic and sci-fi, gradually growing more and more distorted and intense, until some of the sounds coalesce into beats, and the track becomes a supercharged synth heavy sci-fi blowout that wouldn't sound out of place on a Zombi record, although with a bit more of a techno twist. "Ring Frei" counters the previous track with some low slung synthbass, some skittery skeletal rhythms, streaks of feedback and squealing electronic glitchery, and most importantly some seriously fat fuzzy, murky melodies, a crunchy, buzzy muddy krautjam, propulsive and motorik, almost like some far out Kraftwerk / Suicide / Electronicat hybrid. And finally "Ringfest" finishes things off with some Kompakt style throb and pulse, starting out sleek and late night and minimal, before blossoming into something buzzier and more twisted, with shards of rave-y synth, more of those buzzing throat singing style vox and some squiggly spacey Theremin like melodies. Wow. We really can't stop listening to this, so mesmerizing and psychedelic and hypnotic and tripped out and most definitely a new unanimous aQ fave!
We made Reuber's Ring a Record Of The Week a little while back, the latest solo record from Timo Reuber, who is one half of the electronic duo Klangwart. Ring was fantastic, super varied, slipping from kosmische dronemusic to pulsing psychedelic techno to spacey new wave. We loved it so much, that many of us got a little obsessed, and decided to dig deeper and check out some of Reuber's other releases. Thus we have this, Reuber's second solo release, from 2001, the title translating to "Stay Cool", the bulk of which is made up of the two part title track, each part about 22 minutes. The first part, definitely in keeping with the album title, is an extended electronic dronescape, shimmery and crystalline, lush yet delicate, warm tones drifting from speaker to speaker, bathed in a hazy glow, meditative and dreamlike, new agey and a little bit krautrocky, soft flurries of notes dissipate into gauzy streaks, bits of electronic glitch and spacey effects surface here and there, like the score for some educational film about interplanetary travel. The sounds eventually coalesce into an almost rhythm, pulsing warmly, wreathed in strange atonal melodies, before quickly blissing out again, and spreading out into a barely there cloud of glistening, tinkling blur.
The second part of the title track is pretty much the opposite, a pulsing metallic buzz like rhythm, skeletal and mechanical, skitters and shuffles, the sounds growing more and more thick and buzzy, distorted and intense, eventually becoming almost Merzbowian, thick and corrosive, yet still somehow warm and melodic, a wildly buzzing chunk of hypnotic spaced out rhythm, the timbre constantly shifting too, from dense and layered, to brittle and tinny, finally to fully blown out and in-the-red. All the while managing to sound kosmische and psychedelic, under that coating of crunch and thrum and buzz and glitch.
Finally, the record finishes off with another bit of 'cool'ness, a relatively brief (7+ minutes), of hazy high end shimmer, a warm whirling drift of subtle overtones, slow shifting layers, of blurred melodies and glowing near static thrum, a perfect bit of tranquil mesmer to finish with.
Fantastic stuff, anyone who dug Ring will like this too, and anyone into kosmische drift, and spacey new age kraut drone, who is not averse to a little bit of crunch and buzz, this will definitely hit the spot.
And we continue to dig deeper into the catalog of Reuber, aka Timo Reuber, whose most recent, fifth record Ring we made our Record Of The Week not too long ago, and whose other records we've been reviewing one at a time ever since. All different, but all pretty fantastic. This one is record number 4, following Kintopp which we reviewed last list.
