Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We sure do love Shit And Shine. Every record we get by this UK sort-of-collective is weirder, noisier and more fucked up than the last. With a massive lineup featuring multiple guitarists, multiple drummers as well as various unorthodox, non-musical noise makers, these guys manage to make beautiful sounds ugly, and ugly sounds beautiful. It's confusing actually. Their sound is so chaotic and harsh, but so totally captivating and hypnotic, this 12" is no different. Two epic, massive sidelong tracks. The first, an endless rhythmic jam, with ultra blown out drums, sounding a bit like some Butthole Surfers / Laddio Bolocko hybrid, albeit WAY more distorted and damaged. The sound is completely fried, the whole record sounding like it's crumbling through your speakers, strangled vocals drift amidst the tribal pummel, as do weird alien sounding squiggly leads that squirm and slither from speaker to speaker giving the whole track a super disorienting affect.
The second side is a bit more subdued, but only a bit. An in-the-red tribal workout, like a more metallic and way more distorted and druggy No Neck Blues Band. Thick pulses of low end drift beneath streaks of super distorted amp damage, all very krautrock sounding, but filtered through a bank of effects pedals, all broken or with dying batteries. Definitely blissed out and mesmerizing, but so ominous and creepy. A side of this stuff is not nearly enough. Set it to repeat, drink a bottle of Nyquil and let yourself get sucked under.
Cool silkscreened 'bug' cover and some amazingly problematic song titles!
You might want to keep an old rag next to your turntable for this one, to wipe the grit and grime and goo off your needle when you're done listening to this slab of sonic what-the-fuck. A confuional mix of buzzy, damaged psych rock spaceout, Buttholes style tribal weirdness, straight up icepick in the ear noise rock, speaker melting sludge and some very unlikely pop filigree. Instrumentation includes multiple drummers, multiple lawnmowers (?) and lots of guitar all melded into a pummelling wall of grindsludgepopnoisepsych. White vinyl with a hand scibbled insert in a thick plastic sleeve. Limited to 500 copies.
A pretty good match up, and not just based on the band names (although it doesn't get much more perfect than that). Our beloved Texas by way of the UK by way of Texas drum heavy rhythmic noise rockers Shit And Shine start things off with some super lo-fi, looped and repetitive dubbed out minimalism, weird echoey vox draped over a surprisingly super mellow bit of drift and drag, creepy and spaced out, a little skittery and shuffly, at least until it EXPLODES in a blast of grinding distorto noise and howling feedback, transforming the sound into some sort of blacknoise power electronics industrial stomp, yet for all it caustic noisiness, it remains surprisingly rhythmic and hypnotic, the sound SO distorted it seems to be crumbling and decaying as the track plays, replete with all manner of glitches and drop outs, which makes it almost sound like Shit And Shine covering Faxed Head!
We had never heard of Expensive Shit before, but it definitely sounds like the equipment they're using is anything BUT. They counter with their own sort of lo-fi noise rock dubbiness, a twisted, murky, FX flecked dark sonic churn, laced with all manner of clatter and crunch, all over a roiling spaced out dronescape. After a brief blast of noise, the track settles into a slithery, skeletal bit of abstract industrial noise dub, that sounds like Throbbing Gristle recording at King Tubby's and as that might have you imagining, it sounds pretty damn good.
There's been much talk about grunge around aQ these days. A lot of it has to do with the fact that a bunch of us just love grunge, STILL, and thus talk about it all the time. But beyond that, Andee recently dedicated an entire radio show to his grunge favorites, and this summer is the Sub Pop 20th anniversary celebration, which rumor has it, might entail a Green River reunion! And now there's this, the first volume in a proposed series called Grungecore. And the second we heard about it, we knew we needed it!
Gabber jungle dancehall electronic freak Shitmat, covering Nirvana's "Negative Creep"!!! As if that weren't enough, the flipside is some other crazed electronic tweaker taking on Nirvana's "Senseless Apprentice" (aka "Scentless Apprentice"). And if even that weren't still enough, every single 7" comes in a sleeve, hand sewn from actual flannel shirts! Holy shit!!!
So the Shitmat side is a killer. It begins with all this throbbing black ambience, weird rhythmic skitter, which explodes into a fierce relentless blast of gabber madness. But it no way does it sound anything like Nirvana. UNTIL, the vocals kick in, and then it fits, it sound so right, it wouldn't be hard to imagine Kurt Kobain fronting some band on DHR back in the nineties, the rhythm of the original is kept intact, with the little pauses filled with flurries of jungle instead of that moaning guitar, the howling at the end of the chorus processed into some fucked up digital scream. Only reminds us how much we love Shitmat.
The flipside is someone called Ladyscraper, and their version of "Scentless Apprentice" sounds nothing like the original, less of a remix, more of an interpretation. Huge chunks of throbbing sizzling synth, massive grinding bass, the beats are more like speaker shredding bolts of digital crunch, the churn and skitter and occasionally explode into impossibly dense tangles of digital glitch. The vocals are super distorted, almost black metal, the whole thing stops and starts, super convoluted, it's basically impossible to tell it's a Nirvana song, but that doesn't mean it's not awesome.
Each 7" comes in its own flannel sleeve, hand sewn, from various parts of various different flannel shirts. Some are sleeves, and have buttons or cuffs, others have parts of collars, a few have a strange mudflap that flops outside the plastic sleeve. Each sleeve has a Grungecore sticker affixed to the front and a FUKDUP label Sub Pop parody sticker on the back, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, the label on the 7" is hand stamped and hand numbered, and includes a photocopied insert with liner notes and rad high school drawings. WAY recommended.
The return of the Shitty Listener, and as always, we feel obliged to comment on what has to be one of the best band names EVER, and as always, The Shitty Listener is Jason Honea, a one time member of the Jewelled Antler Collective, who's played in or with Teenage Panzercorps, Franciscan Hobbies, the Knit Separates, Child Readers and a bunch more, but as always, the Shitty Listener is a much more intimate, personal affair, in the past, hushed and home brewed, or recorded outside Jewelled Antler style, but for this new ep, Honea has expanded his sonic palette, with what sounds like a full band, and a sound that harkens back to classic eighties new wave and post punk, "No Thrones", is all tribal drumming, and waves of crystalline guitar shimmer, while Honea croons over the top, his vocals powerful and throaty and dramatic, but still it's The Shitty Listener, so it lasts barely 90 seconds before "Beautiful Same" brings things back down, some field recordings, clouds of cymbal shimmer, woozy synths, but the vocals remain upfront, and way up in the mix, like some lost obscure 'wave rarity from the eighties, but again, the song doesn't even reach two minutes, instead, Honea crafting a gorgeously faded sonic fragment, out of time, but also strangely timeless.
The flipside gets more Jewelled Antler-y, "Pool Of Light" is all music box melody over what sounds like a crackling fire, or maybe rain on the roof, the vocals super loud, and up in the mix, lots of reverb, as if Honea was singing right in your ear, hushed and haunting, super intimate, and mysteriously lovely. "Candle On Water" too is super lo-fi, acoustic guitar strum, tape hiss and field recorded ambience, the sound of windshield wipers maybe? Strange fragmented synths drift by, the vocals an ethereal falsetto, a gorgeous bit of swoonsome, wistful, dreamy bedroom 4 trackery to finish things off. Nice heavy full color covers, and probably super limited too!
Latest from The Shitty Listener, still one of the greatest band names EVER, and the work of Jason Honea, a satellite member of the Jewelled Antler Collective, having done time in Child Readers, Franciscan Hobbies, Knit Separates, Chord Fort, Teenage Panzercorps and loads of others, but The Shitty Listener finds the Berlin-based Honea going it mostly alone, creating, delicate, hushed, ultra fragile minimal anti pop, gorgeous drifts of barely there sound, the various non musical elements as much a part of the sound as anything else. Organs whir, Honea's gentle croon hovers and flits, suspended in a cloud of tape hiss, while all around, children play, footsteps clomp by, dishes clank and crash, as if Honea was huddled in the corner, trying desperately to capture a sound, before the outside world intrudes, and only sort of succeeding, but in that partial failure lies the magic of the Shitty Listener. Each song is a captured moment, alive, and immediate, and organic, this is not music you can play in the store, or blast in your car stereo, this is music made to get lost in, the sonic equivalent of the musician, sneaking up to you and crooning directly in your ear. A pair of headphones, and your transported to the world of The Shitty Listener, where music is only a part of the sound.
