During an interview for a Boston weekly, tape experimentalist Howard Stelzer wrapped up the history of his collaborations with Jason Talbot with the pithy statement, "There was silence and we weren't afraid not to fill it." If you want to read any references to John Cage into that statement, they would be found not in Cage's infamous 4'33" but in Fontana Mix, John Cage's classic tape piece where jagged electronic sounds slam against extended passages of silence. The Stelzer / Talbot production Songs is a raw and hostile reinterpretation of the fundamentals behind Fontana Mix within a context of live improvisation. Stelzer with his arsenal of tape decks and cassettes, and Talbot with his abused turntable and tabletop of effects, articulate concise gestures which abruptly stop as quickly as they enter into existence. Reproduced with an incredibly low fidelity, these sounds erupt like distorted blurps and squiggles as if broadcast through an intercom speaker or a walkie-talkie. The claustrophobic intensity of these angry turntable 'n' tape machinations bleeds across the sonic spectrum between noise and silence.
Dug up a little handful of these too, a long out of print collaboration between field recordist and noisemaker Joel Stern and avant guitarist Anthony Guerra, whose collabs are always fantastic, epic expanses of mysterious soundscapery, the field recordings a perfect backdrop for the duo's sonic explorations, the chitter and glitch of electronics, twisted bits of warped FX, draped over the proceedings like a gauzy malfunctioning electronic blanket, while the strings buzz and keen, unfurling streaks of feedback, as well as lush swells, warm chordal whirs, and layered stretches of high end harmony, much of the electronic interference sounds almost like some abstract percussion, the sound often spare and ethereal, but slipping easily into an almost pop ambient sounding soft focus drift, albeit still wreathed in bits of squelch and crackle and hiss.
Released on Antony Milton's Pseudo Arcana label and LONG out of print, these are the last copies EVER...
This is bizarre in every sense of the word. Naturestrip is a label that has dedicated itself to propagating all sorts of composition through field recording, with sound artists like Tarab and Loren Chasse crafting impeccable scores directly from the earth, and rural psychedelic practitioners like Leighton Craig and Eugene Carchesio crafting skeletal song against an environmental backdrop. Australian filmmaker and sound artist Joel Stern has taken his field recording tactics into an unusual place of thickly collaged signifiers with hints of song, rummagings for texture, and straight recordings from out the in the field. It sort of comes across as a ramshackle radio play, as if some genius lunatic outfit like the Starving Weirdos were given permission to fuck around in the INA-GRM studios. Stern offers up some improv clamor in the woods with sticks, twigs, and bird chorus playing equal part in the noise with squeaking horns, concertina strum and squabbling noises. He's also found scraping upon styrofoam, and steel springs for an unnerving background of skincrawling textures that counterpoint tension-loaded pops of long wire manipulation and the occasional heavenly ring of chimed bells. Feral dogs bark and howl in the rain while Stern overlays a simple melody line from a thumb piano coaxed into harmony with a distant chanting of unknown origin. He's at his best when an unsettled musicality seeps through the field recordings; and perhaps he saves his best for last, with the plaintive strum across the guitar and harmonica set against a distant wailing of children becoming a tragic end to this Fellini-esque album. Remarkable to say the least.
On the day that Joel Stern and Michael Northam recorded all of the material for Wormwood, Northam had just arrived in London weary from his ongoing globetrotting travels; and Stern was preparing to head back to his native Australia after living in London for three years. Anxiety and fatigue play themselves out with these reconstituted improvistions, or what Northam likes to call an 'intuitive assemblage.' Northam retains his masterful sensibility for dronescapes that move between complex harmonics and psychoacoustic atonalities coaxed from a variety of discarded objects; on the other hand, Stern presents himself as an upstart student of Keith Rowe, channelling a multitude of clicks, scrapes, crunches, and clatters from his tool box full of discarded objects. On Wormwood, glassine drones, infernal whistlings, and distant machinations crafted perhaps from close-looped feedback systems settle in the background while a variety of textural scrabblings and electrically charged particles struggle to rupture the pristine minimalism of the Stern / Northam dronings. A very nice piece of improvised electro-acoustics.
Now available on vinyl!
Wow! This is probably the best thing we've heard on Kill Rock Stars in AGES. With totally spazzed out guitar playing and impassioned vocals, Marnie Stern has grabbed us by the throats and refuses to let us go. It makes perfect sense that Zach Hill drums on this record as Stern's herky jerky rhythms and relentless spirit share a similar aesthetic and approach to Hill's band Hella and folks like Lightning Bolt and Orthrelm. In fact Marnie Stern has hit the scene almost like a female counterpart to Mick Barr, with the same kind of manic and infectious guitar playing delivered with her unique vision and fist in the air vocals. Kind of like if Erase Errata or the latest Paradise Island e.p. we loved so much were even louder, faster and way more chaotic, or if Mary Timony were kidnapped by Load records. This album does what all the great Kill Rock Stars records of the past did so well, it makes you feel so alive and so young in spirit as your get to watch and hear someone so passionately realize their vision. Highly recommended!
Holy shit! Record collector nerds and weird music obsessives might as well prepare to give up their first born or take out another mortgage on the ol' homestead, cuz this series of ultra limited 8" SQUARE lathe cuts is gonna break the bank, but it's so so so worth it. This is the first in a series that looks like it will include a who's who of noise rock / free rock / avant noise / free folk luminaries, including SO many all time AQ faves it makes our heads spin. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The first batch of these babies just showed up, three titles, each a custom hand cut, Peter King lathe cut, 8", and SQUARE!!! Packaged in gorgeous square and triangular die cut sleeves, super fancy textured paper, with a paste on front cover and a printed insert, each insert hand numbered, each release limited to 150 copies. Phew.
For those new to the lathe cut, it's a hand cut record, on polycarbonate not vinyl, they are more fragile than normal vinyl, and after repeated plays the sound quality can degrade a bit, but in our experience, in most cases it just makes them sound cooler. Peter King is THE MAN when it comes to super limited small run lathe cut releases, and pretty much every cool band you can think of has gone to him for some super rare or limited release or another.
So anyway, these are clear, they are 8"s across, shaped like a square and are insanely limited, and thus, pretty dang expensive! This is the third in the series and features Neil Campbell of AQ faves Vibracathedral Orchestra, along with his sonic partner in crime, the curiously monickered Sticky Foster, and the din these two stir up is not all that far removed from the VCO mothership. Side A is a glitchy soundscape, with garbled vocals, weird percussion, processed voices, thick whorls of murk and fuzz and hiss, bits of steel string buzz all above a dense tangle of chimes and tinkling percussion. The B side is a huge shimmering ur-drone, a fluttering wall of keening reeds and soaring feedback, all smeared into one glorious sky-reaching tumult, very reminiscent of VCO or Sunroof! So nice. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
When we first heard London retro murk poppers Still Corners, it was on a split single with another retro pop combo called The New Lines, and we were so smitten by The New Lines song, that it even had us wondering why it was Still Corners who got signed to Sub Pop and not The New Lines. Well, if there was any doubt about whether Still Corners should be on Sub Pop, it was wiped away within seconds of putting on their debut full length. Like Portishead crossed with Ennio Morricone crossed with Stereolab crossed with The Caretaker, the sound is so washed out and careworn, organs warble and wheeze, the drums minimal and skeletal, the guitars chiming and jangly, the production muted and muddy, all supporting the breathy angelic vocals of singer Tessa Murray, whose childlike croon is ethereal and spectral, the result is some sort of out-of-time faded memory dream pop. Opener "Cuckoo" is a perfect example, about as dreamy and divine as pop music gets. Fans of the various Girls bands (Dum Dum, Vivian, etc.), who want something dreamier and darker and more late night sounding, this might be the ticket. "Circulars" definitely displays the bands Stereolab side, propulsive and a little bit krautrocky sounding, but as if broadcast from underwater, or through an old radio hooked up to the sixties. The distinctive organ sound and the washed out production is what really defines Still Corners' sound, there aren't even any proper vocals on "Circulars", instead just some buried oooh's and aaah's, woven into the softly undulating fabric of the song's gauzy shimmer. Elsewhere the band look to Mazzy Star for sure, even the Cocteau Twins, but their sound is firmly rooted in sixties girl group pop, but not in the way the current crop of garage rockers channel that sound, no Still Corners have made that sound their own, it's not just echo and reverb, the sound is thick, and organic, the vocals dreamlike and crystalline, the songs subtly hooky, as much about the sound as the song, and vice versa.
