In a dream, you've gotten yourself lost in an endless cavern... you've been curiously wandering in the darkness, down down into the earth, for a long long time. When you stop to rest, you realize that the silence that had surrounded you is different now. You think you can hear music... drifting from someplace deeper in the darkness. Drifting, droning, dark, dark, dark... that's this music, the reverberant, cavernous, quiet sounds of The Stumps. Sleepy and creepy at the same time. You move closer, and The Stumps get louder. Troglodytic thud and rumble begins to build. That's the beauty of this album, these tracks are part whale call mystery, part trashy crashy garage rock clangor. Ambient eeriness flows into plodding free rock chaos, with heavy distortion blanketing all. The twelve and a half minute untitled track number 5 (none have titles, as far as we can tell) is all about that drone-drift, whilst track 7, for instance, rouses itself to a spaced-out, slow-motion spasm of psychedelic guitar grind-gunk and percussive splatter-clatter.
The Stumps trio of drummer James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, With Throats As Fine As Needles), bassist Stephen Clover (Seht), and guitarist Antony Milton (Mrtyu, AM, Nether Dawn, etc.) is a New Zealand underground supergroup, by the way. No wonder they're so easily so shambolic, somnolent, and sinister sounding... Outside of their own cd-r littered island realm, we couldn't compare this to much else besides, maybe, Fushitsusha.
Welcome to the cavern, welcome to the dream.
Holy crap those suicidal black metallers have nothing on Stunt Rock. At least in terms of pure self loathing misery. They talk a good game, and the music is appropriately miserable and melancholy, but their depression is so abstract, so much so that in some cases, it sounds as much like a gimmick as 'Satanism'. But this is indeed depression. Misery. REGRET. Past Stunt Rock releases didn't really give any idea that all this lurked below the surface, but this release more than hints at it, it takes his Stunt Rock heart, and pins it open, like a high school dissected frog, letting us poke and prod, and examine all the blackness inside.
It's also pretty funny too, if you think folks like Ivan Brunetti are hilarious, which we do. In fact, this is totally the record we could imagine Brunetti releasing. And it is in fact a sort of instruction manual, covering such topics as to how to choose a new mate, and to avoid the mistakes you made in past relationships. A page of little tags to place on your belongings for after you die when people dig through your stuff (for your pornography stash, for your box of old love letters, etc.), a very Brunetti like comic detailing a botched suicide attempt among other things.
The Prescreening A Potential Love Interest multiple choice form is amazing, it goes on for pages and pages, and is so gloriously black hearted. The there's the Learning To Forget & Adjusting To Living Alone section, also pages and pages, teaching you to do just as the title says, try different routes to work, repaint, get a new social circle, new wardrobe, but it's super well written, wry and bitter, fucking brutal here and there. There's also an activity section, with a form to write down all the songs you want played at your funeral (the first is filled out for you, Creed's "My Own Prison" haha), as well as a sort of last will style form, with spaces for things you want to leave for folks, as well as spaces for the people you want to make sure DON'T get anything (and the specific things you want to make sure they don't get. There's also an amazing section called Upsetting Things You Wrote When You Were Young. Poems, letters, lists of people who wronged you. But they're all blacked out CIA document style, leaving just the caustic comments by the author. All of this is gorgeously hand drawn and printed in a 10" book housed in a super nice cardstock screen printed hand numbered cover, each one hand numbered, the front a three color illustration of a blood splattered sink.
And there's a record. a 2 song 10", two parts of the same piece, titled somewhat cryptically "Dear Christian Girl (Parts One And Two)", a DJ Shadow style indie rock soundscape, lots of amazing (and amazingly depressing) samples, funny, fucked up, sad, melancholy, the song simple and hooky, but stretched out into a more electronic sort of groove, with thick buzzing synths wrapped around the Slint-y guitars, loping rock drumming, subtle hooks, no proper vocals, instead, the tale of the mysterious Christian Girl and Stunt Rock's saga of regret is told in a continuous mix of voices and sounds, of vignettes and fragments, in shuffling beats and melancholy melodies. Pretty great. And the perfect companion for the book. And as if that weren't enough, you also get a cd-r, with the same music as on the 10". All told, you get a 10" vinyl record, a 32 page book with hand silk screened covers, 3 Stickers, 1 Button, a cd-r and 1 of 4 different hand silk screened posters.
And we know all those forms are jokes, but we're really tempted to fill them out. Fun and funny, but only if you're a twisted bitter old crank, like us!
This record seems like it was made for AQ. A scientist, Bob Sturm, attaches microphones to buoys to record different oceanic events. These events translated into sound become gorgeous deep drones, and haunting alien soundscapes. Right up there with the singing telephone wires of Alan Lamb or the subtle vibrations recorded by Toshia Tsunoda. A natural phenomenon that can be studied and explored as sound. That would be enough right there, since the sounds speak for themselves. Gorgeous shimmery ripples, dark muted metallic buzz, if we didn't tell you, you'd probably believe this was some strange limited drone cd-r or a new release from Jonathan Coleclough or Andrew Chalk. But Sturm is a scientist, and these sounds are just one part of his study of the ocean, the atmosphere and their behaviors. So the booklet is packed with serious scientific data, graphs, measurements, algorithms and photos. Included is a research paper AND a Flash presentation on the "sonification of ocean buoy spectral data" originally presented at the 2002 International Conference On Auditory Display held in Kyoto, Japan. Holy crap. This is some dense stuff. But even if the science is way over your head, or all you want is some deep dark mysterious music, then dig in. The track lengths tend to be short, but they manage to blend into long stretches of drifting dreamy drone, very minimal and soft focus, many of the tracks have a strange metallic tang, that sounds more like some alien reverb, giving the drones a steel string like buzz, a few tracks are much more active, high end hiss, and prickly fuzz, but for the most part, the oceanic data translates into huge cavernous rumbles, delicate glistening murmurs, or soft billowing clouds of whirring vibration. So completely captivating. And for the drone obsessed among you, absolutely essential!
Fans of Emeralds and Oneohtrix, here's another fine slab of spacey cyclic synth throb that ought to be right up your alley - the Thrill Jockey debut from Stygian Stride, aka Jimmy SeiTang of AQ faves Rhyton and Psychic Ills. On this solo effort, SeiTang offers up seven tracks of mesmeric electronic pulsations and zoned-out 2001 space odyssey atmospherics, created via vintage analog machines, all very krauty & kosmische, a la Cluster and Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream in the '70s, and also very much beholden to Jean-Michel Jarre (whom we should probably name-check more often, really almost as much as we do John Carpenter!).
It's good stuff, definitely up there with the aforementioned Emeralds and OPN, and Steve Moore and Majeure, also reminding us a bit of Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury's rejected Judge Dredd soundtrack Drokk, the more rhythmic parts anyway, while elsewhere Stygian Stride's machine-based improv does the does the ambient drifting-in-space thing, sometimes slightly sinister soundtrack-sounding, quietly creeping but quite pleasant too. Very much recommended!!
Back in the old days, when space rock heavies SubArachnoid Space called SF home, we sort of took them for granted, they played all the time, and opened for pretty much every cool band that came to town, so without trying, it was easy to end up seeing them play every week or two. But then two things happened. They moved away, so suddenly they weren't ever playing around town, and second, and maybe more importantly, they started to get heavier, and more fucked up, and way more metal, which made us want to see them so we could check out the new, more heavy SubSpace.
But we've been keeping tabs on them through recordings, 2005's The Red Veil was the last one we reviewed, and even back then, we were already talking about them appealing to fans of Kinski and Yeti and Tarantula Hawk, and if anything in the 3 years since, they've gotten way spacier and way heavier, and this is the proof, Eight Bells, released on weirdo heavy label Crucial Blast, and it's a pretty good fit, 5 songs, the shortest a little over 5 minutes, the longest well over 13, every one a tripped out Hawkwinded blow out, effects drenched and psychedelic, propulsive and super rocking, epic and intense, the guitars thick and distorted, the arrangements pretty complex and intricate for space rock, none of that jam at the same tempo for 10 minutes (not that there's anything wrong with that) but it definitely keeps things interesting, and in fact, if we had to classify the new SubSpace, we'd probably call it metallic space prog, which is obviously a good thing.