The songs are not just home recorded, many are captured out in the open, on walks, in fields, by the beach, near the seaside, birds chirp, people walk by, oblivious to the fact that they are contributing to a magical micro moment of musical mystery.
And for all its low fidelity, the sound is strangely lush, and impossibly warm and enveloping. Hissing melodies and softly strummed guitars are whipped up into blurred swirling clouds of feedback drenched drones, but somehow it's never noisy, just dense, and layered, and even in these noisy moments, you can still hear the detritus of life surrounding the music.
"I Keep Dreaming To Myself" sounds as close to a proper song, until Honea stops midsong to talk, and again, lovely strummed guitar is wrapped around, weird moaning melodies, creaks and rumbles, distant bells, a slowly crumbling collage, which leads right into the 12+ minute "The Burst Heart", which begins with a cacophony of crunch and scrape before settling into an ultra minimal bit of dronefolk, which builds to some intense strumming, before slipping right back to a whisper.
The record plays out in a similar fashion, fractured folk gives way to abstract ambience, gentle croons set amidst fluttering flutes, and strange space-y melodies, loops and drones way off in the distance, while rattles rattle and bells tinkle, and voices chatter in a cloud of burnished hiss, finishing off with the Shitty Listener version of a Murder Ballad, melancholy and mournful, infused with a bit of blurred warmth, some streaks of feedback, some tinkling toy xylophones, some reverberant buzz, before Honea instructs everyone to stop playing, and Shitty Listener's buzz and chime finally stumbles to a halt. So strange and magical and fantastic.
The return of The Shitty Listener! Maybe one of our all time favorite band names EVER. And it's about time. We all completely dug the Girls All Say EP we listed a while back, but it just wasn't enough. It was only 9 minutes long after all. Well, Fruitless Accomplishment clocks in at a whopping 26 minutes, and thus manages to take all the elements we liked on the EP, and spreads them out, expands and explores, which just means there's so much more to like.
Actually released as a book, that just so happens to also contain a cd, for our purposes, we'll just go ahead and consider Fruitless Accomplishment a cd, that just so happens to come with a book! For those new to the Shitty Listener, it's not really a band, instead it is one man, Jason Honea, from from the Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers and the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Chord Fort, the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps. The Shitty Listener is his Honea's mostly solo, lo-fi, bedroom folk project. And is deeply connected to his poetry/lyrics and artwork. As is evidence by this deluxe book/cd combo.
The sound is incredibly intimate and low fidelity. Mostly recorded on micro cassettes or handheld tape recorders, Honea incorporates tape hiss and whatever ambient sound happens to occur in the background, whether it's a plane flying by, a dog barking, the sound of crickets, it all just becomes part of the sound. And just like old Sebadoh tapes, the ch-chunk sound of the record or stop buttons being pushed, as well as weird warbles in the tape, become as much a part of the song as the song itself. Lilting melancholy piano, gentle acoustic guitar strum, and not much else support Honea's warbly falsetto, plaintive and emotive, always way down in the mix, a sort of drifty fuzzy dreamy melody within each song. But that's more than enough. Each song ends up sounding surprisingly lush. Our favorites though have to be the ones that sound like they were recorded from a distance, or through the wall or window. Those tracks almost sound like Honea was singing and strumming indoors, while the mic was outside, capturing most of the music, but more than anything all of the ambient action happening around it. Other highlights include the a capella "Bad Wonder", "I Call You Up" which sounds a bit like Morrisey fronting Sentridoh, the minute long "Across My Dreams", a sort of processed dreamy guitarscape, and the 7 minute medley "Sweet To My Mind w/ Someone Flame-Like & Up Too Much", the first half of which sounds a bit like a Basinski composition, but made manually, by playing a figure on the piano, pushing stop on the tape player, pressing record and playing the figure again, over and over and over. So weird and wonderful.
Fruitless Accomplishment is a strangely compelling collision between abstract experimentation and lo-fi pop loveliness, and the results are truly divine!
The packaging is pretty dang divine as well. And just to frustrate and confuse, there are TWO different versions. Both are exactly the same on the inside, just different on the outside. Packaged in either a newsprint covered hard cardboard box, or in a sewn green felt sleeve, inside is the cd-r, an insert with the liner notes, four full color and two black and white inserts featuring various drawings and collages by Honea, and Real Flowers, a small book of poetry, gorgeously printed on nice paper and with a full color paste on cover!
Wow! This is the week for awesome band names, the Chord Fort, Flittermice Of Eld, Maggoted and now The Shitty Listener which might be one of the best band names EVER.
The Shitty Listener is Jason Honea from from the Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers and the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Chord Fort, the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps, along with some guest guitar from our very own Kerry McLaughlin.
This is an ultra personal abstract ambient artifact, equal parts super intimate crooning vocal and whirring mysterious drone. Recorded on a shitty handheld minicassette recorder which gives all of the multi part, nine minute epic "The Cloud Fort" (not to be confused with Honea's other band the Chord Fort) a super murky, haunted lo-fi vibe. Each part is brief, but beautiful, a blown out shimmering ambience that is soon joined by Honea's way in the background falsetto, before the music drops out completely, and then it's ALL vocals, bare and alone, sweetly singing, lightly draped with reverb, but for the most part super naked and intimate. The next stretch sounds like it could have been lifted off some old Jewelled Antler release, a thick textured soundscape of field recordings, and subtle dronings. Then there's some downright indie rock riffing that seem like they would maybe sound out of place, but here they don't, a cool minor key jangle that gives way to another stretch of even MORE intimate vocals, with no reverb or any natural ambience, almost like one of those cassettes you find in a thrift store packed with some aspiring singer's solo vocals. So intense and weirdly voyeuristic. The disc winds down with a murky, whir drenched snatch of easy listening bliss out that just trails off into the hiss of the tape recorder. So nice.
A gorgeously packaged cd-r. Full color cover, with a dreamlike painting on the cover, a textured paper insert, and the disc is professionally printed and is quite striking.
Only 9 minutes long, but also only six bucks!
Hot on the heels of two super limited cd-r's comes the newest batch of ultra personal lo-fi missives from Jason Honea aka The Shitty Listener. Honea (The Child Readers, Franciscan Hobbies, the Chord Fort, the Knit Separates, Teenage Panzercorps, etc.). A super intimate world of tiny folk songs, lo-fi lushness, strange fragments of sound, and whatever other strange sonics figure into Honea's Shitty Listening.
Strange distorted conversations, chopped up, a looped snippet of some Hall & Oates song, a dizzying found sound collage that quickly gives way to a simple warbly guitar strum, melancholy and struggling to stay in key, a lilting and dreamlike sliver of forest folk, complete with drifting falsetto vocals and a strange bit of tapping percussion way down in the mix. Most of the songs on Hunt To Die are of a similar make up, drifting crooning sweetness. although the lo fi production takes over here and there allowing the sound to become super distorted and bleed over everything else. Some droney buzz, some other snippets of found sound. And more fragile folky dreaminess. Like wandering through the lush foggy musical garden in Honea's mind. Everything gauzy and indistinct, mysterious and wondrous, and oh so pretty.
Feature some guest action from Honea's former partners in Jewelled Antler Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson.
Full color cover and a hand painted blue tape with fabric and artwork glued to the front. And as with most things like this probably really really limited...
A very prescient, and very good, record by the sound-artist / field recordist Matt Shoemaker, Erosion Of The Analogous Eye pushes his work of tonal exploration and exaggerated found sounds into the neighborhood of many of the post-noise cosmic explorers who have been blossoming in every corner of the US it seems. At the same time, this is very much a Matt Shoemaker record, following a trajectory set forth through his acclaimed work on the once-mighty Trente Oiseaux label.
