Last list we reviewed Stafraenn Hakon's excellent debut "...Eignast Jeppa". Well we quickly sold out of that one (don't worry, we'll get more) but we do have THIS newer Stafraenn Hakon recording to share with you now. The same facts apply: Stafraenn Hakon, actual name Olafur Josephsson, is from Iceland. And everytime we play anything by Stafraenn Hakon in the store, somebody comes to the counter and asks about it, 'cause this music is simply so nice. Mellow, instrumental post-rock so freaking lovely it's like crying magical tears. No, really, this is nice enough to make 'nice' seem like an understatement. Sad, shimmering, swelling, chiming, gentle, drifting, gauzily melodic. There's another Stafraenn Hakon release coming up on Resonant real soon, and we hope he keeps 'em coming. Sigur Ros, move over.
Hard to tell if "Dr. Stahlgren" and "Dr. Ferguson" are in fact members of Stock, Hausen, & Walkman, but I would imagine they are, as this little 3" CD was released in the series of "educational recordings" on their Hot Air label. Supposedly, these two
Of course, the two "doctors" made many hours of recordings of those machines, of course "solved" the problems, and of course this album "Printing With Magnetic Inks" is the resulting collage of those recordings, of course with "some artistic license, editing and processing.
With this audio fuck-you (much more listenable than V/VM 's attempts at the same), Hot Air offers yet another exceptionally funny piece of contemporary musique concrete filled with all sorts of whimsical bleeps and bloops.
This here is the second solo album by Mr. Moe Staiano aka Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's found percussionist. Frantic, dizzying and cacaphonous, but not without its elements of structure surfacing every now and again to make the explosions of mayhem all the more impactful. Hyper spurts of music boxes, food pans, oil barrels, sheet metal, brake drums, plastic horns, slide whistles and numerous other objects (yes, including a kitchen sink!) as well as the more conventional guitars, cellos, bass, thumb pianos, contrabass, vibraphones, drum machines, clarinets, musical saws, theremin and drums. There's some seriously twisted yet totally tight rhythmic interludes going on here - just as we've come to expect from Sleepytime G.M. not to mention their previous spectacular incarnation Idiot Flesh. Other slower, more haunting/haunted moments that take place deeper into the album brought to mind Nurse With Wound and Mr. Bungle. These tracks were actually recorded back in 97/98, but are just now seeing their release. However, Staiano does acknowledge this tardiness in his liner notes: "This is a Late album. It is dedicated to those who wait." A wonderfully bizarre listen.
Second album from Moe! Staiano's improv orchestra Moe!kestra. Ear and mind-bending performances!
Woohooo! here's another release from the mad percussion wizard of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (and formerly Idiot Flesh)... it's Moe! Staiano (yes, that exclamation point belongs there). This cd features the debut recordings of his highly skilled, high stamina'd Moe!kestra. Two Forms Of Multitudes is yet another display of Staiano's always impressive, expansive and trippy improvs. Played out on an eclectic mish mash of both conventional and found-object instruments, they're rollercoaster rides of sonic experimentation that leave many a listener reelin'.
Second disc from this Dutch black ambient doom outfit and it's just as harrowing and horrific as the first. For more on the band and their strange ways, see the review of the last record Nihilistik Terrror elsewhere on the website.
But, in a nutshell, these guys are brutal, harsh, extreme and really fucking scary. Musically as well as in their modus operandi. Not content with coaxing the harshest of sounds from their instruments (there are instruments?) and emitting harsh demonic howls and hysterical maniacal shrieks themselves, these guys managed (through some dubious connections) to recruit a handful of inmates, in local psychiatric hospitals, to supply the 'vocals' and much of the artwork. And it sounds like it. Stalaggh's sound is a harsh swirling drone drenched freaked out noise, raw and hissy, loads of buzz and shriek and industrial whir, all whipped up into a dense stormcloud of sound, but it's the vocals that truly disturb, and this time they're everywhere, male, female, howling, moaning, weeping, wailing, sometimes barely audible, sometimes ferociously way up in the mix, always completely freaked out and brutally intense. This is like wandering through some old school mental institution, wandering the halls, all set to the sounds of SPK or Throbbing Gristle. This is the sound of human suffering, not just musically, but in every way, this is hate and confusion and misery and loneliness and sadness and despair and depression all channelled into a single 35 minute track. This record is sad and scary, and thus pretty fucking amazing.
It definitely takes a strong stomach, and a lot of mental resolve, and some seriously iron clad ears, but it ends up being worth it. Very little music is this raw and intimate and frightening and seriously scary. It's really pretty fascinating, as well as a little bit repugnant, definitely hard to listen to, but almost equally hard not to.
Limited to 100 copies, each one hand numbered and the inside features a reproduction of a piece of artwork drawn by one of the mental patients.
[The digipaks are all a little worn on the edges, but that's how they all came...]
Bad Vugum is back! Under the name BV2, the crucial noise rock / avant pop / weirdo punk label from Finland has unleashed a new batch of genius for us to, in turn, unleash upon you all. Starting with Stalwart.
From rigid beats to utterly lovely folky guitars, the boys of Stalwart range far and wide within the five tracks, 23 minutes of music offered up on this, their debut ep. Surf guitar twang coexists with metallic chug, and organ jamming meets up with angular riffs, in songs that can be headache-hammering and/or exquisitely melodic. Yet somehow everything holds together, Stalwart being a droning, repetitively rhythmic beast that's definitely very "Circular" in sound... hmm, well that's probably 'cause these Finns are in fact members of Circle, Ektroverde and Kuusumun Profeetta! Maybe you can kind of imagine a more discordant, metallic Circle, with occasional distorted vocals and off-time drumming, veering into Bastro territory? Stalwart also sound a bit like another Finnish band, the menacingly industrialized Paine, with whom we believe they share some members. But Stalwart's songs allow a lot more light and weirdness in. We eagerly await a full-length!
As the title of this record indictates (if you remember your high school German), Stangl (acoustic and electric guitars, percussion) and Kurzman (G3) seek to invoke the stillness, texture and monotony of snow -- snow composed of millions of unique snowflakes. Stark and beatiful.
Over 30 years, Steven Stapleton has worked with countless musicians, miscreants, and madmen in the brilliantly surreal Nurse With Wound, and occasionally he's stepped beyond Nurse to engage in fully collaborative projects. His long-standing friendship with Current 93's David Tibet brings the most prolific non-Nurse collaborations (both with Current 93 and as Stapleton / Tibet pairings); but in 1992, a curious one-off project between Stapleton and Tony Wakeford (Sol Invictus, ex-Death In June) was released. The Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish is certainly not a Nurse With Wound record, but it's also not a Sol Invictus record. The album finds itself in one of those unique locations that really exists on its own, but also manages to perfectly hybridize the aesthetics of both artists.
It's unfortunate that we've not posted much on Tony Wakeford, and for those not aware of his work, here's the brief synopsis. After working with Douglas Pearce in the anarcho-punk trio Crisis and later forming Death In June, Tony Wakeford's personal aesthetic took up a very dark, occultish take on British folk, even darker and more malcontent than those apocalyptic recombinations of Current 93. His vocal style was never terribly polished, with his mumbling delivery and blue-collar brogue probably serving the punk snarl of Crisis better than the stoically minimal arrangements of Sol Invictus. While some of the Sol Invictus records could be pretty painful to listen to, a few are downright classics, Trees In Winter and Against The Modern World being the two strongest.
We seem to recall Stapleton quipping somewhere that he felt Tony Wakeford's music was too po-faced and that his collaborative project was his own way of subverting Wakeford's agenda. The two genuinely seemed to enjoy each other's company, as the liner notes from both artists can attest; but one has to wonder if the flipside was true as well that Wakeford felt Stapleton's collages were too silly from time to time.
The atmosphere of the album is somber from the onset, with slashing drones not dissimilar to the Nurse album Soliloquy For Lilith, but situated into a gentle melody surrounded by gasping noises and eventually giving way to melancholy piano chords bounce off of oscillating drones. These collages of semi-melodic drones continue until a frenzied noise burst gives way to a quick interlude of Perez Prado inspired mambo shimmy. This leads to the albums centerpiece: a song-based diptych of "Lucifer Before Sunrise" and "Walk The White Ghost" (a haunting remix of the former), both of which center upon an archetypal Wakeford song of grim folk tunes that Stapleton twists to their profound benefit. The album concludes with an dubbed collage of spectral noises juxtaposed with more of that mambo grooviness that could only come from Stapleton.
For the reissue of the Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish, there's a bonus disc with material unused from the original album, plus a series of remixes from irr. app. (ext.), Andrew Liles, and Brian Conniffe.
Very nice to have this record in stock again!
Don't really buy that Star Turbine's sound is of "a new age nature" as the press release claims, even as that same statement qualifies this Scandinavian duo as being rather noisy and concrete. Much of the cassette culture that spawned releases such as this some 30 years ago was opposed to or at least was dubious of the propensity of the late '70s / early '80s new age movement to navel gaze. Instead projects like Zoviet France, Cranioclast, or even Psychic TV used the notions of audio hypnosis and trance inducing musics to craft metaphors which spoke against systems of control. Sure the end results may encourage a liberation of the self, but the new age movement's self-identification and self-determination has been argued to have given rise to Thatcher and Reagan era politics. Lest we launch into a PhD thesis on cosmology, aquarian religions, and their impacts on culture and politics, Star Turbine ain't new age, not even in the coying retro pastiche idioms tossed out by NNA Tapes and Not Not Fun. Nope, this is a grimy and dirty cassette of what once might have been deep-space transmissions and radiophonic impressionism but has gone through so many iterations from shitty cassette to microcassette and then back to mangled cassette that the murky drones speak of oil-stained / shit-strewn wastelands. At times, Star Turbine's amalgams of spluttering tape noise and tarnished ambience gets downright beautiful, but those sounds are are seen through the lens of decay and not that of a crystal. Nicely done boys, but get your metaphors right next time. Limited to 100 copies and printed on opalescent paper as is the brand standard for Black Horizons.