Sudpol translates as "South Pole", not entirely sure if there's any meaning, or if there's some South Pole theme running through the record, but like Kintopp, Sudpol seems to simply be a super varied, and totally hypnotic collection of sonic experiments, ranging from propulsive electro krautrock workouts, to droned out fields of glitch and pulse, hazy pop ambient shimmer to super distorted industrial flecked skitter, groovy almost post rock sounding loopage to fuzzy playfully melodic techno-pop, Kraftwerky robotic electronic funk to blissed out sun dappled soundtracky synth wave, culminating in the epic 12 minute dronescape "Steppengraskrieger", with its billows of distant buzz and haunting almost operatic barely there vocals, buried electro beats, sounding as if they're being blasted on the stereo in the apartment next door, lush gauzy streaks of hazy whir and thrum, those buried beats constantly surfacing amidst the swirl and shimmer, until finally, the track transforms completely into a softly slow swirling tangle of looped and warped melodies, strange metallic buzz and soft focus flurries of glimmering tones and muted streaks of smeared sound. So nice. Another winner for sure, and and yet another record that has us wondering why Reuber is not way more of a big deal�
Martin Rev without Alan Vega (the artist's other half in the mid-'70s minimal electronic punk duo, Suicide) seems like Oates without Hall, maybe even Donny sans Marie. But members of duos often make solo "me" time to try stuff they might not otherwise with their sonic partners, and synthesist Rev has been releasing solo records for most of his tenure with/since Suicide. In fact, we were really impressed with his 2009 Stigmata album. While Vega typically donned a rockabilly hat for most of his solo releases, Rev has tried on more than a few musical caps. This new vinyl reissue of his first solo venture from 1980 is one of his more minimalist efforts - think early Human League experiments like "Being Boiled".
"Baby Oh Baby" is the only one of the lp's six tracks that isn't an instrumental - and even there, the lyrics don't extend beyond what you see right there in the song title. The melody on the opening track, "Mari", carries an optimism you wouldn't associate with the dark and eerie downtown duo, and demonstrates Rev's exploration of other moods. It's so upbeat, you might expect Stephin Merritt's low croon to swoop in any second. The rest of the short album is filled with the synth washes and oscillations Rev basically patented as the vocabulary of the synth wave to come. Any fan in search of synth pop's origins will want to include this classic piece of cold electronic minimalism in their collection.
This is not really new, but it's one of our favorite freaked out black metal records, and it was reissued last year (originally released in 2002) although we only now managed to get in touch with the label (they also released the Vorak, reviewed elsewhere on this list) but now finally we can list and review, this amazing slab of bizarre blackness.
Those familiar with the Rev. Kriss Hades, probably know him as the guitar player for Aussie black death metallers Sadistik Exekution, who while weird in their own right, are pretty much furious grinding blacknoise, a sort of sloppy psychedelic black mess, awesome by the way, but more simple and fast than freaked out and fucked up. Which is why this first album from Sadistik guitarist Hades is such a mind blower. This is super abstract, noisy, buzzy, outsider experimental black metal, peppered with stretches of black ambience, industrial soundscapes and plenty of whatthefuck heaviness. This record has been described as a mix of Einsturzende Neubauten, Beherit and Pink Floyd, and while the sound here is probably much closer to Beherit than the other two, their are definite moments of tripped out psychedelia and industrial grind and whir.
But from the first song, it's easy to tell this is some freaky mind blowing stuff. Beginning with haunting acoustic guitar, weaving mournful melodies amidst whipping winds, when the band kicks in, instead of launching into blasting blackness, it's more a sort of murky blown out buzz, the guitars super washed out, the riffing just a blackened smear, underpinned by epic swells of super dramatic keyboards, the drums a buried blast, WAY down in the mix, while over the top the vocals are a confusional pile up of grunts and growls, of shrieks and howls, mumbling and singing in tongues, the whole thing smeared and seasick, buzzing abstractly, almost more experimental black ambience than metal, but there are riffs, and drums blasting away, reminiscent of Wold and Velvet Cacoon in some ways. The first track finishes off with more acoustic guitar, this time though draped delicately over muted black riffing.
And the weird thing is, that's about as metal as the record gets, that first track, from then on it gets more and more unhinged, more psychedelic, less riffy and definitely less 'metal', but no less heavy. The next two tracks are reinterpreted Sadistik Exekution tracks, and while we're not that familiar with the originals, these versions definitely twist the originals into new shapes. The first is a blazing black blast of buzz, but beginning with a tripped out psychedelic assemblage of backwards guitars and processed vocals, then the song itself is super convoluted, riffs slipping and sliding everywhere, squiggly leads, a total damaged black psych freakout, while the other is a sort of blissed out ambient Godflesh / Pitchshifter thing, all industrial rhythms, the riffs, way down in the mix and doused in FX, haunting vocals and all manner of swirling shimmer and crumbling drones...