An ur-drone of analog synthesis opens the album, obviously harkening to '70s kosmische activities certainly a muscular revisitation of Schulze or even an extraction from Richard Pinhas. Such a lazerbeam of a drone has a lysergic sunrise feel to it, with the light and shadow brought into sharp relief, the colors shifted and separating into spectral bursts of yellow, red, pink, and orange. Yet, slowly, Shoemaker introduces atonal drones which clash with that introductory suspension. At first, the metallic slashes have almost an Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough feel, but Shoemaker quickly dispels those notions with a layer of field recordings of insects ravenously scurrying about. That introductory tone, which still continues through this first track, bends like a divebombing plane with Doppler tones trailing behind, descending in a series of bell tones. All of this in a seamless 17 minutes. A steady rhythm of gamelan bell tones opens the second track with accumulated complimentary drones shimmering and vibrating while harmonic dissonance abounds, collapsing into a quiet stream of percolating textures. Spread across 24 minutes, this track seems ancient and sounds beguilingly beautiful. Bellowing rumbles amplify out of recordings of rain, mud, and water and steadily arching through a metallic rattling of various pipes and gongs for the final track, which eventually gives way to an uneasy set of recordings of birds in a rainforest whose calls echo through the trees.
As with all Helen Scarsdale releases the packaging is stellar. Letterpressed text with hand-dyed paper. Each are different, each are quite special. Oh yeah, limited to a mere 300 copies!
Before the days of email blasts and newsletters, mail order was almost always done by way of xeroxed lists from various outlets. One of the more incredible lists cam courtesy of Anomalous Records, who had itemized hundreds of records, cassettes, and various shapes of vinyl on one or two pieces of paper by printing everything an incredibly small font, often hovering around 3 pt in Helvetica or something like that. Not only was the list a task to read in terms of the sheer volume of material crammed into a very condensed amount of space, but the list also held an extraordinary amount of incredibly cool experimental, post-industrial, and avant-garde music that could not be found anywhere else. Sadly, Anomalous Records decided to close up shop about five years ago; but their importance as an outlet for obscure music is still felt today.
Matt Shoemaker's Groundless was one album that had been stocked from time to time on the Anomalous list with a curious description that said something to the effect that Groundless resembled the work of Andrew Chalk. Then in 2001 when Shoemaker's debut was released on Trente Oiseaux, references to Andrew Chalk were not all that common, as his seminal project Mirror had only just begun and his solo records had yet to catch the imagination of every producer of dronemusik. Needless to say, such a parallel was one that caught our attention; and the album was quickly ordered only to discover a strident realm of quiet crackling that was quite foreign to Chalk's all-consuming dronescaping. While Groundless sounds nothing like any of Chalk's recordings, it is still a brilliant piece of tactile sound abstraction. It may seem a stretch but perhaps Anomalous was only making comparisons on the impeccable quality of both Shoemaker and Chalk as composers, even if they don't share much in the way of aesthetics. Instead of the expansive drone, Shoemaker posits a dizzyingly cinematic sound design of streaming crackles, agitated piles of sand, and sympathetic field recordings that burst in dynamic fashion out of extended passages of queasy stasis into sharp snaps of electromagnetic propulsion. These techniques have more of an avant-garde film drama to them as blurry, soft focus objects give way to something which snaps to the foreground announcing all of its ugly bruises and scars with a sharpened clarity. Groundless emerges as yet another amazing recording from Matt Shoemaker.
Seattle's Matt Shoemaker has long stood as one of the few consistently great drone tacticians around, principally because his take on the drone supreme is punctured by humid field recordings laced with occasional bellowings of atmospheric dread. His previous works such as Erosion Of The Analogous Eye and The Wayward Set are demonstrations in equal parts of rich transcendence and hallucinatory isolationism. Given the titles of the two pieces on this gorgeous picture disc released by Elevator Bath, you can make a pretty solid bet that this tends more toward the latter aesthetic of Shoemaker's black-hole expressionism.
Shoemaker begins with a tense diamond-shot drone from overlapping sinewaves generated from controlled feedback. These pierced frequencies slide downwards amidst a curious set of clattering noises, almost like the amplification of a paramecium undulating its way into the crevices of its host body. Extended wheezes of grey gasps of air and motorized growlings swallow everything that came before with a ghostly echo of those feedback tones broadcast from way back at the event horizon. The second side (which may be the first, as Elevator Bath's picture discs are very trickly to discern track listings!) immediately expands into one of Shoemaker's signature pieces of lysergic darkness, with all of his ill-tempered vibrations colliding into huge phase patterns that mutate, deviate, and detour the linearity of his cold drone fundamental. Always bending and set off-kilter this composition is dangerously slippery as if set upon quicksand with the various layers upon layers splitting off in asynchronous, oozing, droning directions.
Very highly recommended as with all of Shoemaker's work! Limited to 233 copies.
If Aquarius Records wasn't located in the temperate climate of San Francisco, would we be so enamored with the sounds of ice? If we had to deal with burst water pipes or having to shovel through several feet of snow just to get to the front door or trying to stay warm in bone chilling temperatures, the romance of ice would probably be lost on us. But as it stands, we love the sounds of a frosty winter. Give us the sounds of the windswept Nordic tundra, the subaqueous squawks of Antarctic penguins, the clank of Finnish oddballs building instruments out of ice, and these frigid recordings from one of our favorite sound artists.
Ice, the source material for Matt Shoemaker's contribution to the Ferns series of 3" cds, which seems to be on the way to rivalling Metamkine's Cinema Pour L'Oreille series of electro-acoustics through their set of expressive drones and molded field recordings. This all-too brief composition begins with a stoic set of raw field recordings from drippings of cold water, the crack of ice breaking under temperature fluctuations and pressure, and unsettled squigglings of water being forced through tiny fissures. After several minutes of this squishy introduction, Shoemaker sets forth a parabolic arc of dense gray drones whose frosty demeanor matches the source material. Eerie blasts of pierced electric tones mark the track's crescendo, after which Shoemaker authors a steady retreat in density back towards the dripping and crackle. Fans of William Basinski, Chris Watson, and BJ Nilsen should definitely take note of this excellent recording!
Undeniably, this is a Matt Shoemaker recording. This Pacific Northwesterner has long been a favorite dronologist here at Aquarius with his ominous recordings spawned from electro-acoustic feedback systems, humid field recordings, tonebent mood engineering slanted toward audio hallucinations, dense guitar swarms, and elongated, zoner synth passages that give John Elliott a run for his money. Soundtrack For Dislocation is a self-evident title for Shoemaker, given how his work fractures temporal / psychogeographical planes, teleporting the listener from one opiated mirage to another. His process is just as interesting as the sounds that he produces, as he drives and controls feedback through a system of slinkies that act like something of a hybrid between a stereo spring reverb unit and an omnidirectional microphone, with Russian synths, VCO filters, and noise-aggregators positioned at various points on the feedback loop track. We had once thought that the pre-digital Merzbow recordings had developed into something of an organism that thrived on electricity, had an intelligence that dictated the course of the noise, and begrudgingly entertained a relationship with Masami Akita. Shoemaker's electro-acoustic contraptions seem to be approaching this Frankensteinian, electric organism on par with Merzbow's, although the architects of both projects have very different designs.
Hence, this is not a torrent of distortion, but a vertiginous path of drone, hiss, blur, shadow, grit, and decay. Placid atmospheres shimmer at times with all of the cinematic grandeur of Stars Of The Lid, only to dissolve, mutate, and crumble into hallucinatory slippages where flecks of environmental sounds breaking through, twisting once again into a metallic resonance on par with the most haunting of Nurse With Wound constructions. Thrumming tones pulse into skittering vibrations that build to rupturing crescendos that snap into near-silent voids of disquieting rumble. All of this comes together in another magnificent album from Mr. Shoemaker. Highly recommended!