Our favorite track would have to be "I Wrote In Blood", which almost sounds like a female Chris Isaak, channeled through some sort of Southern gothic PJ Harvey, the guitars fuzzy and distorted, but still minimal and spare, chiming melodies draped over the chugging swampy blues that seams to be blurred and smeared into a sort of ethereal slither, and when the drums do finally kick in, it's immediately all soundtracky, haunting and mysterious and so darkly evocative. And just as we pick that as our favorite, another one begins vying for the honor, until we finally give in and proclaim the whole record as our favorite. Easily one of the prettiest, darkest, most mysteriously lovely retro pop, dream psych records we've heard in ages, and absolutely destined to top our year end list. At least until that New Lines full length comes out...
Ultra minimal 55 minute live performance by this ever-weirder Icelandic band. From scraping metal to sub wind frequency tones, to clipped click/pop sounds, into slow sweeping drones. Jim approved.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Stilluppsteypa's powerbooking has found a new home on Ritornell, the experimental sub-label of Mille Plateaux. This Icelandic trio (now living in The Netherlands) shows that the digital glitch market is not cornered, nor mastered by, Oval, as multiple layers of clinical drones slash across terse rhythmic clicks and pops. While Oval's collages of skipping cds occasionally fuse into beautiful, "warm" sounding melodic structures, Stilluppsteypa has always maintained a precision in the structure and sound of their digital detritus that is always bleak and barren, always cool and controlled.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another crucial recording in the "Mort Aux Vaches" series of commisions for VPRO Dutch radio. Hyper minimal, austere and quite beautiful. Soothing and hypnotic currents of rumbling bass and prickly micro drones fight not to be heard just as you are straining to hear, when crackles of residual conversations and concrete sounds emerge as dub-like ghosts disembodied above the Icelanders' dronology.
Four-song ep from these Icelandic electronic experimentalists. Somehow this reminds me of the sounds one might imagine encountering in the ducts and pipes of a massive office building, vibrating with the sounds of computers and A/C...and then everyone's gone home, and it's very very quiet. With some trumpet playing by Andy Diagram of the Spaceheads (for a moment, it sounds like a Mille Plateaux Spaceheads remix), and barely-there vocals by Japanese chanteuse Hanayo (who last collaborated with Panacea). Very cool see-thru blue edged cd.
Who would have ever guessed that the first photo cover on the clinically sterile Ritornell label would have been this? A slickly produced cover photo of Stilluppsteypa donning faux-regal sparkling capes with huge stiff collars and one of the members (Sigmar?)
I would hazard a guess that the visual sensibility of Stilluppsteypa has been informed by the odd conceptual agendas of Leif Elggren who is responsible in part for the Kingdoms of Elgaland / Vargaland (amongst a number of other oddball projects). Both Elggren and Stilluppsteypa play with the notions of royalty, as an residual political emblem of inflated egotism as well as of self-deprecating absurdity.
With that entire diatribe on how good the cover is, it needs to be stated that artwork completely betrays the integrity of the music within. Stilluppsteypa has developed into one of the most adventurous staples of the electronica glitch community. "Stories Part Five" deviates slightly from what is expected from Stilluppsteypa with their multipled layers of electro-acoustic minutae exploding into clinical technotic escapades, rippling with deep unwavering basstones. Stilluppsteypa's forays into techno minimalism are not the smooth tendencies of microhouse, instead preferring to enhance the skeletal grooves with a psycho-acoustic tension.
Stilluppsteypa has reduced their ranks down to the duo of Siggtrygur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson as Heimir Bjorgulfsson has left to pursue his career as an electo-glitch superslueth in the Vacuum Boys. Yet the mission of these Icelandic transplants remains as convoluted as ever. Even the nature of this record is a bit of a puzzle; "The Immediate Past" may be a Stilluppsteypa retrospective drawing from their 10 years of recording, but also could be contemporary reworkings of older archival materials, or just their 10th year anniversary present to themselves. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the tracks on this album haven't appeared (in these forms) on any of the earlier Stilluppsteypa recordings. Upon asking Siggtrygur about the album, the response was a vague declaration of everything being "pretty new stuff" followed by an inexplicable AAAARRRRRHGGGG, YEAH! HA! and something about robots. If you allow yourself to be seduced by Stilluppstyepa, you'll see the logic there. It's something I really can't explain, but it's beautiful.
Regardless, "The Immediate Past Is Of No Interest To Us" is another brilliant Stilluppsteypa album of damaged electronics framed by semiotic slippages. Where the drone and the glitch had been previous focal points for the Icelanders, Stilluppsteypa centers upon the rhythm. With breakbeats constantly atomized into their granular parts, bounced backwards and forewards, and filtered through densely packed filters, this isn't music to dance to; but like fellow obtuse pop technicians Matmos, Stilluppsteypa isn't exactly music to think about. Stilluppstepa operate in a funhouse where they happily pull the trapdoor levers to let everybody (including themselves) tumble down to the nether regions below. Really fantastic!
We may shooting ourselves in the foot by listing this record, as we only have a handful of the records and are not too sure about the possibility of restocking it. But what the hell, it's another great Stilluppsteypa album... so we'll list it, but if you want one act fast!
While certainly not by design, the Icelandic duo of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson have kept a relatively low profile as Stilluppsteypa during the past couple of years. Sigmarsson kept himself busy with his own solo projects of likeminded isolationist spectroscopy and grandiose electronic absurdities, but Stilluppsteypa have only managed two albums since 2002 including The Immediate Past Is Of No Interest To Us and this eponymous album from 2004 on the obscure Japanese label Atak. The simple fact that Thorsson has been living in Amsterdam and Sigmarsson has been continuing his studies in Hannover helps explain the slow working process of the two these days. Nevertheless, when they do manage to get together to fire off another raygun blast of high-voltage rhythms crossed with clinical dronescaping, it's always amazing.
On this album, Stilluppsteypa pick up where they left off with The Immediate Past and their 2001 masterpiece Stories Part Five. Mechanical whirlings and abrasively tense drones steadily build into giddy episodes for electo-bossanova beats and carnivalesque melodies. Where most of Stilluppsteypa's contemporaries would treat such source materials with fart jokes and a purile disregard for quality, Stilluppsteypa take a considerable amount of pride in scripting inventive electronica juxtapositions with remarkable technique and theatrical panache. In many ways, Sigmarsson and Thorsson are emerging as the equals of B.C. Gilbert and Graham Lewis in all of their extra-cirricular activities outside of Wire. Great stuff.
Six laptops, three Icelanders, and three Chicagoans embarked on a collaborative tour in October 2000 throughout the US (but alas, not making their way to San Francisco). While certainly familiar with each other's work, they hadn't any previously working
A small pressing of some 100 copies on Colin Potter's ICR label from this little known project Stimulus. Supposedly, this ensemble began life in a more abstract electronica vein; but here they've managed an excellent recapitulation of the classic Organum sound, with open-ended acoustic drones crafted out of growling textures and distended bellows massing into a dense, static cloud of acoustic energy. Further on, Stimulus blurs guitars and vibraphone into more of a distort-o-shoegazer drone much more in line with Fennesz or Machinefabriek, then shift to a heavy subharmonic bass drone coupled with elongated church organ tonalities. Well worth investigating!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another super-limited 45 by playful, clever sample-a-thon electro-Brits on their own label. Side one is for the "gents" with song titles "sphincter" and "fistycuffs" while side two is for the ladies, "ici big jim" and "sore throat". Buy now or cry later.
