As much as we dug the Robedoor disc Hidden Ascension, reviewed a couple of lists back, our first exposure to this doomy duo, we were still a bit taken aback by how freaked out the AQ massive got over that disc. They flew out of here and ever since we've been having trouble scraping up any more copies of that way too limited disc. So we got in touch with the band and managed to get a bunch of another disc (as well as a collaborative lp reviewed slewhere on this list), Christ's Vipers, released on UK label Chocolate Monk, and it should hit the spot for all you folks jonesing for more Robedoor.
Robedoor is the duo of Alex: slime, knives and distortion, and Notnotfun label head honcho Britt on fire, howls and cloaks...
Hmmm... but what does all that mean, sonically? Well, precisely what you might imagine. A blackened drone drenched world of slime and knives and fire, dense clouds of distorted howls, a thick cloak of fuzz and buzz wrapped around the proceedings like a thick, well, cloak!
Actually this is a lot prettier than you might imagine. That is if your idea of pretty includes tons of low end and a world of slom motion doomdrone. Four lengthy tracks, the first, a wash of huge rumbling bass riffs, ringing out and gradually spreading out into a shimmering black smear, above it all, some sort of melody is played out, hard to tell if it's a synth or a guitar, or even a voice, but it wails all muted and muddy above the roiling blackness, the whole track a dirgey throb that sounds a little bit like caveman doom outfit Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. The second is a cavernous, malfunctioning trawl through some wasted Wolf Eyesian industrial soundscape, lots of amp buzz and cord crackle, all manner of glitch and hiss drifting above dense black billows of subterranean sound. Track three is another intensely dark drift, a little more caustic than the first two tracks, this time with vocals, ultra distorted and buried in the mix, it's like another instrument, wailing and caterwauling away, as it is slowly dragged along by a dense flow of furiously blown out low end psych bass swirl.
Finally, the disc finishes off with a near static wall of low end, that builds from a minimal throb to a seriously freaked out sonic squall. Imagine Birchville at its most noisy and damaged, then fuck it up a bit, slow it down some, crank the PA to 11, and stand back as the amps literally begin to liquefy, the stage slowly transformed into some rumbling pusling black lump, the musical version of watching a star implode, or a planet die, all rendered in lots and lots of low end and plenty of grinding glorious feedback.
After a whole mess of lps and 7"s and cd-r's and splits, we finally got our hands on the very first proper cd release from East Coast dirge drone duo Robedoor and it's a killer.
As we admitted before, we were late on the uptake, having only discovered Robedoor early last year, but have been doing our best to make up for it, grabbing every single shred of sonic sludge we can.
Closer To The Cliff is more of what we've come to love. Long extended dirgescapes of crumbling distorted drones, buried black melodies, rumbling expanses of downtuned thrum. Keening feed back and coruscating high end smeared into glimmering expanses of effulgent murk, a deep black glow in a roiling whirl of muted melody. It's like SUNNO))), in its massive nearly static crawl, but where SUNNO)) is like sticking your head in a black hole, Robedoor is like staring into a black sun, letting your eyes glaze over, and the various sounds and colors blur into dreamlike dronescapes, much more lo-fi and textural, gritty, grimey, constantly in flux, less about riffs slowed down as it is about pulling sound apart, exposing the strange musical guts inside, allowing them to spill out like deep black sonic viscera.
But beyond just the sheer brute force of Robedoor's deep black sprawl, much of this disc is spent sans heaviness, letting the rumble and roooaaar dissipate, exploring delicate crystalline expanses of barely there shimmer, twinkling music box melodies suspended in gently whirring fields of whispery ambience and soft chordal washes, reminds us of Andrew Chalk filtered through Tim Hecker, gorgeous and glimmering, but always with that ominous low end in the background. Or imaging a Nadja record, spun really slow with your finger and broadcast through a beat up old amp.
A gorgeously washed out and dreamily disembodied soft-doom...
So just in case the album title doesn't totally give it away for ya, here it is, another slow burning dose of blackened drone from LA's Robedoor! In tune with their prolific nature, the duo brings us another terrific offering of menacing dronescapes to add to their huuuge list of releases. These guys just keep it coming and we don't mind a bit.
Side A is a solid 15 minute slab of swirling, heavenly bodies, of heavy heavy drift, a melting singing bowl in the lap of a woodland mystic. Building from a trembling, blissed out ocean of high end, a metallic wash into a murky pool of buried vocals and low-end geologic rumble. Hypnotic and mesmerizing, a demonic ceremony howling from the depths of an icy cave.
Side B kicks off with creeping, tuning guitar swells, boiling like tar in the hot sun. The blown out toll delicately dissipates leaving only seconds of silence before a sludgy, down-tempo drum lures all into its rhythmic daze. The two march into a slow paced trudge only to unveil Robedoor as they approach actual "song-ness". While most of their other records have been more or less straight-up drone, this track is new territory for the duo, towering chords ringing out over chanted vocal melodies. Pretty cool. Yet another enchanting release that will most definitely satisfy any craving you might have for mysterious sounds, deep ritualistic musics, and cavernous drones that rattle the bones.
Seems like the LA based doooom dronelords Robedoor have slowed their endlessly prolific output lately, pretty sure these guys are in a bunch of other projects and are busy running record labels and stuff, but either way we're happy to have a few copies of their brand new cassette on Monorail Trespassing. Exorcism Blues delivers four brand new tracks of mind-melting, ground ripping heavy drone that falls somewhere between the synth sorcery of the recent secret abuse lps and the dark, doom drone stylings of earlier Robedoor recordings. Slow trudging glacial ambience that melts beneath the paralyzing summer heat. Super killer and super limited, we've only got a handful of these so act fast in you want one, they'll be gone before you know it!
We're a bit embarrassed to admit we had never heard Robedoor before, heck, we'd never even heard OF them. Which is saying something as a quick internet search reveals about a MILLION cd-r's and cassette releases. Although the same search reveals very little else. All we can glean is that they are a duo, one half credited with slime, knives and distortion, the other with fire, howls and cloaks, and that they are part of the Notnotfun noise axis. The rest is a mystery. Which befits their gorgeously mysterious sound. Huge growling, glowing slabs of slow shifting low end. Slowed down riffs and long dark streaks of moaning sound, some sort of improbable mix of SUNNO))) and Skullflower. Or the gloomiest doomiest Wolf Eyes record played manually, pulling it around with your finger, a constantly fluctuating low end rumble, laced with haunting distant melodies and high end guitar buried in the murk. Fans of all thing slow and low AND heavy will definitely want one of these. We need to hear more from these guys for sure!!
Packaged in a plastic bag with a black and white insert and some sort of weird plastic hair. LIMITED TO 78 COPIES!!! These will be gone in a flash...
Latest chunk of dirgey psychedelia from these aQ faves, and as we noticed on the past few records, Robedoor's sound has been growing consecutively more melodic, their songs sounding more like, well, songs, rather than extended freakout jams. These three tracks here offer more proof that Robedoor do in fact have a softer side, but fear not, they're still plenty distorted and dark and tripped out, the songs are just more restrained, they'd have to be to fit 3 on a 7". But the shift suits them, washes of keening high end drift above scrabbling bass suspended in the ether, guitars chime and ring off in the distance, each track is a slow build from spare spaceiness to tribal pummel, the rhythms minimal yet propulsive, vocals hazy with effects and woven into the fabric of these songs, another layer in an already thickly layered sound, the tracks grow more and more dense, usually culminating in spaced out droney drift, laced with delicate melodies, all psychedelic and fuzzy and murky and way psychedelic, and pretty dang kick ass!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A beautiful swirling murk drone mass from the always transcendent Robedoor! Pained Seer is the first cassette document of Robedoor we've gotten our hands on here at aQ, and it's a gorgeous vision quest to be sure!