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Have a glance back at our most verbose descriptions about anything from the avant-garde fringes of music making, and you'll most likely find a common metaphor of specific locations, or rather the memories that the author attributes to that space -- good, bad, holy, abject, transcendent, etc. Upon listening to Spots In The Sun, we find ourselves returning to the well-trod linguistic device of comparing sound to the detached memories of place; however, Shoemaker's exploration of psychogeographic sound never grounds itself upon a specific location -- like a crumbling hospital, reclaimed World War II bunkers, or even his own favored locations of the jungles of Indonesia. Rather, Shoemaker drops the listener into a sunbleached environment, where heat, humidity, jetlag, fatigue, and general environmental claustrophobia prevent any of the specifics to make themselves known. While Shoemaker's landscapes are openly hostile toward the listener, these swarming masses of sound are incredibly alluring, drawing us in even though we may know better than to enter these openly toxic spaces. Shoemaker is always teasing us with small hints as to where we might be, with screeching birds, temple bells, and the patter of rain; but before we can begin to triangulate a position, Shoemaker rips us from our locale with a ruptured crescendo and drops us somewhere else. It is through the drone that Shoemaker achieves all of this and more, his swarming monochrome morphs from complex vibrations into radioluminescent clouds. Spots In The Sun is an exquisite manifestation of abstracted field recordings pushed to the point of grotesque minimalism, and is indeed some of the finest that we've heard (comparable to the likes of BJ Nilsen, Machinefabriek, Loren Chasse, Philip Jeck's Surf, and mnortham).
The music found within Matt Shoemaker's Spots In the Sun certainly makes for one of our favorite records in recent memory, unfortunately this ultra limited version is already out of print and will most likely not be around for long (but fear not, the regular version will follow soon after).
Shoemaker's exquisite manifestations of abstracted field recordings pushed to the point of grotesque minimalism is some of the finest that we've heard (comparable to the likes of BJ Nilsen, Machinefabriek, Loren Chasse, Philip Jeck's Surf, and mnortham), but what makes this "special edition" so unique is the packaging. You may remember many moons ago that The Helen Scarsdale Agency issued an edition of the BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa release with a copper foil cover mounted within a jewel case as the artwork. Well, Matt Shoemaker's Spots in the Sun sports similarly dazzling packaging, a corroded sheet of brass upon which the album text has been silkscreened, only to be slightly distressed in order to give it a beautiful worried quality. How limited is this edition? Fifty, of which we only got less than a dozen. So act fast, or bide your time until the regular version comes out in a month or so...
It has been far too long since we've been graced by any recordings from Matt Shoemaker, Seattle's electro-acoustic hermit who sculpts field recordings and electronics together into vibrantly imagined visions of virulent algae blooms, prismatic growths of crystal from magma, and hallucinatory fever dreams from consuming some quasi-mystical, mostly-nausating tea boiled by a madman passing as a sage. His work has never garnered the acclaim that it should in part due to his deliberately low-profile and grotesqueries of composition that vertiginously twist and turn beyond the scope of the drone and conflate the purity of a field recording with mutations and disease. The Late Day Spectrum is the first published work in nearly four years, and the format of choice isn't doing Shoemaker any favors in expanding his audience. But this micro-edition release exhibits a further refinement of Shoemaker's craft with his sheared metallic timbres carved into elegant arcs following downright melodic phrasings, albeit at the stately pace of Morton Feldman's late period compositions. During the four year absence, Shoemaker has wandered the islands of Indonesia, and the gilded hues of gamelan have clearly struck a chord with Shoemaker, who maps similar sounds out of his tangles of wire. Beautifully eerie is this cassette, and we really do hope it ain't gonna be another 4 years til we get to hear more.
In the handful of exceptional records from concrete/drone composer Matt Shoemaker, the field recording has been central to his work. Take the aggregate tumblings of minerals from Groundless or the woozy humidity from Spots In The Sun, Shoemaker's use of the field recording in his pieces is miles apart from the pastoral use of bird songs or a gentle rainstorm to offer something 'natural' for an electronic ambient record. No, Shoemaker amplifies the more threatening aspects of nature with insects emitting nightmarish chorales, beetles aggressively scurrying towards hapless prey, and the air of a landscape so heavy and pungent with decay as to be impossible to breathe. For Shoemaker, the world may be nasty, brutish, and short; but he's discovering a weird beauty way out there amidst the grotesqueries of the world.
On the last two records from Shoemaker, a greater emphasis on synthesized psychedelia shot through his tense drone constructs; so with Tropical Amnesia One, Shoemaker has built an album that's just field recordings, without much of the atypical filtering, gizmos, and effects that turn Shoemaker's studio into a scientific laboratory. All of these recordings came from a two week residency Shoemaker spent deep in the Amazon forest, where silence was never afforded amidst the constant buzz of insects, torrential cloudbursts, and burbling streams all teaming with life. Watery sounds introduce the first 20 minutes to this album with all sorts of sodden creaks, slurping movements, and mud-sucking events amassed together. It's as if the vantage point to Shoemaker's sounds were just below the surface of a stagnant body of water next to a muddy embankment, crawling with leeches, skin-breaching worms, and any other parasitic creature that could come to mind. Shoemaker then shifts his attention for the remaining 44 minutes upward to the tops of the trees, where the insects have conspired to broadcast an ominous nocturnal hiss worthy of horror film sound design. A few insects and birds puncture the swarming noise, making the environment seem a lot less threatening that Shoemaker has contextualized it to be. A powerful, sublime recording, and what looks like to the be first in a series of recordings from the Amazon.
It has been many years since Metamkine has released anything through their highly esteemed Cinema Pour L'Oreille series of electro-acoustic / musique concrete masterpieces; but if they did, one sound artist who should stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Eliane Radigue, Luc Ferrari, Jean-Francois Laporte, and Jim O'Rourke would be Matt Shoemaker. If anything, Shoemaker's work has such an intensely cinematic quality as the edits of his sound design snap to and fro in dramatic fashion with static periods for magnetic drone, uneasy field recording, and agitated objects; and this cinematic undercurrent to his work alone would make him a strong candidate. But concepts are only really as good as their execution; and few have the panache of Matt Shoemaker. We recently posted a review of his third album Spots In The Sun, and we had been so taken by the quality of that record that we uncovered some copies of his second record Warung Elusion, which had been released back in 2001 on Bernhard Gunter's Trente Oiseux label. This is an album of sheer sonic abstraction whose sun-bleached, disquieting dreaminess parallels many of those 'lost-memory' albums that we have lauded so many time in the past (e.g. Phillip Jeck, Jasper TX, Tim Hecker, etc.). Yet, Shoemaker is not one to sentimentalize such sounds, rather he presents these flickering sound, erratic crackles, and deconstructed ambience as a reminder of human failings in the memory process. Here, meditation might drift into a lulling stupor in need of hard smack against the ear. It's a blow that Shoemaker is more than willing to impart upon his audience. Highly recommended!
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Fantastic drones found here! Seattle's Matt Shoemaker has been quietly making some of the best dronemusik over the past decade with little to no aplomb whatsoever. He hybridizes field recordings, modular synthesis, speaker / feedback constructions, psychedelic colorations, and minimalist stasis into forms which grow, twist, and evolve throughout his work. The last album we heard from Shoemaker was his far more tripped out, post-Kosmische zoner album Erosion Of The Analogous Eye; but this live set recorded at the Good Shepherd Chapel in Seattle harkens more to his earlier albums Spots In The Sun and Warung Elusion, which manipulated field recordings into disquieting, grotesque (in his own words) passages of cinematic sound design. Upon introducing an undulating web of sustained tones woven into complex harmonic phrases, dissonant bellows, and lulling hypnosis, Shoemaker gradually introduces a revolving set of field recordings into his mix. At first the tussle and rumble of leaves, mulch, and sticks in the forest give way to a percolating chorus of frogs, probably originating from the Brazilian rain forests given Shoemaker's excursion into the forest through a residency guided by Francisco Lopez. He then embarks upon a slow descension of his magnetic drones into ominous clouds of static and ghostly reflections of grey noise, arching these sounds through harrowing turns as if he were piloting an airplane through that aforementioned rainforest trying not to crash into a cliff obscured by clouds. This is eerie, hallucinatory music for sure, and this release is strictly limited to 100 copies. Highly recommended!