Along with a photo of a dapper young Stockhausen looking just like John McEntyre of Totroise, this cd also features a massive 188 page book in German and English. Along with "Kontakte" are the compositions "Etude," "Studie I," "Studie II," and "Gesang Der Junglinge." "Etude" is a tape piece inspired by a meeting with Pierre Schaffer in 1952 in which the original recordings of piano strings being struck by an iron beater have been mangled through an incredible amount of splicing and re-recording. "Studie I" (1953) and "Studie II" (1954) are experiments in organizing micro-acoustic sounds and transforming sine waves & white noise into note-mixtures. "Gesang Der Junglinge" (1955 - 56) is a sophisticated electronic composition unifying vocal sounds and electronically produced sounds.
Latest from this long running neo-folk outfit, a fantastic collection of traditional folk standards, performed with a reverence that displays Stone Breath's obvious sonic debt to groups like Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, Comus as well as their modern descendants like Sol Invictus and Death In June. The sound is simple and spare, all acoustic, the instrumentation appropriately old timey: lute-guitar, dumbek, harp, bodhran, tamboura-lyre, ramyaj, etc. and multiple vocalists. Delicate steel string guitars drift dreamily beneath deep dramatic male vox and angelic female vocals, gorgeous harmonies, the sound stirring and timeless, a few tracks slip into almost bluegrass, drawing from classic Appalachia, but most have a sort of renaissance vibe to them, slipping easily from broody and balladic, to hushed and crystalline, soaring majestically, but then settling right back into something much more haunting and spiritual.
Pressed on thick vinyl, and housed in heavy jackets, and yeah, you guessed it, LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
Here's a handy link [http://www.sukothai.com/] to Carl Stone's web page. A Bernal Heights resident and wonderful electronic composer, he's also inventor of that Powerbook-and-human-voice-driven sound-trip called Acid Karaoke, which you really ought to see live.
The Storm Bugs were the construction of Philip Sanderson and Steven Ball, who were two very active participants in the post-punk explosion of DIY productions in the late '70s and early '80s. Their gritty electronic aesthetic tended toward the industrial reappropriation of found materials and abused consumer electronics that harken back to Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. Sanderson and Ball had also formed the Snatch Tapes label, which had released a handful of David Jackman cassettes back in the day as well as some compilations of likeminded eccentric malcontents. So far, a handful of collections of Strom Bugs material has surfaced in recent years with Supplementary Benefit being the most recent. This anthologizes two singles released in 1980 and 1981, as well as an overview of their experiments with the VCS3, a unique British synthesizer whose patch bay could be configured into a series of complex feedback loops, which the Storm Bugs used to great effect. Expect abrasive arpeggiations, primitive technotic marches, and unhinged arrangements of broken turntablist damage, oblique dirges, and obliterated textures. Pretty tremendous stuff, and kudos again to Vinyl On Demand for reclaiming another set of recordings that surely would have quietly disappeared into the ether of history.
One of our Danish customers, an experimental musician named Peter Bach Nicholaisen, aka Stormhat, sent us this a while back - his first cd after a couple cd-r releases. It kind of got lost in the shuffle but we just discovered we had a little pile of them so here's a review! It's a brief (21 minute) disc consisting of six fairly abstract, textural tracks made from field recordings and glitchy digital manipulations. It's mostly quite gentle, yet active. Sometimes quite pretty, at others maybe even a little bit sinister-sounding. There's sounds of a baby gurgling, tinkling fragments of music-box melodies, falling rain and indistinct voices... various crunchings and rustlings, edits and echoes... The droning hiss and weird noises suggesting a nest of small, fantastical creatures, their mysterious activities being listened-in upon from a safe distance via sensitive microphone equipment. The final, title track is our favorite, as these critters settle in for a long winter with ringing drone and drowsy birdlike twittering, the night drawing in, wind at the window, hush, hush...
This is not unlike something that you might find on Hapna, Helen Scarsdale, or Kning Disk. It's packaged in a gatefold digi-sleeve thing, the cd itself being one of those nifty ones that's like a 3" cd inside a 5" clear plastic disc.
Ultra limited (only 100 copies) cassette release from this lesser known solo project of Garek Druss, who plays in PDX dronedoomsludge combo Tecumseh, and also records as Dull Knife (who split a cd-r a while back with aQ faves and weirdo outsider heavies Inh Halentropy). And it's some hazy, heady, gorgeous stuff. A lush layered landscape of grimy, gristly, crumbling, softly distorted dronemusic, at once warm and melodic, caustic and corrosive. Waves of feedback crash over churning buzz, all blurred and blearily blown out, but within this noisy swirl and squall, is a lovely and serene core, a deep meditative sonic swell, that infuses the noisiness with an impossible loveliness, the whole thing seems washed out and sun dappled, any of the jagged edges are smoothed out, and as the sound builds, in volume, and intensity, the sound remains rooted in melody, and drifts dreamily dragging a contrail of crunch and hiss and swirling overtones in its wake.
The first movement (side) is a much more incendiary affair, building to an almost deafening (but still dreamy) Sunroof-style ur-drone roar, a blazed sprawl of zoner drift and spaced out shimmer, but the second half (side) dials it back a bit, the sound more cavernous and echo drenched, the melodies less abstract, and woven into something almost propulsive, wheezing chordal blur over undulating deep swirling swells, a captivating bit of grey ambience, the sound rich with overtones, and buried melodies, hypnotic and woozy and in its own way strangely tranquil, a gauzy droned out minimalistic drift, total dreamdoomdrone bliss for sure...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, nice thick printed cardstock sleeves, and cool transparent cassettes...
Hot on the heels of the recent super limited cassette on Flingco (got a few left, ask if you want one), comes this also limited lp from Gareck Druss, aka A Story Of Rats, who might be more familiar to aQ folks as a member of PDX doomdronedirge outfit Tecumseh. And A Story Of Rats actually seems like a logical extension of the Tecumseh mothership, a more minimal, hushed sound, but definitely the same sort of dirgey drift.
Thought Forms is a single sprawling epic split up into two sidelong movements, the first is as you might expect, a creepy atmospheric dronescape, all distant sounds, reverbed field recordings, warm whirling tones, the sound drifts meditatively, but begins to grow more industrial, as the sounds grow more caustic, bell like chimes, are wreathed in distortion and begin to crumble, vocals buried so they sound like more rumbles and whirs, keening fragmented melodies drift beneath the surface, the sound constantly in motion, but subtly so, shifting from deep somnambulant creep to washed out shimmer and back again. The second side/movement is more looped and hypnotic, woozy and psychedelic, the sounds more hazy and softly swirly, melodies blurred into chordal thrum, it's prettier than the A side, but the darkness seems to grow gradually, a droned out soft noise that builds and builds into a crumbling and ominous black buzz outro. Most definitely for fans of all things slow and low, minimal and droney, dark and drifty.
The packaging is incredible, hand screened jackets, black and metallic gold ink, the vinyl pressed on swirled black and grey vinyl, packaged with a super swank insert, again hand screened in metallic gold ink, on heavy textured paper.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES.
