Brand new disc of free drone weirdness from long time aQ fave Seht, aka Stephen Clover, whose discs never disappoint, whether he's crafting long form minimal dronemusic, or kicking up a clattery freerock buzz, Dead Bees is a little of both, two looooong tracks, the first a super minimal dronejam of deep soft shimmers and warm warbly whirs, that begins soft but gradually gains momentum, and along with that momentum, layers of gradually thickening whir, what begins as a barely there whisper quickly transforms into a heaving slab of rumbling static heaviness, eventually introducing some unlikely melody to the mix, the sound suddenly almost orchestral, a layer of horn like drone draped over the undulating lowend backdrop, the grit and buzz and fuzz slowly sloughing off eventually leaving a smooth stretch of soft soft shimmer.
The second track, another long one, is much more active, beginning with some random clatter, and slowly transforming into a weird pulsing circusy abstract pulse, with strange haunting melodies, almost like Chain Reaction via a New Zealand 4-track, soon the playful pulse is enveloped in a cloud of hiss, creating a haunting gauzy throbbing drift that is both mesmerizing and mysteriously unclassifiable. And once again, the hiss dissipates, leaving a warm whirling warble that slowly settles into a dark, dreamlike drift.
Dronemusic indeed. Seht is one Steven Clover, who has released a handful of limited lathe cuts under different names. On 'Dronemusic' Clover crafts deep, rich sonorous drone music, seemingly simple but lush with harmonic overtones. As the record
Latest cd-r from NZ sound sculptor Stephen Clover otherwise known as Seht. Three tracks, nearly an hour of soft sonic sweetness, warm beds of barely there glitch and click underpin thick rich billowy clouds of cotton candy like organ drones, airy and slowly shifting and overlapping, melodies ghostlike and nearly transparent. Occasionally the organ drifts off leaving a strange hissing minimal fuzz, dense and rife with subtle rhythm and not quite melodies, like some muted guitar riff pulled apart and spread out into a delicate gauze. Or like an alien insect buzzing out some simple message, expressing itself in subtle shades of grey. The final half hour track begins as soft swell of keening high end trill before dispensing with the subtle shadings altogether, allowing the organ to step forward and offer up huge thick swirls of sound, still peppered with subtle glitches and unlikely hiccups and jumpcuts, this is like some epic Charlemagne Palestine jam, but played through a PA with faulty wiring, a stuttery soundscape of warm organ melody and implied rhythmic interference. So cool.
This is a sort-of-reinterpretation of the amazing 'Dronemusic' cd-r released on a while back on Celebrate Psi Phenomena. This is very minimal with lots of incidental clatter and totally random noise. Sounds a bit like some guy cleaning/re-arranging his kitchen, with lots of thumps and bumps and clicks and even some bird calls(!). After about 10 minutes, the drones finally make their presence known. Joined gradually by warbly guitars and wisos of melodies. But almost as soon as they're there, they diappear again. Then it's back to the ambient clatter, discussions, room sound. A reverby piano or buzzing harpsichord surface occasionally, but it always seems to return to our house cleaning, room tidying protagonist. Very strange...
Latest release from NZ free drone sound sculptor Seht, aka Stephen Clover. A single 34 minute track,
a lengthy soundscape of slow burn decay and abstract shimmer. The first 17 minutes are an ultra minimal crawl, through a bleak landscape of barely audible keyboard sputter and amp buzz. Distant grinding gears of some murky machine, drifting strands of simple guitar strum floating to and fro, before everything coalesces into a thick twisting snarl of corrosive drone and reverberating rumble before drifting back into another extended tranquil drift. Haunting and quite gorgeous.
A hand decorated cd-r packaged with a cool textured paper sleeve with iridescent designs on one side, and a full color insert. And as with lots of things like this, it's also unfortunately criminally limited. How limited?
LIMITED TO 86 COPIES!!! We got a handful. Once those are gone, we won't be able to get more...
One of three new 3" cd-r releases on the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis ... Don't! label, each super limited, and housed in cool hand made packaging.
Of all the noisemakers from New Zealand and Australia, Seht, aka Stephen Clover, is by far the dreamiest and droniest and -least- noisy. Which might be why he holds such a special place in our hearts. And ears. Every Seht disc is a gloriously blissed out tranquil exploration of some deep dark ambient wonderland. There's nothing harsh or heavy, caustic or corrosive, instead, listening to Seht is like drifting through space, or floating a hundred feet below the surface of some clear blue sea. Everything shimmers and sparkles, flows and swirls, the sounds are soft and delicate, distant and dreamy, ethereal and indistinct. Soft focus and beautifully blurry. And this little three inch is no different. Gorgeous and serene. This disc definitely feels like a dark drift along the ocean floor, due to the haunting sonar-like pulse that permeates the whole track, it's not at all distracting though, just the contrary, very hypnotic and soothing, an organic, super minimal pulse, a barely there framework for the slow shifting liquid drones.
AS ALWAYS, ULTRA SUPER LIMITED!! We only got about 30, and probably won't be able to get more...
Packaged in thick textured paper black mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
Another amazing sonic document from one of our favorite sound makers, NZ outfit Seht, aka dronelord Stephen Clover. The Green Morning picks up right where the recently reviewed Federacy Boot left off. If anything it's even darker and dreamier, which is quite a task considering how much we dug the last one. Opening the proceedings is a gorgeously lugubrious soundscape of slow subterranean rumbles, a glacial low end shimmer, that gradually begins to allow dreamy song fragments to surface, just barely breaking the surface, before slowly going under again, a droning dreamlike voyage across a thick fuzzy sonic sea. In fact the first three tracks here all sort of follow the same template: a lengthy barely shifting slab of densely layered deep dark drones, while beneath all sorts of random melodic fragments and sonic debris drift and bob. Almost like a thirty minute three part epic. The second to last track is less droney as it is dreamy, the bulk of the song is a murky melody, smeared into a shape so indistinct it almost does become a drone, but somehow hovers just this side, very underwater sounding, almost like a slowed down Oval, with a strange slow motion rhythm picked out by a sporadic glitchy crunch, like footsteps on gravel. The final track is a 20 minute epic, that returns to the sonic theme of the opening trilogy, but manages to go even deeper and slower and more abstract, delivering a delicate drone that barely shifts, just sort of pulses gently, the whole thing wrapped in a barely there layer of sparkling static.
Seht are a modern New Zealand outfit carrying on the tradition of what was once referred to as NZ noise. A good simplified scene summary perhaps, but not all that accurate. In the eighties and nineties, there was an explosion of small labels and loads of bands in New Zealand, all exploring sound in similarly unique ways, but all inhabiting their own unique sonic space. From the clattery free noise of the Dead C and Gate, to the jangle pop of almost every Flying Nun band, to the avant minimalism of groups like Omit and A Handful Of Dust. And the cool thing about the scene, was that the pop bands incorporated occasional swaths of noise and bursts of chaos, and the 'noise' bands were not above introducing a bit of poppiness here and there. Seht fall somewhere in the middle of all those groups, not really crafting songs as much as 'pieces' or maybe more accurately assemblages of sounds, but in doing so, using traditional instruments often guitars, In fact the steel string acoustic guitar is sort of a them running throughout the whole record, picking out simple melodies, while beneath, drones rumble and whir, snippets of conversations surface, as do occasional bursts of static and noise. Collages of found sounds become hypnotic drones, running water becomes a tranquil stretch of dreamy ambience, samples of laughter become a dada-ist sound poem, some strange percussive melody played on a buzzing stringed instrument becomes a lost snippet of unlikely 'world' music, and creaking industrial clatter becomes a strangely tribal exploration of sound and space. NZ noise indeed!