Yet another Wolf Eyes offshoot/side project, and it's another good one, and another unexpected sonic detour, this one ditching all of the harsh noise, and much of the industrial crunch of the WE mothership in exchange for a sort of creepy, bass driven minimal psychedelia, a tripped out psychedelic blues maybe? It's actually quite hard to describe, an obvious comparison would be Jandek, but filtered through a more cracked Midwestern noise rock filter, albeit with much of the noise and most of the rock removed. It's all about the blooping basslines, the bleating horns, fluttering woodwinds, the streaks of hiss and whir, the weird bits of blurred noisiness that add color to these super skeletal sketchy dirges, the vocals a lazy drawled moan, it's almost like Spacemen 3 if they took WAY too many drugs (if that were possible), and were forced to stumble through a set of abstract psychedelic blues, the same sort of druggy mesmer, and hypnotic haziness. The band do gain some momentum on a few of the tracks, but it's still a druggy stumble, with instruments all lurching in fits and starts, the rhythms more a sort of looped repeated stutter buried in a cloud of swirled grey thrum, and when the band do lock in tight, there are some serious stretches of dark droned out hypno-dirgery that manage to be truly haunting and mysteriously abstract, imagine some impossible collaboration between Wolf Eyes, No Neck Blues Band and Jandek, and you wouldn't even be close.
Strange and surreal, wonderfully dour, hauntingly lovely and occasionally chaotic, an unlikely new favorite for sure.
On this new disc, the Starfuckers do a song called "Eternal Soundcheck", demonstrating an awareness of what most people are going to think about 'em...and it's true, most folks just aren't gonna get this. But, we urge you, give it a chance!
Italy's Starfuckers, if you're not familar with 'em, play an abstract, sparse, and totally unique brand of what they term 'rock concrete', something that kind of sounds like This Heat falling down the stairs, but trying to be really quiet about it. Percussive and full of near-silences, their almost-randomly-improvised-sounding music uses guitar, drums, and electronics to take the 'glitch' aesthetic out of the laptop arena and into that of the live band. It's as if they played 'normal' songs, then removed about 70 percent of the music, and shuffled the remaining sounds around. It's counter-intuitive, disjointed stuff, yet every dissonant chord played on the guitar, every bassy electronic rumble, every drum hit seems to have meaning, unknowable meaning. Attentive listening will reveal compelling rhythms and structures. If you dig the likes of US Maple, Supersilent, Kevin Drumm's solo guitar stuff, or that last guitar-less Fushitsusha record, you'll enjoy the Starfuckers. Indeed, you probably already do.
Ok, let's talk about "Infinitive Sessions": the first three tracks ("Blues Off", "Drive On", and "Off Blues") seem to follow on pretty directly from the stuff on their previous album "Infrantumi", kinda being more of the same (which is fine, 'cause there's not nearly enough of this stuff wethinks). One difference though: "Infinitive Sessions" is wholly instrumental, there's none of the Italian spoken in sinister whispers that cryptically caressed your ears on their prior releases, which perhaps is a pity.
Then the aforementioned "Eternal Soundcheck" ups the crackly drone quotient quite nicely for the next 12 minutes, before the final two tracks ("Funked X" and "Vamped X") reveal that the Starfuckers have gotten into a new and unexpected 'funk' bag! Not funk in any accepted form, of course, just the suggestion of funk via a 'funky' guitar sound. This caused their label to compare this record to The Contortions, Big Flame, and James Brown, but that's going way too far. They're MORE 'no wave' than The Contortions, and if the JBs ever laid down 'grooves' like these, The Godfather of Soul would have fined them, fired them, rehired, then fined and fired them again. Maybe a jazz cat like Miles Davis coulda gotten into this 'funk', but even he never took THIS much drugs. These tracks sound a bit like "Rated X" from Miles' "Get Up With It" turned into a 'Glitches' Brew' of funk fuckery.
We've never liked the term 'post-rock', as applied to such bands as Mogwai, Slint, A Minor Forest, and Shellac, however it seems to us that what the Starfuckers play is trully 'post-rock', in a very literal sense, and apparently that's the idea. The Starfuckers website (www.nanananan.it/starfuckers/) features the following statement from one Henry Clitus Colagetti, the President of something called CAMC (the Commitee for Abolition Of the Middle Class): ROCK IS DEAD, WHAT DRAGS ITSELF FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS IS NOTHING ELSE THAT ITS CORPSE CONTINUOUSLY EXHUMED BY CULTURAL INDUSTRY.
ROCK IS DEAD IN 1975 WHEN LOU REED PUBLISHED "METAL MACHINE MUSIC" THAT DECREED THE END OF ROCK MUSIC.
"INFRANTUMI" BY STARFUCKERS IS THE FIRST ROCK ALBUM AFTER "METAL MACHINE MUSIC".
THE NEW ROCK, RESPECTING THE BASIC ELEMENTS THAT CONSTITUTE WHAT WAS ROCK MUSIC - REPETITION AND SIMPLICITY OF PLAYNG - RISES AGAIN BASING ON THE PRINCIPLES OF ASYNCHRONY, UNTUNING AND NEGATION OF EGO.
FUTURE IS ALREADY BEHIND YOU.
He's talking about "Infrantumi" but the sentiment applies to this new release as well, of course.
Best band ever? Well, WE rate these guys with Reynols, the Thai Elephant Orchestra, Fushitsusha, Faust, and few others in the pantheon of fucked but totally original and brilliant musical units.
Wow, exciting times at our shop. Even several of the Starfuckers' biggest fans here at AQ had never heard THIS before, this crucial Italian band's debut lp originally released in 1990. As promised in our Record Of The Week review of the Starfuckers' Ordine '91-'96 collection just a few lists ago, the Holy Mountain label (who know their secret history of rock and roll all right!) has now done a reissue of this early Starfuckers platter, a dark slab of Stooges worship containing a dirty dozen tracks so trance inducingly raw n' powerful we can only imagine the entire band were stripped shirtless, bare torsos smeared with peanut butter, Iggy Stooge style, whilst recording this. The blurry black and white cover photo suggests as much, though the peanut butter is not visible...
If, at our recommendation, you picked up the Ordine cd (which is out of stock at the moment - we have more copies coming from Italy soon, never fear) then you have already heard a handful of early Starfuckers rockers from before they went totally gonzoid experimental. The six songs from the band's 1991 Brodo Di Cagne Strategico mini-lp included on Ordine demonstrated that despite their ultimately unique, counter-intuitive, almost "anti-rock" sound for which we consider the band geniuses, they surely had their roots in "actual" rock and roll, very much Stooges influenced (hence the "Funhausen" tag that Holy Mountain head honcho JW likes to apply to 'em). If you liked the Brodo Di Cagne Strategico stuff, then Metallic Diseases is for you. And anyway, how can it not be great with that title?
Relentless punked out noiserock riff repetition that's fuzz laden, feedback filled, with drawling English language vox all sneered and snotty, and song titles like "Dead Metal City Blues", "Western Man", "Cold White Cancer", and "U.S.A.". Godly garagey stuff for sure, loud and pounding. There's maybe a jangling, poppier side to some of it ("Shake Off" in particular), and that's a real cool time too, but what you've got mainly here is a down on the street death trip, Starfuckers on a search and destroy mission to be your dog... this left hand path eventually leads them to the inclusion of some Funhouse style saxophone squawk, skronk, squall on the penultimate track "Flower Lover", and thence to the seven and a half minute final cut, "Grado Zero", the only song sung in Italian, and heavily laced with wiggy electronic FX, which of the trax here most strongly foreshadows the Starfuckers' later experimental direction, it could have appeared on Sinistri alongside "Ordine Pubblico" for sure.
So, it's as if the Starfuckers guys got together in 1990, and decided, ok, sure, we'll make rock and roll, yeah, let's channel the Stooges, 'cause we want to START at the END, and then push past those limits. So, once they had manifested themselves as the apotheosis of "rock" at its punkest and rockest, on Metallic Diseases and Brodo Di Cagne Strategico, they then moved on to the next phase of their career to utterly DECONSTRUCT "rock" on the Sinistri album and beyond... Why they did this, how they decided these things, what happened? We don't know, we can only wonder.
But, while cool and interesting and all, that doesn't even matter. Let's put it this way, if Metallic Diseases was the only record that the Starfuckers ever did, its reissue would/should still be hailed as the discovery of a long lost gem of timeless Stoogified psychedelic ugly-noise-punk-rawk that belongs up there with the output/outbursts of such acts as Union Carbide Productions, The Heads, Spacemen 3, High Rise, Brainbombs, and (more recently) Vincent Black Shadow. That it was only the beginning of the Starfuckers' sonic explorations, a program of experimental rock n' roll reinvention that took them somewhere that no other band has ever gone, makes it even more special...
Totally recommended, as if you couldn't tell. Sadly for those of us who happen to prefer cds, this reissue is vinyl-only, although it does include a download code for mp3's.