Over the last few years, we, and most readers of the aQ list have become a bit obsessed with the Caretaker, as well as the man behind the curtain, Leyland James Kirby, who as the Caretaker, and also nder his own name, has created a body of work at once moody and mysterious, murky and out of time, a series of releases that sound like the musical version of faded photographs, old 78's spinning in ghostly parlors, that ethereal, ephemeral sound a glimpse into some lost era, or some alternate otherworld, needless to say, pretty much everyone at aQ is utterly smitten. Apparently, The Stranger is yet another moniker Kirby has employed in the past, although this is our first exposure to him as The Stranger, and maybe not surprisingly, this iteration of Kirby's The Stranger has ended up on Modern Love, home to lots of other aQ faves, including most notably perhaps Demdike Stare and Andy Stott. Which makes sense considering the sound of The Stranger, which seems to be a darkly minimal, hushed and hauntological, slo-mo electronic creep, positioning itself somewhere between the skeletal electronic minimalism of Stott, and the ritualistic psychedelic hauntology of Demdike Stare. With plenty of Kirby's washed out, faded sound, buried melody mystery lurking just below the surface. And really, below the surface is where most everything is going on here. The sound is extremely minimal, hushed and at times barely there, a few cursory listens in the store, has us thinking this was a bit boring, like nothing was going on, barring some hissy static, and buried rhythms, with all of the tracks bleeding into a single monochromatic whole. But what a difference some headphones make, and we do recommend headphone listening for this, cuz once the volume is cranked, and the rest of the world is shut out, The Stranger reveals itself as something warped and wonderful, some twisted deep listening, heavy on the rhythm and texture, in fact, it's essentially a deftly crafted landscape of slow shifting rhythms and textures, straddling some sort of avant ultra-minimal techno, and something much more atmospheric, the 'beats' are barely there, often fragmented shards of percussion, buried pulsations, clouds of static that just seem to have haphazardly formed sort-of-rhythms, on some tracks they do drive the proceedings, but on others, they simply bleed into the background, with a few tracks sounding like pure ambient field recordings of subterranean pipe fights, "We Scarcely See Sunlight" sounds like Kirby recording himself in the sewers, playing the iron ladders, creating primitive rhythms from metal on metal, while all around him the sounds of the city filtered from above add deep moans and distant rumbles, while "Spiral Of Decline", sounds almost like the gothic industrial of Vatican Shadow, albeit with Kirby's strange idiosyncratic sound design (the cool main rhythmic component that sounds like marbles rolling around in a plastic tube!).
"Providence Or Fate" comes about as close to the Caretaker as anything here, with it's crackle wreathed orchestral shimmers, the faded melodies and washed out ambience, the whole thing hushed and darkly lovely, reminding us of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck as well, but here those dreamy swatch of sound are tethered to a primitive tribal rhythm. And so it goes, from clattery crunch to blurred thrum, tinkling chimes wreathed in rainfall like static, to glitchy avant drone dub minimalism, barely there downtempo slowcore electro drift, to groaning gothic dirge.
As always, super striking Modern Love packaging, the cd in an oversized multi-panel sleeve, both the cd and lp adorned with mysterious, dripping, grey scale images of an old abandoned building.
The Strangulated Beatoffs are a weird weird band. But then what did you expect from a band called the Strangulated Beatoffs? Or from a band that features members of infamous noise punks Drunks With Guns?
This demented duo sometimes use samplers and loops to make fucked up hypnotic grooves and seriously demented electronic weirdness, but as is evidenced by Greatest Hits, they're also puerile purveyors of sick sludgey noise rock and filthy drunkrock dirges. Greatest Hits is mostly a collection of seven inches, the earliest recordings of the Beatoffs circa 1988-1992 or so and thus are maybe the closest sonically to the late great Drunks With Guns. Some tracks like "Porky The Pig And Bess" and "Heeby Jeeby/Practicing To Be A Doctor" are heavy dirgey space rock drug jams that sound like they could have been yanked from a Butthole Surfers set, while others, like "Lick My Butthole" musically sound like Dutch post metallers Gore, but with the addition of some goofy fucked up lyrics, and some damaged shards of buzz and crunch.
"It's A Vile, Vile, Vile, Vile World" is a super lengthy collage of looped eighties Carpenter-ish soundtracks, that sounds like it could be James Ferraro, but it's from at least a decade before Ferraro delved into lysergic pop music, so the Beatoffs are unsung musical pioneers! Fuck yeah! There's a Troggs cover too, but you'd never know it, a murky field recording that sounds like it was captured in the bar around the corner from the show, there's a dorky acoustic ditty, some strange carnivalesque child molesting weirdness, some Mentors like punk rock, but the finest moments are when the band do their best Butthole Surfers, crafting longform drone dirge drug rock, all swirling spacey effects, gnarled looped guitars, and mesmerizingly motorik beats...
If you're not sold by now, maybe this will sway you: Strangulated Beatoffs are one of Andee's all time favorite bands. EVER. So much so that he contacted them about reissuing all of their records, maybe even a box set, but all they wanted to release on tUMULt was their record of Genesis covers! (And then he never heard from them again.) How rad is that???
Featuring ex-members of Drunks With Guns and White Suburban Youth although you would never know it from the sound. Besides having the best band name ever, the Beatoffs take simple stolen sounds and loop and distort them until they become incessant and
Besides having one of the best band names ever, Strangulated Beatoffs have to be one of our favorite modern purveyors of what-the-fuck sonic weirdness, a group whose sound is impossible to pin down, sometimes a Drunks With Guns like dirgey scumrock sludge, other times, a twisted outsider electronica, groovy and loopy one minute, noisy and punishing the next. Although, not sure where this record would fall on that spectrum. To Begin with, as the title might have given away, The White Album is in fact, the Beatoffs' version of that classic Beatles record, here reimagined as something altogether more lo-fi and noisy, but by Beatoffs standards, not necessarily all that weird. "I Am The Walrus" starts things off, and sounds pretty much like a noisy psychedelic rock band doing a pretty straight ahead version, lo-fi and wreathed in guitar noise, but then things begin to devolve with "Norwegian Wood", the vocals a WAY up in the mix, atonal drawl, over simply strummed guitars, the song peppered with belches and studio chatter, and a whistle solo (!). Damaged and a little bit twisted for sure, but still strangely respectful to the original. Which is, quite surprisingly, how much of this plays out. "Ticket To Ride" is a pretty decent cover, all grungy guitars, and plaintive vocals, buried drums, distorted and blown out and psychedelic, then "Rocky Raccoon" is a warbly sprawl of darkly psychedelic croon and strum, echo drenched, and woozy. The rest of the record plays out similarly, the Beatoffs delivering a fuzzed out, droney, psychedelic take on this classic record, sounding like some warped, wasted bar band, inadvertently transforming the Beatles original into something that sounds more like Liquorball. And if you're wondering where all the other songs are, well, check out "Dear Prudence", which crams fragments of ALL the rest of the White Album, into a single song!
This recording from 1989 has been reissued on vinyl now by Skin Graft, as well as on pro-printed cd-r (yes cd-r not actual cd, not sure why).
We just found a small cache of this presumably out of print record at one of our suppliers, a 2001 reissue of the 1976 debut solo album from the late Egyptian-born singer Demetrio Stratos, famous as the frontman for the Italian "International Popular Group" Area. That avant-prog ensemble was rather more experimental than most, bringing in jazz improv, electroacoustic composition, and more - including what we have previously referred to as "dramatic and bizarre vocal experiments". Despite our love for Italian prog, we've never had an opportunity to review much by Area, but they were one of the best. Just ask Tatsuya Yoshida, he'll tell you that next to Magma from France, Area were probably one of his biggest inspirations for his band Ruins.
This solo album from their singer doesn't really sound like Area, though. Or rather, it appropriately focuses only on one specific aspect of Area, taken to an extreme - Stratos' vocals. We won't say "singing" though, not exactly. This is an album of CRAZED acoustic voice-only sounds, along the lines of later efforts by Phil Minton, Jaap Blonk, Makigami Koichi, and Mike Patton. Heck, we're pretty sure Mike Patton must own a copy of this record, it's basically the blueprint for his debut solo album on Tzadik, 1996's Adult Themes For Voice. We like this better though (sorry Mike).
On Metrodora, Stratos, who considered himself a "vocal researcher", presents the results of his research into what he can do manipulating his voice acoustically. Dramatic and bizarre indeed, as well as interesting and amusing. Gurgling groaning hissing hooting croaking shrieking. Overdubbing and multitracking (as well as extended techniques) allow him to do call and response with himself, to create dense droning hums and carry on nonsensical conversations in multiple voices (on the rhythmic, repetitive title track sounding like Tatsuya Yoshida's a cappella Zubi Zuva group). At times it's like a zooful of primates gone wild, at others much more 'musical', Stratos eventually doing some wailing, undulating singing in more typical Area-style on "Mirologhi (Lamento d'Epiro)" parts one and two, where he also manages to create what sound like synthesizer and percussive sounds in the background. Definitely a classic in the field, and, once you're into it, remarkably listenable.