The first track, "Acid Collapse", Is an undulating sonic dream, pulsating and writhing, feedback and fuzz rising and falling, spooked vocals mutter desperate incantations in the distance, all buried under an acid tongued drone. The sound is warm and enveloping, wrapping the mind in a twilight, come-down trip blanket, made of ghostly tones and acerbic pulsations. Building slowly in intensity, the sound becomes more and more excited, percussive elements enter to punctuate the brain burning death rattle, eyes rolling back into the head, sun caving in, by the end of it there's a hole blown in your head, and a vacuous peace where your mind used to be.
The flip side, "Reverse Vision", proceeds in the same mode, but perhaps a bit darker. Doomy even. A blackend progression is played on what sounds like a cheap keyboard set to cello, or maybe bassoon, hissing otherworldly vocals sing fractured melodies, all buried in murk-fuzz reverberating textures. This must have been recorded in some deep dark cavern situated far below LA, some place where that California sun cannot reach. The sound so dense and distorted, harrowingly dark visions creep through the mind's eye like lost sonic specters searching for a vessel. The piece drifts and drones and floats away into the ether, the progression remaining until the bitter end.
This tape, much like the Swanox / Scraps Of Dogs also on Caligulan featured on this list, is packaged beautifully. A photo of the sun coming through the trees on the cover, with these rad fleur d'lys cut outs on the corners of the inside flap. And A Magic The Gathering card is included in every cassette! Radical shit. Unfortunately, we got the last ten copies of this wonder, so when they're gone they're gone. Get it.
Another sprawling drone space psychedelic doom bliss workout from these Southern California sonic explorers. Whereas past records were seriously dense and grim and droney, Raiders finds the band blossoming into some seriously lysergic space doom drift, vocals soaring through fields of reverb, the guitars thick slabs of burnished buzz, the drums skeletal, the whole vibe druggy and dreamy, and way more ethereal.
The band do get heavier, hauling out the fuzz bass, and letting the drums get all tribal, but even then the thick clouds of rumbling blur, are laced with spidery tendrils of glistening high end melodies, and a soft hazy gauze of smeared vocals and layered effects, trippy and buzzy, drifting into Loop / Spacemen 3 territory, albeit a bit more ferocious and feral. Throughout though, the band seem to keep the ambience anchored to songs, or at least almost-songs, everything melodic, subtly or otherwise, sometimes pretty and haunting, other times chaotic and crushing, and again at other times hushed and minimal.
Still plenty doomy and droney, but probably Robedoor's prettiest and songiest slab of sound to date.
Another grim slab of nightmarish dooooom drone from LA's prolific Robedoor! Initially put out on cd last year by Release the Bats (which is now out of print, and we're sorry we neglected to review it before that happened, considering how much we like it!), this heavy wax offering of skull crushing invocation is some of the most intense and noisy stuff we've heard from these dudes. Rancor Keeper, now thankfully reissued on vinyl by Seacave, builds with layers of crushing overdrive underneath blankets of wretched vocals and blistering feedback, reaching points of Skullflower-like aural annihilation only to retreat to the solemn hallways of abandoned cathedrals. Kind of reminds us of a much more droney and less brutal WOLD, only more doomy and more mysterious. Blackened to the crisp and placed at the foot of the amplifier altar, the record moves from all-out destruction to moments of somber reflection, pools of shimmering organ/synth drones hovering in solace before the devastation returns. "Wendigo Psychosis" is quite the 15 minute finale, hellish hypnosis and pummeling, lo-fi drums kick in toward the end only to leave a heap of smoldering carnage in its wake. Dark and cataclysmic, there's an underlying beauty that lurks deep beneath the surface of the mind-melting sonic destruction. Housed in a super grim black lp sleeve with some appropriately bleak artwork, definitely and completely recommended for all worshipers of the weird, noisy and blackened drooooone!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We first heard from Robedoor a few lists back, their huge swaths of blackened guitar drone totally hit the spot. But on this ultra limited one-sided lp, they team up with another outfit, Haunted Castle, for something a whole lot more restrained. No wall of guitar here, in fact, if there are guitars at all, they are rendered weightless and nearly transparent. This side long single track is an epic slab of creepy, creaking ambience, all fuzzy low end and swirling black ambience. A few minutes in, the drums join the fray, but even then, it's mostly cymbals, their sizzle spreading out over the proceedings like a shimmery shadow. The drones slowly twist and contort, changing shapes and subtly changing tonal color. It's actually less like some avant noise rock and more like some sort of dark ambient free jazz drone thing.
Eventually low end melodies begin to surface, drifting dreamily beneath subtle percussive scraping and what sounds like some sort of ghostly vocals, but all rendered so indistinct as to be just more black blurs. Downtuned riffs (if that is indeed a guitar) way off in the distance add to the rumbling shimmer, the whole thing gradually drifting off and fading away.
Packaged in a cool silk screened sleeve, with printed color insert. Limited to 300 copies, each copy hand numbered.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've been going a little bit Robedoor crazy. We were sort of late to the party, but we're trying to make up for it, by dumping as much of their noisy divinity into our ears as humanly possible. This latest slab of glorious sound is a split with fellow noise maker Leslie Keffer. Hard to tell whose side is whose, but fuck it, it hardly matters, as both sides are amazing.
One side (we're guessing the Keffer side) is a roiling mass of thick hissy clouds, whirring and rumbling, a seemingly unwavering blast of fuzzy white noise, that somehow manages to be super listenable, pretty even, for a brief moment in the middle, the noise fades out, leaving a damaged loop of what sounds like a little girl speaking in tongues, but the loops intensify and overlap and soon the voices are a jumbled mass and we're back to more of that beautiful noise.
The flip side is all glistening guitars and chant like vocals, super distorted and washed out, layer upon layer upon layer, dense and thick and warm, like a roomful of DJ's all spinning the same Sunroof! record at slightly different speeds. Dizzying and so gorgeous.
And speaking of gorgeous, HOLY SHIT, the cover of this lp is SO thick with paint, we almost got high in the time it took us to get the record out and on the turntable. A thick glossy coat of black, and over that, a super detailed illustration done all in metallic gold. So totally amazing looking...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES and already out of print, so act fast...
In our ongoing obsession with all things Robedoor, here's yet another awesome chunk of blissed out drone-noise, teamed up with their perfect sonic foils, AQ faves the Yellow Swans. Both bands dial down the brutality and intensity, offering up two gorgeous tracks of shimmering, buzzing ambience, each with their own vibe, and one still a bit brutal and intense.�
Robedoor are up first, and this is just about the loveliest thing we've heard from these guys. All gliding glimmer, warm effulgent swells of sound, distant moaning cellos that just sort of melt all over the top of the guitar, gorgeous and tranquil, a blissy drift through billowing clouds of soft focus blur, distorted and buzzy, but smeared into one slow burning easy on the ears whir.�
Yellow Swans counter with their own version of 'tranquil' and as you might imagine it's a bit different than RD's. Noisier and heavier, more fuzzed out and harsh, but no less lovely. A whirling wash of thick gritty grime, muted grinding rhythms, industrial whir, buzzing and rumbling. The whole thing thick and crumbling and corrosive, but still so pretty!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered.�
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Yeah, we had the same reaction...'What the hell is Dean Roberts doing on Mille Plateaux?' Yet the NZ avant-guitarist's latest album clearly fits. Filled with pops of electronic noise, sloppy sampling, and free floating guitar noise, Roberts has made an engaging record, well in keeping with Mille Plateaux's high standards.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
New Zealander Dean Roberts made quite a name for himself with a handful of freeform Sonic Youth-esque albums in Thela and White-Winged Moth. Yet, he has shifted to the powerbook as his instrument of choice, turning guitars, piano, and viola into delicate crackling flows. Working with New York percussionist Tim Barnes, Roberts has created a fine album of eletro-acoustic abstraction not far from Fennesz or Oval. There's also a cover of Brian Eno's "Cindy Tells Me."