Wow!!! Most loyal AQ customers are pretty aware of our total love and adoration of almost all things Finnish, especially pretty much everything released on Finnish label Fonal. They just have not done us wrong yet. Islaja, Kemialliset Ystavat, Paavoharju, Es, the list goes on and on. And while for the most part their releases focus on the more murky free folk side of Finnish underground rock they have proven to be a label that isn't just about one 'sound' but instead are simply about beautiful music. Period. Whether it's random ethereal forest folk, dreamy drifty swooning ambience, or crunchy chaotic tribalistic clatter. Their latest release, from the Helsinki quartet Shogun Kunitoki, is further proof to that effect, and dare we say this might even be the greatest thing Fonal has released. Some of you may be shouting IMPOSSIBLE! And under different circumstances we'd be right there with you. But just listenening to Tasankokaiku has us thinking not only is it possible, it's damn near for certain. Color! So much vibrant color just bursting out of Shogun Kunitoki's instrumental onslaught. It starts out on fire and every song and sound just feeds the flame. It's almost as if Steve Reich and Terry Riley raised a child weaned on the BBC Radiophonic experiments, a young Rick Wakeman who grew up listening to the fuzzy guitarscapes of M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas... and the dreamy and propulsive instrumental jams of Stereolab, and thus cultivated a totally informed yet unique outlook and approach to music and music making. The sounds on Tasankokaiku are triumphant and assured, flickering then bursting, warm and so totally alive! Knowing how to perfectly use repetition to build momentum and then suddenly blast off to sparkling spaces that make you feel like you're being spirited away to a place that you've never been to but have always dreamed about. A sparkling glistening land of thick warm keyboards, hypnotic prog laced krautrockiness, Neu-infused soundscapes, basically a world populated by all the sounds that drive us wild. This is another one of those rare records that is an across the board unanimous AQ favorite. Everyone who works here loves it. We all hear different things too, besides the above mentioned bands, Andee hears bits of Goblin and Zombi and Heldon, Allan hears hints of Aavikko and Cluster and Circle, Irwin noticed a little Broadcast and even some Raymond Scott, but no matter what you hear, or what shades of sound reveal themsleves to you, the sum is SO much greater than its parts. A gloriously dense and warm world of fuzzy sound that we just can't stop listening to. No matter what music you've been obsessed with lately, this is one of those special records that somehow trumps whatever it is, straight to the top of your listening pile, elbowing it's way past all the other discs in your collection right into your cd player where it will effortlessly fend off any other records wanting to get in there. It's that good.
Another surprisingly noisy missive in the latest salve of 7"s from the always impressive Drone Records. This one comes from a one man outfit called Shrine, and as with all Drone discs is gorgeously packaged in a full color sleeve, pressed on thick black vinyl, with a printed cardstock insert printed with metallic ink, and as with the others, first edition, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
The record begins all glimmering and glistening, a slowburn of keening feedback and grinding metallic shimmer, the sounds thick and corrosive an caustic, fuzzy, blurred and distorted, with what sounds like filed recordings underneath, dark and dense but still quite lovely. The flipside is the big surprise though, a creepy soundtracky drift, deep pulsing bass notes, and fuzzy Goblin like synths, all ominous and mysterious, plenty of whirring ambience beneath, but over the top those sweeping epic minor key melodies and those haunted house synth swells keep the mood foreboding and a little bit frightening. The track gets more and more intense and distorted as it goes, but never loses its grim chill.
Our friend Adam who runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it...
One man band Shuai makes his noisy lo-fi electronica from a weird mix DHR style digital hardcore breakbeats, throbbing old school synths, blipping bleeping IDM, throbbing hardcore techno and some all out noise. Fans of DHR and meaner/harder IDM stuff should definitely check this out.
Thanks to Brian Turner at the mighty WFMU for turning us onto this. Sibilance is a one man ambient-drone-prepared-guitar-musique-concrete project and involves an amazing array of instrumentation and techniques. The end result is a gorgeously hypnotic, ambient soundscape of whir and hum and rumble and clatter. So nice. Here's the list of instrumentation from the man himself:
"Prepared electric guitar (using electric toothbrushes), field recordings of metal objects being scraped alongside a building at night, field recording of a train, prepared electric guitar (capo at the 12th fret, strings being played behind capo), prepared electric guitar w/delay pedal (screwdriver wedged between strings, sound is screwdriver hitting guitar body), prepared electric guitar (screwdriver used as a slide), prepared acoustic steel string guitar (various objects wedged under strings, played like a hammer dulcimer), prepared electric guitar (sounds kind of train-like, screwdrivers wedged between strings), slowed down field recording of static on an AM radio, prepared piano (various objects strategically placed between certain strings), slowed down field recording of typing on a keyboard, slowed down prepared guitar (hammer dulcimer style), field recording of frogs at night and teenagers screaming from the back of a passing truck, standard acoustic steel string guitar, prepared electric guitar & cat (drumstick wedged under strings being snapped against guitar body, while bowing strings w/violin bow), slowed down recording of prepared acoustic guitar (played dulcimer style), normal speed recording of prepared acoustic guitar (dulcimer setup), even slower recordings of two prepared acoustic guitars (hammer dulcimer type setup on both), prepared electric guitar (played with violin bow and objects wedged under strings moved to change tension), prepared electric guitar & delay pedal (played using violin bow, sounds whale-like), prepared electric guitar (objects under strings moved to change tension while strumming), standard classical guitar & field recordings of birds, backwards odd improv with acoustic and classical guitars, field recording of very strong thunderstorm (complete with sirens), slowed down recording of prepared electric guitar (screwdriver wedged under strings, vibrating against guitar body), normal speed recording of prepared electric guitar (with screwdriver wedged under strings as before), standard electric guitar & backwards recording of prepared acoustic guitar (played with screwdriver serving as a kind of bow), prepared acoustic guitar (played hammer dulcimer style), prepared electric guitar (setup with a few screwdrivers wedged under alternating strings, vibrating all over the place), slowed down backwards recording of prepared electric guitar (using objects wedged under strings and played with violin bow)." Wow. But like we said, it's the music that counts, and the music is lovely and entrancing. Fans of the Dead C, Gate, Birchville Cat Motel and the like will dig this quite a bit.
More limited edition noisy guitar dissonance from SF's Sic Alps. Four gnarled songs including the title track which also appears on their most recent full length Pleasures And Treasures.
Limited to 300 hand numbered copies.
Here's a short cassette released by AQ pal Mike Donovan (Big Techno Werewolves, Nam, Sounds Of The Barbary Coast, The Ropers, Dial Records) of his current band Sic Alps whome you might recall from their split 7" with California Lightening (featuring members of Erase Errata)! As with most releases by the very DIY San Francisco fella Mr. Donovan, there is only going to be a very small homespun run of these made, so needless to say, don't snoooooze!
Pssst... we also have a small number of some other Folding cassette releases, all with hand made covers -- a short one from Death Sentence: Panda plus a compilation he compiled with artist Chris Johanson called SSSSSOSS2 and ones by Dark Yellow Swans (aka Yellow Swans) and NVH with Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny. Dust off yer cassette deck!
Peter Christopherson, John Balance, and Boyd Rice recorded three tracks in 1985 under the moniker Sickness Of Snakes for a split single with Current 93 entitled Nightmare Culture, which understandably has been long out of print. According to the liner notes by Boyd Rice, there had been talk of the three continuing their collaboration by travelling to Calcutta and hiring a really cheap orchestra to perform some sort of atonal mass, whose content and score had yet to be determined. The adventure never took place, leaving the sum total of the Sickness Of Snakes material at very small amount of material (a fourth track was created for a German compilation around that same time, but strangely is not included here). While this reissue from Soleilmoon is commendable in uncovering these rare and quite impressive tracks, the price of admission is rather steep.