Another list, another fantastic release from local label Time Released Sound. This the latest from a one man band called Stray Ghost, who fuses washed out soft focus atmospherics, a la Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, with more modern new classical composition. Lush blurry soundscapes, ebb and flow, gauzy expanses of hushed hazy thrum, which give way to delicate pointillist piano, sweeping and darkly dramatic, haunting and quite lovely, swirling strings, the sound cinematic and at times near symphonic, a sort of faded dreamlike chamber music, shifting easily from layered ominous clouds of brooding electronics, to spare, contemplative drift, to delicate, crystalline shimmer, the sound wistful and melancholy, the spare prettiness and the lush brooding swells, continually blurring into one another, creating a gorgeous bit of electronic / neoclassical modern minimalism.
As with all TRS releases, the Stray Ghost comes in two versions, the standard, which is a proper cd housed in a heavy digipak, which subtly mirrors the meticulously designed packaging of the deluxe version, which is limited to just 100 copies, and is packaged in a handmade sleeve created from hand sewn sheets of antique Braille paper, all held in an origami style black fold up sleeve, hand stamped and Braille labelled, inside various pockets containing antique charts and drawings. As always. WOW.
Another list, another fantastic release from local label Time Released Sound. This the latest from a one man band called Stray Ghost, who fuses washed out soft focus atmospherics, a la Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, with more modern new classical composition. Lush blurry soundscapes, ebb and flow, gauzy expanses of hushed hazy thrum, which give way to delicate pointillist piano, sweeping and darkly dramatic, haunting and quite lovely, swirling strings, the sound cinematic and at times near symphonic, a sort of faded dreamlike chamber music, shifting easily from layered ominous clouds of brooding electronics, to spare, contemplative drift, to delicate, crystalline shimmer, the sound wistful and melancholy, the spare prettiness and the lush brooding swells, continually blurring into one another, creating a gorgeous bit of electronic / neoclassical modern minimalism.
As with all TRS releases, the Stray Ghost comes in two versions, the standard, which is a proper cd housed in a heavy digipak, which subtly mirrors the meticulously designed packaging of the deluxe version, which is limited to just 100 copies, and is packaged in a handmade sleeve created from hand sewn sheets of antique Braille paper, all held in an origami style black fold up sleeve, hand stamped and Braille labelled, inside various pockets containing antique charts and drawings. As always. WOW.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of our favortie New Zealand outfits finds its way to one of our favorite SF labels. AQ pal Antony Milton's free-noise duo Street finds a new home on Glenn from Jewelled Antler's Pink Skulls label and it's a perfect match. Street follow in the dirge-y drone-y footsteps of NZ greats like the Dead C and Gate but add their own special something. Huge warm swells of guitar, organs, effects and all sorts of other noisemakers, pulses and throbs, speckled with glitchy amp buzz and splattery industrial grind. Those same ingredients are somehow tamed briefly to force all that buzzing snarling fury into a rumbling, wheezing pop song, but a pop song pregnant with the possibility of total implosion. The record stretches out and meanders a while, through a creaking soundscape of whining violins and rickety melodies, shimmering tonal buzz and distant clinking and clattering, before the riff drops, a basement, garage sale, no-fi Stooges dirge, with damaged guitars and tortured vocals. Then it's guitars against the amps in a big room time, as huge swaths of feedback and guitar roar, swell and swoop like sonic ghosts who have shuffled off this mortal coil. The final twenty minute track finds Street out-sunroofing Sunroof! with a static feedback/ampbuzz grinding shimmer that hangs motionless in midair, vibrating and threatening to float away, but never does, instead it's a mesmeric drone, endless and boundless. So good. Still definitely one of our favorite New Zealand exports.
What is it about New Zealand? And the ease in which New Zealand bands seem to be able to transfrom 'noise' into something more. Much more. Street+X is a duo, employing violins, microphones, organs and REALLY BIG AMPS in a tiny room. Totally mesmerising, hypnotic, dreamy, shimmery, noisy, dirgy, lo-fi, high-end, spaced out DRONE ala Sunroof!, Total, Skullflower, Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Gate, Vibracathedral Orchestra, etc. I never get sick of this stuff and this is some of the best I've heard, Fans of the above mentioned bands NEED this.
One of two new releases from the Time Released Sound label this week. This one from a woman who calls herself Strie, and who is rumored to have been a big name in European classical music, only to shun the spotlight and head for the countryside to live in isolation. True or not, it makes for a good story, and listening to Strie, it's certainly easy to imagine these haunting sounds being born of a European classical tradition. Haunting and cinematic, brooding and expansive, dark soaring strings, fluttering woodwinds, delicate piano, ethereal female vocals, all laced with strange bits of industrial clatter, little bits of mysterious glitch, the sounds here are moving and emotional and timeless, soundtracky for sure, but not just filmic, these tracks have a depth and dark energy, that seem to connect with the human spirit, a sonic representation of lost loves and forgotten memories, mournful strings, garbled electronics, only give these sounds a modern vibe that further their timelessness, and position them as modern sound, while at the same time retaining the traditions and the music that came before, the label mentions Gorecki and Arvo Part, which we definitely here as well, fans of groups like Godspeed You Black Emperor too will love this. Epic, mysterious and majestic, maybe our favorite release on Time Released Sound so far!
As with all the TRS releases, there are two different versions, the normal less limited (and less expensive) version, which comes in a handsome digipak, and the super special, ultra fancy and pricey DELUXE version, limited to just 100 copies, which in this case, takes that digipak, and houses it in a black double envelope, hand stamped, inside, two vellum sleeves, in one the digipak, the sleeve hand stamped, in the other a set of three 4"x6" prints, as well as a 4"x6" unassembled jigsaw puzzle. The limited version is already sold out at the label and OUT OF PRINT. We have about 5 copies of it and then it's gone for good.
One of two new releases from the Time Released Sound label this week. This one from a woman who calls herself Strie, and who is rumored to have been a big name in European classical music, only to shun the spotlight and head for the countryside to live in isolation. True or not, it makes for a good story, and listening to Strie, it's certainly easy to imagine these haunting sounds being born of a European classical tradition. Haunting and cinematic, brooding and expansive, dark soaring strings, fluttering woodwinds, delicate piano, ethereal female vocals, all laced with strange bits of industrial clatter, little bits of mysterious glitch, the sounds here are moving and emotional and timeless, soundtracky for sure, but not just filmic, these tracks have a depth and dark energy, that seem to connect with the human spirit, a sonic representation of lost loves and forgotten memories, mournful strings, garbled electronics, only give these sounds a modern vibe that further their timelessness, and position them as modern sound, while at the same time retaining the traditions and the music that came before, the label mentions Gorecki and Arvo Part, which we definitely here as well, fans of groups like Godspeed You Black Emperor too will love this. Epic, mysterious and majestic, maybe our favorite release on Time Released Sound so far!
As with all the TRS releases, there are two different versions, the normal less limited (and less expensive) version, which comes in a handsome digipak, and the super special, ultra fancy and pricey DELUXE version, limited to just 100 copies, which in this case, takes that digipak, and houses it in a black double envelope, hand stamped, inside, two vellum sleeves, in one the digipak, the sleeve hand stamped, in the other a set of three 4"x6" prints, as well as a 4"x6" unassembled jigsaw puzzle. The limited version is already sold out at the label and OUT OF PRINT. We have about 5 copies of it and then it's gone for good.