Dean Roberts, he's one of those 'regular name' guys, y'know, like David Grubbs, Alan Licht, Jim O'Rourke... Like them, his output is eclectic, you might hear him singing a song or doing out-guitar drone, as in his old band Thela. Experimental, electro-acoustic indie-rock I guess is his genre? Anyway, he's usually doing something cool, and this disc is no exception. Although Roberts hails from New Zealand (which always seems to be a good thing!), this was recorded in Italy, with several of his Italian friends joining on guitars and drums, while Roberts played acoustic and electric guitars, piano, bass, harmonium, glass harmonica and percussion. His hushed vocals are also present, but these tracks are soft and slow and sad and more about sound than songcraft. Be Mine Tonight is good driving through the woods at night music -- I know 'cause I did just that this past weekend on the way up to Mendocino. This low-key album is really less likely to spark a mood than it is to perhaps simply capture *your* mood, if listened to at the right time (like, driving through the woods in darkness). Roberts and his comrades 'rock out' for brief moments, but overall it's got a sleepy, fragile feel. Editing and processing are key to these results, along with the performances, with this having some of the same live-instruments-meet-glitchy-drone vibes as Roberts' amazing (and sadly out of print) Ritornelle release And The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema from a few years back. Quite nice.
Two extended improvs by AQ favorite Dean Roberts from (Thela, White Winged Moth) and Werner Dafeldecker (Polwechsel, and an assortment of improv ensembles with folks like Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, and Martin Siewert) both playing guitars, electronics and percussion. The first track pairs sine waves with guitar textures while the second epic track rumbles and glides through metallic cycles and stalled clickery. Sinecore meets clankcore.
We had been hearing about this record for ages, and even before actually getting a listen, we were pretty convinced we'd love it. A collection of nocturnal field recordings captured at Bush House, the home of the BBC's world service for seventy years it was recently relocated. Robin The Fog worked nights at Bush House, and spent much of his time there capturing the gorgeously creepy haunted house ambience of that historic site, the hum of air conditioners, the sound of the elevators, various sounds echoing through the empty halls and abandoned studios, the outside world filtered through the structure's thick walls, a barely audible murmur, an attempt to capture on tape, the spirit of a place, and the residual traces of all who had passed through, and the energy of what had taken place in those hallowed halls for the last seven decades.
Those captured sounds were then manipulated on an old 4-track reel to reel tape, and the results are truly stunning. A symphony of whirs and rumble, of echoey traces and ghostly shadowy sounds, moaning and creaking, scraping and rustling, voices surface now and again, as do little snippets of music. Unclear what the actual sources for those elements are, but they add a definite otherworldly mystery to the captured and manipulated minimalist soundscapes.
Imagine Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, the Ghost Orchid EVP recordings, the Conet Project, The Ghosts Of The Bush seems to occupy a similar sonic space, one where tones are blurred into shapeless drifts, echoes captured in dusty old stairwells becomes hazy swaths of weirdly melodic drift, clouds of static and tape hum cover everything like a layer of dust on discarded furniture covered in old grey sheets, long keening high end shimmers spread out like spectral transmissions from the past, it's hard to say how much of a hand the recordist had in the final product here, it's obvious quite a bit, but we like to pretend that perhaps nothing was done to the original sounds, that this is in fact that sounds old buildings make when there are no humans around to hear, creeping swaths of droning rumble, warbling loops of chordal throb and pulsating rhythms, all disappearing into a moonlit murk, scurrying away into the dark shadows in the corners of grey-lit rooms, fragments of music box melodies floating atop the sound of wood expanding and contracting, of scraping metals, and of groaning foundations, the creaking of rusted hinges woven into mysterious keening soundscapes, blurred fragments, echo drenched and slowly dissipating like some spirit called back to the other side, and of course the near silence that upon close listening is not silent at all, the invisible world that comes to life, when the lights go off, and the shadows swallow up the light, a dizzying array of sonic spirits that manifest, way from the ears of humanity, here captured surreptitiously, giving the rest of us a glimpse of what lies beyond, and just outside of our perception. So hauntingly gorgeous. And absolutely recommended for fans of strange found sounds and mysterious minimal soundscaping. And of course, EXTREMELY limited...
Solo improv synth recorded in parking garages!!
Pretty provocative name huh? These problematically monikered nineties Bay Area improvised noise makers, in fact, boasted a pretty surprising and stellar pedigree, the duo included Kelvin Pittman now of Portland Bike Ensemble, and Kyp Malone, of fellow SF noiseniks Iran and now of... TV On The Radio!!? Huh? Yep, long before Malone was playing huge festivals and helping send Pitchfork into conniptions, and releasing solo records, and impressing the indie rock throngs with his impossible and impressive facial hair, he was in fact one half of Rocket Science, a raucous, blasting, psychedelic combo, who spit out a wild fusion of free jazz and free noise, and this was their only record, released on Vulgar Tango way back when, along with the debut Iran lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list. The Vulgar Tango dude discovered a stash of records (both Iran and Rocket Science) that had been hidden away for close to a decade, and decided to let us have them!
So yeah, we always sort of wondered why in all the articles about TV On The Radio, they never ONCE mentioned Kyp's time in RSATNLF, although we can sort of guess. Which is too bad, cuz these guys ruled. Nothing at all like TV On The Radio of course, or Iran really (except for some of the noisiness), Rocket Science took guitars and bells and drums and some 'singing' and wound 'em all up into a super charged take on that SST jazz sound, filtered through a warped SF noiserock filter. Sometimes surprisingly melodic and tranquil, but more often than not, fierce and free and heavy and loud, skittery percussion, tangled grinding guitar gnarl, some serious psychedelic crunch, lots of feedback, all woozy and warped, chaotic and off kilter, brief squalls of splattery atonal skronk, give way to warbly drone psych squiggles, which gives way to drum-kit-down-the-stairs cacophony, which then gives way to some almost metal chug and thud, which always seems to blossom into a crumbling mass of swirling sound and amp damaging free-rock delirium. Gloriously ramshackle and seriously challenging, an extremely noisy and loud look back at one of our favorite unsung outfits that helped define the SF underground in the early 2000s...
We knew nothing at all about this disc when it arrived. Not even sure how we ended up listening to it, but we're so so glad we did. The thing is, we get tons of stuff to listen to. Some all time AQ favorites began life as a random record that showed up in the mail, so we try to listen to everything, or as close to everything as we can. But there's so much, that just listening to random stuff that gets mailed in could be its own full time job (and before you all email wanting that job, trust us, it's not all it's cracked up to be). Inevitably stuff slips through the cracks, or we finally manage to listen to a cd months, sometimes years after it shows up.
But this one caught our eye straight away, with a super creepy cover depicting a dead woman, covered in blood, in a wide expanse of blackness, above her a head, with a hole in the forehead, and a rainbow shooting through the head onto the dead woman, all done sort of oil painting style. Immediately we thought, "Wow, that sort of looks like some Argento movie". Then we saw the title, 31 Invalid Movie Themes � Italian Music. Hmm. By a group called Orchestra Di Rockford Kabine. Okay, so maybe, we thought, a soundtrack to some giallo we'd never heard of. The first track seemed to confirm that, a snippet of dialogue from some Italian movie, dialogue, some buzzing creepy sci-fi synth, a panicked woman, screaming, some sort of struggle...
