[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

Another brilliant disc from this Norwegian "death-jazz" outfit! Bandmember and producer Helge Sten (aka Deathprod) took some 30 hours of material recorded live (direct to DAT) in various European locations (London, Oslo, Bologna) and edited it down to fit

RealAudio clip: track 1
RealAudio clip: track 3

We remember when Supersilent 1-3 came out, and we were like, who the heck are these guys with a debut triple cd?? After listening to it, of course we became fast fans. And Supersilent 4 and 5, which made interesting stylistic shifts, only served to deepen our appreciation of this Norwegian quartet. Now Supersilent 6 is upon us, and it's been eagerly anticipated -- we sold a whole bunch the day we got 'em in! On this disc, Supersilent continue to creatively pursue their own unique Nordic mind-meld of improv, electronics, jazz, and what we might describe as live musique concrete. Maybe we should call it glitch-fusion? Maybe not, but there's gorgeous Frippertronics guitar one moment, breathy trumpet the next, all with electronic drones and scattered drum-beats underneath. Delicate, shimmering soundscapes build into mammoth sound-masses, still shimmering. Their music still holds a great deal of mystery, even if the band is at last getting the exposure they deserve, such as a feature in the new issue (#228) of The Wire. Others have observed that it's amazing that Supersilent's music is totally improvised and without overdubs, and we'd have to agree. Supersilent 6 is a disc thick with noise of great beauty, and comes highly recommended.

RealAudio clip: track 1
RealAudio clip: track 5

Our favorite Norwegian death-jazz electro-acoustic improv ensemble, the one and only Supersilent, are back with a new release -- and it's a live DVD! As such, it serves as something of a consolation for myself (Allan) and AQ pal Cayce, who showed up to see Supersilent perform here in San Francisco for their first and only time (this was a year or two ago, at the Great American Music Hall) only to discover that the band who were breaking their gear down and vacating the stage upon our arrival was in fact Supersilent, making way for Jagajazzist who we had thought were to be the opening act. D'oh!! It was an especially cruel twist of fate for Cayce, who through a set of circumstances we needn't describe here, ended up holding (and paying for) FIVE non-refundable tickets to the show. He actually didn't really mind shelling out $100 to see Supersilent (that's how much of a fan he is) but then to miss 'em in the end was, unfortunate to say the least... So, now through the magic of the DVD format, Cayce and I can experience what that show might have been like. And all Supersilent fans can experience what the show on the DVD (filmed in Oslo, August 16th 2004) was definitely very much like! We were actually a little worried that the visuals would somehow reveal too much about this band, but the DVD is shot in moody black and white 16mm which helps maintain their mystique... and it is cool to see how the actual humans involved interact with their instruments and equipment to produce the sounds of Supersilent, which have always been a blend of very live sounding playing and electronic processing, with the breathy trumpet of Arve Henriksen, snake charmer sinuous at times, suggesting the jazz of Miles Davis amidst the "improv musique concrete" (and this concert is entirely improvised) also being made by keyboardist Stale Strlokken, drummer Jarle Vespestad, and "audio virus" engineer Helge "Deathprod" Sten. The great thing about this DVD is that after a viewing or two, it still functions as a great new Supersilent album (hence the title, 7, designating it the follow-up to their last album, 6). And since now it's hard to buy a cd player that's not also a DVD player, if you've got one of those hooked up to your stereo system you can just put this disc in and listen to it sans video, as if it was a regular cd that's just a bit longer (109 minutes) than normal.

8 is not Supersilent's eighth album, actually, 'cause their first, a triple cd extravaganza, was entitled 1-3... and Supersilent 7 was actually a live dvd. So if you don't count that one, then Supersilent 8 is really the celebrated Norwegian outfit's fifth studio release. Still, it's far enough into Supersilent's career that you'd think we'd have a good notion of what to expect from these AQ faves. But if we really did, it wouldn't be Supersilent. And as usual they offer no clues: the digipack cd design is as usual stylish but generic, and song titles are an unnecessary luxury in which other more ordinary bands indulge. Here we have eight nameless tracks, 66 minutes of new and varied Supersilent output. In the past, they've created stunning soundscapes that are part Miles Davis, part Starfuckers, part Autechre, a hybrid of dronejazz improv and electronic processing, a live band screwing with itself via computer feedback. They call it "death-jazz" but what the heck does that really mean? So maybe a track by track accounting is needed. The disc starts off quietly, cautiously, eerily ambient, not giving much up at first. It's a ways into the first 11 minute long track that, with increased volume, a rhythmic pulse makes itself throbbingly known, and eventually builds into a roiling low-end cacophony, with what sounds like a tolling bell amidst percussive splatter and insectoid buzz, slowed down and grinding. The second track is even more sparse and atmospheric, with occasional improv percussion clatter, echoing cymbals, and suspenseful electronic organ musings. So far, this is turning out to be a good album for this time of the year (Halloween being this week!). The third cut continues the sorta spooky and sci-fi theme, venturing further into a dense thicket of crackly, agitated sounds, with stabs of sizzling synth and clumsy, clomping rhythmic rattle, harking back to the counter-intuitive chaos of Supersilent 1-3. Track four is sleepier, gentler, with the breathy trumpet of Arve Henriksen weaving a fragile melody. Then suddenly with the fifth track, it's like we've flipped the record to a (thus far hypothetical, as a vinyl version hasn't yet been released) side two, which begins on a quite different note than before, with a bizarre, distorted, almost robot-metallic voice or voices intoning some sort of garbled rant. But by the time this track's twelve minutes are up, we've heard more of the melodious trumpet, humming drone, percussive splatter, and glacial glitch that we realize we DO expect from ol' Supersilent. That's followed by the stuttering electronic clicks and plings of track six, this song's special surprise being high, wordless female vocals soaring up and over the ending. Number seven is a skronkier, noisier affair than anything yet on the album, it's an energetic compression of the cacophony heard on tracks 1 or 3, the drummer going nuts, the organist sucking up lots of electricity, and with the addition of what must be wild, howling, heavily effected vocals swirling cryptically over it all. Supersilent let it all hang out on this one, yeah! #7 would be the piece for them to play if they ever had to share a stage with Acid Mothers Temple. And then track 8 brings Supersilent 8 to a quiet close, perfectly spaced sounds and silence like a more regulated Starfuckers jam, clicks and clacks and crackle, that only lasts four minutes and four seconds but could go on and on forever as far as we're concerned. Wow. Another excellent, original Supersilent effort, with the use/abuse of vocals opening up some new dimensions to their sound. Parts of Supersilent 8 give us the idea we're listening to some sort of really strange field recording, the documentation of the fracturing of an iceberg, the swarmings of bugs, or the language of birds or bats, when in fact this is a very human-activated, machine-mediated, far-from-natural audio document. Of course at other times on this album that fact is quite evident! Indeed, Supersilent 8 also is the closest these "death-jazzers" have come to making rock album, especially when the super distorted, hazy murk of psychedelic howling almost garage-rock-improv pummel of track 7 is taken into account.