Ok, look. Drone records are hard to review. They're drones. Some are better than others (dronier?) but what do you say to make that case? Especially when, in trying to do so, your mind is being lulled and numbed and otherwise not wanting to think and type thoughts. You want to join with the drone, not describe and analyze it. So, if we say that this collaboration between Strings of Consciousness and Angel is a damn good drone record, then maybe you should just take our word for it, whaddya say? Or let the glowing green, desolate atmospheric artwork of Seldon Hunt, in which this is housed, convince you. Or the folks involved - Angel, who have other albums we've recommended, is in part the project of Ilpo Vaisanen of Pan Sonic, while the experimental ensemble Strings Of Consciousness includes French laptopper Philippe Petit who runs the Bip-Hop label (not to be confused with the insane tightrope walking Philippe Petit from the documentary Man On A Wire!).
But of course you want further details. Well... there's two tracks here. Long ones, of course. 22:03 and 18:41. The first track is the more spacious, slowly shimmering drone piece, featuring the cello of Iceland's Hildur Gudnadottir, along with other strings - harp, double bass, guitars... plus harmonium, accordion, and the added abstraction of electronics, effects, and oscillators. Gentle rhythms manifest, and melodies seep in. It builds into an ominous physical presence, the volume increasing, buzzing smoothly like a swarm of non-so-angry bees before the end. Quite glorious.
The second track seems as layered and organic, but more intimate. Instead of chamber strings, the "acoustic" element is limited to accordion and resonating Tibetan bowls. Along with guitars... and again plenty of electronics and effects. More "crinkly" and clanky than the first track, with mysterious rattle and rustle amidst a mix of soothing electronic washes and rather more corroded-sounding digitalized drones. But like we said, we're to busy being mesmerized by this music to really break it all down for you. We just know, we like it!
Recommended, either on cd, released domestically by Important (which allows for uninterrupted drone consumption), or on vinyl, an import on the Conspiracy label (which of course requires the listener to assist in flipping from one side to the next).
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Oakland's own Strip Mall Seizures spew forth a thrashing, pounding, and super noisy record on excellent San Francisco imprint, True Panther Sounds. No English is a cacophonous, damaged and ultimately danceable record for the people that like their keyboards turned WAY UP! Hella good.
Another fantastic, archival synth oddity rescued from the abyss by Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin, who on the last list, brought us two fantastic early eighties releases of kosmische synthscapery and darkly propulsive kraut-age psychedelia from Ron Berry, and this time around it's a lost lp from 1982 from a woman named Anna Pauline Strom, who hailed from right here in San Francisco. Blind and obese, Strom struggled greatly with her weight and sightlessness, until one day her doting husband purchased her an electric organ, with which the untrained Strom began to create incredible, beautiful, and relaxing sounds. Sounds that helped her transcend her physical form, to reach higher planes of existence, to eventually become the "Trans-Millenia Consort"!
From the original liner notes (reprinted in the cassette's J-Card: "I consider myself the "Trans-Millenia Consort", by which title I wish to be known. This to me is a personal declaration that I have been in previous lives, that I am in this life, and that I shall in future lives be a musical consort to time."
Strom goes on: "My music is a timeless entity, clothed in the mists of prehistory, beautifully sensitive to the tortured and joyous emotions of the present, rich and voluptuously full of the glory and anguish of future worlds. And so, as the "Trans-Millenia Consort", the living incarnation of this all-embracing entity of music, I endeavor through music to delve into all time spaces to tap resources of knowledge and power as ancient as the Universe and as young as unborn worlds, in the hope that I may bring a measure of peace and joy to emotional, spiritual, material and physical complexity that is humankind."
While it's unclear if her music did in fact impact humankind on such a massive scale, it most certainly did wonders for her personally, allowing her to find peace in the present, and to modern listeners, it's easy to get lost in her lush, lullaby-like synthscapes, simple lilting melodies, subtle sound effects (like the bathtub water splashes on the first track, the simulated animal sounds on the second), the arrangements often sounding like electric harps, fields of ethereal strums, dreamy and soft focus, blooping, bleeping pizzicato melodies, stretched out over the occasional weird sort-of groovy rhythm, Casio style handclap driven primitive drum machine beats, wreathed in prismatic swirls of blurred synth shimmer, all very very new age-y of course, very soundtracky and cinematic, like the music for old educational filmstrips, easy to imagine this having found it's way onto UK weirdo reissue label Trunk, had this been from some obscure British TV show. The new age blossoms into some serious kosmische drift here and there, the whole of Strom's sound though with a serious primitive, home brewed, outsider vibe. Apparently, Strom's quick mastery of that first organ, convinced her husband to create/invent/purchase new instruments and effects and gizmos for her to explore and experiment with, all of which she quickly mastered and wove into these dreamily drifty outsider new age bliss out soundscapes.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Each one hand numbered, with the original album's liner notes included inside the J-card!
Members of Norwegian jazz/electronic outfits Supersilent (keyboardist Stale Storlokken) and Food (percussionist Thomas Stronen) collaborate in this duo, making their Rune Grammofon debut with Humcrush. Being fans of both Food and Supersilent (especially!) we were interested to hear this...also most Rune Grammofon stuff is pretty good. And this is! Improvised live in the recording studio but well and truly sounding like weird, tuneful 'songs', this album reminds us a bit of the Shaking Ray Levis, or maybe even a free improv version of Sagor and Swing, if you know either of them. The ramshackle rhythmic clatter of drums, the glitchy hiss and buzz of electronics, and the quirky synth tones combine quite temptingly to our ears. Not to many other 'improv' records boast cuts like "Marked East" that we want to hit repeat on right after they're over. From bright and bouncy (like that track) to moody and mysterious, Humcrush is an enjoyable ride.
By now, we probably don't need to mention how much we love the turntable as instrument. And to that end, how much we love the sounds of damaged vinyl, or modified turntables, the hiss and skipping and pops and crackles and loops... Or how much we love Jeck and Tetreault and Yoshihide and Bastien and Brumit and Gum and Loop Orchestra and Marclay and anyone who ever smashed up or scraped up their records and then played them anyway, and maybe did that with two turntables or three or a hundred, creating whole new wonderful pieces of music out of misused and abused players and scratched and screwed up fragments of other folks' music. So when we discovered Strotter, aka Swiss turntablist Christoph Hess, we were already sold. Here's an older gentleman, who adds pieces of metal, and elastic bands, and extra needles and multiple tone arms to his turntables. And then uses old records and these customized turntable to create gorgeously hypnotic looped minimal soundscapes. It was only a matter of time before he decided to fuck with the actual pressing process as well. Thus we have two new vinyl only releases, an etched 12" and a super deluxe 7".
From the same label that brought us the beautifully packaged and amazing sounding Aluk Todolo 7" comes a brand new 7" from Hess and hiss Strotter project. Two tracks on each side, the outer track plays normally, outside to in, but the inside track plays backwards from inside to out, and in between, separating each track is a locked groove. Awesome.
The outside track on side A begins with thick fuzzed out low end that is quickly joined by hypnotic looped scraping that warbles and shifts in pitch. It begins to sound like the yelp of an old man and is eventually eclipsed by a simple beating pulse, thick and heavy, that almost sounds like some purloined SUNNO))) guitars. The Inside track on side A is super dense with all sorts of record crackle and rhythmic pops. Scrapes and skips and hiccuping loops. Starting off as a super spare minimal glitchy scraped vinylscape, it quickly builds in intensity, the buried music on the scratched vinyl offering up a haunting distant minor key melody. So creepy.
The outside track on side B is a totally hypnotic mechanized minimal jazzscape, a simple throbbing bass pulse over abstract rhythmic clicking like some old jazz intro chopped and looped. The inside track on side B is a dense staticky rhythm constructed from distant moans, crackling surface noise, the "bass line" getting busier and busier until it becomes a squirming tangle beneath tiny sparkling high end squiggles.
Plain black vinyl with no label, packaged in a thick clear sleeve, with white text and diagrams, printed forwards and backwards. Nice!