There are very few bands we can think of who have so fully and utterly invented a sound for themselves, sounding like nothing else on earth before, and possibly since. Italy's Starfuckers are such a band. And it's a sound that fascinates us. Unique, true originals. One of our favorite bands (and by "our" we mean us, and anyone who belongs to the secret club of possibly demented Starfuckers lovers). Which goes a long way to explaining why we're making this Record Of The Week, a disc by a band with such incongruous and impolite name, and a perhaps problematic sound as well, for some. This disc consists of a reissue of their best / most definitive albums, 1994's Sinistri, and a never-before-on-cd mini-lp that preceded it, plus other, extra rare tracks. 16 tracks in total, almost 70 minutes of music. Or since it's the Starfuckers, should we say "music"? One definition of music is organized sound, and this stuff is organized in its seeming DIS-organization. Deconstructed music. Counter-intuitive rock n' roll. Genius. Here's what we've said about 'em before, in a review of their final album, 2002's Infinitive Sessions, currently out of print:
"Starfuckers...play an abstract, sparse, and totally unique brand of what they term 'rock concrete', something that kind of sounds like This Heat falling down the stairs, but trying to be really quiet about it. Percussive and full of near-silences, their almost-randomly-improvised-sounding music uses guitar, drums, and electronics to take the 'glitch' aesthetic out of the laptop arena and into that of the live band. It's as if they played 'normal' songs, then removed about 70 percent of the music, and shuffled the remaining sounds around. It's counter-intuitive, disjointed stuff, yet every dissonant chord played on the guitar, every bassy electronic rumble, every drum hit seems to have meaning, unknowable meaning. Attentive listening will reveal compelling rhythms and structures."
Yes, indeed, but that's only part of the story, and why this disc is THEE Starfuckers disc to get, if you're ever gonna get any Starfuckers, and you should. We said they established their own sound, but they built up to it from a more familiar basis. The earlier tracks here demonstrate that, while the Sinistri stuff is the best example of the special qualities of Starfuckers alluded to above.
Those earliest tracks, the first 6 here, come from the band's 1991 mini-lp, Brodo Di Cagne Strategico. They're indicative of the band's roots in all things Stooges-y, being totally badass, driving, dark post-punkish numbers laced with shards of noisy, "out" guitar and free jazz saxophone squall... This is the sort of Starfuckers splooge that our pal JW, now head of the Holy Mountain label, once so succinctly dubbed "Funhausen" (i.e. the Stooges' Funhouse meets experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen). Spacemen 3 fans should dig as well. And that avant-garde, Stockhausen side of the equation comes more and more to the fore as this disc progresses...
The Bordo Di Cagne Strategico tracks are followed by two compilation appearances, both "covers". You get their utterly unrecognizable (what did you expect?) version of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" from a cd that came with Bananafish magazine #11, and also their appropriately monomaniacal take on "Mechanical Man", from a Charles Manson tribute upon which they appeared alongside the likes of Skullflower, Controlled Bleeding, and Eugene Chadbourne, among others. We'd like to think that John Lennon would have dug the Starfuckers (if any Beatle would, Yoko Ono's husband would). Maybe Charlie would too, he's crazy enough.
Then, tracks 9-15 are from Sinistri. The main course. The masterpiece. The Starfuckers aesthetic, fully realized, celebrates 'asynchrony' and minimalism, and that's what you get here. Are you ready? It's a mysterious, compelling soundworld, one that stokes the imagination and seems somehow unassailable in its avant garde gravitas. Serious stuff, but still somehow rock n' roll. In spirit, more than anything else. Anti-rock too (with the slogan printed here: "new music means destruction of ego"). These songs/sounds are quite curious, cryptic... Blats and bursts of chiming, chunking guitar. Blips and bloops of eerie electronics. Sudden percussion, sudden silence. Feedback. Suspenseful rhythmic passages. Much moody rumble and hiss. Bassy detonations, chaotic jumbles of piano. And, crucially, the calm, semi-spoken vocals, deadpan declamations in Italian, like we're being poetically lectured by one of the Starfuckers while the rest of 'em disassemble rock n' roll as we know it. How can we describe the Starfucker's Sinistri further? We don't even understand it. But we love it.
Oh, towards the end, Sinistri's got the Starfuckers "hit single" (as far as we're concerned!), the song "Ordine Pubblico", also released on a Drunken Fish 7" back in the day... harking back to the Brodo Di Cagne material, "Ordine" is a sinister, cyclic, claustrophobic rock song, the brilliant last gasp of their Stooges-ness, hypnotic and handclap driven, with subversive lyrics that go something like this: "Criminale / Comunisti / Vagabondi / Terroristi / Prostitute / Extremisti / grazie / grazie..." You don't need to know Italian to know what he's saying.
That's all followed by Sinistri's final track, "Macrofoneie Ia", which sounds like what might happen in the studio after the musicians had all gone home or passed out, if the machines then started "playing" themselves. Clicks and buzzings, as of patch cords being unplugged, or plugged in. Or, you could say it takes the Starfuckers "Eternal Soundcheck" (a song title of theirs on another album) notion to an extreme, as if you recorded not the soundcheck at a show, but the band just setting up beforehand, in near silence but for when electrical connections are being made. Then, the disc ends with a previously unreleased track from 1996 that certainly wouldn't have been out of place on the original issue of Sinistri.
Hearing Starfuckers for the first time isn't just like hearing music you haven't heard before. It's also like hearing an IDEA of music that you've never had before. And, better yet, listening to Starfuckers for the 100th time, it remains fresh/strange, you still are piecing together the hidden structures of what's going on...
While we said that they sound like no-one else, we HAVE referenced 'em in various reviews, to say that other bands maybe remind us a bit of them, usually due to their fractured and confusional compositional ways... Radian, US Maple, Supersilent, Sim+Otomo, even Tony Tears, have all garnered comparisons by us to Starfuckers for some reason or other, but still none of 'em (and nobody) really does what the Starfuckers do. Or ever will.
If you've never heard Starfuckers, and are at all curious (you should be, if we're doing our job) this is the disc to get, as we said. And even if you are a fan, who already owns the long out of print Sinistri cd, you probably need this anyway for all the other rare tracks included. Record Of The Week? Reissue Of The Year! Well, maybe not for everyone, but those select few who 'get it' will really be grateful. And this, with the inclusion of their earliest, most rockin' material, is the most 'accessible' Starfuckers we could suggest.
Italy's Sometimes Records (who were thrilled that we appreciate the Starfuckers as much as they do), have packaged this with a cd booklet containing everything we could expect in the way of photos, graphics, credits, lyrics, and liner notes... the latter in Italian, though we glean references to the Stooges and Demetrio Stratos of '70s Italian proggers Area, possibly another inspiration to them.
FYI, btw, Holy Mountain will soon be doing a vinyl reissue of the Starfuckers rare 1990 debut lp Metallic Diseases, so watch out for that as well!
This side project from members of UK dark prog acts Guapo and Miasma & The Carousel Of Headless Horses presents a second album, following one from last winter on Aurora Borealis, and it's quite aptly titled: Shivers and Voids. That's what this sounds like. Creepy, soundtracky, dramatic droned out weirdness under the stars... stirring and sinister stuff, with martial drums and ominous keyboards. Stargazer's Assistant takes much more of an abstract, soundscapey approach to "prog" than do either Guapo or Miasma, though you will certainly hear some similarities.
This disc, which clocks in at just under 25 minutes all told, consists of 3 tracks but it may as well just be one long, programmatic piece, beginning with the nine minutes or so of "Night Soil", a seductive nightmare that finds the listener sleepwalking on a ghostly, imaginary battlefield somewhere, with explosive detonations and snare rolls violently sundering the heavy-drone-gloom that undergirds the track, making it even scarier. The title track then provides a 4 and a half minute interlude of clanking chains, acoustic guitar, and melodic, monkish chant, heavily layered and effected, delving a bit into Richard Youngs experimental folk territory, quite nice... And then "Dream Kingdom", at 11 minutes long this disc's truest epic, also serves up its most baleful bombast.
Should appeal to fans of the aforementioned acts, as well as the likes of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Darsombra, and anything else you can imagine that would mix field recordings and doomy organ and electronic noise and droning loops... in other words, right up our alley, obviously!
The Stargazer's Assistant is the work of David J. Smith, who many of you might recognize as one of the masterminds behind modern day prog outfit Guapo, or his slightly more esoteric project Miasma & The Carousel Of Dead Horses.
The Other Side Of The Island is not just the name of this record, but a series of sculptures created by Smith from wax and coal and copper and lead (one example is the creepy image on the record's cover). A series of shapes with a deep backstory, the Earth, and the world beneath the surface, the rock and soil, the time that all of those layers of rock represent. These sculptures were part of an installation, for which The Other Side Of The Island is the soundtrack. And unlike the over the top progginess of Smith's other projects, the music here is a dark and mysterious soundworld, an audial representation of the above concepts, a journey into the depths below, and it sounds like it.
Utilizing harmonium, prepared guitars, percussion, tapes, samples, electronics and piano, Smith, along with his Miasma bandmate Daniel O'Sullivan, have crafted a truly scary chunk of buzzing doomy drone. We're not talking SUNNO))) or anything like that, no this is much more cinematic and expansive, more abstract and ambient, no riffs to be found, but guitars crunch and grind, wail and ring out.
The record opens with random bits of guitar scape and piano plonk, hovering over a deep dark swirling abyss, the track builds in intensity, the various elements growing more and more aggressive, darker and more ominous, the low end especially grows blacker and thicker, and eventually coalesces into a doomy drifting psychedelic ambience.
After a brief two minute interlude of industrial scrape and clatter, and some dreamily tripped out backwards vocals and guitars, the band slips right back into the second half of the opening track, a sort of slow burning spaced out style krautrock drift, all extended drones, and wordless vocals, buzzing coruscating electric guitars adding still more layers of psychdrone shimmer, a gorgeously smoldering ur-drone beneath a slithering slippery distorted riff, that flits and flutters like some restless spirit.