"Hunter Seeker" starts off all eighties Big Country style, with a cool effected stuttery guitar part, before the rest of the band launches into a woozy doomy dirge, and over the course of the next 12 minutes, flits from spaced out dreamy ambience, to chugging almost metal, to soaring Godspeed like drama, to full on noise rock. The last three tracks find the band slipping from droney drift to dense psychedelic blowout to pounding space/math rock and back again, culminating in the super frenzied explosive last couple minutes that has us imagining how good this stuff must sound live these days.
Produced by Stephen Ray Lobdell (Faust, Davis Redford Triad), who's now a SubArachoid member weirdly enough! And it boasts cool Stephen Kasner cover art...
Another new one from effects-laden guitarist Mason Jones and his prolific SF-based space rock combo. Lots of deep, trancey grooves to sink into, with '70s haze galore. At turns murky and then shimmering, slowly oozing and then propulsive.
Why look it's a 20th cent. new music/electronica classic.
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
"Featuring former SPK/Lustmord member Annie Subbs on vocals/percussion and Joke Lanz of Catholic Boys in Heavy Leather and Schimpfluch-Gruppe fame on 'noise toys', London duo Sudden Infant begin their industrialised invocation with a soothing, wave crashing, meditation instruction tape that sounds eerily like the voice of Margaret Thatcher before a barrage of broken glass, pump action shot gun blasting and ugly machinery shreds the illusion. 'Noise Relaxation' sets the mood for the rest of the album, a fearsome yet playful crashing together of mechanical noise with slivers of Suicide, tremors of early Current 93 and even a nod to Pierre Henry imbedded into it. These are then occasionally invaded by distorted cover versions of Cabaret Voltaire and Roxy Music tunes, or overlaid wit unsettling Phil Minton-like throat warblings and regurgitations. A strange beast indeed, all topped of with cover art that samples an unaccredited arcane drawing from magician, poet and mountaineer Aleister Crowley's Satanic sketchbook." For a comical, vomit splattered reinterpretation of Wolf Eyes, look no further!
Been hearing lots about Portland's Stunned records, and we're happy to finally have one of their beautifully packaged tapes for your listening/viewing pleasure. This one comes from San Francisco's own sax and guitar duo Sudden Oak. Matt Erickson, who also rips it up solo under the name Radiant Husk, sends soaring sax tones up through the atmosphere while John Ward's guitar feedback freak-outs lay bubbling below. Together the duo travel through strange noise-jazz lands, up and over urban creep zones that move and flow into fluid rhythms and fucked up loops. Picture an old Pharaoh Sanders tape echoing through a blown out amp in a water tank, so weird and so rad. Limited to an edition of 111, each with pro-printed j-cards plus insert, these are already sold out at the source, so act fast if you want one of these beauties.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
OK all you underground obscuro black metal freaks and obsolete format obsessives and fucked up video nasty collectors and super limited release weirdos, gather round this awesome audio/sonic artifact, you are definitely gonna want one of these. And you better act fast, cuz it's limited to 50 copies, and is already out of print, and we have the LAST 12 COPIES! Why should you care? Well for one, it's a brand new 30 minute improvised track of blasting droned out psychedelic black metal mesmer from some mysterious horde called Suffer the Shards Of The Lost Cult Of Silence, which features members of aQ black metal faves Woe and Absu, AND it's the soundtrack to a twisted nightmarish video collage, an eye popping video mashup of all manner of demented scenes from horror movies, sci-fi flicks, giallos, and who knows what else, a dizzying head spinning barrage of twisted imagery, the perfect accompaniment to STSOTLCOS's sprawling blown out black buzz, "inspired by the endless depths of infinite darkness", the sound lurching from noise drenched chaotic black pound to spaced out murky creep, to gnarled atonal doomic pound to blazing Norwegian style epic majesty, the whole thing lo-fi and wreathed in a cavernous gauze of blurred and blackened production, raw and grim and spooky and fucking awesome.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, in white clamshell VHS cases with two color hand screened inserts, recorded onto purple VHS tapes, and comes with a download code (just for the music) as well!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
SORRY.
Real beautiful, slow, quiet, stringed-instrument improvisations from Sugimoto and cohorts. [/cat/experimental169.html]
We're always been interested in the work of Japanese improvisor Taku Sugimoto. There's no one else quite like him, though one could draw some parallels to the work of sometime collaborator Kevin Drumm, the solo guitar work of David Grubbs, and certainly several of Sugimoto's peers in the Tokyo "onkyo" improv scene like Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Otomo Yoshihide -- three gents who, not surprisingly, constitute Sugimoto's Guitar Quartet on this disc along with Sugimoto himself, some playing acoustic, and some playing electric guitars. Now, usually we prefer to hear Sugimoto just by himself, because recordings with collaborators usually get cluttered up with other people's playing, which tends to detract from the beauty of Sugimoto's restrained, minimal aesthetic. But this guitar quartet doesn't suffer from that at all -- indeed, it's really hard to imagine that there's actually four guys playing on this, as the results sound like they were barely there at all! Over these two half-hour plus tracks, the ratio of sheer silence to notes actually played is quite high, as we of course expect from Taku Sugimoto & co., whose careful placement of sound in silence leads to active, anticipatory listening from the audience. This leads us to wonder about their working practice in recording this -- it's over an hour long, but maybe there's actually ten minutes, if that, of audible "music" spread out over that hour. So, did they just play ten minutes worth and then "stretch it out" in ProTools? Or did they play for hours and hours and then edit the recording down to cd-length, picking the best stuff, silence included? Even if this is simply the entirety of a live performance (which it probably is), it's interesting to imagine the silent interaction of non-verbal gestures and delayed musical cues between the musicians, to say who was going to play something and when, with everybody most of the time just sitting there. All that's not to imply that this isn't worthwhile, you just have to be ready for what goes to a particular extreme of "difficult" listening. I personally enjoy it very much. Patience, and anticipation, and concentration, are required of the listener -- it's a meditative experience of sorts, and its beauty is in part your heightened awareness of your own environment.
Japanese guitar improviser Taku Sugimoto (whose gentle, sparse style has made him an AQ-fave) teams up with German electro-acoustic guitarist Annette Krebs (who must live in Japan, as she constantly collaborates in that scene), to make a duo record of popping, scraping, droning, hissing, chiming, buzzing, crackling sounds for Sugimoto's Slub label. Sugimoto's measured, quiet playing, with his isolated melodic moments, is almost too fragile to successfully blend with the random percussive sound-events being conjured by Krebs (we assume, though of course it's hard to tell who is making what sound). This Eine Gitarre Ist... disc certainly IS worthy of investigation by Sugimoto and/or Krebs fans (and Keith Rowe or Kevin Drumm fans too for that matter), but to be honest we'd rather have seen this live, and just listen to a solo Sugimoto disc at home. There IS plenty of the silence and near-silence that characterizes Sugimoto's style, it's just that it too often comes as a relief from the parts that sound like someone (Krebs most likely) is slowly breaking her guitar into little bits. We like to listen to stuff like that too, just not when Sugimoto is playing. But others may disagree, so check it out.
Another meeting between these two friends and improvisers, Tokyo guitarist Sugimoto and Chicago guitarist Drumm. Their guitars (and electronics) will gently and delicate scrape at your brain. It's all very abstract and pretty and full of tiny sounds, good with earphones. Quite nice.
We took preorders for this (and the deluxe box set version too) a few weeks back, but now we have it in stock, we got a few extras of the regular edition so folks who maybe missed out on the preorder now have a chance to grab one of these!