Then suddenly, we're in some sort of groovy sixties funk jam, all shuffling percussion, wah wah guitar, throbbing bass grooves, and then out of nowhere, a strangely convoluted interlude, very brief, but sort of stuttery, and then back to the groove. So now we're dying to know what movie this is from. Then the next track is some sort of stripped down electro groove, a jazzy piano vamp, lots and lots of record crackle, this couldn't be from the sixties...
And it isn't. It ends up it's a German duo called Rockford Kabine, not a person at all, not a composer, an electronic/sampling outfit who describe their sound as "acid smurf" (huh?) and whose modus operandi is crafting little cinematic pop nuggets. Like DJ Shadow doing Morricone. The various tracks are super brief, but super groovy and catchy, some are dark and ominous and ultra creepy, some are playful and exotic. Some sound like they belong in a spaghetti Western, others like they belong in a classic Italian horror film, one track even uses the sound of a pinball machine as the rhythm. Plus the whole disc is peppered with bits of dialogue from movies making it seem even more possible that these could all be little fragments from lost movie scores.
The sounds are all over the place, but manage to sound like they all belong, if not in the same film, at least in the same collection. From the aforementioned opening groover, to the smoky synth flecked mood music of "Al Signor Lorenzo N." complete with a creepy children's choir, to the exploitation cop show funk jam of "Di-Stanza", to the super distorted buzzy sixties psychedelia of "IX", to the Tom Waits via Amon Tobin stuttery junkyard percussion of "Insensato", to the muted meandering twangy western sizzle of "Italo Calvino", to the stripped down, but somehow still spooky rhythmic workout of "Zombi 3000", to the very DJ Shadow-ish creepy crawl of "Profondo Rosso" and it goes on and on. Every track is a strange little gem. Mysterious and cinematic. Each could easily be the theme from some lost film, or just a kick ass little segment from some DJ's set.
31 tracks, averaging a little more than a minute each, these tracks may not actually be from real movies, but repeated listening will have you wishing they were, or just creating the movies in your head as you listen. Fucking awesome.
We first discovered amazing German duo Rockford Kabine via their debut full length, Italian Music: 31 Invalid Movie Themes, which on the surface played like a series of micro snippets of actual Italian soundtrack music, interspersed with snippets of dialogue, brief excerpts from what we can only assume are in fact real films, the music the perfect compliment, wah wah guitars, Morricone-ish twang, smoky synths, spooky rhythmic dronescapes. It was an incredible collection of music that very well could have been soundtrack music, but was in fact an original creation, imagined music for imaginary Italian films. And we were blown away. Not soon after, the band contacted us to let us know that they were already working on a follow up, this one an ACTUAL soundtrack, to some sort of arty XXX adult film, yep, a porno, which in some weird way made sense, what with RK's ability to conjure up super sultry and sexy sounds, that draw from all sorts of different sources, their music already cinematic on its own, seemingly perfect to be wedded to visuals, and heck, when the visuals turn out to consist of sexy women, some wielding daggers, wearing World War 2 style gasmasks and leather bodysuits and well, it's tough to argue with that.
But since the soundtrack was to be available ONLY as a bonus disc with the movie itself, it required some wrangling, and contacting an actual adult film distributor down in SoCal to get our hands on copies. But we're so glad we did. Even removed from the visuals, like all great soundtrack music, Rockford Kabine's score for XERO is incredible, haunting, mysterious, groovy, funky, abstract, cinematic for sure, but also lush and experimental and moody and mysterious. The strange thing too is that the film seems quite European, almost like some Inglorious Basterds style Tarantino war pic (or maybe that's just the aforementioned gas mask get up getting to us), but the music is very Eastern, in fact all the titles seem to be in Japanese, which only adds to the mystique of Rockford Kabine's fantastic soundworld.
So we'll discuss the film in a bit, but as aQ is a record store, and this is in fact our Record Of The Week, it's probably best to discuss the soundtrack/score all on its own first. Like Italian Music before it, XERO is a series of shortish tracks, between 1 and 2 minutes, each super distinctive, with the duo conjuring up incredible mysterious moods in a manner of seconds, leaving the listener in most cases wanting more more more. And like their Italian Music, this does play out like some sort of DJ Shadow style sonic collage, still drawing from Morricone, and the Italian giallo tradition, but also from classic '70s porno music, with some funk and groove, but instead of the oft ridiculed wah wah guitar style porn kitsch, this is much more evocative, and dark, guitars are slithery, basslines low slung, undulating, bells chimes, notes drift through fields of reverb, riffs chug and churn only to dissipate in a field of chimes, spaced out drones collide with almost Tangerine Dream like synths, flutes flit and flutter, the rhythms are minimal and motorik, some tracks playing out like some krautrock groove (reminding us that Can made softcore soundtracks too, way back when), others like some lost cosmic disco. It's actually quite hard to describe XERO, there are so many different sounds and styles, and it's hard to imagine them working as a soundtrack, especially to an super stylized XXX art film, but removed from the film, the music, as varied and constantly shifting as it is, somehow plays out cohesively, like an album proper, guitar twang is laced over a minimal footstep like rhythm, organs wheeze, everything sounds softly woozy and lysergic, exotic percussion collides with gamelan like melodies, minimal hip hop beats are wrapped around stuttering loops, occasionally coalescing into some seriously fuzzy hairy funk, other times drifting into Goblin style almost new wave sounding synthscapes, acoustic guitars unfurl some Western strum, but woven in are some haunting synth melodies, even some mysterious voices, soaring strings and sorrowful piano, tense droned out ambience, skittery almost Portishead style downtempo beats, bells and chimes, all sorts of strange production, the sound sometimes crystal clear and lush and lovely, other times hazy and druggy and gorgeously washed out, a kaleidoscopic sonic journey through some imaginary world of naked women, gasmasks and daggers, weird Asian masks, furry shag rugs, a world that would have stayed imaginary had these sounds not been used to edit the film of the same name.
The film is indeed pornographic, and XXX. It's all female-on-female, there's very little actual hardcore sex though. And while it IS a porno, with no plot to speak of, it's almost more like it's about the music. Indeed, the movie was edited to the music, much like Sergio Leone used to blast Morricone's scores on the set and have the actors move to the music, so the film here is a series of impressionistic tableaus, the colors acid drenched and super saturated, long slow stripteases, even the actual sex is strangely arty and not traditionally sexy, but the strange constantly shifting images, the cool, always changing music, work together, creating something much more than a porno, in fact, the film seemed more like something the band would project behind them when they performed live, strange masks, the aforementioned rubberclad gasmasked mystery woman, another woman who looks a bit like a sexier female version of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, long duster, big hat, face obscured by hair, and as the back cover proclaims, "See the shocking ending the censors didn't want you to witness", and we can definitely attest to the fact that the ending is really weird, depressing and violent, and not at all sexy, but in some way, that makes this whole project more interesting, and bizarre, and pretty much perfect for Rockford Kabine's incredible soundtrack. Though of course you don't HAVE to watch it, the prudish can enjoy the soundtrack fully without reference to the visuals.
Needless to say, this is TOTALLY RECOMMENDED, but, since the soundtrack cd does in fact come with an XXX rated adult dvd, thus is required some unaccustomed legalese on our part, as follows... This is only to be purchased by adults, and by purchasing this, and/or adding it to your online shopping cart, you are hereby agreeing to these stipulations: that you are an in fact an adult, being of legal age, 18 or 21, in your legal jurisdiction to view adult oriented material that may be sexual or graphical in nature. (Local laws vary throughout the United States, so if you are not 100 percent sure of the laws applicable to you, you are advised to check before purchasing.) Further, you agree that you will not redistribute this material to anyone for which it is illegal for them to view or possess such material, nor will you permit any minor, or any person who would find this personally offensive, to view this material, and finally that you will hold harmless aQuarius recOrds, its officers, ISP, and employees, from and against any claims, liability, losses, costs, damages, or expenses (including attorney's fees) arising from you use of the images contained on the dvd. Furthermore, you will defend aQuarius recOrds against all claims of impropriety regarding your purchase of this item. Phew. We'd have put all that in small print if we could.
MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!!MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!!!
Ok, that no doubt got your attention. However, unlike Mississippi's forays into blues, world music, and, uh, Dutch punk rock, this record (an alternately titled reissue of Rockmore's The Art Of The Theremin album) takes a surprising turn into the realm of classical music. But not just *any* classical music, no, this here record will no doubt be familiar to many aQ customers, as Lithuanian born Clara Rockmore (1911-1998) is legendary for her mastery of one of the first and strangest electronic musical instruments ever - the theremin. Even if you think you are unaware of what this unique instrument sounds like, you've definitely heard it SOMEWHERE, most likely in some cheesy sci-fi movie from the 1950s. But rather than retread the story of the theremin in general and Clara Rockmore specifically (for that you're advised to check out the amazing documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey), we will just let you know that this record is completely amazing, absolutely beautiful, and probably unlike anything else you've heard before. Covering selected works from composers such as Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, among others, Rockmore is capable of creating some of the saddest, most mournful sounds ever committed to tape. With literally every song, the theremin sounds like it is weeping out its melodies alongside its piano accompaniment, provided by Rockmore's sister Nadia Reisenberg. Soundwise, many of you will be reminded of a singing saw, or perhaps some heavily sustained bowed string instrument, but the buzzing electronic warmth of the theremin is really beyond classification. The sounds are at once familiar but also totally alien, and anyone who has actually played a theremin should be well aware of how unbelievably difficult they are to control (you don't even touch the thing!). But Rockmore was clearly cut from a different cloth altogether, and to this day she remains undisputed master of the instrument.
Mississippi really outdid themselves with the packaging on this one, the heavy duty lp comes housed in a beautiful thick gatefold jacket with all kinds of detailed information. And we should hardly have to warn you of this record's limited availability, so don't miss out.
We've long been fans of sound artist Steve Roden, and his 'lowercase' sound explorations. His music is minimal and often flickering on the very edge of audibility. Beautiful and occasionally dangerously delicate. On a recent visit, he passed us a cd from Jeffrey Roden, who just so happens to be Steve's uncle, and who is also a musician, a bass player by trade, but just like his nephew, Roden is not content to work within the traditional confines of an instrument's sound, or a particular genre. Roden composes for and records solo bass, but unlike many solo instrumental records, Seeds Of Happiness is all about melody and texture, this is not noisy, or skronky, or 'difficult', the strings are not scraped, or bowed, the sound is not processed, the bass is played like a bass, the notes rich and reverberant, the melodies fluid and lovely, the arrangements languid and lush. Some tracks are super simple, almost like a bass line just plucked from some lost pop song, allowed to hover and drift out in the open, loosed from its traditional rock moorings. Other songs are dense and subtly complex, little flurries of notes, tangled melodies, all woven into a shimmering static backdrop, for a simple swooping melody to drape over the top. The mood is minor key and melancholy, but most of the songs here are infused with a rich warmth, the melodies not so much sad as they are wistful.�
A simply gorgeous, gorgeous lazy afternoon, rainy day assortment of dreamy drifting loveliness. So recommended.
Here's a new lil' 3" treat from the always-interesting LA-based experimentalist Steve Roden. It offers a view of land through a ship's dirty window... three black marks on the glass evoke the 'noise' of worn film as Roden's voice falls below the waterline. This song, "A Slow Moving Boat", has come to life through several poetic transformations described in a short text on the cd sleeve. Taking field recordings he made of a ship's hull in Norway, Roden has used them as guide for his voice as he hummed along to the drone, then replaced the original field with a recording of bowed banjo. As with all of the 'concepts' that drive Roden's work, this one is absolutely gentle... a subjective way of framing and eliciting a creative gesture that, in this case, deftly makes its way back to a ship as a commissioned soundtrack for an FM Staten Island ferry broadcast. The voice on this 15 minute piece ebbs in and out of itself, Roden intoning beautifully at both a high and a low register while the banjo buzzes and flutters. Strangely, as hand-made and human as this music is, it seems to leave its maker behind as it blows out of reach of land...
Steve Roden is the man who coined the term 'lowercase sound' to describe his own strategies in constructing a delicate minimalism out of very quiet sounds, subtle melodic phrases, and subtle looping structures. While many sound artists operate under the lowercase banner, Roden alongside Bernhard Gunter have long remained at the vangarde of this aesthetic and conceptual art form. With Gunter moving further and further down the path of improvisation, Roden's intuitive constructions of gossamer electrons are still as modest as ever, but have clearly developed into one of the strongest artistic statements in modern electronics.
Airforms was commissioned for an installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. Inspired by the spray concrete architectural forms of Wallace Neff who in turn drew inspiration from nautilus shells, Roden designed an installtion of concrete sprayed balloons as an homage to the Neff houses. While these objects -- which sort of looked like a Dr. Seuss variation on Eva Hess sculptures -- were not used to construct the accompanying musical score, they succeeded in communicating an empathic delicacy and sadness along with the music. For the CD release of Airforms, Roden reconstructed the sound elements for stereo listening. As beautiful as it is modest, the Airforms CD ripples with a slow procession of of abstracted pipe organ loops periodically scratched with distant crackle.
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Steve Roden has self-released several 20 minute 3"cds on which he plucked, bowed, and rubbed a singular object with sporadic use of electronic manipulation. The chair that Steve uses on this recording was designed by Harry Bertoia (who made metal furniture as well as his sound sculptures). While the chair itself wasn't intended to make the gossamer tonalities that can be coaxed from Bertoia's sculptures, Roden intentionally mimics Bertoia's sounds and adds his own penchant for discreet melodic passages. Excellent stuff!
In Steve Roden's own words regarding this album which accompanied a Mark Rothko exhibition at the LA MOCA in 2006, "My intentions in placing a quiet 4 channel audio work in an alcove adjacent to Rothko's paintings, was not to create a soundtrack for his work; but to allow a viewer, or listener, to sense that the sound was connected to the paintings. Dark Over Light Earth exists as a separate artwork; but a connection to Rothko's 8 paintings remains, for it never could have been born without them. I initially made a list of every color in each of the 8 paintings, to generate a score. I recorded myself playing the score on harmonium and glockenspiel - the notes and their order pre-determined by my color notations; and the tempo, durations, and overall feel, improvised. Some of these recordings were then processed electronically with filters. I asked Jacob Danziger to listen to a recording of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel on headphones and attempt to play along on violin. He then sent me the recordings of his performance. The composition was created by cutting up, layering, and re-organizing the recordings."
Jacob Danziger's languid violin feature prominently in Roden's composition, coming across very much like a scratchier variation of Feldman with some antiquated twinges of those fictional funerary violin pieces. Roden's additional chromatic swells and hypnotic patterns work very well against the violin; and all of this gets spun within Roden's wonderful revolving loops by the end of the record. A fitting and well-execute homage not only to Rothko but also to Feldman.