When the trio went into the studio, they had rented one of the Fairlight samplers which had been making the rounds in England, and they happened to get the machine right after Kate Bush had used it for her Hounds Of Love album. Samples of tubular bells, noir trumpets, and saccharine strings got repurposed for Sickness Of Snakes, whose opening track "Various Hands" is very typical of what Coil would have crafted on their debut Scatology, with lugubrious sampled strings marching through a doleful electronic sonata, but topped with the sounds of bombs being dropped into the WWII trenches. Those noir horns and electronic bells spill into an elegaic atmosphere on "The Swelling Of Leeches;" and "The Pope Held Upside Down" is a mangled collage of pigs squealling, for an unsettling coda to this unduly short collaboration. In full disclosure, Coil reissued these tracks on their Unnatural History compilation (also out of print), and Boyd Rice tossed "Various Hands" onto his compendium The Way I Feel. If only there were more tape to be scraped off the studio floor.
A few lists back, we got a great response to a disc we listed by Sicilian drone duo Comet III, their debut album Astral Voyager, a totally "kosmiche" trip in ye olde krautrock vein. One half of Comet III, their "space guitarist", has a new cd-r out recorded under the name Siddhi, released by the Italian micro-label Akoustic Desease, and we of course grabbed some asap (they're limited to just 115 numbered copies). So we have a few to share with you and then that's probably it!
Space guitarist indeed. This is way spacey, yet with a folky vibe. 5 songs, 45 psychedelic minutes. Drifting electronic drones, quiet and lovely. Rustling percussive rattle. Repetitive guitar ornament. Slow and stately. Mellow melancholic bliss. Forgive us the sentence fragments, it's just that we're trancing out within Siddhi's cosmic, elemental embrace...
As we said, super limited. Packaged in colorful, stiff cardboard sleeves.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Experimental quintet fronted by Martin Siewert and including former Naked City keyboard player Wayne Horowitz. Meditations on water dripping are conceived here as a continuous performance. Churning guitars blend into tinkering effects and improv drum sweeps with a surprisingly lovely effect.
This actually came out a few months back but we've been waiting and waiting for more to show up in stock so we could review it...now they're here, so here goes: it's Austrian experimental guitarist Martin Siewert's new solo album, wherein he gets into more of an electronic pop thing than we've heard from him before. Has Siewert gone techno? Well there IS some poppy, techno-ish glitch blip stuff on here, and it's good -- but the two longest tracks (like, 14 minutes and 18 minutes) get into a droney, textural zone similar to the electro-acoustic improv work we've enjoyed by Siewert in the past. And one of these epics benefits from the live drumming of Tony Buck of AQ-faves The Necks! Also appearing on the album are prior Siewert collaborators Werner Dafeldecker, Patrick Pulsinger and Radian's Martin Brandlmayr (no slouch in the drumming dep't. either!).
Experimental electro-acoustic improv label Erstwhile has put out a lot of great stuff, but this is perhaps their best release in a while! Too Beautiful To Burn documents the musical meeting of two Martins, guitarist Martin Siewert and drummer Martin Brandlmayr, both from Austria. Siewart we've heard before playing in groupings with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Werner Dafeldecker, Taku Sugimoto, Kevin Drumm, and Jim O'Rourke to name a few. Meanwhile, Brandlmayr we know as the drummer for the fantastic Viennese post-rock outfit Radian. Together, with Martin S. manipulating guitars, lap steel, electonics and synth and Martin B. playing drums, percussion and vibraphone, they've conjured a wonderful 5 track, 45 minute soundscape, ranging from Raster-Noton or Sachiko M style sine-wave tonalities to more vigorous abstract noise that at times even reminds us of the Dead C.
This is spacious, minimal, very beautiful stuff, with layers of gentle electronics, hiss and drone, and glitchy rhythms. Radian fans can perhaps imagine an ambient version of that band, more mellow and drifty. With the guitar as sound source, certainly fellow Austrian Fennesz would be another referent. The duo's live playing gives this a physicality so often absent from laptop computer music, so even though their sounds enter the hard-disc realm at some point, they retain a warm, human element. You can get a sense of how this originated in a live event with two musicans interacting. Extremely successful, and indeed, too beautiful to burn -- so buy it.
Another obscure chapter in post-industrial history is reopened thanks to Russia's Monochrome Vision label. Sigillum S is an Italian project which began in the mid '80s, landing their first outing on the tastemaking label Broken Flag in 1985. The trio mined the sex'n'death concepts which Throbbing Gristle and SPK brought to the foreground through their autopsy and porno collages as part of their social critique through extreme imagery. Sigillum S was far more sensationalist in their use of this imagery, to the point where much of their titles hold the same poetic wordsmithery of death metal's ultra-violence. "Five Or Six Corpses" and "Chewing A Just Used Condom In Her After Coming Bliss... Ageing And Death Of Masses" are just two of the more colorful titles to be found on Studs And Divinity, a super rare cassette originally released on the cult-industrial label Minus Habens back in 1989. Crowlian ritual, dissolute hedonism, and sexual transgression were some of the other theatrically 'taboo' subjects for Sigillum S (along with plenty of other modern primitives from that era); but like Clock DVA and their offshoot The Anti Group (TAGC), Sigillum S stood as technologically savvy engineers of cybernetic noise, dark-minded ambience, and sporadic rhythmic excursions that could transcend some of their dodgier concepts. Studs And Divinity is one of the more successful ventures of Sigillum S, opening with a scalding piece of high-frequency plasma that spills through a minimalist/maximalist network of hiss and white noise. The aforementioned "Chewed A Just Used Condom..." is a cross between the roughly hewn loop practices of Phillip Jeck or Christian Marclay and the depressively neo-folk orchestrations for maudlin strings and electronics from Der Blutharsch or Novy Svet. For such a title, the piece is surprisingly lovely. Elsewhere, splintered electronics and flanging power-drones entangle within decentered arrangements, splattered crescendos, and the occasionally rhythmic lockstep that parallels what Greater Than One was doing around the same time. Remastered from the original cassette and now fleshed out with two bonus tracks from back then as well. Nice.
Another marvelous album from Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, one of the founding members of the Icelandic experimental / electronica ensemble Stilluppsteypa. Generally speaking, the themes of contradiction and tension that run through Stilluppsteypa's recordings also appear in the solo work of Sigmarsson, although he spends much more time allowing all of his ideas to unravel, slowly articulating each sound before offering semiotic and / or acoustical counterpoints. "A Little Lost" opens with a fluttering drone from a digitally enhanced church organ sounding quite similar to the sounds heard on "Ship" his sublime debut for Trente Oiseaux. Flicking in and out of audibility, these drone hamonics subtly couple with a quiet smoldering of static to offer an expanse of lulling sound. Throughout the album, Sigmarsson slowly dismantles the hypnotic atmosphere, first with pronounced lapses of the drones in favor of delicate textural sounds, then through a series of repeated chunks of elemental grit sliding backwards and forwards against the grain of the drone, and climaxing with a tumultous blast of digital noise shaped into offkilter metal riffs which abruptly cut to some drunk yokel barking the alarm call from a German U-boat. Sigmarsson's genius becomes apparant in how he has moved from the calm beginning of the album to this abrasive pinnacle with a self-contained intelligence and sly continuity in sound construction. The album returns to a sense of calm through the final track, a lengthy remix of mutant minimalism provided by Irr.App.Ext, the sorely under-represented project of Santa Cruz artist Matt Waldron. Very, very nice!