MPEG stream: track 3
MPEG stream: track 5
MPEG stream: track 7

Wow, we're getting old. Our favorite Norwegian electronic/jazz/WTF improvising unit, Supersilent, are already up to number 9 in their discography! Almost into double digits. (Of course, that's not nearly as prolific as some bands, imagine if Circle, Nadja, or good grief Acid Mothers Temple numbered their releases. you'd never be able to recall which one was which, that's for sure. But, hey, you would at least know what order they came in... c'mon AMT fans, do you remember if Ominous From The Cosmic Inferno predated Iao Chant From The Cosmic Inferno, or maybe it was Journey Into The Cosmic Inferno that came first? And where do Demons From Nipples and Crystal Rainbow Pyramid Under The Stars fit in, chronologically? Not that you really need to know either. Ok, enough with that digression...) So, what's Supersilent all about this time? As usual, the lack of titles and artwork don't give a lot to go on. The Kim Hiorthoy designed digipak is a bright sort of blue this time, for what that's worth (being about the only design decision Hiorthoy has to make for each otherwise identically generic looking Supersilent release, probably a lot of thought goes into the color choice). Well it turns out that Supersilent 9 is one of their more atmospheric, almost ambient efforts, with band member / producer Deathprod's aesthetic to the fore. There's four tracks, none of 'em short, ranging from 11:43, to the longest at 14:32... plenty of time for the listener to get lost in their carefully improvised, mostly quiet and slowly unfolding soundworlds... Arve Henriksen's breathy trumpet is ultra muted, really we're not sure if we are hearing it or not, and in terms of percussion, Supersilent 9 is entirely without the quirky rhythmic elements that characterized their chaotically skittery debut Supersilent 1-3 or the almost Autechre-ish glitchery of Supersilent 4. Instead, this, when rhythmic at all, evinces more of slow sawing whirr or thick throb, as on the droning and kinda doomy second track (the loudest one here as well), which pulses with shuddering distortion and has a bit of an atonal 20th century classical vibe to it. The tracks on Supersilent 9 are also more "of a piece", not as eclectic as on 6 or 8... There's certainly variation but it's constrained, the group taking a "less is more", minimalistic approach to this disc. The surprise vocals and psych-rock moves of Supersilent 8 are nowhere to be found this time 'round. Instead this hews closest to the glacial bliss of Supersilent 5, if we recall correctly, but in even more of an abstract manner. In parts, this comes quite close to literally living up to the band name. Dreamy and drifty, this is. And so very nice. What we've since learned about the (even by Supersilent standards) unusual nature of this disc is that their drummer quit the band right before they recorded this... and the remaining three members all decided to play Hammond organ exclusively for this session! Not that you'd guess that's all you were hearing. Ultimately, another very satisfying release from this unique outfit! Leaving us curious about what direction they'll take in the future, when it's time for number 10.

MPEG stream: 9.1
MPEG stream: 9.2
MPEG stream: 9.3

These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out." Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks. The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance. Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for. Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful. Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades. This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is! And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.

MPEG stream: In A Sweet Song
MPEG stream: The Arabian Song
MPEG stream: The Sun's Bells
MPEG stream: Strange Song
MPEG stream: Synaesthesia
MPEG stream: Cuchulain (Blackbirds Loom)
MPEG stream: Columnated Ruins / Seeing Distant Chimneys
MPEG stream: Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise)

These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out." Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks. The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance. Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for. Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful. Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades. This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is! And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.

MPEG stream: Synaesthesia
MPEG stream: Cuchulain (Blackbirds Loom)
MPEG stream: Columnated Ruins / Seeing Distant Chimneys
MPEG stream: Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise)

These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out." Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks. The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance. Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for. Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful. Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades. This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is! And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.

MPEG stream: In A Sweet Song
MPEG stream: The Arabian Song
MPEG stream: The Sun's Bells
MPEG stream: Strange Song

We didn't know too much about Surachai, or his record Plague Diagram, but from the way it was described to us, as a one man electronic / metal outfit, whose sound was equal parts black metal, doom metal, powernoise and avant garde, we were sorta convinced it would be right up our alley (and yours), and now that we're finally hearing this stuff, we're pretty sure we were right. The metal sounds remind us of the more mechanical / industrial groups like Godflesh and Pitchshifter, the sound churning and chugging, the rhythms, precise and clinical, hard to tell if it's a real drummer or a machine, but it hardly matter, this is some serious heavy, downtuned crush, and even in the first track, there are hints that this is more than just a metal record. Little stutters here and there, chirps and glitches and squelches, subtle at first, before eventually, the metal dissipates, leaving a weird bit of black ambience, all bleating horns, looped low end, hazy shifting drones, fluttering backwards effects, gradually growing more and more abstract and tripped out, before giving way to the second track, which opens with a flurry of soft chaos, machine like rhythms erupt as do buzzing riffs, those bleating horns seeming to still be present, underpinning the relentless chug, the vocals harsh and howled, the arrangement mathy and precise, and then again, out of nowhere, the song splinters, and is barraged by strange electronics, mysterious sound effects, before slipping into another expanse of ambient drift, all muted distorted glitch, heaving low end melodies, all strangely cinematic. The rest of the record plays out similarly, a churning and chugging electronic flecked metal gradually decays eventually leaving some sort of glitched out sonic shadow, a tangle of dense pulses and layered shimmer, of staticky squelches and grinding blackened melodies, the final few minutes of the record maybe our favorite, a strange sort of slowed down demonic IDM, all chirps and hisses and whirring, that gives way to an almost Aphex Twin sort of melodic drift, albeit just a bit twisted and slightly atonal, sounding a bit like a demonic Christmas Carol, before gradually being overtaken by another squall of black buzz. Includes lots of strange guests: Richie Devine, Nordvargr, Otto Von Schirach and others, and is pretty nicely packaged, pressed on 180 gram clear vinyl, housed in a thick PVC plastic sleeve, with a printed insert and a sticker. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.