We are huge fans of weird turntable music, from Jeck, to Gum, to Otomo Yoshihide, to Martin Tetrault, but as much as we love all of those folks, our heart belongs to Strotter Inst., aka, Christoph Hess, an older Swiss turntable mad scientist, who creates Frankensteinian record players with multiple arms, weird obstructions forcing the needle to jump and skip, strange strings and rubber bands, that the moving parts pluck and strike, all creating gorgeous mechanical symphonies of sound, with JUST the player, when the manipulated records are added (and they often are NOT), things only get more expansive and lush and amazing.
This latest release from Hess finds his interest in fucking with lps and their players extending to even the pressing process, with the various tracks mastered at different speeds, requiring a small diagram on the label demonstrating which part of which side plays at which speed. Not that it necessarily matters, as Hess' crazy sonic concoctions sound great at any speed.
The sounds here follow on from those on the many other records of his we've reviewed, like some sort of minimal DIY krautrock, or a band like Avarus, populated exclusively by homebuilt noise making robots, all assembled from turntables, it is unbelievable to hear these sounds and know they were designed and planned by Hess, but it's the machines that are creating these gorgeous hypnotic rhythmscapes.
Hypnotic, repetitive, cyclical, but always shifting subtly, crackle, scrape, rumble, hiss, skip, all deftly arranged into propulsive grooves, the rubber bands offering up melody, strange rubbery tones, percussive, but definitely melodic, while the turntable itself, when not striking or plucking the bands, unleashes strange grinding rhythms, peppered with percussive scapes, haunting textural whirs, the rhythms almost tribal, often skeletal and sparse, but just as often dense and layered, when the records are included in the sound making, the various manipulated grooves, spit out even more strange clicks and moans and bleeps and even some strangely appropriate counter rhythms.
Absolutely fantastic stuff, we would imagine as amazing to see as to hear, lucky for us, there's a good chance, Hess will be in the US soon, and will hopefully be visiting aQ for a demonstration / performance.
We've said it a million times, but it bears repeating, we love turntables, and scratchy records, and the sounds of both, we even (especially) love the sound of both with the music removed. Or at least most of the music removed. Fuzz and crackle and buzz and pop and warble and whir. All the sounds people try desperately to remove from their listening experience is exactly what we want piled on top of ours. In fact, all the crackle and surface noise that audio nerds discard, well, they should save it all up and bequeath it to us to sprinkle, dollop, pour, douse all of our music with. So it was really a no brainer that the debut cd from Strotter Inst. would be record of the week here at AQ (as it was just a few weeks ago). Strotter is the work of one man, Swiss turntablist / sound artist Christoph Hess, who takes old turntables, augments them with various wires and elastic bands, pieces of metal and all sorts of found objects, and then creates gorgeously Spartan symphonies of rhythm and texture using just the turntable and the stylus, no records at all. No music. The turntable becomes an instrument capable of more than just playing other peoples' music, it is a sound making device, an instrument as viable as any other. Although with a truly unique palette of sounds, reminiscent of some strange minimal electronica, albeit with a much more organic feel.
This disc captures a performance recorded live to minidisc at Oblo Cinema in Lausanne, Switzerland, in April of 2005. And is a gloriously hypnotic soundscape of glitchy beats, warm textural drones and strange low end strums, all locked into hypnotic loops, that slowly shift and drift in and out of sync as more turntables join the fray, or as the speeds of the turntables change, or as various implements shift. The set begins with a lush drone, difficult to imagine how it's produced, but it is warm and deep and quite organic sounding. Soon the sound of the reverberating bands are introduced, sounding a lot like some muted guitar, playing a simple low end figure, the notes coming faster and faster until the whole thing stumbles into a shambolic rhythm, a loping lurch, with occasional bursts of needle squelch, eventually settling into a dreamy motorik groove. The set seesaws back and forth between strange machinelike rhythms and stretches of drone and rumble. Right toward the end there is a burst of super distorted NOISE which slowly gives way to the final rhythmic groove, that slowly winds down, notes drifting off until all that is left is a single mechanical pulse. So nice.
Comes packaged in a cool cardstock sleeve with a little diecut circle perfectly above the hole in the center of the cd. More nods to the record and its design. The picture of Christoph Hess on the inside of the booklet looks like some old faded textbook photo of Einstein Or Edison, hunched over his machines, modified turntables in this case, a study of a quirky inventor, Strotter as the sound of antiquated machinery, of objects reassigned to new tasks, the tireless pursuit of technology recontextualization, only adding to the whole vibe of Hess' music being some recently unearthed or discovered scratchy, crackly sonic artifact.
It's been almost 3 years since we've heard from turntable mad scientist and alchemist Strotter Inst., whose haunting mechanical record player mini-symphonies evokes mysterious worlds, populated with shadow creatures and amorphous figures operating strange turntable like machinery, everything shaded grey, with a patina of rust, or perhaps dust, the machines wheezing as turntables spin lugubriously, multiple tone arms like a child's mechanical toy octopus, everything held together by rubber bands and bits of strings, a Rube Goldberg style contraption, designed to create a new world of sound, the above mentioned shadowy kingdom, where we can wander and get lost.
Strotter Inst. is Swiss musician / tinkerer Christoph Hess, who customizes old turntables, using whatever is at hand, to create loop making machines, collages of skipping sounds, but unlike the playful melodiousness of Pierre Bastien, or the gauzy ambient drift of Philip Jeck, Strotter's sound is much more raw, and almost heavy, feral even, tons of low end, drones everywhere, hiss and buzz and rumble, in fact much of the time, the turntable sounds like it has been transformed into some sort of instrument of destruction, conjuring up some seriously abject Wolf Eyesian dirgescapes, heaving and roiling expanses of looped blackness, as if some evil genius unleashed his army of automatons, a landscape dotted with Steampunk style contraptions, all gears and ratchets, spewing steam and lurching forward in unison, in fact much of the time, if one didn't know better, one might not even realize that the music of Strotter Inst. was created with turntables. Until the sound shifts, and suddenly a staticky crackly record begins to skip, and becomes the rhythmic source for whatever might come next. Sometimes the sound will hew close to that stuttering skeletal framework, other times, the skipping record is immediately engulfed by thick slabs of sonic blackness, churning machinelike whirs, and percussive low end thrum, this is industrial music for sure, especially if the industry in question was antique turntables. Seriously though, the sounds here are occasionally pretty intense, and heavy and abrasive, which sort of shames the various noisemakers who need a table top full of pedals and a bunch of amps, and a million patch cords and cd players and mixers to make their music, especially when one old man with a handful of record players, a pocket full of rubber bands, a soldering iron and a pile of turntable parts, can kick up a rhythmic din just as hard and heavy as any of 'em. But it's definitely not all hard and heavy, those blasts are balanced by long loping stretches of motorik rhythms, looped and hypnotic, locked into totally mesmerizing grooves, a symphony of percussive thumps and twanging rubber bands woven into strange alien krautrocky dirges.
So fantastic! We often forget to include him in the aQ turntable pantheon, but he absolutely belongs: Jeck, Tetreault, Otomo, Bastien, Fun Years, and Strotter Inst.!!
Packaged in a beautiful cardstock sleeve, with a super striking fold out poster.
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The turntable has to be the greatest instrument ever invented. At least the greatest instrument that was never actually intended to -be- an instrument, or to be -played- at all. What was a revolutionary breakthrough in the playback of popular music, eventually became the ultimate plunderphonic device, with a sonic palette only as limited as your record collection, and then not even limited by that. Broken records, shards of different records glued together, discs made out of wax, or sand paper, or stone, or plastic, or even no records at all, just the sounds of the turntable and the needle. We're not talking DJ's playing records either. Sure we dig that stuff too, but we're talking about people MAKING music out of bits and pieces, scraps and shards, creating whole new worlds of sound. Hard to say what it is exactly about the sound of a needle on vinyl that moves us so, it's warm, and fuzzy, and imperfect, maybe it's the sound of our childhoods, our early musical discoveries, but whatever it is, we love that sound, the whir and hiss, the pop and crackle, for all the striving for pristine perfect digital sound, we can't help but lean in the exact opposite direction, loving our music to be rough and murky, thick with warm warble and rain like static, a hiss that is all age and character and texture.