A long in the works new release from one of our favorite labels, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us amazing records from Boris, Circle Acid Mothers Temple, Aidan Baker, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Atomine Elektrine, Merzbow, Drakh, Rapoon, Wolfskin and more. This latest comes from Tokyo psychedelic drifters and longtime aQ faves Suishou No Fune, who are teamed up here with local psyche rockers Numinous Eye, aka Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space) and Mike Shoun (The Oh Sees), whose recent Clockwork Moon lp we raved about recently on the aQ list.
And this is not a split, no this is both bands together, we imagine in some dark dimly lit space, in the middle of the night, no words exchanged, just a gradual opening up, everyone slowly losing themselves in a sonic trance, and letting the music carry them off, cuz that's what this sounds like, woozy and washed out, laid back and lysergic, the rhythm section simple and shuffling, motorik and darkly propulsive, while the multiple guitars weave tangled melodies, and smear strange shadowy streaks of ambience and atmosphere. Chordal swells pulse of deep rumbles, wound around the unwavering rhythm, while above, the sky is filled with prismatic streaks, aching, lilting melodies, soaring, drifting, ethereal and ghostlike one minute fierce and fiery the next. There are vocals too, wordless croons, that slip into strange falsettos and then back again, a sort of monklike chanting, that becomes almost operatic, there's harmonica too! On the more abstract nearly 30 minute second track, the drums skitter loosely beneath streaks of melodies and shards of disembodied guitar skree, little bits of twang, and distant reverby textures, while the harmonica wheezes and whispers, that track occasionally coalescing into a sort of almost-krautrock, but more often than not, simply dissipating into loose clouds of drifting sound, free form psychedelic exploration, lush and textured, but super open and abstract, the various guitars holding things together with their aching melodic explorations.
"The Rainbow Dissolving In The Ocean" channels a little Haino, in the wailed vocals, over moaning, keening guitar buzz, peppered with flurries of drum skitter and cymbal shimmer, all blurred and smeared into heaving dreamlike billows, eventually building to a wild multi-guitar, psych-noise tangle, swirls of echo and reverb, thick thrumming bass, and swirling percussive shimmers, all wrapped in a prickly field of distorted guitar swirl. And finally, closer "Space Cruising", locks things down rhythmically, the drums and bass, laying down a languorous, sinewy slither, wreathed in shimmery guitar strum, and again, surrounded by constantly shifting streaks of psychedelia, twangs, rumbles, whirs, melodic squiggles, slow smoldering chord progressions, eventually the whole thing builds again to one final blowout, aching vocals, blown out guitars, wild drum pound, the sound noisy and heavy, but still strangely lilting and lovely, definitely channeling the spirit of Les Rallizes Denudes, as does much of the record!
This is a special pre-order for two different versions of the latest release from one of our favorite labels, Brazil's Essence Music, who in the past have brought us amazing records from Boris, Circle Acid Mothers Temple, Aidan Baker, Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Atomine Elektrine, Merzbow, Drakh, Rapoon, Wolfskin and more. This latest comes from Tokyo psychedelic drifters and longtime aQ faves Suishou No Fune, who are teamed up here with local psyche rockers Numinous Eye, aka Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space) and Mike Shoun (The Oh Sees), whose recent Clockwork Moon lp we raved about recently on the aQ list.
And this is not a split, no this is both bands together, we imagine in some dark dimly lit space, in the middle of the night, no words exchanged, just a gradual opening up, everyone slowly losing themselves in a sonic trance, and letting the music carry them off, cuz that's what this sounds like, woozy and washed out, laid back and lysergic, the rhythm section simple and shuffling, motorik and darkly propulsive, while the multiple guitars weave tangled melodies, and smear strange shadowy streaks of ambience and atmosphere. Chordal swells pulse of deep rumbles, wound around the unwavering rhythm, while above, the sky is filled with prismatic streaks, aching, lilting melodies, soaring, drifting, ethereal and ghostlike one minute fierce and fiery the next. There are vocals too, wordless croons, that slip into strange falsettos and then back again, a sort of monklike chanting, that becomes almost operatic, there's harmonica too! On the more abstract nearly 30 minute second track, the drums skitter loosely beneath streaks of melodies and shards of disembodied guitar skree, little bits of twang, and distant reverby textures, while the harmonica wheezes and whispers, that track occasionally coalescing into a sort of almost-krautrock, but more often than not, simply dissipating into loose clouds of drifting sound, free form psychedelic exploration, lush and textured, but super open and abstract, the various guitars holding things together with their aching melodic explorations.
"The Rainbow Dissolving In The Ocean" channels a little Haino, in the wailed vocals, over moaning, keening guitar buzz, peppered with flurries of drum skitter and cymbal shimmer, all blurred and smeared into heaving dreamlike billows, eventually building to a wild multi-guitar, psych-noise tangle, swirls of echo and reverb, thick thrumming bass, and swirling percussive shimmers, all wrapped in a prickly field of distorted guitar swirl. And finally, closer "Space Cruising", locks things down rhythmically, the drums and bass, laying down a languorous, sinewy slither, wreathed in shimmery guitar strum, and again, surrounded by constantly shifting streaks of psychedelia, twangs, rumbles, whirs, melodic squiggles, slow smoldering chord progressions, eventually the whole thing builds again to one final blowout, aching vocals, blown out guitars, wild drum pound, the sound noisy and heavy, but still strangely lilting and lovely, definitely channeling the spirit of Les Rallizes Denudes, as does much of the record!
There are two versions of the record, a super deluxe boxset version, with extra music in addition to the extravagant packaging, and this one, the standard version, which is nearly as limited as the deluxe box, only 170 copies made, and each comes in a handmade and hand painted tip-on style mini lp sleeve with a printed Japanese obi, every one totally unique, we're only gonna order as many copies as we actually get orders for, so if you want one, and you probably do, you should definitely order it now. We'll have them in a few weeks and can send them off then.
Summons Of Shining Ruins is the nom de plume of Japanese post-shoegazing guitarist Shinobu Nemoto, who had released a rather exceptional piece of cinematic ambience for Experimedia in 2009 that came and went rather quickly. This is another one that will disappear in the blink of an eye as well, given the tiny edition of this pressing. There's only 53 copies around, probably due to the inclusion in the packaging of an antique chemists label culled from chain of British drug stores that at one time sold such things as 'liquid extract cascara sagrada' and 'camphorated oil.' A nifty piece of esoterica to go along with this tape of woozy, muffled drones from Nemoto. The tracks are much less dramatic than the album he did for Experimedia, instead these sullen ambient movements slowly waver along grey streamlined tones with upwelling melodies moving to the foreground from time to time. Certainly on par with the murky cassette work that Maeror Tri and Troum produced way back when, or maybe even some of the Lovesliescrushing driftworks but given a tape hiss makeover. Nice.
The sun is warm, the sun lights the way, the sun brings life... what's in a name? Well, it's certainly no misnomer for this group. It'll Be The Same is the second album from Sun, not to be confused with SUNNO))), although these guys are also a duo (Oren Ambarchi and Chris Townsend) and half of 'em (Mr. Ambarchi) have collaborated with SUNNO))) in the past. This Sun isn't from Southern Lord, but from the southern hemisphere (Australia), and play purely pop music, slow and soft and hushed but nothing doomy or blackened at all... some gentle droniness certainly does creep in, experimental glitch techniques n' textures that are of course what we might expect from Oren Ambarchi, who after all is known for solo albums along those lines (in fact, there's a great new one by him, actually on Southern Lord, reviewed on this list too). There are layers of static and field recordings (Townsend's children's voices, perhaps?) that along with Oren and Chris's own voices and guitar strums are formed into six moodily relaxed, truly sun-dappled, electro-acoustic folky-pop songs... a calm, cryptically detailed setting for lovely, wistful vocals that remind us of the Skygreen Leopards' Glenn Donaldson and Richard Youngs.
We loved Sun's first self-titled album (and extra disc of experimental remixes) back in 2003, and are happy to finally hear this excellent follow-up!