MPEG stream: Isolation
MPEG stream: Ashes

This legendary document of nineties New Zealand noise/drone rock, originally released on Bruce Russell's (Dead C) Corpus Hermeticum label has finally been rescued and reissued by the fine folks at Utech, and it's strange that a 15 year old record sounds so right at home amongst the rest of the Utech catalog, but it does, which either speaks to the curatorial genius of Utech, or the extreme sonic vision of the guys in Surface Of The Earth. Most likely both! Fans of this era of New Zealand underground rock are no doubt familiar with these guys, in fact, lots of folks out there probably already own this, but for those who don't, this is some glorious, Dead C style drone-noise soundscapery, thick billowing expanses of humid guitar drone, lots of clatter and crunch, static and hiss, voices, amp buzz and various sonic detritus that most bands would do everything in their power to get rid of, but for Surface Of The Earth and other NZ bands at the time, the lo-fi-ness was as much a part of the sound as the sound itself. No pretenses, no bullshit, this was music for music's sake, organic, personal, and intimate, this was sonic creation, and everything involved in that creation was worth including on tape. Modern slo-mo drifters like Earth and Barn Owl and the like owe these guys a huge sonic debt whether they realize it or not. These sprawling smoldering dronescapes are epic and majestic yet still strangely minimal, tones laid out like thick sheets of black fog, the sound alternatingly warm and liquid, lush and layered, or dark and crumbly, distorted and detuned, this stuff takes the whole guitar-against-the-amp thing to another level, not so much playing the guitars as coaxing the sound out, in fact in many ways, the player seems to be removed from the equation. Unlike with most bands, where the physicality of the playing is inexorably linked to the sounds produced, Surface Of The Earth, seem to toil behind the scenes, they are musical alchemists, more concerned with producing these magical mysterious sounds than 'rocking', it's hard not to imagine these guys set up in some huge dimly lit space, not all robed like SUNNO))), no dry ice, no colored lights, just these shadowy figures, hunched over their instruments, lit only by the little red light on their amplifiers, ghostly figures creating these ghostly sounds, surprisingly physical sounds that have weight, and heft, modern NZ guitardroners like RST are obviously channeling the spirit of SOTE, worshipping at the altar these guys constructed 15+ years ago, and left as a monument to these very sounds. Multiple guitars pealing in a dark room, creating black clouds of sound, warm and whirling, dense and hypnotic, peppered now and again with some synths, or some walkie talkies, or some other random noisemaker, but those moments are subtle, and are as likely to slip by unnoticed, it's really all about the guitars, and 'the sound', the energy and emotion, the power of these sounds, listening to this stuff again, it definitely puts the current crop of guitardrone wannabes in perspective. Like anything, it's easy to do, but to do well, there has to be some magic involved, and this stuff is truly magical. Dark, ritualistic, dreamlike drone magic. Awesome. Incredible packaging, a thick fold out heavy black paper jacket, embossed with the record's original artwork, inside a printed black and white insert. Limited to 500 copies.

MPEG stream: 4.02
MPEG stream: Causer Grid
MPEG stream: Voyager

Folks went a little crazy for the debut tape from this one man black metal band, enigmatically called Surt, who trafficked not so much in black buzz and a sort of haunting folky ambience, all blackened and mysterious, we could barely keep those tapes in stock, and we were all ready to review this second tape, when he sort of disappeared, and the tapes got harder and harder to restock. But since we were left with FIVE copies of tape #2, we figured we'd list it, so at least a few of you who dug the first tape could get your hands on this one. And just like the first one, the sound of Surt remains, folky and ritualistic, some sort of subterranean Appalachia, mostly steel string guitar, lots of echo and reverb, the sound rhythmic and cyclical, mesmerizing and repetitive, all over a backdrop of subtle swirl and hushed ambient shimmer, the sound slipping from strident and urgent to hushed and drifty and psychedelic, swaddled in swirling barely there synths, giving it a distinctively kosmische vibe for sure. These are limited to 100, hand numbered, but as we mentioned above, we have five copies, and not sure if we can ever get more, so grab one while you can...

Super limited split, on local tape label Brotherhood Of Light, featuring one man black ambient alchemist Surt, who we've featured before on the aQ list, and who just so happens to be the man behind the BoL label, here teamed up with Austrian ambient soundscaper Uruk Hai. As might be expected, the packaging is very abstract and minimal, the track listing non existent, so it's hard to figure out which tracks are which, but it hardly matters, the sound a brooding, synth heavy shimmer, a sprawling warm blackness, slowly unfurling minor key melodies, all hazy and gauzy and washed out, sinister and ominous, but with a mysterious warmth, the vibe a little bit medieval too, reminding us in places of aQ fave Dark Ages, with majestic chordal swells, giving way to haunting medieval melodies. The flipside (again, not to sure which is which), is a much more melodically dense affair, lush tangles of melody, distorted and blown out. grinding low end, heaving swells of crumbling synths and spidery melodies, a churning, dense slow motion wall of sound, that drifts from hushed near shimmer to caustic black ambient crush, the tones pulsing and pulsating, overtones galore, a dizzying swirl of abstract psychedelic ambience, that is ultimately more avant experimental than black ambient. Killer stuff! LIMITED TO JUST 66 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered.

One of five new tapes from the awesome Austin based experimental tape label, Holodeck. Largely documenting the growing and diverse Texas underground scene of synth conjurers, drone lords, psych meditators, and classical folk devotionalists, each tape conceived as a unique listening experience with beautifully designed minimalist packaging. We listed tapes by Lumens, Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw awhile back, and this time around we have another tape from Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as tapes by M. Geddes Gengra, Silent Land Time Machine, Amasa Gana and this one from mysterious synth quartet Survive. Two side long tracks, the first a pulsating cavernous modular synth exploration, an extended version of a track from their self-titled debut 10" which we had a handful of but are now gone (though if we can get more we'll surely list it). That track is otherworldly, sci-fi and dark, like early Cluster, Klaus Schulze and Alpha Centauri-era Tangerine Dream. The other side is more spacious and primordial, and begins like a still night on some toxic planet. Gaseous rumbles, eerie night whistles and percolating textural bloops, far off some humming phased mechanoid vocals building up to what sounds like it could be the foley for the final hellish scene in the movie The Black Hole. Stripped of John Barry's ominous orchestrations, what we're left with is cold robo-futurist doom, laid to rest by an extended funereal space dirge. Limited to 100 copies!

One of six new tapes from the always awesome Holodeck label out of Austin, Texas is the full length debut (and second Holodeck release) from Texas Synth worshippers, Survive. We've previously listed a self titled tape and a self titled 10" (all of their records are basically self-titled and only distinguished by their catalog names) and we had the vinyl version that came out on Mannequin records for a little bit, but never had enough to list and now that's gone too, but at least we have this new tape to enjoy. The 10" debut had an airy feel to the synth formations that gave the compositions lots of space, but their sound now has darkened into a molten early Klaus Schulze-like aesthetic. There's a more alien and perhaps passively menacing vibe at play that creeps into an eighties sci-fi soundtrack trajectory like you might hear in Judge Dredd, The Black Hole, or Tron. The moods are somber, cold and anxiety ridden, but not in a human emotional sense, more like the unrealized dreams of robots but with an occasional ray of hope in an otherwise darkened universe. Limited!