Definitely for fans of freaked out free folk, dark abstract ambience and the heart of the sun bliss out sound of krautspacedronemusick like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Expo 70, and the like...
The latest tape from this Oakland duo finds these guys drifting ever further into the cosmos, their crumbling soundscapes and blurred fields of synth shimmer, stretched way out, a sprawling, hushed world of minimal sound, a seemingly never-ending drone, softly pulsing, and surrounded by clouds of gristle and crackle, slowly unfurling, and emitting subtle sonic sparks, like buried melodies, and and ripple like shimmers, that background noise starts to take more solid shape on the second track, transformed from a whisper into a dense thrum, a distorted slo-mo stasis, cascading sheets of distortion burnished into woozy blurs, before finally receding and leaving just shadows, barely there voices, all set in a field of digi-dub like crackle, a woozy loopscape like some Philip Jeck fever dream.
The second half of Eruptionem dials back some of the low end, instead layering tinny pulsations into a glimmering crystalline stretch of grainy resonance, one that picks up grit and grime as it progresses, the shape becoming more and more Caretaker-like, all crackly and faded, sun dappled and wistful, before unexpectedly splintering into some lurching beats and thrumming low slung bass throb, but things quickly slip back into tranquility, the title track another SUNNO)))-like sprawl, all decaying distortion and slow motion riffage, smeared into a dream-doom haze, before things finish off with a gorgeous bit of Stars Of The Lid like dronescaping, moody and cinematic, minimal, but with a density and tension that gives the proceedings a seriously heavy heart, perfectly paired with the song's otherwise melancholy sonics.
LIMITED TO 140 COPIES, each one hand numbered, super swank 6 panel full color J-cards and light blue tapes.
First we've heard from this Oakland outfit, whose sound is a glorious, throbbing, crumbling, super distorted droned out world of grinding, glitched out synths, and heaving blurred heaviness, two tracks of ritualistic psychedelic drone-noise, that manages to blunt the sharp edges, and create something almost kosmische sounding, like Skullflower style ur-drone crush fused to glimmering synthy shimmer, dense walls of sound, crumble and warble, sprawling into oozing expanses of blackened rumble, underpinned by gristly buzz and softly pulsing shimmer, the B side blissing out into some hazy, dreamlike soft-noise thrum, shot through with lilting melodies, the whole thing swaddled in undulating sheets of looped buzz and soft swirls of heavenly chordal thrum, the whole thing building to a huge finale of softly swirling dream-noise.
The tape also includes a download coupon, that in addition to the two songs proper, tacks on a bonus 10 minute track, a lush, deep listening, cavernous chunk of droning, dreamy driftiness, lush and all enveloping minimal slow burn bliss out.
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered, already sold out at the label, so the few copies we have is all we're gonna get. The packaging is super over the top too, the tapes dubbed onto old school vintage reel to reel looking cassettes, housed in three color hand screen printed J-cards, and blue or pink dayglo cases.
We dug the Medicine Eagle tape from Oakland synth-noise-drone combo Starlite Coffins like crazy. Sadly that tape went out of print WAY too fast. But here's their latest, and another chance for you to nab some of this glorious psychedelic noisiness. A full hour of smoldering, layered soft noise bliss, sprawling expanses of blurred buzz and processed synths, woven into softly undulating fields of spectral shimmer, peppered with bits of glitch and all manner of buried percussive murk, the sound slipping easily from ethereal kosmische drift, to grinding gnarled distorto crush. The sound laced with ur-drone like ragas, and hazy melodies, the sound woozy and warble, recorded at extreme volume, the tape speed in constant flux, creating a fantastically uneasy spatial soundworld, that at times reminds us of Our Love Will Destroy The World, Tim Hecker or a much darker, dronier, heavier Expo 70. Some tracks slip into full on washed out Caretaker-like mesmer, all bleary faded shimmer, while others, dial it down even further, slipping into Stars Of The Lid territory, smoldering, slow burning epics, that feel on the verge of blossoming into something explosive and Godspeed-like, but instead, are stretched out into tense, dense dronescapes, that are at once intensely sinister, and washed out and almost ethereal. Gorgeous stuff for sure. As is the packaging, 1960's Op-art style two color hand screened J-cards, the tape a deadstock bi-color yellow and blue cassette, custom inserts and all housed in blue, white or clear cases. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
We've been huge fans of the Stars Of The Lid ever since their first record, Music For Nitrous Oxide, way back in 1995. And their last record, Tired Sounds Of... is a beloved favorite and all time AQ best seller. It's been fascinating to observe their sonic development, from murky guitar based 4-track bedroom guitar drones, all foggy and fuggy and murky and dreamlike, to their current sound, a more modern, almost classical sound, of rich reverberant swells, and lots and lots of space.
The Stars' sound has obviously become much more clear and well defined, polished even, but everything we loved about Nitrous Oxide is still present, albeit in slightly altered form. The Stars' were always about swells, ebb and flow, melodies and compositions played out over expansive stretches of oceanic shimmer, and that at least hasn't changed on And Their Refinement Of The Decline. Notes aren't just played, they begin as tiny sparkles, little distant glimmers, and gradually grow into thick rich whirs, or massive rumbles, before just as quickly fading away again. Oceanic is definitely an apt descriptor, as the music here, as on the more recent records, does have that feel, like some epic dimly lit sonic sea swirling and churning, sometime tranquil and barely moving, other times heaving and tumultuous. It's the sound of a new dawn, an impending storm, or the birth of a galaxy, it's so completely epic while at the same time managing somehow to be pastoral and contemplative and breathtakingly beautiful.
In the early days it was just 2 guitars and a four track, and the sound reflected that, much more gritty and fuzzy, the mood a lot darker, evoking the desert, the starry sky, a druggy dreamy innerspace of muted minimal shimmer. As the band grew, and added instruments, more players, recorded in real studios, the sound changed dramatically, and suddenly, instead of some indie bedroom project, the Stars were crafting pieces that could stand alongside any modern classical piece, while remaining dreamy and drone-y enough to tickle the ears of indie dronesters worldwide. Which is probably the most fascinating part of the Stars' sound. They were making music equally as expansive and epic and gorgeous 10 years ago, but those sounds were limited by the technology, by the band's meager recording set up. And only now it seems that the band is able to fully realize the sound they have been hearing, and essentially creating, all along.
There are guitars here and there, it is after all still the root of their sound, but they seem to be overshadowed by the other instruments (although it is often difficult to pinpoint the instrument creating many of the sounds), heavy on the strings, three violincelles and a harp, as well as a surprising arsenal of horns, two trumpets, flugelhorn and clarinet, AND a children's choir!! But it's not just the players or the instruments, but how they interact and the music they create, and here the results are divine. Many of the tracks do sound like bits of modern classical stretched out into languorous stretches of muted drone and subtle shimmer, like watching the planets from outer space, observing the epic drifts of solar systems and an infinity of cosmic interactions, but others definitely reference more earthly sonic treasures, "Apreludes (In C Sharp Major)" has some serious Morricone going on, and "Don't Bother They're Here" references Scott Tuma's washed out guitar work in Souled American. But whatever subtle flavor is introduced into each track, the sound is definitely and distinctly Stars Of The Lid. Their shift to double disc releases also seems to suit them, allowing their slow burning soft swell compositions plenty of time to sprawl and spread and evolve into epic and soul stirring soundscapes. But even two discs is not nearly enough as far as we're concerned, so everyone buy this one, so next time, these guys can release a four disc set, or a ten disc set or a twenty disc set...
A brand new record from the Starving Weirdos, two old old tracks, resurrected and pressed onto what we're pretty sure is the SW's very first 7". The group's sound changes so much, that these two archival tracks, while entirely different from anything we've heard from them, still sound very much at home in their constantly shifting body of work. And unlike the more recent material, is much more lo-fi and looped, giving the sound a very rough, lo-fi, sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker vibe, which obviously we love!
The A side begins with a murky processed pulse, with propulsive krautrock drumming but before it gets more than 10 seconds in, there's a strange backwards swoop, and the track seems to skip back to the beginning, which takes up almost the whole side, a gorgeously fragmented tribal drone krauty loop, until right near the end, when the track shifts, the guitar builds to a chaotic squall, the drums blown out, the cymbals sizzling distortedly, a serious freaked out psych jam, with strange spoken word vocals, bits of feedback, and tons of distorted murk.
The flipside is also loop based (or sounds like it), a militaristic snare, rat-a-tat-tat's out an insistent beat, over which a cool shimmery loop, cycles over and over, while in the background deep rumbles pulse and swell, until the drums drop out and the track finishes off with some moody washed out Jeckian ambience.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pro printed black and white covers, with printed inserts.
Brand new vinyl only full length from these Humbolt county noise makers, totally deluxe and ultra limited, the record comes in an elaborate hand silk screened jacket, hand numbered, LIMITED TO ONLY 470 COPIES, with a heavy cardstock sleeve affixed to the inside, and with a decidedly different sound.
In the past the Weirdos, once a duo, now a trio, had dabbled in all sorts of abstract soundscaping, usually ending up droning and shimmering and creating dark expanses of murk and murmur. The A side of Blue Herons finds the band kicking out a clattery noise jam, very industrial, with tons of clatter and creak, metal on metal, squeaking and groaning, as if they were performing inside some huge antiquated steam powered machine. The trio offer up stretches of grinding whir, streaks of feedback, bleating horns, lending a bit of a twisted free jazz feel to the proceedings, the whole thing unfurling like some nightmarish industrial-noir soundtrack.