Aussie guitar experimentalist Oren Ambarchi has been a prolific gent of late, mainly doing droney improv glitch stuff we've been diggin'. But we know there's other musical sides to his personality as well -- after all, we first encountered him playing in the loud n' noisy scatological Boredoms/Buttholes influenced band Phlegm back in the early '90s. So now here's another, new and different Ambarchi project, a duo by the name of Sun (not to be confused with the doomster duo Sunn) that pairs Ambarchi with one Chris Townend (described as an "Australian music figurehead" whatever that means). And it's not noise, or drone, or improv, or electronics -- it's full on indie-pop! Really nice too, with laid back drum beats, gentle vocals, and pretty guitar strum. They're called Sun (and there's some la la las sung) but they'll have you thinking of rainy days too with their lazy, wistful songs. It's got that 60s Beatles/Floyd filtered through 90s indie-pop thing, like a Elephant 6 band or the Aislers Set or something.
Originally released in 2001 in Australia only, Sun's debut has now been licensed by Staubgold for the rest of the planet. What's great is that they've also tacked on a 2nd bonus disc of remixes, featuring all the tracks from the album redone (or done in) by the likes of Pluramon, Hrvatski, Christoph Heeman, Rafael Toral, Pimmon, Mapstation, Tom Recchion and Norbert Moslang of Voice Crack! Quite an international lineup of experimental artists there, reinterpreting the music of Sun in ways closer to what you're used to hearing from Ambarchi. Droney and fucked up, these mixes add a lot to the package, making it not just real nice but really interesting as well. And what other pretty pop duo would get Voice Crack to do a remix?? I guess Ambarchi might just be angling to become the next Jim O'Rourke...
For all the deserved attention and press the whole Los Angeles musical underground has been receiving in the last couple years, we still think that Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, is perhaps the most unique musical visionary to come out of that scene. Beyond being so prolific, the quality of his proper records just gets increasingly better and better. On Patrol was one of our favorite albums of 2010, and with Ancient Romans, Sun Araw continues to move forward from that dubbed out blueprint and expand on what has become one of the most singular sounds of any new band of the last decade.
The moment the album starts, you immediately understand that you are at the beginning of a ceremony, some sort of stange sonic ritual, which requires the listener to open up to completely, wholly trusting in these sounds to carry you away. With dirty, hypnotic organs for the opening tones, setting the stage for the textured and layered dubbed out trip that will unfold over the next 80 minutes. More then almost any band we can think of, Sun Araw is a master of creating a unified vibe. The tracks on Ancient Romans just melt in and out of each other, you lose track of what song is playing, and instead just get lost deep in the fuzzed out grooves, and tripped out meditations. It's hard to explain when music feels this spiritual, it's just something you feel and trust. And with Sun Araw we get that feeling so intensely. It places you in some dusty, archaic temple that we could imagine was transported directly from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Once inside the temple, you forget about the trivial details of the everyday, and instead leave your body and find yourself somewhere mystical, magical and totally transcendent. This is going to be a contender for record of the year!
A reissue of record number two from Sun Araw, aka Magic Lanterns guitarist Cameron Stallone, and much like the other SA releases, Beach Head is a fuzzy, druggy, washed out, effects heavy psychedelic krautdrone new age blow out. Four extended tracks of smoldering minimal drift, soft cacophonies of bells and chimes wrapped in streaks of feedback and swirls of spaced out FX, undulating tendrils of sitar buzz, warped calliope melodies, and muted almost folky twang, everything sun dappled and Technicolor ear candy.
"Thoughts Are Bells" is indeed a bell heavy intro, a slow building, dronescape of percussive swirl, smoothed out angular guitars, and a slow motion avalanche of effects and buried melodies. "Horse Steppin'" is all laid back tropicalia via Ariel Pink, and broadcast through loud speakers hung from palm trees on some deserted tropical island. Flirting with Ducktails style lo-fi tropical garage pop, but transforming it into a reverb drenched bit of slow dreampop, that almost sounds like Animal Collective being spun manually at about 10rpm, the guitars glisten, the drums are muted and barely there, the vocals are soaked in echo and delay, everything laid back and stretched out and washed out, hazy and lazy and bleary and deliriously dreamlike.
The rest of the record doesn't deviate too much from those first two tracks, "Beams" manages to fuse the two, the sort of raga drift of the first with the slowcore blurpop of the second, into a Spacemen 3 style druggy drone, replete with woozy basslines, ethereal guitar atmospherics, and all the other various elements, vocals, drums, buried in a glorious sonic murk, while "Bridal Filly", takes the same combination, but stretches it WAY out into something even still more indistinct, an almost Tim Hecker-ish landscape of blurred grit, and pixelated melody, softly pulsing melodies, weightless wordless vox, muted percussion, swaths of thick buzz, eventually coalescing around another lumbering bassline, into some total stoner zoner psych drone spacerock drift. Awesome.
On the 7th full length from Sun Araw, we're not quite sure if Cameron Stallones is pushing boundaries or testing our patience or a little bit of both. Since his (in our opinion) best ever effort Ancient Romans - both on his collaboration with the Congos & M. Geddes Gengra and then on his Inner Treaty ep, he rode a divisive line around here between sublime devotional immersion and deliberately distancing bro-jam cacophony. We had begun to become a bit wary, and we're still somewhat on the fence here, though ultimately, we like this better than the last two aforementioned previous releases. On Belomancie, he reigns in his kitchen sink cluttered dub clouds for a type of long-form minimalism, but not one pivoting on repetition. Rather, Stallones uses a reductive musical approach to create a complex overlaying string of obtusely connected phases that lead the listener into strange sonic spaces. Designed for active listening, one could spend some time with this record and never hear it quite the same way twice. Yet, the synth tones are laid out and built upon so slowly that it seems like ages for a song to take its form and it will likely come across as either a rarefied mystique of plaintive searching or boring meandering noodling depending on your engagement and patience.
Jeez, guitarist Cameron Stallones has been on a roll lately with his solo endeavor Sun Araw. His third lp on the hugely prolific Not Not Fun label, Heavy Deeds picks up where the Phynx left off, more slow grooving jammers that fall somewhere between psych soul and pop-hop. Wailing delayed-out guitar, tons of wah and tons of soul, catchy vocal passages call out over and over as a leisurely turning lumber plods on with a hypnotic groove. Kinda like listening to a Suicide song on half speed while starring at the sun on a warm beach in Florida, whip out the hula shirts and Robitussin, it's going to be a trippy afternoon. All five tracks are so densely layered with all kinds of organ flutters, ripping solos, mumbling vocals its easy to get lost in Sun Araw's psychotic world of ultra catchy, mind melting blues. There's no doubt this kid has loads of talent, and is super productive, and we have to say we really dig Sun Araw's ability to balance pop sensibility with over the top psychedelic melt-down. There's enough here to get a song or two stuck in your head, without the music being at all straight forward or simple, pretty rad. Oh and by the way, the cd version comes with a killer bonus track titled "Hey Mandala"!
Cameron Stallones is back from his pilgrimage to Jamaica, where he made that FRKWYS album with The Congos, and now offers up a new Sun Araw album on his own Sun Ark imprint, full of damaged grooves and new twisted strain of avant dub weirdness, fragmented and spaced out, stumbling and super loose, the guitars spidery and echoey, the rhythms skittery and a bit abstract, the vocals doused in effects and WAY up in the mix, the whole thing sounds like it's melting, gradually decaying, peppered with blasts of fuzzy synth, swaths of swirly organ, percussion that sounds like clinking bottles, shuffling processed glitches. The tracks stutter and hiccup, never locking into a groove, so much as drifting and slipping from sound to sound, a series of swells, often fading out to near silence, before slipping back into it, some folks here thought it sounded kinda like Blues Control making a reggae album, while someone builds furniture next door (!), but some of us definitely got a serious Fastest vibe, total fractured outsider whatthefuck weirdo reggae action that will definitely have lots of folks scratching their heads and wondering what the hell is happening here. Although plenty of other folks will flip for Stallones' new, more damaged incarnation. Listen to the sound samples, and you'll know pretty much right away, which side you'll find yourself on.