Yes, that does in fact say "Shorewed" in the title, a mistake that escaped all of the parties involved in proofing the artwork for this delicate and beautiful composition by LA's sound artist Steve Roden. Alas, these things they happen. For a few years now, the French label has been commissioning shortened compositions for what has turned out to be an exceptional series of 3" singles. There's an immediate parallel one could make to Metamkine's long out of print Cinema Pour L'Oreille series from many years back, although Ferns has less of a theoretical strain coming from musique concrete and more of a haunted impressionism relying on the smoke and mirror strategies of the drone. Roden's work is an excellent compliment to those contributions from Giancarlo Toniutti, Joe Colley, and Matt Shoemaker. Ecstasy Shorewed Its Petals uses only a small hand bell as the source material, which is more than enough for Roden to cull a wide range of sounds. With ample uses of pitch shifting and his excellent use of two delay pedals (anyone with a Loop Station should take note of Roden's work to learn a thing or twelve), Roden lays down a hypnotic and slightly eerie set of phasing loops with golden hued tones. On top of this foundation, he gradually builds up softly rasping textures, the gentle tinkling of the bell unprocessed, reversed tape gasps of drone snippets, and a distant tapping which sounds more like water tumbling out of a pipe rather than a bell. Roden keeps the composition simple, revealing the wealth of his sounds and then quietly retreating to a silent conclusion. Very lovely stuff!
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Steve Roden's "Four Possible Landscapes" was initially presented as a conceptual challenge to Bernhard Gunter. Roden sent this piece to Gunter for consideration to be released on Gunter's Trente Oiseaux without explaining that this record was composed only using transformed elements from Gunter's delicate whisper of an album "Details Agrandis." While listening to "Four Possible Landscapes," I really can't hear any concrete references to Gunter's recordings, which certainly puts these two records into the now oddly anachronistic theoretical space of the simulacrum -- defined as 1. a network of semiological reflections and refractions which only point to references and never state meaning; 2. a buzz word that art theorists liberally slung around in the '80s, and more than a decade later may possibly be used to actually define something.
The mirroring that Roden applies to Gunter's work could be viewed as a brilliant haiku that gets the words rearranged into a sparse yet metaphorically loaded lullaby. The emphasis is thus placed on the major differences between these two 'lowercase' artists: Gunter with his Morton Feldman-esque approach to the decontextualized domestic sound, Roden with his beautifully delicate application of melody and rhythm. Roden composes "Four Possible Landscape" with repeating motifs of digital bell tones (which may have origins in a tiny moment of Gunter's sine-wave feedback) and distant tidal washes of static (which could be from anything). Where Roden succeeds is, of course not due to the conceptual endgame but rather because of compositional prowess.
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Each sound from this series of 3"cds is the result of manipulation of a singular object with occasional electronic trickery. Steve Roden has taken a metal ribbed bubble lamp built in 1952 to fashion 20 action packed minutes of stethoscopic deep rumbles, polyrhythmic plucks, and subtle drone exploration. [/cat/experimental153.html]
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Steve Roden's Speak No more About The Leaves has been Allan's favorite going-to-sleep record of the past little while, its whispery drones reminding him distantly of everything from a deconstructed Richard Youngs to a dessicated Bohren & Der Club of Gore. There's a bunch of academic concepts and references that went into the making of this record (discussed below) but that's less important than the fact that it sounds so nice. This lovely record deserved a lovely review, so we asked our pal Loren Chasse, friend and fan of LA experimentalist Steve Roden, to take a stab at it, as follows:
Steve Roden has been given shit by the soundart world for being "experimentally incorrect". Perhaps this is because the concepts behind Roden's work are never so "conceptual"Ì or self-important that they become the reason why the music is supposed to be interesting, good or enjoyable. Roden's conceptual practice seems to be more of a private strategy for going about his creative work -- for providing the compositional process with specific possibilities and limitiations -- than it is a purposeful means for earning validation from the experimental art/music world.
Take Speak No More About The Leaves...a sort of threeway meta-collaboration with composer Arnold Schoenberg and poet Stefan George in which Roden happens upon Schoenberg's use of George's verse for some lyrics to a piece of music titled "The book of the Hanging Gardens", transplants a cutting from this and cultivates a whole new life from it in his own work. The life of this record, indeed, comes so much from Roden's own mouth as he sings syllables taken from the original text and creates not so much a work of high fallutin' conceptual art as he does a beautiful song that might leave us wondering if Mr. Roden hasn't also been listening to Eyeless in Gaza somewhere along the way?
If you like the title of the record and appreciate the poetic impulses at its origins you're already on your way to liking the music. Roden's voice is extremely intimate as it sits in the edge of the speakers (seeming as if it might be coming out of the phone you forgot to hang up), chanting into the room as shining slivers of sound effervesce, chime and fall around it. It's a world you can't quite place, probably because you haven't been so small that you could ever fit inside the terrarium that contains it, yet you will intuit something comforting and familiar as you use this record as a sort of stethoscope for listening in on the processes of tiny lives taking root as old ones decay and all but disappear.
Here's a 2003 release that we've never stocked before, from one of our favorite sound artists. Steve Roden built this album originally as the sound design for an installation back in 2000, with all of the sounds sourced from three musical instruments found in a Chinatown giftshop, including a toy wooden flute, an aluminum wind chime, and a paper accordion. Where so many musicians would take these instruments and render their sounds cute, cheeky, or ironic, Roden has always been an artist with a profound sensitivity for his source material; and he deftly extracts harmonically rich and emotionally resonant hues and tones from all of those instruments. The first piece, sourced from the wooden flute, elegantly weaves sustained wisping tones out of a deep, almost sinewave-sounding thrum of down-pitched low-end rumbling. The looping hypnosis of this track harkens to the pre-digital smears of flutes that Zoviet France created on such albums as Shouting At The Ground or Shadow Thief Of The Sun - in other words, haunting, sublime, and gorgeous. The second track is adopted from the aluminum wind chimes, collects an aggregate of variably pitched sounds of those chimes, with deep resonance, metallic textural scrapes, and chittery clicks coming into the mix. The pacing of this track is quintessentially Roden, deliberate and hypnotic, becoming all the more engrossing the further one engages with the track. The final composition is for the paper accordion, whose spare notes evolve into a beautiful elegy of lilting tones that overlap and loop with each other, upon sets of miniature abrasions and a thick set of low-drones, which must have been designed to simulate those on the first track. Like much of Roden's work, this is a lovely piece of introspective minimalism, slowly germinating into a beautiful ambience.
Scores for sound installations often have a way of not really translating when heard outside of the installation. Steve Roden is one of the few sound artists who has perfected the balancing act of creating a sublime sonic experience through his installation work which also translates equally as well on disc. Transmissions (Voices Of Objects And Skies) was originally commissioned by the Fresno Art Museum, and found Roden creating a metonymic environment that bridged childhood wonder with the rough technologies of tin-can telephones and daydreams of space travel and NASA. The installation itself was an 8 channel sound piece spread over 64 speakers which were all mounted within tin cans and suspended from the ceiling alongside countless other tin cans that housed low wattage colored light bulbs, creating a fantastic chandelier of muted light that was perfect for the delicate compositions. Roden states in the liner notes that the source material for the album was recordings of satellites by amateur astronomers from the 1960s through the 1980s; and through Roden's impeccable reductivist filtering and manipulation, he arrives at a slow-motion collage of electronic bleeps which might have more in common with a distantly flickering flute than anything electric in origin. Nevertheless, Roden turns these sounds into looping lullabies and subtle declinations of sound. It's one of the best pieces we've heard from Roden and is certainly recommended!
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Steve Roden's "View" consists of four 'possible landscapes' as drone studies into the resonant frequencies of glass.
He collected a handful of samples from a window (sometimes closed, sometimes open - thus allowing the thick haze of city ambience to rush through) and revealed that the glass held beautiful tones distantly resembling slow moving flute passages or chimming bells rising out of miasmic washes. "View" ends up being similar in execution to the audible work of Francisco Lopez or more minimal Andrew Chalk pieces. This was initially presented as a sound installation at the jennjoygallery here in San Francisco, with the samples culled from the window overlooking Market Street.