AQ fave Seht (aka Stephen Clover, who is all over this week's list, also appearing as part of The Stumps) teams up with East Coast sound maker Howard Stelzer for an intercontinental drone drift long distance relationship, and the results are absolutely divine. Both are masters of crumbling decayed ambience and slow shifting organic drones, both of which are present and accounted for on Exactly What You Lost. Field recordings, old tape loops, old tape recorders, all contribute to the gorgeously frayed soundscapes. Thick warm swells shimmer and slowly expand, the louder they get, the more they seem to crumble and dissipate, until the tones becomes staticky blasts of garbled sonic interference. Haunting faded melodies drift through dense clouds of abstract whir, all wreathed in a druggy haze, bits of tape manipulated into strange rhythms and textures, all leading up to the nearly half hour long final track, the darkest and heaviest on the record, a slow drift through a blissed out fuzz drenched universe, drifting in a slow orbit around both the Earth and the SUNNO))), floating on thick swells of downtuned thrum, a crumbling mass of glacial guitar, ominous, foreboding, but also strangely pretty, eventually emerging into a more serene soundworld of murky shimmer, oscillating overtones and strange footstep-like percussion. Mysterious, and quite cool!
That's Bay Area avant-garde icon Michael Gendreau working with a semi-anonymous Seitz who's asked to keep things hush-hush about his/her full identity. This collaboration is one that stems from Gendreau's long-standing use of the turntable as musical instrument. Back in the late '80s, Gendreau (in his project Crawling With Tarts) was composing turntable operas of surface noise and snippets of recontextualized sounds from the records themselves, very much akin to those Christian Marclay recordings from the same time period. By the turn of the millennium, Gendreau had honed his craft as an acoustician (scientifically analyzing the impact of environmental / industrial sound on a particular architectural / workplace system), and he applied those tools to composition, amplifying the tiniest of frequencies from a turntable motor, or the squeaks from a loose belt, or the haptic rumble from the needle scraping against inner label on the record itself. The clarity he was able to reproduce was such that these commonplace sounds became foreign and at times malignant. Here on the Seitz Versus Gendreau record, the turntable is is one of the sources, along with a distorted toy piano whose melodies come into the mix with atonal chops on the opener "Chorus After Rains." The two launch into a gnarled New Blockaders grunt of acoustic scapings and scabrous noise on the following track "Things Lost That Will Never Be Found", that dissolves into a crumbling low-frequency drone. The 18 minute "Trains Will Not Stop" enjoys an apt subtitle "Grand Surface Noise Opera Nr. 9" with a gradual unfurling of crackle and hiss joined by deep subharmonic hums that thrum ominously outside the relative calm of the surface noise / campfire mimesis. A great piece of sound art that lands on the more obtuse sonic sides of Philip Jeck, Janek Schaefer, and the aforementioned Christian Marclay. Limited to a stupidly low number of just 90 copies.
Epic crushing metallic industrial heaviness, the kind of thing we thought they just didn't make anymore, but this is total Swans / Godflesh / Cop Shoot Cop worship, pounding metallic percussion, soundscapes of whirring drills, blown out low slung bass, howled distorted vox, the whole thing so repetitive and mantric, thick slabs of distorted rumble wrapped around tons of damaged electronics, bleating horns buried beneath reverb drenched beats, some songs are full on walls of twisted electronic crunch, others are brooding, droning skeletal sprawls, laid over deep blurred basslines, and tribal rhythms, some are dense whorls of deeeeeep sinister black ambience, all darkly drifting layers, and distant bits of clang and shimmer. For a few moments here and there, the sound gets downright poppy, like some sort of washed out post industrial deathrock, but even then, it's shot through with a seriously menacing sonic undercurrent that seeps into every beat, and every note. Filthy, crusty, heavy, haunting, crushing and brutal, the perfect mix of old school industrial pound, and more modern bleak blackness. Fucking fierce and frightening, grim and punishing, and we're digging it like crazy.
There's a bunch of new tapes on this week's list from Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin, this one the first we've heard from Selaroda, who deliver three tracks of ominous drones, and buried rhythms, a sort of moonlit kosmische, all swirling synths and muted pulsations, the first track is mostly chordal smears and shimmery drift, with a brief rhythmic intrusion, being the only thing keeping it from pure aural blissout. The second track is a brief bit of staticky swirl, which quickly builds from white noise squall, to slow-mo space-kraut slowcore, all dreamy, prismatic thrum, and skeletal programed beats, wreathed in soft streaks of Michael Rother like guitars, before bleeding right into the epic closer, which begins like some bedroom Kraftwerk, all pulsing rhythms, and time lapse electronics, deep melodic ripples, and streaks of arpeggiated synth shimmer, a hazy, futuristic new age drift, that soon ditches the drums, letting the sounds billow outwards, weightless and ephemeral, but underpinned with a slightly sinister vibe, due in no small part, to the roiling sea of electronics, and the darkly blossoming drones, slowly surfacing, that build to a rumbling climax, only to collapse into another field of dubbed out rhythms, and glitchy electronic static, which in turn, blossoms into a gorgeously epic bliss-scape, the sound of sunrises and glimmering stars, of warm blue skies and deep black space, all blurred into one long swath of rich, lush, lustrous dronemusic.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! And packaged in full color, two sided, embossed J-cards.
It's like Christmas around here (we know, it is ACTUALLY like Christmas around here right now), whenever we get a new batch of tapes from Auris Apothecary, not only is it bound to sonically all over the map, without fail the packaging is totally stellar, often high (or low) concept, meticulously hand assembled, often involving organic matter, or broken glass, or sponges, or scrolls, or who knows what else. Needless to say, every AA release is special, and is often as much a work of sonic art, as it is a piece of music.
This one might be the most extravagantly packaged of the new batch, but more on that in a second, first the music. A strange detuned psychedelic folk exploration of opium abuse and the descent into addiction from this mysterious Swede, all spidery steel string guitar buzz and muted lumbering percussion, echoey and buzzy and abstract, darkly hypnotic, a sort of late night creep, very dark and ritualistic, haunting and harrowing, the sound seem to be unravelling before your ears, the notes brittle one second, warm and languid the next, the production reverby and lo-fi, occasionally building to a bit of noisy soft chaos, only to return to woozy lumber, it some ways this reminds us of the late great Reeks And The Wrecks, with it's warped blues stumble, but there also seems to be a weirdly blackened buzz, and a depressive futility to the sounds that hints at some doom / black metal influences, maybe more in mood than in sound, but the result is pretty fantastically dark and dreamily depressive.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Housed in a super swank black spray-painted intricately folded cardboard box with metallic gold printing. Inside a printed metallic gold sticker, and a ziplock baggy affixed to the inside of the box, with a gold and black sticker, each bag containing poppy seeds, the tapes printed in gold ink. Each box hand-numbered in gold ink.