One of two cassettes that we're listing from Serbian cassette / objet d'art label No Basement Is Deep Enough. The artwork itself is totally fucking ridiculous - a gold painted wooden frame with faux-baroque trim that perfectly houses the plastic clam shell with an ironic / not-ironic photograph of the handsome mug of Mr. Sigmarsson himself, looking all the part of a 'serious' composer. Yeah, it's very cool looking; and Sigmarsson is the mad genius behind the long-standing, dada-electronic-drone outfit Stillupsteyppa out of Iceland. Sigmarsson does have a smattering of solo releases, and the sonic solo fruit doesn't fall that far from the Stillupsteyppa tree. A strain of very dry, black comedy can be found in much of Sigmarsson's work, evident in the title to this cassette and the snippets of half-strum, seemingly drunken Icelandic folk tunes that periodically get collaged into the arctic wash of holy minimalist organ drones, backmasked swells of maudlin orchestral music, skin-crawlingly Otto Muehl-esque vocal garblings, delirious tape-noise machinations of slasher film incidental music / sound design, and riveting miasmas of dreamy post-Derbyshire radiophonics. Much of it sounds very much like Sigmarsson's one-time collaborator Andrew McKenzie aka The Hafler Trio, especially in those manic collage drones that McKenzie cranked out in the late '80s and early '90s. It's a wild trip that could only be engineered by Sigyrggur Berg Sigmarsson. We've only got 5 of these, and there will be no restocks, sad to say.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is a member of the transplanted Icelandic trio Stilluppsteypa, whose work has evolved over the past decade from avant-rock wackiness to studied drone / glitch work but has always maintained an off-kilter and at times absurdist approach toward their concepts. "Ship" is Sigmarsson's debut solo recording and continues in the minimalist direction that
What a strange and wonderful trip it has been for Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson! Despite a journey that currently extends into its third decade, Sigmarsson's course as an artist has never lost its youthful charm, emotional resonance, and Scandinavian grandeur. Since 1994, he has been the crux for the Iceland outfit Stilluppsteypa. Once, a damaged art-punk trio of drunken Dada noise, Stilluppsteypa effortlessly reinvented itself into one of the more adventurous of glitched, fizzed, and digitally abraded outfits right before the paranoiac lapse of Y2K, only the shed those clothes for taciturn sound design of radiophonic drone and polar spelunking which earned them more than their fair share of exemplary dronological recordings often joined by the esteemed BJ Nilsen. Dotted throughout Stilluppsteypa's catalogue of recordings, you will find a few recordings from Sigmarsson on his own, occasionally reflecting a similar aesthetic course to Stilluppsteypa; but often veering even further towards austere minimalism and colder than cold electronics. The ice that is in Sigmarsson's veins belies some of the summery poetry that he has affixed to his solo work. His early masterpiece Ship ripples with sepulchral organ tones and rumbling frequencies that were in many ways the personal soundtrack for Sigmarsson's excursions of floating in the sea around Rejkyavik, while staring at the sun daydreaming about clouds, girls, booze, etc. What could be better? So Long is an album that began around the same time as Ship, in the form of extracts of luminously dark organ drones whose pools of sound never made their way on to any other recording. Slowly over the years, Sigmarsson began shaping those lumps of aural clay into a somber wanderings of soft noise, gorgeous hypno-mesmerism, radiant black drone, and elegantly subtle melodies buried under six feet of snow. Until, the next Thomas Koner record, we can delight in the heavy drones from Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson!
While the majority of contemporary digital minimalists furrow their brows while contemplating which filter to tweak in order to get the perfect attenuation of a completely inaudible sound, a few practitioners of minimalism have managed to dig a little deeper
The artwork is a series of poorly shot photographs of urban detritus, grimy hallways, discarded plastic bags, refrigerators filled with frozen meat, empty bottles of vodka, children's drawings, and even a portrait of Sigtryggur after an extended bender. Not the most readily discernable collection of images, but provides the sense that Sigmarsson still views himself as the chaos-loving Icelandic punk who founded Stilluppsteypa a decade ago. Match the music and the images with such idiosyncratic titles as "If I Remember, I Have Always Been Certain" or "The Sometime Charm," and Sigmarrson has developed an intriguing set of semiotic puzzles that may or may not have any solutions. When asked by Rob Young of The Wire if his Stillupsteyppa was willfully obscurist, his obvious answer was "In a way we are astronauts, we are filling in the missing gaps." Anyway, this is an album the more than lives up to its title.
Signal is the Raster supergroup/collaborative effort between Frank Bretschneider (aka Komet), Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), and Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto). Having set up an arsenal of laptops, black boxes, and oscillators, Signal's caustic electronics have produced a synthetic aural approximation of the Pantone spectrum of grey. Dessicated rhythms form terse electronic structures within layers of timestretched sinewaves and digital clickery. Nice work.
The latest chunk of clinical otherworldly, stark white dancefloor anti-funk from the always amazing Raster-Noton label comes from Signal, who we haven't heard from in ages, a sort of modern minimalist supergroup, featuring Frank Bretschneider (Komet), Olaf Bender (Byetone) and label head Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto), and you might think with that many cooks in the sonic kitchen, the result would be dense and messy and chaotic, but anyone even slightly familiar with these guys and this label know that nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, this is just as minimal and stripped down as anything we've heard from any of these guys�
But like much of the later Raster-Noton releases, the label's Ikeda-ish trademark super spare high end low end sine wave click and buzz has been tempered with bits of melody, subtle hints of groove, the result a strange alien robot dancemusic.
Beginning with a thick swirl of buzzing synth, almost like an electronic SUNNO))), the buzz quickly gives way to a glorious minimal skeletal funkiness. Where Chain Reaction took minimalism into a fuzzy, grungy underworld and wrapped it in murk and whir, these guys lay the whole thing out in a bright white space, all metallic edges and sanitized surfaces, a gloriously machinelike and propulsive future funk abstraction of techno created in some alien vacuum. The best part about this Signal disc is that in addition to all the stark minimalism and clipped robotic beats, they've also introduced some, well, maybe 'dirty sounds' might be the best way to describe them in this context, some air conditioner hum, some spurts of Geiger counter glitch, bits of blurry fuzz, smears of distortion and crumbling effects, some low end buzz that is chopped up into what almost sounds like metallic riffing. Rather than sounding out of place, they simply add more texture, more grit, make the music sound slightly more human and less alien, they also serve to highlight just how clinical and awesomely austere the beats and sounds are when those bits of buzz and hum drop out, a dramatic sonic shift that almost makes your ears pop. Awesome.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ultra minimalism from the three heads of Noton/Rastermusic - Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), Frank Bretschneider (aka Komet), and Carsten Nikolai (aka Noto) - whose combined effort is abstract digital sound structures based on the very simple clarity of sine waves and noise modulation.
Yet another jam packed issue of outsider rock, modern music, free jazz and everything in between. If you already read the Wire, you should definitely make room for Signal To Noise, they both cover similar sonic territory, but each with their own bent, meaning they compliment each other pretty perfectly.
This month Animal Collective is on the cover. And inside: Akron/Family, Andrew Hill R.I.P., Astral Social Club, The Terminals, Rod Poole R.I.P., People, Future Rapper, Khate, a piece on the Chicago drone movement, and a seriously massive collection of reviews, cds, lps, books, performances, installations and more.
Latest issue from this amazing modern music magazine, giving the Wire a serious run for their money! This time around Jarboe's on the cover, obscured by trees, while inside: Arbouretum, Harris Wulfson, Blood Brothers, guitarist Peter Walker, jam band The Slip, vocalist Lauren Newton, saxophonist Jean Derome, tripped out poster artists Patrick and Amy Borezo, the Globe Unity Orchestra, composer Milton Babbitt, trombonist Steve Swell, Sean O'Hagen of the High Llamas and then an overwhelming array of reviews, insightful and well written, books, live performances, tons of cds, dvds lps and even mp3's, 7", 3"s and tapes, and finally a whole mess of reissues...
It's been awhile since we heard from Austin based one man band Silent Land Time Machine, not that Jon Roberts hasn't been busy. He runs his own Indian Queen imprint as well as co-running the fantastic tape label, Holodeck (from which we've reviewed releases by Thousand Foot Whale Claw, Smokey Emery and the other band Roberts does times with, the awesome kraut-psych drone outfit, Lumens). His debut, & Hope Still on Time-Lag, felt like a host of musicians in a full-on psychedelic Henry Flynt whirlwind, but all instruments were deftly played by Roberts himself. Here on this six song vinyl ep, he gives his compositions more space. With treated violin as his primary instrument, he carefully crafts beautifully layered psych-folk dirges that sound as if they were transmitted from some far-off place and time. Billows of static over looping and cascading filigrees of melody, murky percussive rhythms, and field recordings add to the songs' haunting remote quality. With harmonium and parlor piano on a song like "An Own To One's Room", it feels like some old west paean to days gone by. The long title, I Am No Longer Alone With Myself and Can Only Artificially Recall the Scary and Beautiful Feeling of Solitude, is a quote from Carl Jung, and it aptly describes not only the overall feel of the recording, but also the mysteriously romantic notion of how experience is shaped by continuous yet selective entanglements with the memories of our past. On 180g clear vinyl. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Highly Recommended!