It makes perfect sense that the man behind Sutcliffe Jugend has spent a considerable amount of time partnered with William Bennett in Whitehouse. There's many an attribute that Kevin Tompkins deftly recapitulates from Whitehouse into the equally breathtaking / stupefying / problematic ensemble Sutcliffe Jugend. While both Sutcliffe Jugend and Whitehouse unashamedly endorse the aesthetics of ultraviolence through painfully harsh electronics and belted vocals, Tompkins seems to be more interested in the social ramifications of power and control (by telling everybody to fuck off), rather than Bennett's sexual sadism (who wants everybody to suck his cock). Tomkins is also far more comfortable behind the guitar than he is behind a Wasp synthesizer, thus the piercing frequencies of Sutcliffe Jugend are more of the product of amplifier abuse and neck-wrangling freakouts that sustained corrosion from electronics, although synthesized tones are certainly present. On a couple of tracks, the density of guitar and electric noise transcends Whitehouse's borders and into Birchville Cat Motel territory. Tomkins tops all of these abusive sounds with a vocal delivery that obviously parallels Bennett's as his devilish sermons jump from commanding rhetoric into hysterical screams and sustained ululations. This is seriously fucked music, if you dare call it music at all.

MPEG stream: What If
MPEG stream: Restraint

Sutcliffe Jugend is the long-standing power electronics outfit of Kevin Tomkins and Mark Taylor, which Tomkins founded in 1982 with the release of a massive 10-cassette box-set of transgressive noise dedicated to / inspired by various serial killers and psychopathic malcontents, appropriately released by Come Productions. Tomkins shelved the project for much of the '80s whilst he sharpened his knives for electronic power-violence by joining William Bennett in Whitehouse; but in the '90s, Tomkins re-ignited Sutcliffe Jugend with the help of Mark Taylor, who's also collaborated with Tomkins in the abject-rock outfit Bodychoke. With Extreme Prejudice is the first Sutcliffe Jugend album in nearly three years, although both Taylor and Tomkins report a considerable amount of new material on their website, including an absurdly large 17 disc boxset documenting Tomkins' autoharp compositions(!). While the autoharp is listed as an instrument in the liner-notes for WEP, Tomkins and Taylor demolish any and all of the instrument's sonorous qualities in the crucible of noise, distortion, and unpure thought. But lest you think Sutcliffe Jugend unfurls a static harsh wall of noise for 70 minutes, With Extreme Prejudice emerges as a varied and dynamic album always scraping and scratching at the depths of human cruelty. "Carnage" blorps and bleeps with atonal electronics that might lend one to think of a David Tudor exploration, if it weren't for all of the guttural howls and splattered screams. Tomkins and Taylor must have been listening in on William Bennett's Cut Hands project in relation to "Empathiser" although the Frankensteinian rhythms seem pilfered more from Justice than from African drums. Still, a frenzied maelstrom of ill-will and bad-vibes abound. "Lucky" is one of those power electronics tracks that presents a disgusting narrative from a sadistic anti-hero who's paid for an hour with a junky prostitute after torching his workplace. Needless to say, it's not a happy bit of fiction. "Fuckrage" pretty much says it all in the title, and the final cut "Fall Of Utopia" takes a dark ambient loop to a punishing noise crescendo that's equal to the heights that Controlled Bleeding and Prurient have reached in the past.

MPEG stream: Carnage
MPEG stream: Empathiser

One of three recent releases from this Bay Area black metal / black ambient horde, that make up a part of a loose trilogy, which included the recent Monument Of Decay 12" on Black Horizons (reviewed on the last list, and still available) and continues / culminates with the Become lp, which was originally released in an insanely limited edition on aQ beloved label Auris Apothecary, in the form of a lavishly packaged reel to reel tape. Two sprawling fifteen minutes tracks, maybe SH's most abstract work to date, where other records displayed a distinct delineation between the atmospheric movements, and the buzzing black sections, no such separation exists here, with each track/side, existing as a single sonic ritual, the group's black buzz, smeared into blurred squalls of washed out noise, heaving swells of abject industrial thrum, buried vocals, oozing riffage, buried rhythms, according to the band Become was specifically created to inspire madness through repetition, a tranced out minimal/maximal cloud of roiling black sound. Playable at 45 or 33, both deliver a similar experience, although we are of course partial to the slower speed, which causes the sounds to grow even more indistinct and blurred out, a heaving, tarpit doom-drone that oozes from the speakers. But even at 45, this is more noise than black metal, a near psychedelic blacknoise, the A side featuring some seriously rib cage rattling low end, and when the noisiness abates, the sonic clouds part revealing some haunting beauty, tangled melodies and almost shoegazey textures, lurking just below the surface, eventually building back up to a dense death march crawl, more of a ghostly drift actually, the sound shedding low end, gradually growing more and more brittle, until at the finish its nearly Merzbowian white noise. The B side delivers more of the same, shadowed beauty, beneath cloud of demon breath vokills, of keening ur-drone shimmer, crumbling Caretaker-like atmospheres, occasional gouts of face melting howl and crush, but those moments are balanced by brief passages of sublime sonically tarnished beauty, that drifts darkly through the ether, before being obliterated by one final blast of speaker shredding blacknoise crush. LIMITED TO 351 COPIES!! Packaged in swank Stoughton style tip-on jackets with super striking metallic gold offset printed cover art.

MPEG stream: Five Faces Of Decay
MPEG stream: The Voice / The Void

Latest black sonic ritual from this SF trio (formerly duo), and like the last record, Larvae, which came out on Handmade Birds, Behind The Throne continues the group's evolution away from the blacknoise that defined their earlier sound. As we mentioned in our review of Larvae, the band seemed to spend a surprising amount of their time lately not blasting or buzzing, instead, conjuring up some surprisingly lovely ambience, and that's true here too, although the ambience here is less shimmery and abstract, and more like some sort of blackened dronescapery, thick swaths of guitar buzz, and dense swells of processed vocals, creating something that's both haunting and hypnotic, dense and intense, it's not really until about 7 minutes into the first track (which fills up the whole first side of the vinyl), that the band finally do unleash some black metal, but when they do, it's a dense blurred buzz, so blurred and blown out it almost sounds more droney and washed out than grim and heavy, but the crazy thing is, the band haven't even started, as a couple minutes later, they somehow explode again, the sound splintering into a weird almost industrial sounding black chug, a grinding, howling maelstrom of black buzz and churning psychedelia, that quickly fades out leaving just a long stretch of crumbling noise, distant vocals, tolling bells, and crackling staticky ambience. The second track / B side is another sprawling epic, this time bookended by some creepy industrial ambience, what sounds like jangling chains, plenty of rumbles and creaking high end, all smeared into a blackened ur-drone, soon guitars drift in, but not riffs, more like black chordal clouds, that hover darkly, before finally coalescing into proper riffs, but like the first track, the riffs are so distorted and blown out, the 'black metal' here is more of a blackdrone blur, that even with headphones reveals very little of what's going on in Sutekh's roiling black soundworld, the guitars murky and muddy one second, harsh and caustic the next, the vocals a buried bellow, and if there are drums, they're buried so low they just add to the general cacophony. The track churns and chugs, and at one point sounds almost like a sonic approximation of a locomotive, clattery and industrial, but still wreathed in a swirling blackbuzz fog, before the blackness dissipates, leaving just the strange ritualistic ambience that opened the track. Super swank packaging, full color photos of some sort of altar ritual, candles and chalices and knives, all wreathed in shadow, with all the texted printed in a clear reflective spot varnish.