Lichtung is sort of a collaboration between two beloved sound artists - Steve Roden and Machinefabriek (aka Rutger Zuydervelt), as the two only share sound files on one of the tracks found on this disc. The project began as part of a group exhibition / installation between Roden, Zuydervelt, and German visual artist Sabine Burger for a gallery in Germany. Burger created the video component, Roden and Zuydervelt produced the sound aspects, visual elements from all three artists populated the walls, and the floors were covered in leaves. Got it? There was obviously some discussion as to the scope of the audio work, as both Roden and Zuydervelt created work that shared sonorous sympathies while maintaining their own individual sensibilities. Roden brings field recordings to the foreground with phasing loops gathered from contact microphone studies with found objects. These are delicate constructions of tenuously held textures, quietly burbling at the edge of perception. While Zuydervelt, on the other hand, brings elegiac drones through violin and guitar for a quiet but comparably more dramatic set of recordings than Roden. With Zuydervelt's field recordings of crumbled leaves and broken twigs, his work fluidly moves in and out of Roden's haptic inventions, making the album feel quite seamless. The one track on which the two exchanged files is an extract of a live Machinefabriek show in which Zuydervelt used Roden's field recordings and the scrabbling of metal objects as the source materials to accompany his cinematic dronescaping. A beautiful, subtle album; but really can this be called a proper collaboration? It hardly matters really, lovely stuff regardless...
As archival collections of "lost tapes" by hitherto unknown musical geniuses go, Strut's release last year of Rodion G.A.'s The Lost Tapes was the creme de la creme. The bomb. Top of the pops. We made it a Record Of The Week and it's still steady sellin'. Fuzzed out, Eastern Bloc electro-prog funk madness from the late '70s / early '80s that's super catchy, melodic and motorik; a lo-fi, synth-laden outsider kraut-groove delight all around. Then, this year, for Record Store Day, Strut was like, check it out, there's MORE! They released a limited edition 12" consisting of Rodion's previously unreleased (and apparently, unused) soundtrack music intended for an animated science fiction series on Romanian television, circa 1983, called Misuinea Spatiala Delta (Delta Space Mission). Wow. It was limited to just 1000 copies, we got as many as we could for Record Store Day (a whole bunch) and they sold out immediately. Never got to list it. BUT, yay, somehow some more copies were just made available to us by one of our suppliers. Don't know if it's a repress or what, pretty sure we can't get more in any case. So we brought in a bunch for all of you who missed it on RSD, grab 'em while you can.
As with The Lost Tapes, this 12", which plays at 45rpm, is highly recommended! Featuring lots of swirling, spacey synth (of course!), all pew-pew-pew zip-zip-zap, this also of course includes some funky electro grooves with tick-tock electronic beats and nicely melodic synth-swoosh. Come to think of it, it's not unlike the music of T.R.A.S.E., another recent Record Of The Week. And of course if you liked The Lost Tapes, you'll like this. Let's hope they keep digging in Rodion's vaults, a Lost Tapes Vol.2 would be cool!
LIMITED! Record Store Day leftovers (???) while they last!!
(By the way, you can find some of the Delta Space Mission animation on YouTube, supposedly with the Rodion music. Looks pretty cool!!)
What a great time this is, and how lucky we are to be living in it, as the back catalogs of both Cluster members, Moebius and Roedelius, have been getting the long overdue reissue campaign they so rightly deserve. So many gems to be found in both of their discographies, in fact, they're almost all gems.
The Diary Of The Unforgotten is a collection of musical sketches that Roedelius made between the years 1973-1978. It never saw release until 1990, and sadly that pressing came and went quickly, so most of us here had never heard these amazing tracks before.
Shimmering with dreamy atmosphere, melancholic and flowing with a soft grace, you can tell Brian Eno was so in tune with these same sounds, sounds which would eventually evolve into their future collaborations as well as on Eno's own records like Before & After Science and Another Green World. What's so miraculous about these tracks is that while they flow with such a golden ease, they were actually recorded in such a lo-fi manner. Roedelius would just let the tape roll and would not add any overdubs afterwards. Perhaps that's why the emotional quality of these songs hits us so strongly. Nine of the ten songs range in the three to five minute range and then there's the epic twenty four minute centerpiece "Hommage A Forst". While we could argue forever about which Roedelius or Cluster offshoot release is our favorite, right now The Diary Of The Unforgotten is making a pretty great case for that honor.
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After a handful of gorgeous drone releases under the name Berber Ox, David Rutledge returns with his new trio, Roger Nova Twelve, and a killer disc of experimental krautrock. The opening track here wouldn't have been out of place on a Berber Ox records, a dark, pulsating sprawl of kosmische low end, a softly undulating dronescape wreathed in squiggly high end filigree and underpinned by a hushed warm thrum. But the sound soon shifts gears, a strange swirl of collaged radio broadcasts and mysterious shortwave transmissions gradually gives way to a simple motorik rhythm, the surrounding sounds building momentum, the drums and what sounds like either a bass or a keyboard, locked into an endless hypnorock loop, while all around it, FX swirl and squirm and shimmer. Eventually guitars swoop into the mix, chugging out a trancey psychedelic riff, while another wraps the proceedings in layers of sonic swirl, and suddenly, we're in total space-psych bliss out, sounding like a dreamier more laid back Heads or White Hills, building to a serious heavy psych blowout, a dense squall of guitarnoise, that gradually fades leaving just a sky full of echo drenched delay and the tracks and traces of fully faded out riff.
But that's just part one. Part two begins with a strange muted whirl of percussive murk, peppered with chiming harmonics, everything blurred and bleary, like some strange underwater symphony, burbling and shimmery, voices chopped up and looped into strange textures, laid over the liquid sonic swirl, wreathed in organ and fuzzy soft focus drones, all manner of strange reverbed melodies fragmented and sent spinning off into the ether, all building to a thick billowing cloud of low end, which is when, about 14 minutes in, the first sign of rhythm appears, surfacing gradually, wreathed in the thick swaths of layered loops, finally becoming a proper space jam with about five minutes remaining, droney and tranced out, this blissed out pulsing psychkraut groove fading out way too soon, when it easily could have stretched out for another 35 minutes and filled up the whole rest of the cd-r.
Fantastic stuff, and definitely recommended for fans of the current crop of psych/space/kraut rockers, a la White Hills, Wooden Shjips, Carlton Melton, The Heads, Lumerians, Moonrises, Mugstar etc.
LIMITED TO 30 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered, and housed in a cool clear coat printed envelop made out of magazine pages, each one different. And each one accompanied by a printed postcard/insert.
Latest from this Swedish duo, whose day jobs just so happen to be producing tracks for artists like Fever Ray and the Knife, but whose musical heart seems to belong to groups like Goblin and folks like John Carpenter, their records gorgeous, dark, cinematic soundscapes of swirling synths and pulsing rhythms, and this latest disc is no different, although if anything, it's much more subtle, and carefully crafted, as well as being quite a bit darker. Where past recordings evoked the the swirl of space, conjuring up streaks of celestial kosmische-ness, or the sleek streamlined imagined future of high speeds and automation, this new record is much more grimy and menacing. Even the opening track eschews the usual RTD hallmarks, and instead locks into a relentless groove, all ominous tension, and haunting repetition, no beats, to soaring synths, just a throbbing cyclical melodic played on old analog instruments that seem to decay as the track progresses growing more and more distorted. One might imagine the record might let up, but the following track is another looped bit of synth-y tension, a blooping minor key melody, over dark minor key swells, but laced with some gorgeous elegiac piano, which adds a serious gravitas to the proceeding, but in no way lightens the mood. This is fantastic stuff, the soundtrack to some dark dystopian future otherworld, as imagined and rendered in analog sound.