Silent Servant's dour techno emerges from the now defunct Sandwell District collective of techno-heds keen on bending the Detroit / Berlin axis to allow for the grim pathologies of Industrial culture and all of its post-punk offshoots to infiltrate the boom-boom-boom of a 909 drum kick. Sandwell's Karl O'Connor is certainly the most vocal, hardlined, and aggressive of the District's members through the brutalist techno that he's produced over the years. His DJ sets are notorious for dropping Whitehouse and other power electronic squalor amidst furiously hard breakbeats. Juan Mendez (aka Silent Servant) strikes a gloomier pose than O'Connor through the Sandwell District and carries this over into the ethereally witched-out Tropic Of Cancer. Silent Servant's Negative Fascination drops from Hospital Productions, whose ghastly noise aesthetic parted once before for Cold Cave's gritty synth pop, making room for head honcho Dominic Fernow to follow suit with his own adventures in rhythm (e.g. Vatican Shadows, Christian Cosmos). If one were to imagine what Dom would want out of a techno record on Hospital, Negative Fascination is exactly what comes to mind - Chain Reaction's dub-inflected heroin house, Clock DVA's cybernetic futurism, and the atmosphere from the mournful dirges of New Order's first album.
A fine grit coats the production of Negative Fascination, and it's something that electronic purists may find off-putting, but it suits the bleakness and dystopian overtures that Mendez injects into his production. Acid-like gurgles propel the minimalist techno thump of "The Invocation Of Lust" and "The Strange Attractor" both of which rise and fall through a complex sequence of churning rhythms and shifting drones. "Temptation & Desire" lifts a taut rhythmic stab straight from The Sisters Of Mercy circa Body Electric and mutates it into a punchy minimal wave number with appropriately coldly theatrical drones hovering in the distant. The finale "Utopian Disaster" is right out of the Sandwell playbook of modulated techno sequencing, Chain Reactive dubby rhythms, and stealth bomber vibes. A fucking great record. (FYI, turntable types: the vinyl version's first pressing sold out, but is being repressed right now, so back in soon.)
Second release from Silentist, a bizarre grindcore twentieth century classical hybrid. At least that's what they used to sound like. Originally described to us as a classical pianist playing with a relentlessly blast beating drummer, their sound ended up being more like a grind band with a pianist and no guitarist. Which was still pretty darn amazing. This time around it's a whole different beast. All the metal and the downtuned fury, the blast beats, the shrieked vocals, all gone. In their place is a strangely avant garde piano, vocals and drum cabaret. Wild and splattery, ultra dramatic and completely unlike anything we've ever heard. Wild atonal piano intertwined with pounding tribal drumming, accompanied by over the top super dramatic vocals. A brief flurry of manic and impossibly intricate piano drum interplay before the drums drop out and the piano becomes a multiphonic blur, a lush jazzscape of shimmering cymbals, repetitive piano figures and crooning keening vocals. A strange pop song with fuzzed out rhythms, affected vocals, shuffling jazz drums, sounding a bit like a jazzier Animal Collective... But it's the final track that kicks in with a bit of Silentist's old heaviness. But only a bit. A super distorted low end rhythmic buzz over haunting creepy piano melodies, and wailed mournful vocals, all drenched in reverb, laced loosely to a lurching loping tempo, a weirdly catchy minor key epic that builds and builds with manic drumming surfacing beneath the seasick tempo and turning an already harrowing sounding track more and more intense. Really really strange and completely amazing!
We've pretty much totally fallen for these guys. Big time! Initially we were lead completely astray by a friend who described them as a classical pianist / grindcore drummer duo. We were expecting something like that weird Dave Lombardo record where he drums along to Vivaldi. What we got was much different but no less satisfying. A demented dark grind band with a pianist who added all sorts of unlikely tonal color, and weird melodic flourishes. On their second ep, they ditched the grind completely and replaced it with some sort of damaged cabaret, with super dramatic vocals, insane piano, and all sorts of swirling jazzisms. Well, here we are at ep #3 (what is it with the ep's guys?) and they've gone and done it again. It's almost like they're a different band each time. But there's always something that links all their disparate musical personalities no matter how tenuous. On House On The Hill, Silentist are some sort of doomy, gothy slowcore band. The opening track is a loping dirge, simple shuffling drums over a rumbling bass drone and drawled sung spoken vocals, with occasional bursts of anguished howls and extra-pounding drums, almost like a much more malevolent Codeine with some distinct Swans influence. The second track is equally as dark, but is a super dramatic sort-of-industrial version of the first song, music box melodies, weird distorted electric piano, grinding fuzz synths, pounding drums and moaned baritone vocals, that also occasionally shift into black metal screams. Imagine some neo-classical, black metal Birthday Party and you might be close. Very dark, and very creepy and strangely psychedelic. Heavy too, but not like metal heavy, more sort of dense and disturbing. This record is almost like the perfect mix of the first two, wild whiplash grind and super glammy cabaret, a blackened glam grind maybe? Some tracks are sweeping and epic, some are blasting and chaotic, but always the interplay between the drums and piano manage to hold it all together. Dreamy minor key melodicism jammed up against lightning fast blast beats, howled tortured vocals draped over sweetly melancholy ambience, dizzying and confusing, but so fucking great.
Every Silentist review always requires a quick recap of the band's back story. Or at least the story of how we were introduced to the band. We were told they were a duo, a classical piano player, and a grindcore drummer (when in fact the same guy handles both drums and piano!!), and thus it was some sort of classical grind hybrid, and while perhaps there are elements of both in the music of Silentist, it's way weirder and harder to describe.
The sound here is similar to the last record, the A side begins with pounding low end piano, forceful and almost violent sounding, beneath it, super mathy and complex drumming, lots of rumbling bass buzz, the result is a sort of classical metal cabaret if that makes any sense, the howled vocals adding a strange punkish element to the weirdly complicated sort-of-groove.
The B side opens with swirly clouds of piano a la Lubomyr Melnyk, over rubbery rumbling bass and muted crunchy percussion, the vocals this time are heavily effected and crooned, and again, the cabaret vibe is heavy, albeit more evil and demonic. The rums explode and get super heavy, the piano becomes more frenzied, the bass thick and distorted almost like a metal guitar, all the elements tangled up and clashing wildly.
Plus at the end of the A side, there's a super brief track, a 26 second long burst of super lo-fi power violence, just insane drumming and shouted vocals, like Drop Dead or Man Is The Bastard but stripped WAY down.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
There are weird bands, and then there is Silentist. Originally described to us as a classical pianist playing along with a metal drummer kicking out insane blast beats, it ended up being not nearly that simple, and in fact it was even better that that description would have led us to believe, sounding much more like a weird grind metal band who just happened the have a lead pianist.
So after three eps, we have the very first Silentist lp, and it's as weird as we remember, maybe even weirder, and somehow even better. As of this writing, it's been playing for about 5 minutes, and EVERY customer in the store has come up to see what the heck we're playing, a few who were digging it, and a few who were seriously confused. And rightfully so. Imagine doom metal crossed with cabaret, classical music and grind metal, that description alone would lead you to believe that hearing it might do your head in, and actually hearing it, well, it just might, this is some totally insane, totally unique, and absolutely fantastic stuff.
Beginning with solo piano, the record starts of dark and dolorous, melodic and mysterious, but soon the pianist begins playing a bit more wildly, the drums kick in, and the shrieking vocalist soon follows, and suddenly it's some insane black metal / free jazz / whatthefuck hybrid. Imagine Dave Lombardo jamming with Lubomyr Melnyk and Gaahl from Gorgoroth on vocals. Or a grindcore reimagining of "Flight Of The Bumblebee", but all of those descriptions are really too reductive, this is some serious next level shit. Epic and majestic, sometimes sounding like a piano-led Swans... other times sounding like classical black metal, really quite difficult to describe, which in most cases means they're doing something right.
Anyone into weird heaviness or heavy weirdness, this is most definitely for you.