"Kenotaphion" is one of the most unusual collections of archival recordings to pass through the Aquarius doors, as British artist Jonty Semper has culled through the archives at BBC, British Movietone, and ITN Reuters for recordings of the 2 minutes of
Semper was not content to simply collect the solemn silences bracketed by the chiming of Big Ben and the crack of the rifles, he interspersed them with snippets of narration uttered by the BBC commentators, often poetic, yet certainly sentimental thoughts spoken in the finest of Queen's English. Disc one features the oldest recordings (1929 - 1965) and ripples with tons of surface noise, yet as the microphone technology improved through the later recordings (1967 - 2000) the quiet din of London trying to be silent makes itself known. A strangely alluring record.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Definitely the 'summer album' for the stellar monthly series of minimalist electronica counting down to the year 2000. Bubbling pulses from banks of little black boxes build sounds that move from pretty drones into dense if rather sedate electronic dub. Senking's twenty minutes share a lot of the same tonalities and structures as Aphex Twin's monumental Selected Ambient Works Volume 2.
A sort of companion piece to Alva Noto's Xerrox, reviewed a few lists back, both in design and presentation, as well as sound and scope. In a past review of an older Senking record, we commented that Senking mainman�Jens Massel was restoring our faith in electronic music, and if we had lost faith since then, List would surely do the trick to bring us back into the fold.�
Malevolent and dark, from the first few seconds, it's like diving headlong into some black pool, floating through some Argento style horrific tableau, all grinding buzzing synths, and ominous low end swells, the various elements crackling and bathed in hiss, before being joined by a super minimal beat, mostly click and thump, and some haunting disembodied vocals. If we didn't know better we would think this was actually from some film, as it is, it sure as heck should be. Ultra creepy and gorgeously abject. The second track is more of the same, suffocating sonic darkness, this time with a bit more shimmer, and the briefest flares of melody amidst the corrosive rumbling.�
A few of the other tracks border on the danceable, some strange skeletal offshoot of IDM, bits of shuffle and skitter, but all stretched way out until the beats sound like pebbles tossed into a still black lake. Even then, the beats are occasionally swallowed up by huge swells of low end, or buzzing swaths of slithering synths.
Cinematic and dark, throbbing and mysterious, creepy as all get out, dance-y too, but only if you have a dancefloor in your secret lab, painted black, watched over by an army of cyborgs whose various creaks and ticks are what is creating this strange alien haunted house minimal techno. So good.�
The cd comes packaged in another striking and strange oversized Raster-Noton package, a multiple panel fold out sleeve, with die cuts holding the disc in place.
If the archetypal Raster-Noton style of pixel-point rhythms and clinical data-streams represent "Ping", then Senking's far more sensual approach here to the click-n-groove would indeed be "Pong". It's the deeper, weightier side of the equation, but undeniably linked to that equation. The Cologne based sound engineer Jens Massel is more interested in a thickened low-end with rumbling basslines more indebted to a slowmotion techstep cruise or more of a Demdike Stare / Ghost Box electro-haunt than the post-techno shuffle ingrained in most every Raster-Noton artist's DNA. The Raster sounds of sonar blip echo, small rhythmic points, and slashing post-acid squelches do surface as the skeletal grid of rhythm guiding the throbbing bassbin rattle, yet Massel is not averse to coupling these sounds with moody, almost noirish melodic phrases for piano, Rhodes organ, and even some vibraphone. Pong is quite an evocative downtempo record that effectively comes across as something like a Pole / Bohren & Der Club Of Gore collaboration!
The second disc is a CD-ROM with a re-engineered version of the old-school Atari game Pong as a 3-D game, that looks and feels a lot like another old-school Atari video game Tempest. We haven't played around that much with it, but at least it looks really cool!
Yet another installment in Raster-Noton's similarly sleeved (simple black and silver diecut digipaks, quite nice) and sonically consistent Raster.Post series. Voulme four is the work of Senking and is another beauty (like the Komet elsewhere on this list), helping restore our faith in modern electronica, a genre that has been getting less and less fascinating with every compilation and same-sounding record. Unlike the warm dreaminess of the Komet, this is a much colder beast altogether, more ghostly and spare, chilly and skeletal, with skittery rhythms, glitching and shuffling across an epic expanse of blackness, and rhythmic pulses and ribcage-rattling swells of bass throb supporting almost-melodies that are barely there. Think a more clinical, more abstract, less dub-obsessed Pole, and you start to get the idea. Hard to say why this is so pleasing, but it really is. Quite possibly my favorite electronica record of the year!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Raster's conceptualism of electronic, almost utopian purity has some interesting theoretical leanings, but the cold minimalism of Raster/Noton succeeds more often than not through the novelty of subtle melodies and interesting rhythmic patterns. While most of the critical acclaim for Raster / Noton is deserved, they are undoubtably purveyors of The New; and Senking's "Trial" is no different.
With techno and dub each getting the digital deconstruction in the respective work of Thomas Brinkmann and Pole, Senking's work has been emerging as the reductivist reclamation of electro, sounding much like a clinical atomization of Andrea Parker or Depth Charge. Senking's deep grooves of thudding sub-bass plod boldly through the Raster / Noton signature sound of skittering digital errata. Certainly recommended to the already converted... and definitely a good start for any one interested in such things.
Sensorband - a trio comprised of Zbigniew Karkoski, Edwin van der Heide, and Atau Tanaka - is interested in the incorporation of interactive technologies within a context of experimental electronic music. While the hardware incorpates neural interfaces (Tanaka's BioMuse translates the electric signals of the body into digital data) and physical interfacing (Karkowski and van der Heide have built instruments that alter pitch based on proximity and distance in any given space), the net result is an album of slowly phase shifting pure tonalities "considered the missing point between The Hafler Trio, Ryoji Ikeda, and no-techno Pan Sonic."
For "Zero Point," San Francisco ambient technician Seofon has remixed (um, excuse me his term is "recycled") Ambient Temple of Imagination's "Mystery School" and has brought in the talents of Vidna Obmana, Steve Roach, Stephen Kent, Robert Rich, Not Breathing, and Thermal (whew!). With the best intentions of New Age harmony and sonic accomodation, "Zero Point" has become a
First vinyl release from At War With False Noise and it's a doozy.