The flipside is something else entirely, a soft cacophony of metallic clang and clatter, like the recording of a giant spindly robot, stumbling through a jungle made entirely of metal. There's the clinking of glass mixed in as well, and bits of woodwind, the robotic forest mashing gives way to something much more tranquil and dreamy, some Eastern ritual, lots of space, tones ringing out, melodic fragments drifting across wide open expanses, darkly delicate and subtly haunting.
As always, really nice sounds from the Starving Weirdos camp, and some kick ass packaging to match. And once again, LIMITED TO 470 COPIES!!!
BACK IN STOCK!! LAST COPIES EVER!!!
Who would have though that a little cd-r from some unknown group called the Starving Weirdos would have caused such a ruckus? But stir up a ruckus it did! We have been selling that first disc like hotcakes, and why the heck not, a glorious noisy blast of free rock avant drone, No Neck by way of the Dead C by way of the Yellow Swans by way of Avarus by way of Sunroof! by way of Birchville Cat Motel. Or something like that. For more on how we discovered the Starving Weirdos, or more precisely how they discovered us, check out the review of their debut cd elsewhere on the site. So now we have this here brand new double cd-r and it's as good as if not better than the first (it features one track that was on the first record, but everything else is new and previously unreleased). The duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay is truly adept at crafting ramshackle conglomerations of clattery percussion, weird warbling guitars, abstract ambient soundscapes, moaning horns, shuffling almost-rhythms, wide open expanses of random sounds, soothing and mesmerizing, a gloriously shimmery clatter and shuffle, rattle and wheeze. Five lengthy tracks spread out over two discs. Fans of ANY of the above mentioned bands will be in drone rock free folk bliss out heaven!
Released on the Root Strata label (run by Tarentel's Jef Cantu) each double disc is packaged in a hand painted gatefold cd sleeve, quite beautiful!
Seems like only yesterday, that the Starving Weirdos were just that, a couple of weirdos from Humboldt who would send us huge boxes of cd-r's. all hand decorated, and home recorded. Record after record of amazing disembodied ambience and dreamy abstract noise.
Well, it seems the rest of the world is finally catching on, so these guys are no longer our little secret. But that's the way it's meant to work. This stuff is to amazing to only be heard by a handful of folks lucky enough to get their hands on some criminally limited cd-r.
So as far as we can tell, this is the Weirdos' first proper cd (non cd-r) release, and it's a doozy! Managing to capture everything we like so much about the band in the first place, while at the same time striking out in some decidedly new sonic directions. The opening track is the perfect example, all glistening high end, chimes, and tinkles, swirling ripples of upper register shimmer. Like wandering through some vast landscape made up entirely of old music boxes and strange pieces of metal hanging from the sky. Breezes nudge the various metals into each other, causing soft reverberant twinkles of sound to drift skyward. Melodies are spread out into long glistening strands, everything bathed in some sort of sun dappled reverb, thick delay, like waking up in some glorious meadow, trying to look around but your eyes are still bleary and filled with sleep. Dreamy! The second track is like a slowed down, downtuned, stretched out version of the first. Strings scrape and shimmer, warm melodies blurred into smears of melancholy sound, like listening to a string quartet through ears filled with funhouse mirrors, sounds overlap and become entangled, steel strings buzz, a simple melody surfaces, only to be swallowed whole by a slow moving swirl, the whole thing looped and extremely dreamlike and hypnotic. Think a more expansive and epic Basinski and you might be getting close.
The final track revisits the Weirdoes' earlier sound, a blissed out take on the Dead C's free noise rock, rendered much more abstract and lovely, but still ominous, creaking and clattering, billows of cymbal shimmer and percussive rumble form a thick bed over which all manner of plucked strings and disembodied melodies drift. Like sitting on the dock of a bay made up of black sound, filled with all manner of sound making buoys, that just float, and moan, and creak, their bells muted by thick fog, a subtle murky cacophony that becomes a gorgeous dronelike drift. Awesome! Quite possibly our favorite group in this new breed of quiet noisemakers. So recommended.
Latest in the slow flow of dreamy sounds from this Humboldt County duo, who not counting their 20 or so unreleased full lengths, have gradually built up an amazing body of work, most unfortunately super limited, this new lp no exception.
Released on Tarentel's Root Strata label, Harry Smith is a single side long track, a slow burning cinematic wonder, a huge buzzing field of charged particles, run through old beat up guitars and a table full of FX pedals and broken toy instruments, alchemically changed from lead into a gold.
A sitar-like buzz, submerged in reverb and wrapped in dense overtones, spreads out like a melting glacier, constantly shifting and changing shape, above that drift huge washes of metallic shimmer, effulgent yet muted and murky, a subdued sonic glare, warm and wistful. These dreamlike expanses are punctuated by ghostlike pulses, bells or chimes smeared into indistinct tones, let loose and allowed to fade into the subtly churning sonic backdrop. Very dark and dramatic. And oh so lovely.
This is a one sided lp. The flip side has black and white artwork pasted right on the vinyl, housed in a clear plastic sleeve. And of course super limited...
ONLY 300 COPIES PRESSED!!!
The Weirdos are back with a brand new release, this time on London's Bo Weavil, and these Arcata mystics are hungrier then ever. Into An Energy is a slow brooding coastal spell of swirling, cascading drones laced with primal percussion and their signature junkyard ambiance. We heard the Weirdos came home from their European tour loaded with tons of ideas and were eager to lay it all down to tape. And we're very pleased they did, as Into An Energy is quite the psych noise masterpiece, even trekking into some unexpected dark industrial territory. One part ritual trance ceremony, one part noise rock opus, the album starts with a super grim, sinister glimpse into the hazy nightmares of a decrepit sea captain as he watches the bones of his crew be picked over by sea birds. Field recordings of waves layered under creepy whispering, wild flutes and metal clanging. Things start getting tribal with "Pagan Unity Ritual", plodding drum hits circle round and round as distant flutes and synths float into the sky. The album plays on with the faint sound of rising saxophone loops and far off chimes, all melting together into some dreamy bad trip bliss out. Every track is constantly changing, each sound shifting around and evolving into another, quiet drones lingering in the background, voices calling from beneath the ground, a truly intense experience impossible to soak up in just one listen. A perfect addition to the extensive Starving Weirdos discography and a must have for any fans of this free psych collective.
The Starving Weirdos have long been a conundrum, but it's one that we love to entertain. Their unanswerable riddles are due to the scattered references that flow nearly unfiltered through an insatiable hunger for any and every cultural product churned out over the past century (and probably beyond). To engage in conversation with the Weirdos is to connect the dots between the six or seven strands of thought running through their psychically fused brains: How did the Dallas Mavericks do in the game last night? What did you think about that Serge Gainsbourg movie? Have you heard the new tape from Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier? She makes sick jams! Fuck! Check out that orange-crowned warbler that just flew out of the marsh! That shouldn't be here now. Global warming, man, it's gonna fuck us up... and the conversation circles back to Dirk Nowitzki. Yet, somehow it all makes sense as an organic recognition of the impact of cultural overload on individual consciousness. Just go with the flow, dude.
Musically, that's what you get with the Starving Weirdos. Their creativity is birthed in the hazed environs of Humboldt County through the psychedelic jam session; but they are not interested in repeating what their stoned, hippy brethren did 40 years ago. No, they hack into astral jazz, ambient smeared electronica, sixth-generation takes on PiL excursions of dub-punk, and a twinkling quest for their own path to transcendence - stoned, spiritual, or otherwise. Drum programming and synth emulators have crept to the forefront of the SW sound, with the trippy effects, swirling guitars, and opium-den vibes never far behind. It's certainly an unintended reference, but Land Lines harkens back to the ritual-ambient project O Yuki Conjugate from the mid-'90s. An obscure reference, yeah, but SW have stumbled through the droned-out excursions of Taj Mahal Travellers and an arboreal shimmer of Organum (via the satellite project RV Paintings), so to hear something else in the Weirdos is to be expected. This will certainly rank as one of our favorite SW records, for sure.
We only got 10 of these, direct from the band on their return from Europe. Pretty sure we got the last copies of a way too limited batch, but we figured at least a few Starving Weirdos fanatics should be able to get their grubby mitts on these. Cuz as much as we hate to say it when we have so few, this is pretty dang fantastic.
A 20 minute live set captured live in Portland Oregon, as a part of something called Challenge Night, organized by Pete Swanson from the Yellow Swans, and it seems the Weirdos were up to the challenge, offering up a strange drifty sort of skeletal doom. With detuned acoustic guitars, mantra like vocals, simple percussion, all set within a shimmering field of distorted squiggles and air raid siren like wails, eventually joined by some seriously tribal drumming, a la NoNeck or Sunburned Hand, the track transformed into a distortion drenched drum circle / free psych freakout. The guitars coalesce into post rocky almost metal riffage, the vocals slathered in distortion and spouting invective WAY down in the mix, the drums unleashing a woozy groove, and the guitars, the heaviest we've heard from these guys, tons of reverb and delay, like old school goth guitar style, but somehow rendered more jagged and metallic, not to say this is necessarily heavy, although it kind of is.
But by the halfway mark, the drums have dropped out, the guitar have shed their metal coats, and everything is muted and blurred and smeared into an oozing organic soundscape of what sounds like moaning horns and shimmering strings, thick swells that ebb and flow, finally grinding to a halt in a whirling cloud of soft feedback and washed out drones. Really nice. Too bad we only have a handful.
Cool packaging too, mini 3" jewel cases, with gold metallic ink on black covers, each one hand drawn and every one different. LIMITED TO 58 COPIES!!