The sounds range from hushed piano drive ambient swirls, to creepy lumbering dirges, from gristly expanses of electro-drone thrum to blurred ominous synth buzz blur, and from blurred almost symphonic drift to washed out almost Eurodisco sounding grooves, but all held together by those dark dolorous piano melodies, and that melancholic mood that seems to infuse all the sounds here. Dark and mysterious, a grim and gorgeous glimpse of a dark kosmische underworld.
A super special limited Record Store Day release from these Swedish duo, a production team who has worked with Fever Ray and the Knife among others, but who on their own create super cinematic synthscapes that definitely appeal to fans of Umberto, Zombi, Majeure and the rest of the new wave of Carpenter worship.
This 2 track 12" was recorded live in Sweden in 2010, and features two sprawling sidelong epics, each a fantastically evocative chunk of synth heavy soundtracky pulse and shimmer. The A side is some seriously spaced out krautdrone drift, equal parts Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter, the sound grows more and more dense as the track progresses, from minimal, to a dark haunting throb, the sound more noisy, more aggressive, before exploding in a final burst of frantic synth freakout. The flipside unfurls sweeping pulses that seem to swoop from speaker to speaker, a dreamy melancholy melody draped over the top. Distant swells, thick swaths of low end buzz, the vibe super cinematic, and darkly tense, multiple melodies overlap and interact, layer upon layer, the sound ever more dense and dark, the second half finds the sounds changing dramatically, the percussion ultra distorted, the eighties soundtrack feel even more pronounced, again finishing off with a barrage of wild glitched out synths. Great stuff.
And again, a SUPER LIMITED Record Store Day release. We were lucky to get enough copies to list post-RSD, which means these most definitely won't be around for long.
A bit of a left field release for Digitalis, Roll The Dice is a duo from Sweden, producers who have worked with The Knife and Fever Ray, but who here, serve up some sort of futuristic retro John Carpenter / Goblin style synthscapes, albeit with their own twist.
The sound is most definitely spacey, and synthy, and soundtracky, throbbing, pulsing, subtly psychedelic, the continuous sci-fi pulse that seems to drive every low budget movie made in the eighties, but wrapped around elements that are distinctly more earthy and organic, a little bit of folk, some broody minimalism, even (and especially) a bit of pop, definitely a strange hybrid, but of the two elements it definitely leans heavily in the synth/space/retro direction. That said, these guys cover a lot of ground, slipping from full on Goblin pulse, all haunting and minor key, to moody poppy playfulness, to long drifts of shimmering spaced out ambience and even extended moments of almost Basic Channel-like deep dub minimalism, all of those held together by the presence, either subtle or pronounced, of that relentless, pulsing sci-fi synth line.
The flipside finds RTD getting all blissed out and Pop Ambient, washed out, shimmery, sun dappled and glimmery, crystalline melodies, and barely there buried soft focus rhythms, before closing the record with what sounds like the music behind the credits from some super obscure, eighties, straight to video thriller, slow and spacious and smoldering, ominous and a bit creepy, but still spacey and synthy.
Anyone into recent records from Umberto, D.A., Anima Morte, Somnam, Pulse Emitter, Steve Moore, as well as yeah, of course, the aforementioned Goblin, Zombi and John Carpenter, would do well to check this out too.
SOLD OUT AT THE LABEL, super limited, not sure how long these will be around.
Rollerball scares up all sorts of psychologically charged demons within their cabaret theatrics, not unlike the atmospheres that saturate the works of Barry Adamson and to a lesser extent Tom Waits and Nick Cave (due to the fact that Rollerball's vocal duets / croons are engaging, but not as engrossingly powerful as either Waits or Cave, but the accompaniments remain similar). The slow patter of brushed drums, a minor chord on a piano, and melody lines from clarinet, accordion, and trumpet fix a darkened mood upon their jazz-decay creakiness. Occasionally, Rollerball dissolves the structures into epic free-jazz spaciousness that recalls their Portland comrades Jackie-O Motherfucker. "Long Walk For Ice Cream" collects the "Sam Donaldson" 7" single and the "Zapatos" 10" previously released through Cochon as well as four new tracks.
As much as we'd prefer not to, we're sure some of you would appreciate if we started this review with one of those AQ alerts. Goes something like: BORIS ALERT!!!! BORIS ALERT!!!! NEW ON INOXIA!!!! BORIS RELATED NEW RELEASE!!!! Okay, so now all you Boris obsessive can skip right to the buy button and move on, you're probably gonna want this, cuz A. it's on Inoxia, and B. it's produced by Atsuo from Boris! Oh, and let's not forget C. IT'S LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
For the rest of you, who need more than a loose Boris connection, this is in fact a pretty awesome slab of drifting droning acid psych. No huge pounding sludge, or blown out fuzz rock, most of the tracks on Pinhole meander aimlessly, wandering from fluttery folks, to ambient drift, and back again, with the occasional squall of distorted buzz.
The record opens with a thick wash of blurred guitar, dense and swirling, groaning waves of distortion flecked with streaks of feedback, while beneath lurks a playful little melody, gently swaying peacefully beneath the sonic turbulence. Then suddenly, the record shifts gears, and we're floating weightless through some sun dappled glade, lilting detuned guitars unfurl gentle melodies all wistful and abstract, WAY off in the background some tape hiss and crumbling distortion. It's very spare and lo-fi, wreathed in sparkling solar flares and soft focus reverb, sort of like a druggy mix of Jandek, Loren Connors and the Durutti Column. Elsewhere reverbed guitars sway suspended in clouds subtle delay, nursery rhyme melodies and hummed / mumbled vocals draped over a shimmery crystalline latticework of delicate drifts of sound, super simple and unobtrusive percussion as well as barely audible field recordings. Now and again, the band launches into some super aggressive strumming, kicking up dense clouds of high end skree and blown out free noise fuzz, but even at their noisiest, Rollo are never far away from settling back down into another long stretch of soft psychfolk shimmer. Good stuff for sure. Not necessarily sonically something Boris fans will automatically love, although some of this did remind us of Boris at their dreamiest and most abstract, but fans of Japanese stuff like L, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Masaki Batoh, Eddie Marcon and the like will be in heaven.
Roman Bathhouse is one Carl DiSalvo, an SF experimental sound artist recently relocated to Pittsburgh (PA or CA, I don't know...). Lots of steamboat style horns, low rumbles and vinyl crackle. Sort of a lo-fi small scale amateur version of Philip Jeck. Sort of. On Hactivist, run by the forward thinking folks behind Creation Is Crucifixion.
This here is a noise record. No way to sugar coat it. There are bits and parts that are less than noisy, some subtle sonics and strange ambience, but ultimately, to dig this, you need a taste for NOISE.
Roman Torment is a blast of face melting ear shredding rooooaaarr. A dense smear of sonic chaos, grinding shrieking howling, thick crumbling masses of sound, blinding streaks of feedback, bursts of speaker shredding grit. Intense and thick and L O U D.
Feed The Dragon, are all about the noise too, but they creep up on it slowly, starting out with some minimal glitch and stutter, a swirling, scraping ambience, lots of low end and distant sonic gristle, before gradually building into a thick undulating swell of electronic buzz and rumbling sonic grind, sheets of skree draped over throbbing pulses of crunch and grind, that gets so thick and heavy near the end, it almost begins to resemble something distinctly metallic, like Earth or SUNNO))), but of course way noisier...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Pressed on super thick vinyl. with cool and creepy paste on art.