MPEG stream: I. (excerpt 1)
MPEG stream: I. (excerpt 2)

Latest blast of blurred blacknoise brutality from this SF duo, whose records seem to disappear in a heartbeat, every one a ridiculously limited microedition, this new 7" no different, already sold out and out of print, we got 20 copies, and will most likely not be able to get more. Which is a shame, cuz this is maybe SH's most melodic and distinctly black metal record yet. Frantic riffing beneath super distorted vox, a blurred tranced out almost blacknoisedrone, until the drums kick in, but when they do, it's less like a blastbeat, and more like another layer of blurred low end buzz, the guitars churning relentlessly within a cloud of black/white noise, super repetitive and cyclical, but the melodies continue to seep through, mournful and minor key, buried beneath thick swaths of roiling blackness, the sound murky and muddy and surprisingly warm for being as intense and blackened as it is. The flipside is another surprise, all echoey and industrial, more processed vokills, this time though draped over clean guitar strum and a clattery machine like rhythm, the overall vibe brooding and downright doomy, a sort of creepy black ambient industrial maybe? There's an even more surprising second half, laced with clean, post rock-ish guitars, some death march ultradoom plod and creepy, cinematic piano-like melodies, the oozes and drifts darkly before disappearing in a haze of Merzbow worthy buzz, a thick swirling cloud of roiling blackness. LIMITED TO 253 COPIES!! We have less than 20, so grab one before they're gone...

Killer cd reissue of the recent singles collection, Empyraisch, from local blacknoise/black metal outfit Sutek Hexen, which includes a bonus 3"cd-r with an exclusive unreleased 20 minute track! More on that in a second, first, here's what we had to say about Empyraisch when we reviewed the lp version: Empyraisch is a compilation of sorts, gathering up all the tracks from Sutekh Hexen's super insanely limited and long out of print 7"s from the last couple years, as well as a rare compilation track or two. We'd imagine most of you were like us, and were unable to snag any of those rare 7"s, or perhaps only managed to track down one or two, so this should still be of interest to even the most obsessive SH fans, but fair warning to the folks who did manage to get em all. For the rest of is though, this is a godsend (devilsend?)... This Bay Area black metal / noise outfit dig deep into the crypt for these grim blacknoize rarities, a gloriously dizzying mix of blurred noise drenched black buzz and haunting atmospheric ambience... The opening track introduces Sutekh Hexen at their noisiest, the initial stretch of washed out buzzing blackness giving way to pure face melting black noise, unrelenting and devastating. Which is a bit of foreshadowing, since this collection obviously represents the group at their noisiest and grimmest. The record continues to unwind with blasts of corrosive noise, this time underpinned by low drones and chant like vox, adding some melody and color, however subtle, to the proceedings, everything blurred into a Tim Hecker-ish haze. The first half closes with a blast of extremely harsh black metal, the buzz and any semblance of riffage, nearly buried beneath an avalanche of grinding psychedelic noise. After that, Sutekh Hexen flex those soundscaping muscles, at least briefly, opening with a stretch of droned out thrum, a soft black swirl, drifting ominously, only to disappear in a squall of torrential blackness, a wild roiling black hole of sound, that eventually dissipates, allowing the harsh vokills to slip to the fore, then the buried rhythms, but again, it all bleeds into an extended sprawl of black metal murk, woozy and blown out, blurry and dense, trailing off into a cloud of grim black energy. This reissue tacks on the 20 minute "The Power To Condemn", which opens with some seriously ominous abject ambience, swirling winds, some creepy scraping (bones dragged on stone?), creaking, rumbles, all laced with strange sonic shimmer, soon voices drift in, demonic whispers, in the distance keening feedback, we were steeling ourselves for the band to launch into some caustic black buzz, but it never happens, this is all ambient, although about halfway through, some deep low end thrum surfaces, pocked with strange pulsations, and eventually, some proper buzz swoops in, but it's way low in the mix, sounding off in the distance, not black buzz so much as glacial tar pit ooze, downtuned rumbles, slo-mo riffage bleeding into black blurs, a SUNNO)))-like dirge, which soon blossoms into something blacker and noisier, a swirling squall of harrowing, hellish howls and churning blackness, darkly psychedelic and hauntingly harsh, the sounds seem to melt and fade before our ears, gradually settling into a low level feedback drenched thrum, before finally fading out completely. Swank packaging too, housed in an oversized black matte envelope, sealed with a printed sticker, inside, two printed inserts, and two printed clear plastic transparencies, probably SUPER LIMITED too, so don't dawdle...

MPEG stream: Bled Thy Likeness
MPEG stream: Murmur
MPEG stream: The Power To Condemn

The sound of this Bay Area blackmetal / blacknoise duo-turned-trio continues to evolve, and in surprising directions on this, their latest in a flurry of extremely limited releases over the last year. Beginning life as purveyors of dense speaker shredding noise, informed by, but not necessarily sounding much like, black metal, it seemed more a case of black metal riffs buried beneath sheets of white noise and crumbling industrial detritus, and blast beats recorded on a crappy cassette tape and played back through a Walkman, and again, buried beneath a punishing wall of sound. But with every record, the sounds seem more composed, perhaps less antagonizingly harsh, with more time spent creating atmospheres and ambience, than actually buzzing and blasting, which again is the case on Larvae. The opening track, begins with 3+ minutes of shimmery ominous ambience, laced with strange insectoid clicks, the guitars, when they do surface, unfurl soft strummed streaks of chordal whir, beneath which lush swells undulate drowsily, it's at about the 4 minute mark, that the song splinters, and explodes in a dense blurred barrage of furious murky black buzz, that while heavy, is also soft focus enough that it nearly has more in common with Tim Hecker or folks like that, until the group crank up the sound once again, and it becomes full on black metal, that lasts less than a minute, and the band return to the haunting drift that opened the record, before one final time, blasting through the last two minutes, the guitars a black blur, the vocals a fierce monstrous bellow, the drums, if there are any, buried in the mix, a heaving wash of noise drenched heaviness, that manages to be massive, but still weirdly textural. The relatively brief second track applies the group's corrosive crunch and black atmospheres to something much more dirgey and dismal, a churning industrial tinged creep, the sounds blown out and in-the-red, a tangle of black noise / white noise and industrial crush somehow sculpted into a lumbering black doom, peppered with squalls of blaring FX drenched ear shredding skree, but also underpinned by all manner of layered drones and disembodied voices. The final track, clocks in at a whopping 15 minutes, and again, finds the band easing into it, unfurling a hushed bit of blackened dronescaping, again flecked with strange clicks and skitterings, the guitars drift in, this time sounding like some sort of Appalachia, draped over streaks of muted crumbling crunch, the song sprawling out into an epic chunk of black folk drift, tangled voices, swirls of hiss and thrum, all wreathing the steel string buzz of the acoustic guitar, until at about the ten minute mark, everything is swallowed up by an avalanche of frenzied black buzz and frantic riffing, so dense and tangled that again, sans headphones the riffs all bleed into one thick roiling cloud of sound, eventually coalescing into an almost classic metal sounding chug, a murky hypnotic dirge that churns malevolently to the record's end. Both the cd and the lp come in super swank, and gorgeously designed packaging, the artwork abstract in all blacks and greys, with the text printed in clear spot varnish ink, designed by Sutekh Hexen member Kevin Gan Yuen and Dwid Hellion from hardcore legends Integrity. The cd is limited to 500 copies, the lp is already sold out and out of print, so these are the last vinyl copies we'll be able to get...