The A side is a band called Seppuku, who not long ago sounded completely different and were called Testsuo! Ring any bells? No matter, what we've got here are two songs, the first a caustic slab of Eyehategod, caveman Sabbath style sludge doom, classic Sabbath riffs melted down into something much more raw and viscous, the vocals a feral howl, practice space drums that plod along bravely amidst the doomic din, all wrapped up in a warm swirling cloud of downtuned buzz and lurching drone. The second track is way more spare and space-y, some sort of tripped out abstract krautjam, the drums skittering along in wide open expanses of whir and rumble, riffs drifting in clouds of glittering FX, cookie monster vox waaaay off in the distance, a stumbling druggy meander that eventually careens into a chaotic free psych blow out. Sounds like a lo-fi noise rock version of Bardo Pond or Comets On Fire, but after WAY more pot and too much Hawkwind. Wait. There's no such thing as too much Hawkwind. Awesome.
The flipside is by Mutant Ape, and sounds a lot like you accidentally set the needle down directly on the label instead of on the wax. A horrifying white noise crush, electronics grind and squeal, feedback shrieks and all sorts of blown out sounds crumble and collapse only to be set afire and shoved through your melding speakers. This is indeed NOISE, and is truly for those partial to such things, or with ears of steel. And of course, it's a good aural palate cleanser, flip it over between spins of the Seppuku side, blow out all the doomy riffs, so you can begin again�
LIMITED TO 220 COPIES. Oversized gatefold sleeves, with laser printed full color paste on artwork, and a photocopied insert.
Solo album (and we mean SOLO), from the bassist for eccentric Spanish doomlords Orthodox. Avant-garde and experimental, this disc consists of improvised soundscapes of creaky string screech and droning, bowing rumble on acoustic double bass. It's all very dark and atmospheric, difficult listening at first, but then it gets kind of mesmeric, Serrato layering his bass textures into constructs of claustrophobic density. The penultimate track "Las Dos Caidas De Cuervo" adds horns and drums (all ALSO played by Serrato via the magic of overdubbing), for more of an overt free jazz (or "death jazz"?) approach.
Comes with liner notes from Serrato, commenting on each track with regards to this album's overarching "story" (a mythic concept about an unborn crow...) was well as citing specific musical inspirations including raw early '90s black metal, Hindemith, Xenakis, Ligeti, Black Sabbath, and fellow improvising bassist Simon H. Fell.
Orthodox fans looking for doom metal won't really find any here, not that it's not "doomy" in other ways. But if you like the more un-orthodox extremes of what Orthodox does, then check it out. By the way, Serrato also plays in the isolationist duo Jacob, whose disc on Utech we reviewed last year.
Latest from this mysterious 'alien black metal' duo whose sound definitely leans way more toward the alien than the black metal. We went pretty nuts for their Stratospheric Passenger record, a dizzying assemblage of psychedelic drones and outerspace black buzz, of dark drone metal and abstract otherworldly ambience. That record still ranks up there as one of our favorite slabs of outsider black metal weirdness, and then recently we got to see them play on THE BUS here in town, transforming an old city bus, parked under a highway overpass, into some sort of smoke filled, ear drum destroying, trance inducing sonic starship.
So here's their latest batch of strange sounds, confusingly packaged in an eye popping almost cartoonish, full color geometric cover, sealed shut with a similarly printed little band-aid style sticker. But inside, it's the same twisted blackened psychedelia we were hoping for. Spidery minor key guitars, field recordings, raspy metallic drones, harsh vokills way off in the distance. Simultaneously meditative and hypnotic, harsh and caustic, abstract and blackened, a sort of post rock black metal drift, warped and washed out and weirdly not all that black metal at all. But that's just the first track. From there on out it's a series of strange soundscapes, analog electronics, treated textural drones, creaks and thrums and moans, wreathed in strange FX and smeared into abstract sounds and shapes, everything bleary and blurry and indistinct, haunting and ghostlike, snippets of samples(?) surfacing occasionally amidst the layered drifts of chordal thrum and soft black buzz. Slow motion melodies unfurl over clouds of shortwave static, ethereal billows of muted shimmer, and delicately swirling textures, malfunctioning machinery, and all sorts of other slowly decaying sonic ephemera, suspended in some sort of rusted out, gauzy dreamworld, bleak and beautiful, creepy and claustrophobic.
LIMITED TO 80 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered.
Another mysterious transmission from this alien black metal duo, whose black metal seems to get more and more alien with every release. This time around, the whole A side seems to recast SS's black metal as something much more abstract and indistinct, ultra lo-fi and darkly chaotic, a sprawl of murky free form drift, thick clouds of squiggly FX and gristly buzz, buried pulsing rhythms, heavily effected vokills, the vibe more black-drone-kosmische than black metal, the sound brittle and washed out, the opening track flowing directly into the follow up, which arranges the same ingredients but adds a bit more black buzz, to what sounds like blast beats, although they too are buried deep in the sonic murk, here too, everything blurred into a black psychedelic swirl.
The flipside cranks up the fidelity a bit unleashing a wave of thick droned out guitar buzz, laced with space-y squiggles, the sounds smeared into a heaving dronescape, until a buried rhythm surfaces, eventually transforming the sound into something more black metal, but still washed out to the point that it's almost ambient, before finally shedding all the blackness and all the buzz, leaving just a shadowy stretch of brooding kosmische synth swirl.
Pressed on super cool black smoke swirled clear vinyl!
NOW ON VINYL!!!
Finally, another dark missive from this 'alien black metal duo', long time aQ faves Servile Sect, whose ritualist spacepsych dronescapes crackle with black energy, occasionally erupting into full on metallic blackness, but just as often slowly drifting and expanding into sprawling stretches of blurred low end mesmer, laced with chant like vocals and buried bits of melody, mutant otherworldly landscapes of hushed ominous drift and muted psychedelic black ragas.
On past records, the black metal element seemed almost like an afterthought, the records way heavier on the drone and drift, but on Realms Of The Queen, right out of the gate, a blasting lo-fi drum machine rhythm sets the scene, while thick sheets of coruscating guitars and harsh shrieked vokills are laid over the top, but even then, the sound is not so much fierce and grim and sort of hazy and blackly psychedelic, like a black metal blurred into some sort of trancelike black raga, the guitars lush and layered, everything cloaked in a gauze of murky muted swirl.
But soon after, the band dial back the buzz, leaving just the black, a crunchy, distorted almost Wolf Eyesian industrial dirgescape, all mechanical creaks and staticky hiss, but underneath, a mournful piano picks out a barely there lament, a swell of black buzz rises up from the murk, sheets of hiss, like super distorted vocals drift in, the result a haunting funereal industrial doom, that again is not so much heavy and crushing, and moody and atmospheric.
The rest of the record follows a similar pattern, creating lush ritualistic landscapes of distant buzzing drones, SUNNO)))-like avalanches of crumbling distortion, hazy crystalline streaks of almost new age sounding drift, synthy soundtracky tranceouts that sound a little like Zombi or Majeure being played at 16rpm and being broadcast from speakers submerged in brackish water at the bottom of some giant cavern, there are even occasional vocals, deep dramatic croons, way down in the mix, adding a gorgeous dark pop element to certain tracks.