Meandering and gloriously unfocused, The Inner Treaty definitely lacks some of the catchiness and groove of past Sun Araw releases, but for what it lacks in those areas, it makes up for in confusional weirdness, lacing its sundappled WTF dub with James Ferraro weirdo-wave retro VHS wooziness, and Ariel Pink / John Maus style avant drama-pop, and tangles it all up into something totally bizarre, something in fact that is so fucked up, it's like a musical car crash, we don't necessarily WANT to keep listening really, but somehow can't seem to stop ourselves. Very reservedly recommended, and even then, only for folks who like their music a bit baffling. Which come to think of it, is probably a whole lot of you.
Latest cloud of smoked out dub psych damage from this one man band, a massive sprawling double lp, every song bleeding into the next, one epic druggy abstract sonic trip. The Sun Araw sound keeps drifting further and further out, and in the process, approaching something that sounds a bit like reggae, but filtered through a cracked Not Not Fun filter, and a bank of busted amps and malfunctioning effects pedals. Oh and pot smoke. Lots and lots of pot smoke.
Woozy, warbly, prismatic, sun baked (and just plain baked), stripped down, dubbed out, inner space drift. Wah Wah guitars hover over skeletal rhythms, reverb and delay coats everything in earshot, disembodied chantlike vox are draped over SA's twisted mutant lo-fi dub. The record drifts into some warped murk, still peppered with plenty of upstroke reggae guitar jangle, but wrapped in wheezing keyboards and some super distorted fuzz bass.
The second record begins all ethereal and new age, some hushed glimmering ambient drift, near static, before launching into some dubby krautrock, muted and muddy and minimal, flurries of keyboard tangle spray notes at the relentless motorik pulse, still more abstract vox and lots of gorgeously spidery guitars, all tangled up into minor key melodies that seem to fade into the background, the whole record sort of hazy and ghostly, while somehow remaining krauty and dubby. The sidelong final side strips everything away, or piles it all on, blurring and smearing and winding everything into a dense layered drift, looped and hypnotic and psychedelic, that wouldn't sound out of place on a Monopoly Child Star Searchers record. Rad stuff. Thick vinyl, full color gatefold sleeve, and yeah, probably limited.
Take the blown-out pop psych euphoria of Les Rallizes Denudes, throw in a dash of Parson Sound's hypnotic kraut feel, and you're getting close to honing in on the futuristic yet tribal psych jams effortlessly conjured up by Cameron Stallones, a member of Long Beach's Magic Lantern who goes it alone as Sun Araw. From the prolific folks at Not Not Fun, Phynx resounds with a heavy California daze, a drugged out, bluesy blend of face melting drones, fuzzed out guitar riffs, and repetitive clangy rhythms. Ritualistic and somehow modern, Sun Araw walks the line between pop and drone. Moments of the album are dense with catastrophic buzzing thickness, and other parts are more rockin' with a pretty defined heavy groovin' psych feel. All very guitar based, we're reminded of dudes like Ignatz, but less lo-fi and intimate, definitely more rhythmic and percussive. We're even sort of reminded of Brightblack's older stuff, heavy lethargic blues on Robitussin.
But Phynx is much more dense and perplexing. Layers of fuzz on top of layers of vocals on top of layers of drones...you get the idea. A seriously engaging album, there's tons of variety and small details to get all wrapped up in. And not to mention the sweet picture on the cover of some mysterious blindfolded figure in the dim hall of a library! Don't miss out on this California tribal psych gem!
Some deep and heady devotional vibes from this unlikely dream collaboration of Sun Araw, M Geddes Gendras and reggae legends The Congos for the latest installment of the RVNG label's FRKWYS series. Reminding us of a more churning and lysergic exploration of Dadawah's long form Nyabinghi jams, Icon Give Thank as this disc in the series is titled, turns the standard dub-reggae expectations on their heads and instead offers a strange brew of soft swells, smoky psych drift and oceanic dub interludes, punctuated by the honeyed falsetto vocals of elder statesmen Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson from Congos. This release has garnered the most divisive stance of the FRKWYS series among us at aQ so far, with some of us considering it one of the better collaborations and for others a squandered opportunity smacking of colonialism. Granted, the sound design relies heavily on the Sun Araw side of the coin, but his approach is hardly "the white boy playing reggae" criticisms this release has occasionally garnered. The sound, for one, hovers hazily in the air like swirling smoke while the grounding bass is pushed back way in the mix instead of anchoring it rhythmically. Each member of the collaboration has come together on the premise of praise and invocation of thanks, making this project a more spiritual concern than just a good-times-get-high-let's-jam together record. By the end of it, we're in a completely different headspace altogether, in reverent clouds of the Divine.
And along with the cd, you get an hour-long dvd disc, called Icon Eye, a travelogue/documentary all about the collaboration process.
We first discovered the raga drone duo Sun Circle via a cd-r sent to the store, direct from the band, and as mentioned in the review of that very cd-r, somehow the disc got lost, only to be discovered literally YEARS later, only for us to finally listen to it, and be totally blown away. The band was as adept at growling howling humming dronemusic as it was at ephemeral atmospheric ambience, crafting their own variations of classic ragas, filtered through an aesthetic as informed by modern music, noise rock and who knows what else, as it was Indian classical music and 20th century minimalism.
On their newest, Lessness, as the title suggests, the band do indeed work with less, each side of the double lp performed on single instrument, either drums, tamboura or gong, but in doing so, manage to transform the minimal instrumentation into something lush and expansive, rhythmic and hypnotic.
The first side is just drums, and is most definitely the most minimal of the bunch, maybe too minimal for some, with just a very simple spare rhythm, pounded out on a drum, maybe several, but the sound is spare, and simple, but listen close, and listen for the whole of the side, and the sounds grow ever more complex, on the surface the rhythm never wavers, but as you get sucked in, the sounds do seems to come alive, the overtones, the subtle shifts in timbre, constantly evolving, but so subtly, it might not be noticeable unless you're in it for the long haul and have those headphones strapped on tight. Total rhythmic raga bliss.
The second two sides are both produced with just tambouras, and the sound is incredible, thick and layered, gorgeously lush, an organic, and living sound, the subtle colors of the sound reflective and prismatic, constantly shifting, intense and mesmerizing and strangely meditative and psychedelic. On the second tamboura side, the sound becomes a bit more structured, but only a bit, buzzing steel strings, subtly rhythmic, locked into a looped groove, deep rumbles beneath a repeated fragmented melody, the most traditionally raga sounding of the bunch, and like the two sides before it, seemingly unchanging, as if it really was looped, but this is the sort of sound that rewards deep listening, and blossoms into a world of complex sound, just below the surface.
Especially on the final side, which is all gongs, and very much like the Karen Stackpole records on Dielectric, the sounds is deep and resonant and so sonorous, ringing out, layered here and there, but more often left to just hover in space, before fading away, only to have another tone take its place, no processing, just the glorious sound of vibrating metal, dark and mysterious, meditative and hypnotic. So gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!
Originally released for a Japanese tour with Grouper and Ben Vida, Tapes is a collection of, yep, you guessed it, tapes, from this drone duo, whose last two records were big hits around here, SC's sound a super minimal blend of hushed layered dronemusic and cosmic ragas, often creating epic pieces from single sound sources, like the gong piece on the Lessness lp, which might be one of our favorite Sun Circle tracks ever, a sprawl of deep sonorous shimmering metallic thrum.
Tapes, as we mentioned, collects a handful of previously released, and now out of print, cassette releases, and offers them on cd for the first time, along with two previously unreleased tracks, none of the songs here titled, instead, presented with a description of where they came from, how they were created and sometimes how limited the original release was.