MPEG stream: Isvar Savasana
MPEG stream: La Det Bli Lys

Finally, the debut full length from this Bay Area black metal / blacknoise duo, who in recent months have garnered a whole lot of hype, based on a flurry of killer (albeit insanely limited) releases, and a recent West Coast tour, which found the duo playing outside of the Bay Area for the first time ever. And while we've raved about everything we could get our hands on from these guys, this is definitely the band's finest moment, albeit, weirdly their least noisy. But noisiness is all relative. Cuz this is still plenty noisy, it's just compared to some of their previous releases, and their blistering liver performances, this stuff is far removed from that black metal Merzbow sonic attack that defined their early days. Here, the noise takes a backseat to the black metal, which is actually a good thing, the riffing, and prerecorded blast beats, weaving a woozy washed out buzzscape, which on their own, would make the sound a sort of soft focus Wold, all washed out and blackly buzzy, but over this blackened foundation, the duo add heapings of noise, the vocals, processed to oblivion, sound like gouts of white hot buzz, more guitars, extra layers of blackness, it's as if the black metal core is at the center of a swirling cloud of jagged, caustic blacknoise, the two seeming to function independently for the most part, but the band create dramatic dynamics with the twisted mix, which finds, various elements dropping out, only to erupt and explode back into action moments later, or the black metal riffing getting fused to the blacknoise creating a harsh wall of sound, which just as quickly separates leaving the blast and buzz to pound furiously, shadowed by streaks of hiss and hum, the sounds dramatically stereo panned too for further twisted effect. The stretches of ambience are darkly effective, as are the weirdly mournful clean guitar parts, the band obviously capable of creating mood and mystery, and when the buzz kicks in, none of that mood or mystery is lost, instead, it's absorbed into the frenzied black chaos which transforms the sound into something more than noise, more than black metal, it's a darkly epic, strangely textured assemblage of buzz and blast, howl and pound, the sound a living black entity, sonic chaos given form, this is the real transcendental black metal, all should be worshipping before the altar of the priests of Sutekh Hexen. LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!!

MPEG stream: The Great Whore
MPEG stream: In Worship, They Weep His Name

This local black metal / drone-noise duo have been cranking out recordings like crazy, not that you would ever know it, as all of them were released as lavishly packaged, outrageously limited cassettes (and all in batches of something like 50 copies). Finally, the band seem to be making waves beyond the WAY underground, and a comprehensive reissue campaign is under way, as well as a whole spate of about-to-drop new releases. But THIS, this is the first recording we've been able to get from these guys to list, and fans of noise drenched blackness, and super distorted psychedelic heaviness will be in heaven (hell?). A blasting, blown out, ultraviolent blend of raw, primitive black metal buzz, dense drones, lysergic psychedelic atmosphere and caustic abrasive blacknoise, these two tracks require iron ears, a black soul and preferably some headphones to get lost in SH's bizarre black cacophony. "Bled Thy Likeness" is a blurred and muted expanse of crackly, staticky black thrum, murky and muddy, a writhing, swirling sprawl of hazy washed out minor key riffage, laced with streaks of soaring guitars woven into a background of distorted black ambience, eventually exploding into a whitenoise drenched blast of heaving, crumbling, ultra distorted blackdrone crush, hellish shrieked vokills smeared into undulating sheets of Merzbowian buzz, all underpinned by a haunting monkish chantlike melody, adding a strange bit of melancholy mystery to the harsh hellish buzz. "Murmur" is just as intense, a wild frenzied blown out assault of fierce and fucked up blacknoise chaos, the shrieked vox distorted and processed into another layer of furious buzz, tangled up in the frenzied berserker riffing, the whole sound a twisted, gnarled tangle of face melting, ear shredding, soul shearing fury, the song somehow blossoming part way through into something subtly more melodic, the blacknoisebuzz and grim black-blast infused with a strangely lush and warm melodic undercurrent, a deep sonic swell, rife with epic black metal majesty, but nearly suffocated by the caustic clouds of brittle buzz and in-the-red roar overhead. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES. Super striking, thick black and white jackets, and printed on nice heavy vinyl...

MPEG stream: Bled Thy Likeness
MPEG stream: Murmur

This latest batch of tapes from local label Merz Tapes finds the label expanding and rebranding, now known as Merzbild, and no longer limiting themselves to cassettes. It is however this most recent batch of cassettes we're here to discuss. In this case, it's this collaboration between SF black metal / blacknoise outfit Sutekh Hexen, and long time Nurse With Wound collaborator Andrew Liles. There would be a time when Liles remixing a black metal band would seem crazy, but the fact is that at this point, SH are really only tangentially black metal, as they spend much of their time weaving dense dronescapes, or sculpting bursts of feral ear splitting noise into tense and intense walls of blown out sound, granted, there's still plenty of blast and buzz, but it's often obfuscated and recontextualized. Each side of this tape seems to offer up both the original track, and then Liles' reworking. On the A side, SH unfurl a dense blurred rumble, peppered with muted bombastic thuds, and subterranean pulses, buried voices, and a tranced out sprawl of undulating layers, blacks and greys, haunting and harrowing, a sound that's bleak and abject, the perfect launching point for Liles, who takes that track and stretches it from a little under 6 minutes, to almost 18, making the focal point a haunting, reverbed piano, drifting in soft billowing clouds of what we take to be the original track, letting the occasional drum blat leap out, or spidery tendrils of industrial buzz, gnarled tangles of voices speaking in tongues, and then suddenly, at about 10 minutes in, the song is transformed into what sounds like a sort of industrial rock? Chugging metallic guitars, big drums, all over that churning Sutekh brood, there's even some psychedelic guitar leads, unclear if somehow those sounds were buried in the original track, or if Liles just went nuts and essentially turned SH, at least briefly, into a weird industrial metal band, but then suddenly, it all fades away, leaving the track to slither ominously to the end, trailing a cloud of buzzing detritus in its wake. Wow. The flipside finds SH exploding right out of the gate with a blurred blast of black buzz, murky and swirling and dizzyingly dense, before settling into another long sprawl of black ambient drift, much more haunting, abstract and serene. And again Liles takes SH's 5 minutes and more than doubles it, the whole thing, a brooding blackened driftscape, the tones oozing and rife with what sounds like some sort of demonic chorale, a blurred black raga, laced with sheets of harsh noise, jagged shards of processed vocal hiss, building to an impossibly dense and noisy, speaker destroying crescendo, that sounds like multiple Herman Nitsch compositions playing at once, atonal, droned out, and weirdly mesmerizing, underpinned by what sounds like organ or calliope, the vibe very cinematic, the sound collapses into a cacophony of smashing bottles, before beginning the slow build again, this time to a blown out, smeary drone, seemingly constructed from the blast and buzz of the original, but here recast as something more Tim Hecker like, massive crumbling distorted swells, and granular sheets of sound rife with melodic murk, gradually collapsing into a strange stuttering digital freakout, and one final burst of smashing glass. Super sweet packaging, printed silver-on-smoky-clear tapes, reflective silver on swirly green and black J-cards.