One of TWO new double lp releases from Humboldt's Starving Weirdos, the other, a killer reissue of the long out of print Self-Hypnosis, with a whole extra side of unreleased material tacked on, and this one right here, Path Of Lightning, which as far as we can tell, is a brand new record, or at least one we've never heard before.
Sonically though it definitely sounds more like recent SW outings. Less bombastic and pipe fight-y, more drone-y and shimmery, treading a similar sonic path as their free noise compatriots in No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand Of The Man. On Path Of Lightning, the band seemed to have abandoned rhythms, or at least relegated it to the background, more an occasional pulse or stutter, than anything, snippets of voices surface here and there, intercepted transmissions, streaks of ethereal feedback, deep ominous rumbles, shimmery expanses of hushed minimal drift, haunting and lovely, any noisiness is muted, smoothed out into blurs of soft noise texture.
Four side long tracks, by side three, there does seem to be a drummer in the mix, but he doesn't seem to be drumming as much as using his kit the way the other two guys in SW approach their guitars, as a soundmaking tool, subverted from its original purpose. The drumming here is more an occasional skitter, a shuffly scrabble way off in the background, while the Weirdos weave a haunting gauzy sprawling dronescape, that sounds like it could be some Jeck turntable piece, all warbly and warped and looped sounding.
The final side is yet another extended bit of murky drift, muddied percussion floats on layers of ethereal guitar, and woozy tangled melodies, a black ambient buzz that seems to be draped over something more music, shadows and shapes of whatever melody lurks below, barely visible through the softly undulating murk, all wrapped in a patina of ephemeral distant high end shimmer and buzz. So awesome.
Like the Self-Hypnosis record, Path of Lightning is pressed on ultra thick vinyl, and comes in a super heavy gatefold sleeve, and has some of the most eye poppingly sci-fi artwork ever, a topless warrior babe with a machine gun riding a giant spider! Hell yeah! LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
The Starving Weirdos (and their handful of off-shoots) have made the rounds of pretty much all the cool labels around the world... Olde English Spelling Bee, Blackest Rainbow, Root Strata, Not Not Fun, Helen Scarsdale, Weird Forest, Amish, etc. Now, they return to Bo Weavil, a label mostly known for their outsider folk recordings, although the Weirdos certainly fit nicely next to the hillbilly ragas of Henry Flynt, who's got a couple of his scratchy pieces of minimalism on Bo Weavil as well. Out of the foggy constructions from primitive horns blurting prolonged atonal blasts and creeping VHS-horror melodies, the Weirdos kick out a rolling, mid-tempo breakbeat to gird their psychedelic minefields and delay-crusted clatter. It almost sounds like a witch-house track, but rendered with an apocalyptic ritualism that would have fit right into a Psychic TV jam circa Unclean or Dreams Less Sweet. A similarly creepy atmosphere is cast on "Flowing Without Rest, Forever Onward" through the intertwining loops of slasher noise, cracks of thunder, squalls of feedback, more horror-score minor key melodies, and tumbling drum fills. If Godzilla were ever to wreak havoc on the Eureka Bay in Humboldt county, the Weirdos have already mustered the perfect soundtrack. A blinding transcendence of squalid hums and suspended atonal mutterings emerges from the junkyard Tuvan throatsong of "Contemplation Of The Setting Sun," before descending into a far more mysterious rattling of chains, bellowing horns, and synthetic notes clashing at the bottom of some murky catacomb. This dark trip is limited to 350 copies, all housed in silkscreened covers.
To be totally honest, when we first heard the name Starving Weirdos, we definitely weren't expecting to like it. It was a strange name, that didn't seem to suit their strange abstract sound. The name seemed goofy, while the music was dark, and ominous, and fucked up. But then something strange happened, like it has so many times in the past, the Flaming Lips is a prime example, something just clicked and suddenly they couldn't bee called anything BUT the Starving Weirdos. And that music, could not have been made by anyone BUT those same Weirdos. We never had any sort of qualms about the music though. From the very first note, we realized these guys were on to something. Something pretty, and something really strange and unique. This latest missive comes to us from the Sound & Fury label in Australia and demonstrates the Weirdos' continual quest to explore and get lost in their music. It's hard to sound totally unique, especially when you're trafficking in the overpopulated world of abstract free noise or whatever, but the more we listen to these guys, the more distinctive their sound becomes and the more fascinating their approach to making it seems. These three lengthy tracks show three distinct sides of the band, each one drastically different, but still inexorably linked to the others. The first track sounds a bit like the Dead C setting up and tuning up in some giant airplane hanger. Clatter and clanks, crashes and thumps, reverberate into the ether, every sound wrapped in thick layers of natural reverb, while floating delicately around these strange percussive occurrences are keening streaks of high end, that just sort of shift an shimmer, while all around chimes and bells ring out. Like walking though some big empty building made entirely of metal, while all around you the bits and pieces of the building spontaneously ring and chime and resound. The second track is less clattery and abstract, instead, thick thread of warm vibration runs through the track, some sort of buzzing bombinating string, that stretches into forever, while all around it, various other instruments vibrate sympathetically, building to a frenzied ur-drone, before the vibrations begin to taper off until it's a barely there afterimage, hovering in some nether world before blinking out completely. The final track is a return to the metallic land of the first track, but now that huge metal structure is crumbling all around you, like the sound of metal raindrops, clang and clatter, a percussive free for all, while beneath, a gentle lilting minor key melody is stretched into a longform drone, that continues to drift dreamlike even after the metallic clatter has died down, eventually becoming shimmering sheets of singing metal, ringing out brightly and then slowly fading away.
Packaged in a red textured paper sleeve, held shut with a black wax seal. The cd is housed in a printed inner sleeve, each disc with an individual piece of band made art. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, each disc is hand numbered.
Hard to believe it was only a matter of months ago when two guys from Humboldt sent Andee a stack of 15 full length cd-r's. All mysteriously packaged, with bizarre collage art, strange song titles, and music that was stranger still. We went apeshit and insisted they make us a sort of best of disc, which they did and we sold about a million (we still have a bunch in stock too!). Word spread and now the Starving Weirdos are like a real band, with releases coming out all over the place, including a recent one on Root Strata, and this here gem on the Yellow Swans' Jyrk label. They were even in the latest issue of Vice Magazine!! Thankfully all of this hasn't gone to their heads and this blast of murky free psych weirdness is just as fucked up, demented and downright beautiful as anything else we've heard from them. Huge spacious recordings of Dead C like clatter, cavernous swells of haunting ambience, like exploring some lost sewer system that leads right to the center of the earth. Clatter and clang, percussive splatter drenched in natural reverb, like some sort of silverware war in an abandoned cistern. Free jazz played on scrap metal in a cave. Cool and creepy.
The second lengthy track introduces sax, but not in that annnoying sax-ruins-everything sort of way. No, this is more of a deep listening sort of sax, long foghorn like blasts, rumbling and reverberating, drifting into the reverby distance, a slow low meditative series of short rich drones, the whole thing a barely recognized melody stretched into it's constituent parts. A foghorn symphony played on duck calls and broken reeded bagpipes. The final 15 minute epic is a return to the metallic clang of track one. A pipe fight to the death, taking place at the bottom of a black pit, walled with stone and the crushed skulls of past pipefighters, between Z'ev and David Jackman, each hurling broken cymbals, warped gongs, bent cutlery and assorted car parts at each other, while in the background a mad scientist boils up an unspeakable brew of warm wheezing guitars and gurgling electronic drones, each and every sound wrapped in a thick smear of reverb, drizzled with delay, and sent drifting back to the surface where they were recorded onto a wax cylinder. Fucking awesome!
Hand screened cardboard sleeve, photcopied insert. Limited to 200 copies!
With all the Starving Weirdos records around here over the last year or so, it's hard to believe this is only their 2nd proper actual cd release. A handful of cd-r's (not counting the 20 or so unreleased full lengths) and lp and a split, every one of em spectacular, these guys are one of the few bands we almost wish would be more prolific. Not that we don't love Acid Mothers Temple, but we'd sure as heck trade a few of the last 20 or so new AMT records for a couple extra slabs of Weirdos wonder. Nonetheless, Shrine Of The Post-Hypnotic find the Weirdos continuing in their sonic quest, this time around incorporating more guitar it seems, more feedback, the overall sound somewhat heavier, from the dirgey slow motion buzz of the opener "Crewell", to the buzzing clattery Dead C worship of "Droned And Poned", it's a sound that most definitely suits them. It's like the No Neck Blues Band teamed up with some serious amplified firepower. A buzz drenched rambling percussive meander. Murky keening soundscapes, huge distant arcs of grinding feedback, thick swells of crumbling fuzz, heavily reverbed percussive clatter, streaks of glistening guitar, simple angular strumming, hushed minimal shimmer, bells and chimes wreathed in black whirs, massive cavernous room sound wrapped around muted melodies, moaning groaning drones drifting in thick swirls of high end glimmer and rumbling crunch, haunting industrial rhythms sinking slowly in dense fields of dreamy doom, wispy clouds of FX wrapped around creaking ambience, processed vocals transformed into undulating layers of viscous sound. It's all of that and so much more. We can describe the various sounds and sonic events, but it's so difficult to explain just why they sound so fantastic, and what sort of musical magic makes them all fit together so well. But they just do and who knows and who really cares, you should just stop reading right now and dive right in. You won't be sorry.
Packaged in a gorgeous fold over card stock sleeve, screen printed with an amazingly trippy hand drawn landscape.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!
Brand new release from Humboldt County's finest sons, the Starving Weirdos. And their very first tape release. LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, we got about 15, so we won't go into too much detail, as SW stuff generally flies out of here anyway, so odds are these will be gone in a flash.