Right after that is the super brief "Luciferion", a super distorted, ultra fuzzed out shred fest, just guitar, buzzing riffs and wild leads, the whole thing blown out and in the red, followed by "Meditation Of The Midnight Candle Practice" an extended soundscape of warped distorted guitars, strangled effects, huge washes of glacial guitardrone, super affected leads, glitched out minimal rhythms buried way down in the mix, drifting lo-fi ambience and super tweaked studio sounds, all woven into a seriously cracked world of black sound. The record finishes off with a creepy haunted house horror movie church organ jam that morphs right at the end into a super thick corrosive deathdronedirge...
A seriously demented slab of damaged psychedelic black buzz. Which obviously means WAY recommended.
The reissue includes a thick booklet with lyrics, photos, an excerpt from an interview with Hades, and lots of Hades' super intense artwork...
Field recordings and the sounds of activated environments (e.g. the crunching of leaves, the tactility of sand, the resonance of an abandoned warehouse, etc.) are the building blocks for the compositions of many a musician championed here at aQuarius. You could look no further than the Jewelled Antler bunch, who marched out in the woods to craft much of their rustic psychedelia crowned with lichen, twigs, birdsong, and rocks. This Revenant project may share the spirited tromps out in the forest and even the revolving door approach found in Jewelled Antler; the but the results end up being quite different. The members of Revenant for this recording were Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer), John Grzinich, Hitoshi Kojo (aka Spiracle), Yannich Dauby, and Olivier Fernaud, all gathered together on the Slovenia-Italy border surrounded by an old growth forest and a few confounded birds. The idea behind Revenant is site-specific acoustic actions, or activated environments with each action being a document of a specific moment in time in a specific location. The five brought minimal equipment, just a few violin bows and a couple of digital recorders, and scrounged around the woods for the rest of their soundmaking devices: leaves, blades of grass, seedpods, heavy stones, etc. The violin bows were employed to atonal use on the first track as these five each took up a particular branch on a particular tree to scrape rasping tones that would even give Tony Conrad the shivers. The following explorations of tactile abrasions, weird gurgles, and gentle swoops enjoy a deliberate pacing; and the concluding track features what must be Hitoshi Kojo chanting in Japanese amidst a chorus of mouth organ drones, which ends up more like an Akio Suzuki meditation.
Like some dusty old 78, left in the basement for 20 or 30 years, wet and warped, gritty and scratched up, thrown onto the ol' Victrola as is, and allowed to unfurl a warped and warbly, rickety detuned slow motion blues crawl. That's exactly what this latest disc from the Reveries sounds like. Recorded live in Italy in 2004, the Reveries, fronted by Eric Chenaux (who for those of you up on your nineties indie math rock, fronted Toronto's godlike Phleg Camp), magically create this sound from another time. But there's more to it than that, the sound is strangely damaged, alien even, and for good reason. The band employ a technique as bizarre as it is brilliant. Each player, in addition to wielding guitar, harmonica, bass, saw, nose-flute and thumb-reeds (!?), holds a tiny cell phone speaker IN THEIR MOUTHS!!! WHILE THEY PLAY!! OR EVEN SING!! So each of the instruments is sent first to the speaker in the mouth of another player, who much like a Jew's harp, is able to shape and warp the sound with the shape of his mouth. So you're hearing guitar come out of the bass players mouth, the bass coming out of the guitar player's mouth, the flute through another player's mouth, and on and on...
Then there's the singing, which all three members do, and as you might imagine, it's pretty difficult to sing with a speaker in your mouth, and a speaker cable trailing out of your mouth to an amp or a bandmate's mouth. The result is a mumbled and warbly, mush mouthed drawl, fuzzy falsettos, a garbled croon, often sounding like a toothless old Nina Simone, but just as often, like some strange buzzing growl, perfectly complimenting the band's detuned twang flecked scrawl.
It's almost like the Starfuckers playing Django Reinhardt at 16 rpm, with a countrified Derek Bailey on guitar. Cracking, wheezing and skeletal, a demented yet lovely underwater slow motion Western Swing, plenty of downtuned buzz, scraping and shuffling, whispering and whistling, seasick and gorgeously woozy. There are stretches of garbled instrumental chaos here and there, but the majority of the set is spent slithering and shimmering, meandering drunkenly through some strange sonic haze, an old timey radio broadcast, from some strange musical alternate reality, bits of classic blues and jazz muted and smeared pulled apart and tangled up into haunting and perplexing shapes. So gorgeous.