A small group of like minded artists have been exploring the possibilities of the turntable for years, the early experiments of Milan Knizak and his broken music, the grand and gorgeous soundscapes of Phillip Jeck, the vinyl sculptures of Christian Marclay and Martin Tetreault, the rhythmic playfulness of Pierre Bastien, Otomo Yoshihide's turntable explorations in Ground Zero, the minimal compositions of Institut Fuer Feinmotorik, utilizing the runoff grooves, and between song ambience to construct their pieces, and on and on.
For over a decade Swiss sound artist Christoph Hess had been experimenting with turntables, tape loops, skipping records, before deciding to jettison any and all music made by other musicians, and instead using just the turntable itself to create sound. Thus was born Strotter Inst. Five customized turntables, each rigged up with pieces of metal, strings and wires, elastic bands, allowed to spin at different RPMs, each turntable contributing a subtle element, creating dense tangled soundscapes of rhythm and texture. Loping and hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerizing. Low rumbling reverberations, slow stuttering twangs, these modified turntables sound remarkably like some sort of long stringed instrument with strings tightened just enough to stay on, but loose enough that they sort of buzz and rumble, pulse and throb. The framework for each track is a sort of lowend turntable riff, the wires and bands and cords are struck and plucked by the revolving turntable, creating slow slithery rhythms, within each a very subtle muted melody, everything slowly morphs and shifts as the various turntables sync up and then drift apart. Imagine the sound of five bass players, all playing simple slow melodies on primitive one string basses, and imagine them playing similar parts, but at slightly different tempos. A slow moving, motorik soundscape of thump and thrum. And around these loping rhythms are soft fuzzy clouds of crackle and hiss, the sound of the needles scraping the surface of the turntables, or skidding across pieces of metal, these contrasting sounds are dense and rich, sounding almost like super distorted vocals at one moment, thick washes of feedback the next. The sound may be simple and subtle, but it's also intense and overwhelming, like Jeck spinning Skullflower, or Marclay armed with only some Mingus bass solo dubplates, or a Tiermes / Bastien soundclash. So dark and mysterious and totally pure and primal sounding. This is SOUND as much as it is music. This is the turntable as musical instrument. This is rhythm and rhythms, this is machine music, but a machine freed from it's shackles, a new instrument, born, loosed, unleashed. Amazing.
Amazingly packaged in a die cut cardstock digipak, a large circular hole cut in the front, a smaller hole in the back, so you can see straight through. The front cover has imbedded in it an actual piece of plastic with record grooves etched into it, playable on your turntable! In fact when you listen to the cd you'll notice the first track is all silence, that's because the first track is actually on the sleeve, while the final track is only downloadable from the Strotter website, managing to subtly connect our history of recorded music, a release that is only complete as a record, a cd and an mp3.
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By now, we probably don't need to mention how much we love the turntable as instrument. And to that end, how much we love the sounds of damaged vinyl, or modified turntables, the hiss and skipping and pops and crackles and loops... Or how much we love Jeck and Tetriault and Yoshihide and Bastien and Brumit and Gum and Loop Orchestra and Marclay and anyone who ever smashed up or scraped up their records and then played them anyway, and maybe did that with two turntables or three or a hundred, creating whole new wonderful pieces of music out of misused and abused players and scratched and screwed up fragments of other folks' music. So when we discovered Strotter, aka Swiss turntablist Christoph Hess, we were already sold. Here's an older gentleman, who adds pieces of metal, and elastic bands, and extra needles and multiple tone arms to his turntables. And then uses old records and these customized turntable to create gorgeously hypnotic looped minimal soundscapes. It was only a matter of time before he decided to fuck with the actual pressing process as well. Thus we have two new vinyl only releases, an etched 12" and a strangely cut and mastered 7".
The 12" consists of 4 short tracks spread out over 12 vast inches of vinyl. The A side features the grooveless outer few inches, minus one locked groove every few centimeters, instead, the name of the record and the artist have been written there in silver marker. The first track is a strange world of stuttering static and slowly growing glitches and pops that build into a mini cacophony. The second track is a clattery array of clicks over a propuslive throbbing bass thud, that also builds, but in this case to an abstract low end jazz dirge, like the upright bass breakdown of some old blue note standard, chopped up and skipped into a little stutter.
The B side has no grooves on the inside half of the lp, instead it has a super detailed etching of two rats. The first track on side B sounds almost like CIrcle, if they were rendered in the simplest possible sonic manifestation, basic lines and shapes, super stripped down tonal colors, an ultra skeletal krautrock groove assembled from nothing but clicks and glitches and rumbling bass pulses. Track two is all reverberating low end, pulses coming rapid fire until they almost become a drone, tempered by tiny distant upper register sparkles.
The disc is housed in a thick plastic sleeve, bound to a printed, embossed thick card stock panel by an elastic band, just like the ones used on the Strotter turntables. So cool.
The Stumps are total NZ noise rock royalty. Antony Milton (AM, Mrtyu, Nether Dawn, etc.) James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, With Throats As Fine As Needles) and Stephen Clover (Seht). With some special guest action from Birchville Cat Motel's Campbell Kneale. phew, what else needs to be said? Much like the 3" cd released on the Grey Daturas' label recently (and of which we have a VERY few copies left), somehow, the combined sum of the Stumps' parts is less than the what you might imagine. More minimal at least. The record opens with a ghostly keening whir, way off in the distance, murky and fuzzy... eventually drums kick in giving the proceedings a definite Dead C vibe, a laid back blown out noise rock peppered with free jazz drum splatter, that sort of careens haphazardly over thick slabs of distant distorted riffage. This goes on for a whole side, and while there are different songs, they sort of drift together into one glorious whole.
Side two is similar, in that there are three songs that all seem to be movements of the same song. But this second suite starts off with wild disembodied prog keyboards, swirly and splattery, with little bits of drum damage here and there, some sort of 'noise rock prog' which is most definitely a good thing. Eventually the track morphs into a heavy, groovy, fuggy Pink Floyd seventies fuzz jam, albeit more warbly and damaged, sounding a bit like someone was fucking with the pitch control while it was being recorded. Eventually the fuzz dissipates and the track settles into a dreamy and mellow SUNNO)))-lite fade out of crumbling distant guitars and soft focus barely there melodies, a murky low end ambience that eventually fades into nothingness.
One of three new 3" cd-r releases on the Grey Daturas' Diagnosis ... Don't! label, each super limited, and housed in cool hand made packaging.
Pretty much impossible to imagine a more star studded NZ free rock band than this. Sure Mr. Kneale's absent, as are a Russell and a Morely, but shit this trio is already bursting at the seams and ready to blow. The Stumps, the trio of which we happen to be speaking, is made up of equal parts
Antony Milton (AM, Mrtyu, Nether Dawn, etc.), James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, With Throats As Fine As Needles) and Stephen Clover (Seht). Holy shit is right (that is what you were thinking, right?)! Three tracks, nineteen minutes. Total transcendental free noise drone rock bliss!!
The opening track is nine minutes of deeeeeeeep dreamy drone. Distant melodies smeared into fuzzy clouds, occasional bursts of distorted guitar muted and stretched apart into shimmery drones, a final build into a thick wall of white noise whir, high end peals and crumbling feedback. The second track is a full on rock jam, a stumbling Dead C like groove, lurching through a dense swirl of fuzzy synths, grinding guitars and squealing feedback. A killer slab of off kilter, drone drenched psych rock. The final track falls somewhere between the first two, droney and abstract, but with fuzzy bass, and jagged streaks of psychguitar, thick swirls of cymbal sizzle, and distant squalls of guitar freakout. Awesome.
AS ALWAYS, ULTRA SUPER LIMITED!! We only got about 30, and probably won't be able to get more...
Packaged in thick textured paper black mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi. Nice.