Thick corrosive dins collide with shoegaze-y fuzz, murky avant blackness drifts into hushed minimal shimmer, gnarled black riffage gets tangled up into epic swirling blacknoise squalls, Sunroof!-like ur-drones settle into droned out blackness, culminating in the epic closer, "Universe And Self, Sender And Receiver", which sounds like a prettier fuzzier Wold, noisy and dense and black as pitch, but shot through with subtle melody, with rich layered textures, shifting constantly, a blurred murk that finally explodes into a surprisingly lush and lustrous dreampsych shoegaze softblack blowout that sounds almost like some sort of black metal dreampop, fuzzy and washed out, but still frenetic and fierce. So fucking incredible.
From the same label that brought us the amazing Gog records, Sounds Of Battle And Souvenir Collecting, comes this bizarre, and hauntingly beautiful slab of alien black metal. Not sure what else to call it, it's definitely black metal, but it's weirdly blissy and electronic sounding, more like Alcest or Amesoeurs than old school grimnity, but even then, it's still weirder, like it must have been played by robots or insects, or some massive black metal machine assembled beneath the surface of some mysterious moon. You can almost picture some mechanical monstrosity, pieces of human flesh, various organs, somehow built into the machine's inner workings, everything grinding and sparking all in a Herculean effort to produce this glorious droning buzzing blackness. A cloud of black buzz that will eventually drift through space and time swallowing any planets in its path, and extinguishing all life it encounters. Heck, even the cover of the record is the view from some sort of alien lander, looking out and the cold dead ground of some red planet, as if any minute some huge horrible black beast will lurch into view over the horizon, dashing all of our ideas about said planet being uninhabited.
The sound of Servile Sect is epic, and majestic, the guitars glistening sheets of sound, the surface of that sound peppered with bits of electronic shimmer, causing the long drawn out riffery to reflect and refract, tiny little sonic events occurring every second, the surface alive and constantly squirming and changing color, but viewed from afar, it's simply a blown out undulating buzz. Those guitars are digitized and processed, spread into thick smears of warm glowing whir, the riffs barely discernible beneath the constant roar of Servile Sect's sonic swirl
The vocals add just more buzz to the mix, howling and wailing, but stretched into streaks of sonic violence, and drums, assuming there are any, are buried, festering beneath layer after layer of crushing guitar fuzz, emitting noxious rhythms that don't so much blast or pound as they do explode into tiny squalls of still more buzz.
Occasionally, the buzz abates, leaving the guitar to sway lazily, the notes ringing out, the guitars lurking in the distance, but it's never long before the lilting melody is engulfed by a colossal buzzing roar, and the band locks into another extended psychfuzzblackdrone.
Another out of left field immediate AQ black bliss classic.
Fans of the new wave of droned out dreamy metal, black and otherwise: Nadja, Angelic Process, Ameseours, Alcest, etc. will dig this, as will dronelords who like their drones heavy and loud and yeah, a bit metallic...
The latest transmission from this alien psychedelic black metal duo, and when we first got this in, we were convinced we had already reviewed this before. And then realized that it was in fact, a vinyl reissue of the long out of print cassette that was originally released on Handmade Birds as a companion to Servile Sect's Trvth record, but it was something else, something more, and then it hit us, the new cover art was what was so similar, and then we realized, it's actually the EXACT same painting as the cover of the Lumerians' Transmallinia record. Doh! What can you do? It's obvious why both bands picked it, cuz it's a seriously bad ass painting by famous outsider artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, all cosmic and swirled greens and yellows, and in some weird way, it suits both bands. In the case of Servile Sect, it definitely taps into their weird alien vibe, and their subtle psychedelic undertones, both of which are present throughout Surrender. Here's what we had to say about the cassette version when we first reviewed it earlier this year:
Released as a companion to the group's recent Trvth record, Svrrender acts perfectly as an extension of Trvth, building on the band's sprawling blackened psychedelia and scorched blackbuzz drones. The record opens with sheets of thick buzzing synths, and swirling electronics, all over strange murky pulses, and laced with strange disembodied voices, before launching into a full bore blast of traditional sounding black metal fury, huge thick squalls of barbed riffage, programmed beats blasting wildly through the murk, the vocals a sick, raspy demonic croak, a blur of chaotic blackness, that manages to meld traditional BM tropes to something much more mysterious and experimental, the group infusing the seemingly traditional sound with all manner of unlikely texture and subtle warped FX. Definitely grim enough for unadventurous metalheads, but as this is Servile Sect, the sound soon shifts to something much more spacey and droned out, total psychedelic cosmic drift, thick undulating swells of crumbling rumbles and sci-fi shimmer, wrapped around chantlike vox and smeared layers and textures, and over the course of the five songs on the A side, the sound veers from that droned out celestial thrum to furious churning black metal blasts and back again, the whole side a dizzying twisted black/drone juggernaut.
The flipside is just as heavy, but in a completely different manner, taking the band's knack from blackened soundscaping, and applying it to a blurred, lumbering ultradoom, sort of SUNNO))) like in its slo-mo glacial heft, but the band's grim psychedelic dirgery somehow manages to take that sound and push it even further, the guitars grinding (or are they synths) and rumbling, streaks of spacey FX and glitched out electronics, not to mention heavily effected vox, swirl above whorls of feedback, and smeared synths, all anchored by a deathmarch ultradoom pound, a caveman creep wreathed in thick downtuned rumble and thrum, super hypnotic and heavy, but also caustic and abject and fucking massive sounding, not to mention somehow totally spacey and psychedelic. Easily some of the best stuff we've heard from these guys.
And like the tape version, this vinyl is also limited to so grab one quick before they're gone!
How does he do it? R. Loren of Pyramids, Sailors With Wax Wings and White Moth launched his new vinyl only label mere months ago, and already has a catalog that puts most labels who have been up and running for years to shame, releases from Blut Aus Nord, Celestiial, His Name Is Alive, Key, Evan Caminiti, Der Blutharsch (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), with forthcoming releases from Black Boned Angel, Blood Of The Black Owl, Circle Of Ouroborus, Human Quena Orchestra, Crooked Necks, Jasper TX, Our Love Will Destroy The World, Lovesliescrushing, Panopticon, Sutekh Hexen, Locrian, White Ring, Tenhornedbeast and TONS more, a mix of reissues and brand new records, and it wouldn't be so bad if everything wasn't so good, but if you're like us, you want them ALL.
Including this, a brand new release from black metal psych drone duo Servile Sect, formerly of Arizona but now split up with one member in Humbolt, the other in NYC, but the distance doesn't seem to have made much of a difference, with TRVTH taking up right where their last full length left off, a sprawling expanse of drugged out blackened psychedelia, programmed rhythms, buzzing lumbering dirges, thick guitars blurred into washed out streaks, harsh vokills that seem to hover wraith like within ever swirling clouds of dark effects and slowed down riffage, the sound shifts from blurred murk, to smoldering black effulgence, from grinding churning crunch to hazy abstract drift, SS's version of black metal less about the blast and buzz, and more about the vibe, the sound, the tone, the texture, the ambience, the mood, the feel, the duo crouched behind their duct tape adorned synths, a holy mountain of gear, hiding these alchemists as they unfurl sprawling soundscapes equal part haunting blackness, and druggy dreamy shimmer, each grim missive a controlled chaos of black hole dopesmoke drift and blackened ritualistic ur-drone buzz.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
If you're anything like us, you've always been fascinated by aliens and outerspace and all that science (fiction?) stuff, X-Files, In Search Of, Star Trek, Cosmos, art, TV, movies, magazines, with every move forward, every discovery, every shuttle launch, every planned mission to Mars, the world comes on step close to becoming what humans once only dreamed of, and wrote about.