MPEG stream: We Once Walked Upon These Coals (...To Save Us From Satan's Power Mix)
MPEG stream: Selling Light to Lesser Gods (He Is Risen Mix)

The name of this 'group' might not be familiar to you, it wasn't to us, even though this is Suum Cuique's second album. SC is in fact Miles Whittaker, whose name you also might not recognize, but he is in fact one half of aQ faves, the hauntological electronic duo Demdike Stare, but Suum Cuique, while sharing some sonic similarities with Demdike, is very much its own beast, with Whittaker recording straight from the mixing board, using only analog equipment and almost no edits or overdubs. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell, but it does lend the sounds of Suum Cuique a sort of raw urgency and an old school primitivism that is definitely missing from Demdike records. The record begins with a wild squall of spacey synths before slipping into a long sprawl of skittery primitive drum machine driven space kraut, wreathed in metallic shimmers. The record gradually drifts towards a more reverbed soft noise collage, peppered with rhythmic pulsations, the sounds oozing into blackened drones, abstract percussive workouts, and finally, finishing up the A side with a looped sounding stretch of hypnotic murk, al buried sine tones and rumbling crumbling whirs, sounding quite a bit like Philip Jeck. The flipside is equally all over the map, starting off with a churning doomy electronic dirge, that gradually dissipates into an ominous ambience before transforming into some hazy hauntological dronescapery, only to splinter into a serious blast of super distorted blown out Our Love Will Destroy The World style rhythmic noisiness, all looped and layered, gnarled and tangled, only to finally fade out in a cloud of cosmic FX shimmer. LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!

Two new Utech's this list, and that's something to be stoked about, 'cause the label rarely disappoints, if ever. This one's from Japanese guitarist Suzuki Junzo, who's played in Tokyo flashbacking psych rock bands like Overhang Party, Miminokoto, and Astral Travelling Unity, though here he's solo, just him and his guitar and the black void. Yes, it can be bleak and ominous... but pretty, calm, mesmeric, too. There's four long tracks, beginning with the 20-minute title track, inspired by bluesman Lonnie Johnson's "Blue Ghost Blues"... though again, this isn't blues. Something far darker. For the first half, it could be a folky James Blackshaw on luudes kind of thing... then it enters eerie ambient suspense soundtrack territory... before around the 12 minute mark when Junzo puts the pedal to the metal and his amp begins to howl and fry Keiji Haino style. For reals, for Rallizes. Track two, "Beyond The Yellow Clouds", is 11 minutes of dark shimmering drone bliss, segueing smoothly into the disc's shortest (8:33) but most badass track, its title a tribute to the Pink Fairies, "Shivering Larry's Last Freakout", totally monomaniacal, distortodelic, repetitive riffarma that comes across like one of Tetuzi Akiyama's brilliant/dumb "Don't Forget To Boogie" cuts mixed maybe with some NWOFHM (Circle) stuff, frantic primitive minimalist ZZ Haino in a wind tunnel action - damn! Then as a comedown, chillout, final piece, there's 13 more minutes of ghostly guitar grind, a la Ulaan Khol or Li Jianhong, "Studies For Three Broken Canes Of Dr. Dream", that lives up to its fantastic title, whatever that means. We like, but we'll be queuing up ol' Shivering Larry again in a second, that's the jam! Utech wins again with this one - grab a copy and put on your shades and enjoy. Limited to 300 copies only. And as usual with Utech stuff, packaged in a nice oversized sleeve. The artwork's mostly black, the only image, a half-seen Junzo holding his ghostly guitar. He's NOT wearing shades, which seems strange.

MPEG stream: Ode To A Blue Ghost
MPEG stream: Shivering Larry's Last Freakout
MPEG stream: Studies For Three Broken Canes Of Dr. Dream

Keiji Haino, Takashi Mizutani, Munehiro Narita, Kawabata Makoto... these are (some of) the gods of Japanese psych guitar. Add Suzuki Junzo to the list, if you haven't already. He's quickly becoming one of our faves, for blacker-than-blues guitar/feedback wrangling. Back with another solo disc for the always-on-it (and out-there) experimental Utech label, Junzo, who has played guitar for such bands as Overhang Party and Miminokoto, delivers a gorgeous, darkly entrancing mixture of both noisy, heavy-duty distorto drone whoosh and quietly lovely acoustic atmospheres. Regarding the former, the epically titled (and epic otherwise as well) opener "When The Grey Skies Turns Into Blood Red" launches right into a session of wind-tunnel psych guitar grind, tumbling end-over-end with skittering percussion accompaniment to match, courtesy of Junzo's colleague Ikuro Takahasi (LSD-March, ex-Fushitsusha, etc.). That 15 minutes and 15 seconds of amp-worship improv is beautiful in its way, as is the quite contrasting next track (and title cut), Junzo shifting gears for an intimate acoustic reverie, a la James Blackshaw or Jack Rose. Junzo is back to laying on the ghostly reverb (and some whispery hushed vocals too) with track 3, "La Notte", and the freely-textural percussion returns as well. That one's lovely enough, but then the finale, at 17 minutes even more epic than the opener (and with an even more epic title, too: "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible Tower In The Ring Of Holy Mountain") takes us a way on a tremulous trip of slow sad strum and minimalistic string buzz. Tune in, zone out. Yeah, another very nice one from our man Junzo!! In the usual swank Utech packaging.