As if to commemorate their first tape, the band offer up a whole new sound. Well not a -new- sound exactly, instead, they take the subtle free jazz filigree that infused many of their other releases and shove it kicking and screaming to center stage. On the opening track, the band unleash some seriously freaky out-jazz, as free and chaotic as it gets, wild squalls of horns, the drums in full on kit-down-the-stairs mode, a swirling whirling dervish of sound. Some seriously off kilter speaker shredding jazz fury for sure. But after that opening salvo, things settle down a bit and get back to a more recognizably ramshackle SW sound, long stretches of abstract percussion, disembodied fractured folk strum, high end shimmer, rumbling industrial drones, moaning minor key melodies, chaotic tangles of soaring strings, plenty of abstract ambience and druggy drone-y floorcore, but with echoes of that opening track surfacing here and there, bits of skronk, woozy horn harmonies, but all deftly woven into the constantly shifting and swirling back drop.
Beautifully packaged, pro pressed and printed red cassettes housed in super thick multi panel offset printed sleeves. And again, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES. We have 15 of those. You no doubt no what that means by now...
Latest from AQ faves The Starving Weirdos, the first we've heard since the beginning of the year (which is practically unheard of in the current way too prolific cd-r scene), and it's not just a new batch of killer blissed out SW dronemusic, it's also a film the band "chopped and screwed" and presented at the third annual Experimental Film & Music Night in Humboldt, and this dvd contains the film and the music composed to accompany it.
The film itself is Sudden Fear, from 1952 starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance, but the band re-edited it and re-arranged it, hard to say how much was changed, we haven't ever seen the actual film, but from this version it looks pretty freaked out and fucked up. Although it could be the Starving Weirdos' extra creepy score too, a cacophonous Hermann Nitsch like drone, thick and abrasive, but haunting and ominous. The film playing out, at different speeds, the screen split, images super imposed over one another, the music, appropriately dark and terrifying.
This is definitely the darkest and most menacing we've heard the Starving Weirdos, and it really suits them. Strings sing and squeal, feedback moans and groans, bits of percussion surface and are carried a way by thick swells of low end whir, it's like Bernard Hermann meets Nitsch covering Goblin. Scary as hell and so so good!
Packaged in a mini dvd style plastic case, with a black and white insert cover, and pasted on liner notes on the inside.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
A brand new full length from Humboldt County's masters of dark droning cinematic ambience, and another gorgeous chunk of masterful dark mystery. In the beginning, their sound, while still quite beautiful, seemed much more haphazard, much more improvised, the vibe decidedly NNCK or SHOTM, a bit chaotic and druggy, the sound of guys just sort of jamming and seeing what happened. Obviously we dug that stuff, a LOT, but the band have continued to hone their craft, their music becoming much more assured, much more dense and varied, more expressive and emotional, and weirdly enough much darker and scarier.
Their last disc was a new score for their chopped up version of the classic film Sudden Fear, but Summon With Electronic Sorcery, sounds just like the title would lead you to believe, some ancient ritual performed in a cave below the Earth's surface, surrounded by demons and shadows dancing in the firelight, like it could be the soundtrack to some lost Argento film, a truly creepy and intense sonic sprawl�
Four long tracks, each one a self contained soundscape of billowing blackness, layers of muted buzz swirl and shift, various steel strings reverberate and shimmer, melodic fragments drift through the ether, doomful melodies chime and ring out and are then sucked under, strange creaks and moans are blurred into a constantly evolving backdrop. Eventually, the sounds coalesce into huge black sonic swells, an ultra slow motion ambient doom, lurching glacially through flurries of percussive clatter, like some huge demon rolling hollowed out skulls like dice. Later, we wander through some old boiler room in an abandoned building. The clank of old pipes, the hiss of escaping steam, all woven into a hissy whirring drone, underlaid with droning guitars and streaks of shimmering melody, barely discernible. Chant-like vocals drift up from the abyss, haunting loops overlap and blur into each other, a murk that seems to glow from within, building to an intense staring-into-the-sun buzz. Finally, a field of high end sound, thick streaks of feedback, simple clattery percussion, distorted melodies, moaning horns, all doused in reverb and allowed to drift and intermingle in gloriously washed out slow motion. Like watching a decaying filmstrip of and old noise rock band frame by frame, the sound flickering in the dim light, the heat of the bulb causing the film to bubble and melt.
So gorgeous. As always.
Packaged in a crazy, glue sealed multiple folded envelope style silk screened package. You have to unseal it, unfold it, and then the cd is revealed inside held in place by a diecut slot. And of course, it's super limited. A ONE TIME pressing of only 250 copies. We got 40, but judging from past SW releases these will go pretty quick.
Back in the spring we received a mysterious email that read as follows:
"We would like to introduce to the most radical band in Humboldt county and maybe North America---Starving Weirdos. You're probably pretty busy but we have TEN full length albums recorded and they are fucking good. So we figured what the hell, maybe you could listen to 1 or 2."
I have to say we were a bit impressed with these guys' moxie! Ten full lengths, all fucking good? So, we bit. Told them to go ahead and send a couple for us to check out. A few days later we received a big ol' box in the mail with ALL TEN full length cd-rs with a note explaining that they couldn't decide which two were the best since they were all so good. Well, alright. Must admit we were a bit skeptical based soley on the name, a little goofy, but Andee decided to go for it and listen to all ten (actually all FOURTEEN, as they sent a second batch a few weeks later!). And you know what, they WERE all fucking good. Fucking great in fact. But ten discs is a bit much for most folks to swallow, so the 'Weirdos put together this three track cd-r with their favorite tracks just for sale at AQ. So what's it sound like? It's gorgeous and droney, abstract and extremely actively ambient. Maybe somewhere between Sunroof!, the Dead C, Fflint Central, and Avarus. They would be right at home on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, or Pseudoarcana, or any of the other killer cd-r labels everyone freaks out about. In fact if any of you cd-r label types are reading this, get in touch and help these guys get all their records into the ears of people who need them! The first track sounds a little like Sunroof and Birchville Cat Motel playing live in a gymnasium DURING basketball practice. Extended peals of feeding back guitars, streaks of white hot upper register shimmer, wheezing toy instruments, reverberating high end scrape and squeal, with random abstract rhythms constructed from heavily reverbed slaps and whaps, like foot stomps and rubber ball bouncing. The whole thing wrapped in gauzy reverb and all warm and thick and creeping along like a big fuzzy caterpillar in the noonday sun. Track two is a similarly abstract and spacious soundscape, but less sun drenched and a little bit more claustrophobic, a dense swirl of blurred vocals, and rumbling machinery, and tinkling chiming percussion that sounds like a railroad crossing gate gone haywire, and that over the course of its twelve minutes manages to become simultaneously more and more epic, and more and more dark and dismal. The final track is a twenty minute free noise, tribal ambient workout, reminiscent of No Neck Blues Band, Anaksimandros, Avarus and Sunburned Hand Of The Man. A slow shifting framework of super distorted chiming plucked guitars, that on closer listening could instead be a blown out recording of some ramshackle gamelans, random and clattery, but all warm and fuzzy, with haunting high end melodies, cobbled together from various whistles and wheezes, tweets and trills. About halfway through the track shifts abruptly into a more subdued soundfield: subtly shifting layers of high end buzz, swoop and slip over and under each other, a constantly moving high pitched drone, pulsing and fluctuating, completely mesmerizing.
Absolutely essential listening for fans of Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Birchville Cat Motel, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, No Neck Blues Band, Avarus. Burning Star Core, Double Leopards, Hwyl Nofio, MCMS and all things CPsiP, Pseudoarcana, Rhizome, Lal Lal Lal, Last Visible Dog and the like.
And if you find yourself particularly smitten by the Starving Weirdos and decide you need all 14 of their cd-r's, drop us a line and we can probably put you in touch with those guys.
Latest missive from our favorite Humboldt County free rock / freak noise / avant whatever dream duo the Starving Weirdos, here teamed up with Tom Carter of Charalambides and Shawn David McMillen, for two sprawling sides of slow burning blissed out ur-drone space raga. Which sounds as good as you might imagine. Dark and dense, swirling and whirling and creeping ominously through billowing clouds of slow motion string buzz, fractured melodies splitting into prismatic shards, drifting dreamlike through a haze of outer space bong smoke building to a gloriously soft cacophony, streaks of feedback, and sheets of high end wrapped around a warm pulsing and churning sonic core, all before slipping into something much softer and folkier, a slow slithery expanse of soundscapery, that sounds like a super subdued Wolf Eyes. And that's just the A side.
The second half of Live At The Accident! starts off all abstract and contemplative, the drones pushed way off into the distance, while the foreground is peppered with random crunch and clatter, what sounds like field recordings, buzz and glitch and hiss, which slowly sinks into the blackened morass, locking into a sort of lugubrious post industrial drift, the whole of the side like some late night wander through a ruined factory town overtaken by the forest, a living thing wrapped around the husk of something long dead, mysterious and haunting and ominous, but also strangely lovely, weirdly delicate, slipping from noisy muted crunch, to hushed reverent whisper, eventually disappearing into a strangely looped field of crackle and hum. Nice!