Six tracks, the longest 22:24, the shortest 13:05, all gorgeously minimal, and each displaying a different side of Sun Circle's sound. The opener is from a 2007 split tape limited to just 50 copies, and is a 21+ minute synthscape/rage, beginning with pulsing analog synths, very tranced out and hypnotic, before a metallic buzz begins to form, and slowly builds, eventually blossoming into a thick layered drone, rich and lustrous, there also seems to be voices, all these sounds woven into thins softly undulating streak of warm effulgent sound, which continues on even as that initial synth fades out, finishing with a hazy bit of metallic shimmer and buzz. the second track is from another split tape, this one from 2008 and limited to 100 copies, and begins as a slow burn bit of abstract drone/drift, smoldering and humid, that initial drone laced with streaks of complimentary sound, longform tones, swirling overtones, the whole thing almost sounding like a symphony in slow motion. Hazy and shimmery and dreamy. The final track on the first cd is a collage of ALL of the live sets from a 2007 tour, just voice and organ, but 11 different performances layered on top of each other, resulting in a sweet slab of thick warm blur and buzz, super mesmerizing, culminating in an explosive noisy final movement.
The second disc begins with a live track, taken from a 2009 tour tape, limited to 100 copies, and begins as a delicate drift, which is soon joined by some bagpipe like buzz (harmonium?), wheezing chords over that warm minimal shimmer, very ritualistic sounding, just drifting and drifting, until the second half where the sound seems to become more muted, the edges worn to a dull glow, the sound a bleary blurred expanse of soft metallic shimmer, driven by a simple rhythmic beating drum. The second track is taken from the same tour tape, and was recorded in 2009 right here in SF at the Swedish American Hall, and is the most rhythmic of the bunch, starting out with some tribal drumming, all over a distant low end thrum, it's not until about 3 minutes in, that a buzz begins to surface, quickly burying the drums beneath its unwavering, slow shifting whir, some serious soft noise mesmer, that goes on and on and on, completely sucking the listener in, before fading out about 12 minutes later, leaving just those drums to finish things off.
Finally, the last track is previously unreleased improvisation, overtone singing performed in a acoustical echo chamber, and then layered over recordings of gongs from an earlier tour, and if there's anything we can think of that could sound better than that, we sure don't know what. The voices and gongs wreathed in reverb and natural echo and delay, the notes stretching way out, all manner of harmonies and overtones, totally heavenly minimal dronemusic, and barring a brief squall of crunchy distorted noise, the whole track is hushed and delicate, drifty and dreamlike. So good.
Nice packaging too, two color silkscreened origami style folded cardstock sleeves, with a printed insert, featuring all the liner notes.
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This mysterious musical missive showed up here way back in 2007, and quietly slipped through the cracks, and sat huddled on a shelf in the closet, until just a matter of days ago when we re-discovered it, and thus, we present to you, the last 10 copies of this long out of print cd-r, released in a limited edition of 100.
It was so long ago, we're ashamed to admit, we don't remember much about the band or what they're all about, so we'll go purely on sound (which is probably what we should do anyway).
Two looooong tracks, the first begins quite strangely, a thick undulating dronescape made from voices, howls and hums and croons woven into a strangely soothing wall of textured sound, we kept expecting it to shift but it never does, 19 minutes of pure voice raga, it's super intense, and so raw and intimate and organic, when it ends, like all dense drones, it feels like all the air gets sucked out of the room.
After the fervent intensity of the first track, the tranquil beginning of track two is almost jarring in it's softness, drifting clouds of bells and chimes, spread out over lots of space. Once again, we kept expecting the song to kick in, but instead, it's another exercise in space and tension, ultra minimal and percussive, the chimes and bells ring out and are allowed to decay to almost near silence, before the next flurry of tinkling and chiming. Really gorgeous and strangely zen.
This sort of stuff requires dedicated close listening, headphones help, but that sort of listening is indeed rewarded.
Packaged in a beautiful cardstock sleeve, with paste on liner notes and abstract cover, a metallic gold sticker, and a cd spray painted gold. Once again, there were only 100 copies and that was a year ago, so these are definitely the last copies we'll see...
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After an almost three year hiatus (Sublime Frequencies seems to have been garnering the Girls' attention and finances these days) the Sun City Girls have racheted up the Carnival Folklore Resurrection project with two new titles, both of them live performances by the trio on the radio. This second set, CFR volume 13 was recorded on Kim Sorise's show on WFPK in Louisville, Kentucky in April of 2004. Both sets are quite similar in execution, spanning the gamut of SCG's musical tendencies. Either of these performances could be seen as a great introduction to the group or, equally, one for serious fans only. It's all here: overseas shortwave and field recordings, Uncle Jim rants, skronky improv madness, pretty instrumental interludes, re-engineered soundtrack themes and bizarre mixes. If there's a noticeable difference in the balance of material on the two releases we'd say that Radio One & Two has more Uncle Jim ranting and field recording mixing, while 98.6 Is Death has more actual live rocking, jamming and skronking in the studio.
An absolutely essential, vinyl-only Sun City Girls release, one of our all time favorite SCG records since Torch Of The Mystics. The bad news is, A. it's really expensive, and B. we only got 15 copies and it's totally out of print. So SCG fanatics best act fast if they want one of these, cuz holy shit is this one mindblowing and ear tickling release...
The packaging alone makes this worth the price tag. An ultra thick, eye popping sleeve, housed in a die cut lp slipcase, with metallic embossing on the front. Inside, it's a one sided white vinyl lp, with the flip side gorgeously silkscreened. And there's so much stuff crammed inside the sleeve, it weighs a ton. There's multiple 12"x12" full color flats that seem to be alternate cover art, lots of random sized artwork, all on thick cardstock, two sheets of stickers, a band photo, a childhood photo of SCG Charlie Gocher (who passed away recently) and a page of confusing SCG linernotes from some zine from way back in 1999. Hard to say if that means this was previously released, but none of us have ever heard it.
So when you go to play the record, don't be confused by the needle hovering endlessly on the edge of the disc, it plays from the inside out, backwards, so set the needle down next to the label and let 'er rip. And as if the direction of play was any indicator, the music is almost entirely backwards! And it's amazing. Dark and droney, creepy and haunting, a little bit circusy, but mostly dizzying and hypnotic. Imagine listening to the darkest scariest SCG album backwards.... (and in fact, this is apparently the backwards version of "The Venerable Song (The Meaning Which Is No Longer Known)" from the LP Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings released on Majora way back in 1993!)...
Haunted vocals and mysterious chants and howls, fluttering flickering flutes all drift and hover over a gorgeous landscape of backwards drones and strange pulsing rhythms, created from that swooping backwards 'ffffzzzzt' sound that music makes in reverse... We weren't sure what to expect, but we've been listening to this nonstop, over and over and over, so goddamn good.
Not sure how limited this was (other than REALLY), and apparently there were a million different variations of color and inserts and whatnot in this already tiny micropressing, but we only have 15, and once these are gone, they are gone forever.
The second volume in the ongoing series of singles compilations from legendary outfit the Sun City Girls was one of the many duds that frustrate so much of the die-hard SCG fanbase. It was especially frustrating given that the first volume - You're Never Alone With A Cigarette (which as of spring 2013 is sadly out of print) - was so fucking good, mostly due to the fact that much of that material was made up of tracks that were left off the group's masterpiece, Torch Of The Mystics. At one time, TOTM was slated to be a double lp set with the Girls working towards fleshing out the whole album with a bunch of similar sounding tracks. So when the album dropped just as a single slab of wax, all of the remnants ended up finding their way onto various singles back in the early '90s. As Volume One did feature many of those leftovers, Volume Three thankfully completes the task, with two of those discarded Torch tracks culled from the Three Fake Female Orgasms 7" (released on Majora in 1991) as well as all of the cuts from the Eye Mohini and Borungku Si Derita singles (both released through Majora in 1992 and 1993 respectively, the latter featuring a different version of "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" from Torch Of The Mystics, just to make things all the more confusing). There's also a different version of "Kickin The Dragon" from the other SCG masterpiece 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, as well as a live version of another Torch classic, "The Flower".