One of those epochal science moments, happened in 1977, when we launched a gold record into space, encoded on it were all the various things that make humans human, music, and math, voices, and languages, recordings of heartbeats, whatever scientists could think of that might help an alien species that discovered the record be able to understand and maybe communicate back (assuming they had turntables!).
Similarly, we've always been a bit obsessed with SETI, the Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project, a group who monitors the sky for communications from space, and perhaps from alien beings. In all the time SETI has been active, they have not received a single confirmed alien transmission. Which brings us to the similarly named SETI-X, Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence in Exile program, who supposedly received transmissions, that were believed to REMIXES (!) of those records we sent into space. SETI-X meticulously reconstructed these very sound files here from the various transmissions, bits and fragments, snippets and shards of sound. Scientists were of course skeptical, so SETI-X set out to contact the micronation of Sealand, who were well known for supporting controversial and radical science, might step in to help, but a typo when searching in Google resulted in them contacting Seeland Records, Negativland's record label, and they were of course more than willing... now wait a minute...
So yeah, this incredible 'scientific document' is in fact absolutely and certainly alien remixes, NOT some elaborate and brilliantly conceived and executed musical art hoax from a band who exists to fool the foolish. The sounds begin with a twisted greeting, which then explodes in a grinding squall of distortion only to unveil a warped bit of classical music, and the greeting we originally sent skyward, and from there on out, Scrambles Of Earth is a dizzying assemblage of collaged sound, beats and rhythms, strange loops, disembodied voices, textures and drones and truncated melodies, twisted bits of pop, slowed down classical music, voice in many languages, snippets of various musics, usually wrapped around weird voices and glitched out electronics, lots of hiss and buzz, lush swells, super blown out corrosive crunch, gorgeous hypnotic bits of kosmische electronics, all manner of mysterious production, squalls of competing sounds sweeping back and forth through the stereo field, bits of jazz, blues, calypso, and so many voices, surprisingly, it's a really great listen, flowing like some twisted sonic travelogue, as if this is how the aliens see us, based on how we represented ourselves. Cool and strange. Oh, and absolutely real.
Includes extensive liner notes, with a history of the Seti-X program, a description of each track, lots of photos and diagrams, oh and did we mention that this was released on Negativland's label Seeland, but is not Negativland, but in fact actual alien remixes? Good.
Ambient post rock bands are a dime a dozen these days, and bands who sound more like Godspeed that Godspeed ever did at this point probably outweigh the legions of Neur-Isis clones. But every once in a while, bands manage to remind us just why we fell in love with that sound in the first place. Danish quartet Seven Mile Journey definitely take that sound to whole 'nother level, brooding, epic, cinematic, like post rock without the rock, a sort of abstract filmic chamber music constructed from rock instrumentation.
Slow building, slow burning, so tense and intense, moody and mysterious. The drums are kept to a minimum much of the time, more for propulsion and flourish than actual beat making, but when the drums do come in, they come in hard and then drive the song, while the other instruments weave lush tapestries of sound, minor key swells, lilting overcast melodies, buzzing strings, simple piano parts draped over keening moaning minimal soundscapes, jangly guitars drifting amidst warm whirring lowercase drones, in some cases the songs build to incredible climaxes, like staring into the sun, everything blinding and chaotic and exploding like some sonic supernova, others just smolder, glowing from within, never quite easing up on the built up tension.
Fans of the usual post rock culprits - Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky - will have very likely just found their new favorite bands, although for us, the band are at their best when they mix it up, removing the drums, spreading out the sound into impossibly emotional and moving imaginary soundtracks, ratcheting up the tension, building and building and building. Epic, transcendent and beautifully cathartic.
Latest strange sonic missive from aQ beloved UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one from a multi media artist/musician/filmmaker/soundscaper named Lary Seven, who most of us here had never heard of, but who we discovered is a bit of a NYC fixture, a legendarily cantankerous maker of art, both audial and visual, there's very little in the way of details about the sounds here, other than they were recorded live in 2001 and 2004 in different spaces in New York. The first track is a gorgeous bit of looped minimal buzzing, darkly rhythmic, and strangely hypnotic, quiet enough that you can still hear the conversations in the room, which makes for a strange collage of random voices, textured electronic crunch and stuttering blurred glitch, impossible to determine the sound source, but it does seem to essentially be a collection of whirs and hums, clicks and chirps, very machinelike and robotic, like an ungrounded speaker or an instrument with the cable just barely plugged into the jack, creating a strange array of fluctuating statics, which are then sculpted into something that sounds a bit like a way more lo-fi home brewed Raster-Noton recording.
The second side / set again features the room sound, footsteps, voices, throat clearing, sneezes, various scrapes and shuffles, until finally, Seven introduces some electrical buzz, which then undulates, pulses and thrums, extremely minimal, lushly layered but in the context of a live performance in a big room, almost like a symphony of appliance hum, eventually, Seven does crank up the voltage, creating another framework of skeletal rhythmic skitter, the electronic fields swirling around a dark, throbbing industrial thud, like some sort of weirdo mad scientist primitive house music, being performed with an array of malfunctioning Tesla coils. Again, pretty dang cool, and another weird and wonderful set of sounds to add to the Tapeworm's twisted canon.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, with cover art by Savage Pencil (see more SavX art and various other Tapeworm cover art in the Art Of Worms book, that's reviewed elsewhere on this week's list!).
Anyone familiar with the Vinyl On Demand label is probably well aware of how utterly amazing their releases are, how well researched, gorgeously packaged, and of course how limited and difficult to track down. We managed to get three titles, all of them amazing, we only have one copy of each, and wanted to give some of our mailorder folks a shot and snagging one of these. So a brief description follows, and we only have a single copy so first come first served.
Another collection of rarities unearthed by VoD, all of the earliest recorded material from the legendary Severed Heads, recorded between 1977 and 1981, as well as some unreleased bonus material from 83-85. Five lps, housed in printed hand numbered sleeves, pressed on thick vinyl, all in a gorgeous printed embossed box.
WE HAVE ONLY ONE COPY!!
Steven Severin's Codex Astra odyssey continues with Hours Of Gold. The compositions were inspired by the words of Aleister Crowley. On the inside of this release is inscribed "Ordinary mortality is only for ordinary people." The all too fleeting 18-minute ep features two tracks of sumptuous dronescape. The first offers some light, glistening with an echoey underwater feel. The second stand in marked contrast as it closes in like a creeping, fog-drenched shadowy form. A lingering ghostly roar. Beautiful.