Aracta's one and only avant-drone duo the Starving Weirdos are back with a brand new lp on UK's Blackest Rainbow. After delivering yet another impressively far-out full length on Bo' Weavil a few months back, the weirdos offer up some new ideas on B/P/M Series 1. Since both Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay have spent time recording the legendary Humbolt based pianist Darius Brottman, they've decided to take a break from their usual musical formula to use these recordings as source material for this new lp. Each side features a different reworking of Brottman's recordings, all arranged and cut up to reveal two distinctly unique sides of gorgeous piano bliss. Though both sides exhibit that distinct production style of all Weirdos recordings, they each uniquely reiterate the virtuosity of Brottman's playing. Side A opens with brief, straightforward piano before more layers of tones and clinks build into a signature Weirdos wall of sound type composition. Side B starts on the more psychedelic side of things, all at once erupting in a sea of reversed loops, chaotic, vigorous piano and reverberating tones. Really great stuff, both sides completely hypnotic and wonderful, like being caught in some orchestral dream world or being lost on acid in a giant piano shop. Beautifully housed in a pro-printed lp sleeve adorned with the psychedelic artwork of Mick Wiggins, this one is limited to 500 and will be gone in no time.
Trensmat continues to deviate from their previously psychedelic/space rock focus, and delve deeper into obscure electronica, with this latest blast of rhythmic murk from Chicago producer Stave, who delivers a gorgeous bit of gristly rhythmatism, all hazy, synthy swirl wrapped around churning tangled skitter, and all sort of washed out and hazy, buried melodies drifting serenely beneath the roiling surface, all tangled clockwork beats, and mechanical grooves. In a way, it reminds us a little of the more electronic leaning outings from Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World, but where that stuff was total blissed out kitchen sink chaos, Stave is much more measured, sounding at times like classic Autechre dipped in a weirdly noisy psychedelic brew, just check out the opener, strip the beats away, and it's almost some serious Pop Ambient dreaminess, and the beats do drop out at one point to reveal just what's lurking below the surface, but only briefly, before the sound slips right back into more electro-crunch, IDM mesmer. The rest of the tracks follow suit, the sound dense and noisy, the beats wreathed in clouds of static, and fracture melodies, each track a swirling rhythmscape that skirts chaos, but instead of crumbling and fracturing, Stave somehow sculpts that chaos into something propulsive, and moody, and atmospheric. One track goes full on jungle, but Stave style, surrounding the classic break, with a barrage of auxiliary beats, that only add to the strangely psychedelic vibe of the whole thing, before things mellow out into a gorgeous field of muted pulsations, and hushed rhythmic skitter.
Includes a download of the whole record with two bonus tracks! The first of which sounds like it was plucked right from the record, another murky psychedelic chaotic banger, while the closer, sounds almost live, the drums pushed way up to the front, while hazy clouds of chordal thrum, and distant keening melodies, drift dreamily in the background.
This Swedish fellow used to record for Cold Meat Industries as Inanna and Archon Satani, but with this release he has dropped the dark ambient occultism in favor of oblique noise modulations and noxious low end rattles closer to the Raster/Mego sound, which the Swedish National Council For Cultural Affairs has seen fit to subsidize. Nice cover by Lief Elggren, of Ghost Orchid (and much else) fame.
Dark, sometimes droning improv from this Swiss post-jazz trio (drums, electric bass, Hammond organ/electronics). Maybe not as crazed as their countrymen Alboth! or 16/17, but still full of appeal to folks with John Zorn records in their collections. On this disc, one of two simultaneously released new Grob-label cds by the band, they take two different compositions ("DB", written
- RealAudio clip: DBIII
- RealAudio clip: AC6
One of a pair of new cds by this Swiss instrumental noise-jazz-rock trio with a sort of silly name, that have just been simultanously released on the Grob label (following up an obcure live disc from a few years back). The material on this cd was recorded live, in Budapest presumably, and is all improvised (except for the intro/outro, forged from their "grunge" encore by
Ever wonder what it would sound like if Tatsuya Yoshida, drummer extraordinare and mastermind of Japan's hyperkinetic Ruins, somehow collaborated with classic, keyboard-fronted prog rockers E.L.P.? Well, Steamboat Switzerland essentially provide the answer. This instrumental, avant-garde trio of drums, electric bass and Hammond organ say, "Hell yes!" to that concept.
From, yes, Switzerland (not sure how the Steamboat part of their name derives, though), these guys have several prior releases of crazy improv-jazz-prog that we've liked, and some others we still need to find. On this album, and not for the first time, they're doing all pieces composed by their colleague Michael Wertmuller, who knows a thing or two about extreme, insane music, after having been the drummer in the amazing '90s jazzcore act Alboth!, who along with 16-17 were basically Switzerland's answer to John Zorn's Naked City. Wertmuller is currently the drummer for Nohome, feedback guitar wrangler Caspar Brotzmann's new Massaker-like trio, whose debut we highlighted last list, and he also plays in Full Blast with Brotzmann's famous father Peter, among much else on his c.v. of course.
As mentioned in our Nohome review, Wertmuller is a pretty impressive percussionist, so you'd expect the drummer in Steamboat Switzerland to be darn good too, and he is - thus garnering the comparison to Yoshida at the top of this review, his octopoidal playing pounding and precise. Indeed everybody in Steamboat Switzerland plays with virtuosic passion and precision, presumably taking Wertmuller's music to the level he must have expected, and beyond. Zeitschrei is a spectacular attack of avant-prog, with bombastic organ frenzies ably aided and abetted by the energetic, ADD rhythm section. At its most dizzying, this is some intense, "Flight Of The Bumblebee" skree. Heck, the manic, choppy organ runs here would make Keith Emerson stab himself, not his keyboard! There's also some semi-ambient passages of high end droning and skittering drumscapes, but those moody pulsations are often, if not always, violated by sudden machinegun outbursts of volume and violence. So it's not a mellow listen, but it can be a gripping one. Imagine a bass-heavy mathrock mashup of spooky Hammer Horror / Carnival Of Souls soundtrack music. Or, like we said, Ruins with E.L.P.'s organ. Wowzers!
One of four new tapes this week on weirdo UK tape label The Tapeworm, and as much as we love all of them this time out (and we do), this one we find is fast becoming our favorite, but then we've never been able to resist deep, dense, dronemusic.
Sinus is a collection of sprawling sine wave tones, which produce the sort of drones, that with headphones on, make your head feel like it's being filled with some sort of thick liquid. Or, if played through speakers at high enough volume, will probably set your whole house to resonating. Lush and layered, the main component a pulsing soft swell of extreme low end, nearly rib cage rattling in its power, but strangely serene, a deep black hole pulse, that throbs glacially, while over the top, other tones offer subtle sonic colorations, and wistful barely there melodies, soft turbulence and bleary slightly blown out textures.
An utterly immersive sonic experience, meditative, bliss out deep drone dreaminess, with just a bit of sinister sonic malevolence, which gives these pieces the feel of some strange arthouse soundtrack, it's not difficult to imagine an empty expanse of deep black space, or some bottomless cavern reaching all the way to the center of the earth, or even a crumbling abandoned city, the perfect score for the end of the world, and with just the tiniest bit of black dub throb, and abstract ambient techno vibe, a murky buried otherworldly propulsion, which at times make Sinus feel like the bleakest, most haunting Pop Ambient jam Kompakt never put out.
Tapes were always a fickle medium, with the mechanics of the tape liable to fail the more you played it. Similarly, dropouts were always a possibility if you mistakenly hit the record button when you meant to hit stop; and then there was the hiss which rounded off all of the higher frequencies and dulled rhythmic edges. Even if you got a professionally manufactured tape, the hiss was still there. Indeed, tape noise is a particular sound which has faded from the collective consciousness in almost all arenas, except maybe for right here at Aquarius. We've certainly championed more than a handful of brilliant tape-sourced albums, including the best being Reynols absurdistly self-evident Blank Tapes and the maudlin evocations of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. We can also add to the list Howard Stelzer's brilliantly deadened compositions of densely compacted tape hiss found on Bond Inlets.
Two long tracks roughly equal to what would fit onto a 60 minute tape, Bond Inlets is grounded in a gray noise smearing over all of the low-end thud rumbles and distant field recordings where motion and energy is only the faintest shadow of its former self. Stelzer works in layering piles and piles of this source material and then rips these layers apart along slip-strike faults, leaving decaying echo and gravel throated drones in its wake. While definitely intense in its slow-burning compositional dynamics, it's hard to qualify Bond Inlets as a proper noise album, as this isn't the punishing electrocution of Merzbow, Masonna, or Prurient. Dare we call this a 'mature' noise album? Don't worry, your parents will still hate it.
Howard Stelzer is the man behind Intransitive Recordings, one of the finest experimental-noise-drone-fucked labels of the past decade or so. He's quite an exceptional mangler of sound in his own right, thanks to piles of barely working tape decks and thoroughly gunked up cassettes, promoting a distressed aesthetic of murky tape noise, garbling hiss, gray thrummings of compressed rumble, sea-sickened whirlings, and start-stop mechanics. Stelzer's collaborator here is David Payne, a Canadian noise-junk thrillseeker who might be known to some for his releases in / as Fossils. Admittedly, we're not all that familiar with Payne or Fossils, but Stelzer's broken collage approach is definitely present.
Small Cruel Party like textures amass out of the ever present fog of tape hiss, which Stelzer and Payne push to steam-vent intensity amidst churning, lumbering emanations that crawl out of calcified hums, decayed tones, and wind-sheer microphone obliteration. The tapes are not without their recognizable forms (although for the most part, these mud-crust recordings stay purposefully abstract), as twitterings of a bird and the rasp of car horns puncture the low-tech musique concrete approach from these gritty tape machinations. Grizzly crunches that sound like bones getting snapped in half, to which we have to hope is not the result of Stelzer and Payne setting contact mics on their fingers whilst shattering their own digits. Swelter finds itself somewhere between the first Dry Lungs international noise compilation, Merzbow's really early noise-junk offerings, and Maurizio Bianchi's Sacher-Pelz turntablist warbling. Limited to 200 copies and not long for this world!