The title track here in particular is a classic Sun City Girls jam, with Richard Bishop's desert-blues inspired fingerpicking seamlessly shifting from Arabic flourishes to Southeast Asian folk-pop and the more commonplace No Depression styled Americana, all with brother Alan plaintively sounding out syllabically a maudlin melody that may or may not be complete nonsense or some polyglot of languages dialed in by the Girls' esoteric antenna to all sorts of wild and wonderful songs from around the world. "Gum Arabic" is a terse re-interpretation of heavy Turkish psychedelia which would certainly foreshadow Sublime Frequencies eventual reissue collection of Erkin Koray's works. "Abydos Carousel Tapsel" has a bad-ass south-of-the-border vibe which shifts into an unhinged jubliant psych-folk in "Borungku Si Derita" which strangely sounds a lot like Comus! With so much of the Sun City Girls catalogue terminally out of print, getting a hold of anything from the band is a cause for celebration; but getting an album as great as this, even a collection, maybe especially a collection, is all the more reason to rejoice. And for those uninitiated into the demented psych-punk weirdness of SCG, this is a really great place to start.
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
The vinyl of Funeral Mariachi is undoubtedly limited, but a cd is scheduled for release later in October, we're told.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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After an almost three year hiatus (Sublime Frequencies seems to have been garnering the Girls' attention and finances these days) the Sun City Girls have racheted up the Carnival Folklore Resurrection project with two new titles, both of them live performances by the trio on the radio. This first set, CFR volumes 11 & 12, was recorded in November of 2002 on Brian Turner's radio show on WFMU in New Jersey and was actually originally released a year or so ago as a super limited edition available only through the group's website. Both sets are quite similar in execution, spanning the gamut of SCG's musical tendencies. Either of these performances could be seen as a great introduction to the group or, equally, one for serious fans only. It's all here: overseas shortwave and field recordings, Uncle Jim rants, skronky improv madness, pretty instrumental interludes, re-engineered soundtrack themes and bizarre mixes. If there's a noticeable difference in the balance of material on the two releases we'd say that Radio One & Two has more Uncle Jim ranting and field recording mixing, while 98.6 Is Death has more actual live rocking, jamming and skronking in the studio.
Ah the Sun City Girls. Ever perplexing and unpredictable... yet reliably weird. It's nice to know there's always the Sun City Girls. It's kinda that "there'll always be an England" feeling. But different. Very different. Anyway, and now we're up to number fourteen in the SCG's "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series. Static From The Outside Set recorded (or should we say compiled?) for a BBC radio program, On The Wire Lancashire, in the summer of 2005. There's 29 diverse tracks here, many of them collaged tracks-within-tracks edited to simulate the spinning of the radio dial. Highlights? Well there's a lot of almost Jewelled Antlerish tinkering and droning, we liked those cuts quite a bit. The SCGs can do the psychedelic drone folk thing quite well (and they also play on our heartstrings by doing a very faithful cover of "Gently Johnny" from The Wicker Man soundtrack!).
But there's more: fake-jazz ("Tea Boy Attitude", "Django-ized"), Beeheartian skronk ("Iced-Off Broccoli"), interminable talk radio parody ("Sacrifice in the USA"), blues, a limerick, a Brian Wilson song, all sorts of jibber jabber and non sequitur interludes, like the track "Elvis and Machinery" wherein the Colonel tells Elvis, "stay away from that wheelbarrow, you don't know nothin about machinery". You'll go "huh?" but then the Girls will spin that dial and you'll be dealing with something else already. So it's something of a grab bag, but one we sure didn't mind groping around in.
One of two new releases on the Imminent Frequencies tape label, the other from long time favorite Zomes, this one from the curiously named Sun Son Sun, who craft, gorgeous and ominous soundscapes of bass clarinet and manipulated tapes, creating a haunting low end drift, long moaning melodies suspended in a field of tape hiss and natural reverb, a cavernous free jazz slowed down to a near crawl, a subterranean sonic crawl, glacial tangled melodies, looped and recontextualized into blurred textural streaks and fragmented melodies, slipping from warm and washed out and melodic to rumbling distorted throb, often hovering somewhere right in between. Mysterious and otherworldly, equal parts abstract improvisation, dark ambience, and psychedelic dronemusic. Cool.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!
What might one expect from a band named after a Dead C record? Something a tad bit noisy would be our guess, and you know what? We wouldn't be all that far off. Unlike the grinding Amrep style dirge rock of Trapdoor Fucking Exit, another Dead C named outfit, Sun Stabbed definitely occupy a sonic space much closer to their forbears. But unlike the splattery noise rock of the 'C, Sun Stabbed sound like a ghostly after image, like looking directly at the Dead C, then staring into the sun, then everywhere you look you see these shimmery white hot feedingback shapes, white hot outlines of the original. Imagine the Dead C stripped of drums, and any forward momentum and you'll have something resembling Radio, a big static swirl of incandescent guitar, huge throbbing thrum, keening streaks of luminous feedback: Bits of Sunroof! and Vibracathedral Orchestra surface here and there. And it's heaviest, it could be a dreamier mellower, more blissful SUNNO))), while on the other end of the spectrum it's a gentle lilting confection of lighter than air strums and ringing out chords, of amp buzz and soft warm whir...
It's easy to hear bits of No Neck Blues Band and Sun Burned Hand Of The Man And Avarus, and various other practitioners of that sort of rambling free folk stumble when first listening to this mysterious disc by some group called Sun Supreme. But listen closer for a minute and think about it. SUN Supreme, and where would any of those bands be without... Well, yeah, without the Sun City Girls, and while we can't really confirm it, this disc -was- recorded in Seattle, in 2004 and does pretty much sound like a late night, druggy ramble through some serious SCG territory.
The give away, is that it's not nearly as abstract as those other groups, it's way more melodic and musical, with a heavy emphasis on the guitar, and a distinctly Eastern bent, lots of strummed chords and kitchen sink percussion, bits of piano and other noisemakers, going from that sort of stumbling campfire improv to decidedly propulsive krautrocky groove, occasionally devolving into ramshackle chaos, but just as likely to coalesce into huge epic swells, before settling back down into more dreamy late night rambling. Really cool.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Packaged in beautiful hand screened chipboard sleeves and pressed on ultra thick vinyl.
Getting tough to know what to say about these guys. For no reason other than the constant flow of new releases, cd's, lp's, double lp's and so many cd-r's!! But what the hell! They're all pretty fantastic so who's to complain. We managed to get about twenty of these from the band when they were here, therfore there's a darn good chance we won't be able to get any more, so if you want one act fast. Packaged in that by now immediately recognizable brown paper sleeve, pasted-on art on one side, hand written text on the other, Anatomy was recorded from 2002-2004, and features a much more 'rock' SHOTM, which seems to be the direction the band has been headed lately. Shuffling spaced out psychedelic grooves, sort of Grateful Dead meets Acid Mothers Temple meets No Neck Blues Band. Plenty of processed vocals, heavily affected guitars, and shuffling Krautrock rhythms, simple and hypnotic. There are brief song fragments that harken back to their more hippy pagan free folk drum circle daze, but for the most part Anatomy is chock full of amazing head nodding, dreamy and druggy space psych grooves!
Finally! Some new music from our favorite space-drone-free-rock-hippy-drum-circle-caveman-stomp-folk-clatter ensemble Sunburned Hand Of The Man. And once again, these are extremely limted and we don't know how long we'll be able to keep these in stock. Probably not very long at all. This double cd-r is volumes 9 and 10 in SHotM's proposed series of 50 and some of their best so far. As a whole, these two discs are much quiter and ambient than any of the other releases, focusing on space and the sound AROUND the sounds. Disc one is a spare creaky framework of mumbly, lo-fi space jams, distant melodies, ghostly and ethereal, reverbed vocals, minimal wah guitar, rhythms all clattery and loose, stumbling and barely there, almost marking out the beat like the occasional stone thrown into a still pool. All wrapped in spidery cobwebs of murk and mire and hiss and stutter. Truly gorgeous. Disc two continues on in the same vein with shuffling rhythms and vaguely Eastern melodies, chanting and mumbly vocalising. There are moments on disc two that change things up a bit, most notably a strange bastard funk jam that sounds like Starfuckers chanelling James Brown, and then as the disc progresses some No Neck Blues Band meets Sun Ra free jazz clatter with saxophone bleats, space-y rhytmic abstracts, and splattery percussion.