Sadly, rock has always been a bit of a boy's club. Sure most things are, but rock especially. And it only gets worse as you move toward the heavier and darker side of the sonic spectrum, metal, industrial, noise, women are few and far between. That's not to say there aren't woman making serious noise in those realms, there most definitely are, maybe none more fearsome than Sewer Goddess, aka Kristen Rose who traffics in some of the darkest, heaviest, filthiest sludge, blackened doom and abstract industrial we've heard, and whose particular brand of abject blackened noise is on full display here, a collection of various live performances over the years 2009-2010, and finds Rose, backed up by a full band, and engaging in some seriously harrowing soundmaking.
The opening track begins all thick bass buzz and keening feedback, soon industrial percussion emerges, and Rose's echo drenched wail, the bass buzz coalescing into sludgey dirgey riffage, while all around it guitars and samplers and effects fill the blackened sky with all manner of blackly psychedelic noise, the sound lumbers and lurches, before shifting gears in a flurry of horror movie shrieks, becoming more of a blackdrone, all layered hiss and skree and rumble, chaotic but weirdly hypnotic. The second track, the relatively brief "We Ate Their Eyes", introduces more of a groove, albeit just barely, more like a monstrous dirge, rhythmic and grimly propulsive, buried beneath an avalanche of shrieked vox and caustic low end crumble, before giving way to "Mother Agony" that channels Laibach and Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten into a Swans like creep, all hazy and washed out, the sound laced with streaks of high end, of sonar like pings, of gristly crunch and super distorted buzz, there's a definite Wolf Eyes vibe too, and then the vocals swoop back in, hysterical and terrifying, curdled with effects, it manages to be the most mesmerizingly hypnotic track here, while still retaining an unhinged mania.
The epic "Chained To The Cage Of Existence / A Lifeless Dreaming" seems to be the centerpiece here clocking in at 16+ minutes, and again begins as a blackened rumble, all buzz and blur, peppered with strange industrial clanks and clunks, before erupting into another grinding dirge, Rose's haunting deathlike vox adding a serious creep factor, the song a droned out rift, that seems like it might go on like that forever, until it splinters suddenly into a full on drum driven chunk of blackened noise metal crush, lurching, lumbering, shrieks and atonal riffage nestled amidst swells of black buzz and pounding rhythms and lots of feedback, before slipping right back into a sonic death march that continues until the end of the track, loping and minimal, laced with some cool metallic melodies, again slathered in feedback, and Rose's vox, that here remind us of the hysterical shrieks of black metal horde Bethlehem. And then finally, "Slavepiece" finishes things off, the most metal of the bunch, but sounding like it was recorded on a wax cylinder, the sound brittle and blown out, the band locked into a super in-the-red, feedback drenched riff heavy dirge, that sounds like an even more unhinged take on Brainbombs / No Balls. Fucking awesome, but most definitely only for the iron eared.
Fans of other blackened filth like Gnaw Their Tongues, Aderlating, Demonologists, Gorgontongue, and Hallowed Butchery as well as classic industrial / noise / blacknoise weirdness will be in heaven...
Elsewhere on this week's list (in fact, probably right above this review) you'll find the Disciples Of Shit cd, a collection of live recordings from blackened industrial noisescaper Sewer Goddess, aka Kristen Rose, a seriously brutal, but blackly beautiful collection of caustic live performances. Now that you know what Rose is capable of on stage, here's a glimpse of what she can do in the studio, and as you might expect, it's not to far removed, if anything, it's darker, heavier and LOUDER. But otherwise the same sort of droned out industrial crush, a bleak cinematic blackness that definitely reminds us of Gnaw Their Tongues, lots of industrial clank and clatter, a keening distant high end tone that seems to drift atop monstrous hissed vokills and streaks of blackened sound, the long stretches of buzz and crush infused with mysterious melodies.
The flipside is more riffy and dirgey, with some seriously creepy (and weirdly sexy) whispered vox, the buzz thick and corrosive, all tethered to a lurching mechanical rhythm, all within thick clouds of hiss and hum and whir, the vibe moody and murky and very soundtracky, but still bleak and menacing and seriously harrowing, shades of Wolf Eyes too, but the more we here from Sewer Goddess, the more we're beginning to think she really sounds like nobody else.
SUPER LIMITED, comes in a cool silkscreened jacket with a printed fold out insert.
Fucking hell. Where did this guy come from? And why the hell haven't we heard anything else that he's done? To answer the first question, Sexton hails from the quaint hamlet of Franklin, Tennessee and had travelled up the road to Nashville to collaborate in the (now defunct) outsider noise-junk collective Horsehair Everywhere - another project we've not heard, but by all accounts conveyed a psychedelic violence through stoned happenings for collaged film, scabrous dronemuzik, and stoned antics. Sounds a hell of lot like The Starving Weirdos to us; and Geoffrey Sexton seems to be taking a page out of the Brian Pyle playbook with his underappreciated acoustic-dronology project RV Paintings. Sexton's prepared guitar drones ooze with a subterranean murkiness, growling and undulating towards dramatically dense codas on each side of this tape. The scraping textures give the impression of Sexton rummaging around some crumbled farmhouse, generating resonant frequencies out of antebellum glass and earthen rumblings from piles of rounded bricks all sweating in the humid Southern summer heat. Think Parson Sound, Thuja, and yup RV Paintings and you're getting somewhere close to what Sexton is doing here on 197 Black Pendulums. Fucking great.
Here's a super obscure blast of long lost Southern garage punk caveman drug rock blooz stomp from a short lived band, who existed for a brief stretch way back in the late nineties, featuring members that would go on to play in aQ beloved weirdo avant black metal outfit the Mausoleums. But don't be expecting any tripped out black buzz or pop flecked post BM trippiness, this sound of Sexual Confusion was something else entirely, primal, and raw, primitive and fucking fierce, this dense squall of swampy, swaggery punk rock energy was written and recorded when the band members were just 17, and was originally released as a cd-r, limited to just 30 copies and sold at one of the few shows the band actually played, including several at Christian coffee houses, where they would wait 'til right before they played to announce the name of their band, and according to the scant info about these guys we could dig up, one of those shows was the Tampa Bay Oi! fest, where the skinheads were most definitely not amused.
Citing Black Flag, the Godz, the Germs, the Fugs, Teengenerate, the Stooges, 13th Floor Elevators and the like as influences, we also hear shades of Green River, the Lyres, Wipers, Aussie outfits like the Scientists, Feedtime, King Snake Roost, pretty heady stuff for a bunch of deep South teens, but these guys pulled it off big time, laying down a pretty convincing sprawl of filthy, furious, sweat soaked, bloody lipped, thud rock, all swaggery, heavily flanged guitars, murky caveman drum pound, whiny snarled vox, slipping easily from organ driven old school garage rock creep to stripped down, lo-fi dirge pop to full on punk rock, fist in the face, fuck you up and get high, skull caving pound. The tracks laced with wild psychedelic synth squiggles, churning swampy bass buzz harsh howled vocals, their debt to classic sixties garage rock jangle on display big time, but all fused to some serious furious punk rock energy, and further warped by the occasional stretch of druggy acoustic blues, tweaked and twisted tangles of angular, atonal psychedelia, brutal bursts of near hardcore pummel, super rad backwards guitar, spaced out sitar raga style buzz, and long droned out layers of undulating high end shimmer, but ultimately all of that weirdness is only window dressing for a pretty serious set of songs, that still sound pretty fucking bad ass more than a decade later.