The Reveries were indeed a revelation. A modern slow-mo, off-kilter, creaky rickety avant country combo, whose sound was a bleary blend of campfire twang, woozy slowcore, and most notably, a system by which each player holds a tiny speaker in their mouths while they play, with the various other players sending their sounds and signals into the mouths of the other players, letting the various musicians shape and twist and contort those sounds, often combining them with their own vocal parts.
The result was truly unique, haunting, mysterious, and gorgeously fractured. The last Reveries disc, was titled Plays The Music Of Sade. We weren't sure if that was some high concept thing, and it was in fact inspired by the Marquis De Sade, or if they were indeed covers of songs by the pop vocalist Sade (pronounced shar-day). It's perhaps a testament to the Reveries skill at reinvention that we were unable to realize that they were actually Sade covers (or it might speak to our being wholly unfamiliar with her body of work minus THAT song) Regardless, just like the record before, the Reveries created a wholly otherworld of moaning melodies, and creeping tempos, of strange voices, of detuned guitars, warbly basslines, shuffling percussion, all warped and funhouse mirrored by their circuitous journey from instrument to amp to speaker to mouth to microphone to recorder to compact disc.
On this first volume, in a proposed ongoing series, the Reveries tackle, as the title suggests, the music of country music icon Willie Nelson, and it's a pretty fine match. The first track is a surprise though, fairly rocking by Reveries standards, a rollicking version on "I Let My Mind Wander", with propulsive drumming, some serious riffing, and that strange whistle like melody that the band seems to lace each song with, a sort of falsetto croon. And the vocals as always are a sort of mush mouthed garble, due in no small part to the singe having to sing around the speaker in his mouth.
The rest of the record unfurls lazily, all creaking back porch blues, the guitars often drifting by in disembodied twangs, each arrangement spare and abstract and seemingly always on the verge of collapse, the drums shuffling and minimal holding it all barely together, but it's the melodies that make it immediately the Reveries, each one, each vocal line wavery and woozy, unfurled and filtered through a jew's harp like warble, keening whistle like tones tangled and ghostlike. Even the most recognizable songs, like "Crazy", become something totally and utterly different.
The overall sound is dark and drunken, mournful and mysterious, some tracks add harmonica, nose-flute, singing saw, and while those elements add to the lushness of the Reveries' sound, they're almost unnecessary, their core sound is so delicate and alien even at its most stripped down, so beautifully creepy, that all it ever takes to suck us in is that slow languorous twang, some warbly vocals, and a sweetly sad minor key melody...
Past record of the week honorees the Reveries return with this super limited live cd-r, and while we're not always huge fans of live recordings, this one is worth it for two reasons, one, we've been dying for more Reveries, we can't get enough of their soporific warbly alien blues, and second, their sound is so strange and woozy, that the various crowd sounds, and the lo-fi recording, only add to their mysterious ambience.
The Reveries, for those of you who missed their AQ record of the week a while back, are a minimal blues trio, who take their somewhat standard instrumentation, guitar, bass, harmonica, musical saw, nose flute, and augment them with what the band calls 'mouth speakers', a tiny cell phone speaker, that each member holds in his mouth while they play, the various instruments being fed to the speaker in one of the other players' mouths, where the sound can then be altered by that player changing the shape of their mouth, or singing along to another instrument. The result is so gorgeous and so completely strange. The sound is off kilter and abstract, woozy and druggy, and totally beautiful. This live set finds the band augmented by a drummer, and various members playing stuff like streetsweeper bristle bass and thumb reeds, which only serves to give these songs a bit more propulsion, not quite as languorous as their last disc, a bit more 'rocking', with some simulated wah guitars (using their mouth speakers we figure) and more of a focus on the vocals, gorgeous mournful melodies, plaintive falsetto harmonies, all draped over the band's blurred bluescapes.
Folks who dig Bonny Prince Billy and Iron And WIne and the like should definitely check this out. It's that sort of modern blues twang, melancholy and melodic, but the Reveries, take that sound and twist it all up into something much stranger, and somehow much more moving.
SUPER LIMITED. Totally over the top packaging, a screen printed cardboard box, each one individually augmented by various glued on pieces of paper and art fragments, inside the box is stuffed with various inserts and found paper debris, flyers, newspapers, pictures cut out from magazines, and all manner of other strange visual detritus.
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