A visit from Sunburned Hand Of The Man always means a bunch of new releases, this time it's two lps, and a handful of cd-r's they've been lugging around on tour. We'll get to as many as we can, but let's start with Complexion. Like all of their releases, this lp, recorded live in 2004, is a gorgeous and stumbling tribal and primal mess, psychedelic and tripped out, space-y and rhythmic. There are multiple tracks listed but this plays like one massive track, two sides of loping campfire dirges, detuned guitars, simple shuffling rhythms, warbly organ melodies, super freaked out vocals all wrapped in reverb and delay, distant distorted wah guitar, and even some tape drop out that sounds as intentional as any of the other sounds present. Occasionally everything coalesces into super dense, perfectly concise passage of abstract rhythm and propulsive skitter that definitely reminds us of the legendary This Heat. This is druggy and dreamy bliss! All woozy and seasick and completely mesmerizing. At its most psychedelic it sounds a bit like Santana's little brother, high on tequila and peyote, sneaking into his big brother's practice space with his drug buddies and proceeding to get even higher and jam out all night long. Side two is a little more mellow and abstract, super minimal and trippy, a simple shuffling rhythm and all sorts of vocal and instrumental weirdness drenched in effects and splattered with little bits of random percussion, ghostlike vocals, and hazy drifting melodies.
If you've kept up with the prolific and often very limited and hard to track down back catalog of Sunburned Hand Of The Man you'll know that they're always eager to explore new territory and widen their musical horizons. But even so, we still think you'll be thrown for a loop, in the best possible way. In fact this disc has even won over a few of us here who had always been on the fence with these Sunburned fellas in the past.
What's important to know about Fire Escape is that it's just as much of a Four Tet record as it is a Sunburned Hand Of The Man record. Four Tet and Sunburned!? Huh! What?! Sometimes the seemingly oddest pairings produce the most creative and unexpected results. And wow, we've totally been swept away by the magic these two forces have created, each contributing the best of of their respected, yet disparate qualities.
Sunburned got to do what they do, improvising and travelling in all their drugged out and mystifying glory, while Four Tet then collected hours upon hours of their recordings and worked his own magic on them to create a final product that might be the most realized, colorful and immediate Sunburned record yet.
From the opening track, which had us all thinking of 23 Skiddo in all the best ways, and throughout the entire album, you get to hear a band who pride themselves on their improv abilities but with the much more careful and deliberate and musically astute filter of Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, who has proven over the years that he not only makes really great music, but that he understands and appreciates great music in so many shapes and varieties. It's almost as if his recent collaborations with free jazz legend Steve Reid opened him up to the possibility and power of improvisation while still allowing him to retain the great sensitivity to sound that his made him one of the most compelling musicians to emerge out of the electronic scene in the last decade.
It's so exciting and exhilarating to see this kind of creative energy exchanged and brought together by folks from two seemingly different scenes, sharing the common thread of aiming to make transcendental music that transports you to different dimensions and offers up all kinds of unexpected twists and turns. After their recent collaboration with Circle and this totally successful meeting of musical minds with Four Tet we have to say we are loving the collaborative spirit of Sunburned Hand Of The Man more than ever, and while there was all kinds of hype surrounding SHOTM a few years ago, we are happy to report that they just might be only just reaching their most realized moment right now!
This is a limited lp version of Jaybird, one of the handmade SHotM cd-r's, the one in fact that was singled out for much praise on Julian Cope's Head Heritage website (check it out here: http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/reviews/index.php?review_id=667)
And while maybe not my favorite Sunburned Hand record, it's definitely still great. This is SHotM at their most straight ahead and their most 'rock'. Stoned, psychedelic, spcaed out and downright groovy. Simple static beats, wah guitars and sprited yelps and hollers. This is still a slice of heavenly seventies krautrock, but HEAVY on the hippy vibe. Imagine a weird supergroup jam with a super-damaged Grateful Dead, the Dead C, Phish, Jandek, Santana, Reynols, John Spencer (on horse tranquilizers at 16rpm) and the No Neck Blues Band. Bluesy psychedelic rock, rambling and meandering and filtered through the aethetic of modern noiseniks. Toward the end of side two things start to stretch out, more echo, more delay, upping the freakout quotient considerably as the record blisses out and winds down. Nice.
Every time these folks shamble through town we dig through their stuff and get as much as we can for you all, often they're down to only a few copies, but for this we took everything they had, the last 20 copies of this super limited tour only double 7".
Two clear vinyl slabs of far out free-ness, very Middle Eastern sounding in that Sun City Girls world music filter way, clattery drums and rattles and shakers, distorted music box melodies, tribal hand drums, wood blocks, affected guitars, lots of reverb and weird loops, some very Beefheartian vocals on one track, and some lovely chanting on another that sounds like a super distorted call to prayer. This is SHOTM at their most exotic, sounding quite a bit like some super lo-fi long lost Muslimgauze recording. Really cool.
Thick clear vinyl, striking full color sleeve, and again we only got about 20 off these and most likely won't be able to get more once they're gone.
It's been ages since we've heard from these guys, maybe the second most referenced band on the aQ list when we're trying to describe stumbling tribal avant free rock, after the the No Neck Blues Band, both bands pretty much rule that world, each an ever shifting collective with a few core members, able to conjure up super epic clattery free folk, and droned out abstract minimalism, dipping liberally into noise rock, free jazz, 20th century classical, infusing their lo-fi chaos with a sense of art.
No Neck definitely drifted in the artier direction, releasing super limited editions, deluxe lps, performing in art spaces, playing with dancers, mysterious vocalists, while Sunburned Hand stayed more sort of punk rock, releasing an endless series of home made cd-r's, their sound remaining relatively consistent, a gorgeous, cracked, grimy and gritty anti rock, as much about noise as jazz, the players connected on some other level, their performances amazing, their recordings equally so, slipping from buzzing ragas, to strange clattery soundscapes, to full bore free rock roar, to hushed and contemplative drift, to spidery post rock minimalism, to skronky almost free jazz, to foresty free folk all detuned guitars and fluttery horns and stumbling drums, to a sort of avant Appalachia, all of that and more are touched on here, a killer recording from way back in 1998, only now seeing the light of day, packaged in a cool hand stamped origami style sleeve, with pasted on front cover art, and a printed poster / insert. LIMITED to 999 COPIES... (hmm, that's a lot for a cd-r!)
Finally we've managed to get our hands on some of these cd-r's by Andee's new favorite band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man (you may remember me gushing at length about their recent 'Headress' lp a few lists back), and these cd-r's, if anything, are even better than the lp! Sunburned Hand take the tribal clatter of the No Neck Blues Band (with whom they share members) and add all sort of other elements: seventies folk, droning krautrock, creepy ambient soundscapes, free jazz, stumbling free rock thud, and some actual ROCK! And come up with a totally otherworldy sound. Space-y, folky, dark and drone-y, dreamy and ethereal, driving and relentless, creepy and scary, morose and melancholy, all in the space of a single record. Bizarre instrumentation and a way with sound make SHotM heirs to the modern ESP/krautrock/psych/freerock throne!
Mind Of A Brother, recorded in 1998, is the first cd-r in this proposed series of fifty, and it's probably the most ambient. Dreamy and wispy, guitars fade in and out, echoing into nothingness, shakers shake out simple almost imperceptable rhythms, guitars play serpentine leads that are buried in murk and grime, while hums and whirrs set the foundation for these sonic explorations. Every once in a while, the drums kick in, a simple, rock rhythm, but the added rhythmic oomph pushes the sound into classic krautrock territory, motorik and propulsive, and the ghostly guitars seem to take a more solid shape as if in response to the drums new found purpose. The record ends in a primitive sort of ritual, guitar swells and warm washes of thick tones with wailing Yoko Ono-ish vocals. Some really heady and amazing stuff from this Massachusetts band!