In addition to the original 'album', this limited reissue tacks on a handful of demos, which in most cases we would expect to just be shittier versions of the proper songs, but here, the tracks sound possibly even better in demo form, super raw, even more lo-fi and blown out, wasted and murky, the sort of filthy drugged, out, busted up sonic filth these guys were made to wallow in.
One of three new releases this week from what might be our favorite tape label, The Tapeworm, who as always remain impossibly sonically unpredictable. This one from the oddly named duo SGR'CAV is in fact a collaboration between someone you likely know, Cristian Vogel, and someone you likely don't, SOS Gunver Ryberg, and together, these two whip up a very Tapeworm worthy soundscape of staticky alien broadcasts, haunting chordal drift, lots of hiss and hum, loads of space, a field of warped sonic events that seem to be drifting in a haze of near silence, the sound building to thick tarpit buzz, then splintering into skittery blasts of fragmented crunch, occasionally smoothing out into gauzy swirls of soft focus shimmer, but just as often, collapsing into tangled collages of psychedelic free-noise ambience. At times primitive and lo-fi, at others, heavily textured and caustic, and still at others, dark and delicately lovely.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
Okay 'new weird America' obsessives, drone nerds and limited vinyl fetishists... on your mark, get set, go! Vinyl only. Limited to 400 copies. Already sold out. We have the last 30 copies we could get. Features members of the Double Leopards and the Magic Markers. And to top it all off, it's actually also pretty darn great. Slowly drifting, warm murky ambience, the drone-y haze barely obscuring the moaning of distant feeding back guitars, simple atonal strumming, machine like creaks and simple muted percussion. All smeared into one fuzzy indistinct whole. Blurry guitars stretch into vast expanses of ambience and found sounds, eventually getting more active, scraping and squeaking, never enough to disrupt the droning dreaminess, while the original guitar seems to thicken and distort into a pulsing and throbbing slab of super thick drone. Nice!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
As with each Shadow Ring record, the sound (it's questionable to call them songs) presents itself with a smug difficulty. Piercing feedback, detuned guitars, and sputtering percussive elements strive to meet their free noise counterparts of the Dead C or Skullflower, but are drawn b
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
New Zealand import of this strange, delicate, noisy English band's debut cd.
The Shadow Ring were a deliberately odd British trio, beginning in 1993, releasing a handful of improbably compelling records for Corpus Hermeticum, Siltbreeze, Swill Radio and their own Dry Leaf Discs, and then terminating the project a decade later for reasons unknown. So much of what The Shadow Ring offer just should not work: comedically sloppy lullabies played on toy instruments, atonal squeals from cheap electronics, and rhythms banged on tin cans and xylophones. Yet, their persistence at methodically fucking up the simplest of melodies not only became an instant signature sound, it also became a metaphor for a dour, anti-social discomfort which also featured heavily in the lyrics from alternating vocalists Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris. Lambkin's voice is somewhat musical in nature, wrapping around the tinny stringed melodies as a counterpoint; but Harris, on the other hand, employs a commanding bellow which he wields with the urgent rhetorical flourish of a BBC announcer reading off obituaries, but with a snide delivery as if he loathed each person who had died. While Lambkin may have been more of the musical anti-genius of the two, Harris has the voice that reaches out to grab you by the ears. Lyrically, the Shadow Ring coupled the abject and the mundane, with rats, bottom-feeding shrimp, lice, and wasps all playing heavily into the convoluted poetics of their very English dourness. Life Review is a retrospective culled from their eight albums, handful of singles, and archive of unreleased material, including one mighty odd re-interpretation of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive." Revisting The Shadow Ring has been a very worthwhile experience for all of us here at Aquarius, conjuring thoughts of Jandek and The Shaggs working together through the Current 93 back catalogue. Brilliantly fucked up.
Remains Unchanged is a sort of alternate history of UK minimalist outsider rock weirdos The Shadow Ring, gathering up 20 never before heard tracks, spanning a decade, culled from recording sessions for pretty much every Shadow Ring record, from 1993's City Lights to 2003's I'm Some Songs, with stops at Lindus, Lighthouse, Hold Onto I.D., Wax-Work Echoes and more in-between. The first record starts off with the late great John Peel, opining on The Shadow Ring, explaining that he doesn't really love them that much, but for some reason, can't stop listening to them, which definitely gets to the heart of the 'Ring's mysterious music, although most of the folks we know, do in fact LOVE pretty much everything about these guys. And those fans will NEED this for sure, and even though it's essentially a collection of unreleased outtakes, it's not a bad intro to the group either.
The first record starts off with a long stretch of detuned acoustic guitar and sporadic percussion, Graham Lambkin doing his weird spoken word croon thing, but then all of a sudden, the song devolves into something else entirely, the music drifting abstractly along, while Lambkin talks about seafood, and some friend whose a vegetarian, a weird bit of casual conversation, that somehow sound perfect in the context of the song.
And so it goes, the first record is mostly acoustic, super lo-fi, lots of primitive weirdness, barely there rhythms, occasional bursts of super distorted drumming, the sound super abstract and dirgey, billows of angular guitar shimmer, towards the end there's some wobbly synth squelch and primitive electronics, that hint at the new direction of the group.
Which is fully explored on the second lp, covering the later years, unfurling woozy electronic melodies over dreamy slowed down samples, pitch shifted vox, abstract droned out drifts, minimal rhythmic noise accompanied by strange intoned vocals, sounding a bit like a more spare Will Over Matter, finishing off with a long stretch of warbly dreaminess that might be the prettiest thing we've heard from these guys.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, housed in a heavy full color gatefold, and includes a massive poster, with an awesome early shot of the 'Ring performing / recording in what looks like somebody's apartment.
Supposedly the Shalabi Effect were slated to do a split with Godspeed You Black Emperor (some of who's members appear here as guest musicians), but the project became so involved that they ended up passing the deadline and instead forged ahead to produce this double cd tour de force. The brainchild of Sam Shalabi, the Shalabi Effect can and have been compared to the likes of Acid Mother's Temple, No Neck Blues Band, Faust and even early "Umma Gumma" era Pink Floyd with their long, hypnotic songs which develop in and out of sparce psychedelic soundscapes and powerful droning jams (even breaking out and playing straight up Sudanese music!). The instrumentation is suitably varied: from standard rock guitar, bass, drums, to electronics, oud, tabla, flute, violin, you name it, it's probably on here. Definitely for fans of the "Constellation-label sound".
Textural improv psychedelia, what we might term some kind of modern "international krautrock" (our new invented genre), from this group of Montreal outer-limits explorers lead by Sam Shalabi (Molasses, Detention, solo, etc.). This is a fine follow up to their