MPEG stream: When The Grey Skies Turns Into Blood Red
MPEG stream: La Notte

For whatever reason, the recordings of Akio Suzuki are not easy to come by. Most of the output from this visionary Japanese instrument builder and improviser have quietly emerged and quickly disappeared. So this very subtle and very delicate 2003 improvisation with David Toop from the good folks at Sound 323 in London certainly caught our attention. One of Suzuki's most well known instruments is his collection of stone flutes, and the sounds from these instruments feature prominently in this set with David Toop. These curious objects product an eerie and ancient sound whose rasping whistles and watery trills embody an earthiness that predates the nomenclature from the history of music. Suzuki matches these sounds with delicate scrapes and textures from a couple of cymbals and a handful of small rocks. Toop does his best to articulate similar gestures within the purely acoustic improv strategies of the New London Silence school which developed in parallel Bernhard Gunter / Lowercase aesthetic of very quite electro-acoustic music and out of the late period works from AMM. For better or for worse, some of Toop's elements speak of a particular time and of a particular place (e.g. London, 2003) whereas Suzuki's offerings are beautifully non-specific in their cultural references. At other times, the two spiral metallic textures and softened drones of feedback with whirring flute glissandos, which all quietly float out of periodic silences. We've been told that during one of the quieter moments in the session, a woman next door can be heard singing in the bath. But like Suzuki's previous Kogezan Koukiji of temple improvisations recorded against a backdrop of a dramatic rainstorm, we've been thwarted in hearing these sounds by the patter of a springtime rainstorm and the constant blur of traffic sounds on Valencia Street. We're pretty sure Suzuki would be okay with those interruptions.

MPEG stream: Breath Taking (excerpt 1)
MPEG stream: Breath Taking (excerpt 2)

Daisuke Suzuki is mostly known as the proprietor of Siren Records in Japan, home to some amzing drone records from the likes of Jonathan Coleclough and Andrew Chalk (including the universally acclaimed "Sumac" album). But Daisuke has also contributed sound works on occasion to Ora (the loose collective of Chalk, Darren Tate, Colin Potter, Coleclough, and others). "D.D.D." marks

The name sure sounds like one of those Norwegian black metal bands we like so much, doesn't it? Well, Svalastog are indeed from Norway, but they're not a black metal band. Definitely not. (Though we'd love to hear what a black metal band on Rune Gramofon would be like!) This could go under an electronica/experimental/just-a-wee-bit-folk category, we'd suppose. Svalastog (who is actually a he not a they, being one guy, Per Henrik Svalastog) has taken several traditional Norwegian folk instruments -- very old fashioned indeed, primitive even, including a ram's horn (Bukkehorn) and a cow's horn (Kuhorn, duh), and also a Norwegian zither called a Harpeleik that apparently belonged to his grandfather -- and played them into his computer, chopping and looping and processing them into glitchily rhythmic, swooping, loping electronica. The idea, to bring the sounds of the rustic Nordic past into the modern musical laboratory of bits and bytes, clicks and cuts, works pretty darn well we'd say. This is moody, mysterious, also quite lively and lovely. Given the concept behind this, we -might- have hoped for something a little -less- processed and smoothed-out, a little more obviously "outdoorsy" or ancient-sounding, than what we get here, if only this wasn't so nice and soothing the way it is!

MPEG stream: Mouse Tracking
MPEG stream: Cow Goat Goat

Fresh off his collaboration with Aidan Baker and Andrea Belfi as B/B/S, Norway's Erik Skodvin aka Svarte Greiner outdoes himself on this one, one of the most "miasmatic" of the releases on his own Miasmah label yet. Doomiest anyway. And while some doom or dooom or dooooOOOOOoooom relies on heavy, highly amplified guitar riffs and anguished (or Ozzyish) vokills, Svarte G has none of that, pure instrumental atmosphere instead, drones and tones and ominous percussive sounds only, stately and suspenseful, "acoustic doom" he calls it and it IS. Seriously, imagine your most bummed out session of existential "why am I here, what is life about" angst, this is the soundtrack, but one that somehow finds the radiant beauty in that mood. Mood being doom spelled backwards as we all know, and Svarte Greiner has it both ways. Two long tracks, "Black Tie" and "White Noise" (hmm, is he a Bowie fan?), each 20+ minutes, both slowly unfolding, strangely soothing, yet total void-embracing, never-to-awake-or-return sonic nihil. How does he conjure such blissful darkness, with sudden soft-edged reverberating crashing chords interspersed amidst sparse, quietly textural soundfields? Sure probably with a piano or cello, guitar, synth and effects and other mundane everyday musical gear; but the results sound like they're sourced not from within an instrument or a computer but within the inner spaces of your own mind and (damned?) soul, for good or ill, the way you might, in a isolation tank, listen to your own heartbeat or bleakest unspoken thoughts and feelings, gaining solace from the blurred continuum of self and non-self. Whatever that means, but that's the sort of thing that the music of Svarte Greiner makes us ponder, and THAT at least should mean something. If you're already a fan, and so many are for good reason, then that this gets the eyes closed, zoned out, thumbs up from us should be enough, get it, it's another transcendent slab of Svarte Greiner's cinematic downer drone loveliness. Also recommended to anyone into other Misamah soundscapes, Deaf Center and the like, stuff on Type too. Those still on the outside looking in, take a chance on crossing over and sink into this, it will sink into you.

MPEG stream: Black Tie
MPEG stream: White Noise

Another super limited vinyl only missive, broadcast as always from some dark sonic underworld, courtesy of the man known as Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin to his mother), following the equally haunting and mysterious Man Beard Dress lp from the end of last year. As we've mentioned before, this is doom. But not doom as you know it. Not heavy and crushing and downtuned and distorted, instead, spectral and ghostlike, abstract and ambient, doom in vibe, intention, spirit, as much as in sound. It's not about riffs or beats, it's about mood and space and soul, and taking a cold hard look through the cracks into the crumbling wasteland that lies inside all of us. The opening track deviates from SG's usual M.O., taking the soft blackened shimmers and distant foghorn like drones, and adding a layer of grit, a swirling skree reminiscent of Skullflower or Sunroof! Like rattling chains, or bits of rusty metal falling from decaying structures, this extra element turns acoustic doom into something far more harrowing, a soundtrack to the descent, of slick stone walls and flickering grey lights, of black clouds obscuring burning skies, everything fading to nothing as the music lowers us deeper and deeper into the abyss. The second track is a bit less harsh, more spacious and sprawling, skeletal, soft swells of moaning minimalism drift through a wide open expanse of far away throbs, and muted pulses, ghostly voices lurk beneath the surface, the slow motion sound of decay and despair, pretty, but ominous, and sinister, and beautifully bleak. The flipside begins with another soundscape of space and soft sound, like a super abstract ambient Wolf Eyes, bits of feedback are streaked through hushed black whispers, creaking industrial whir wraps itself around desiccated barely there melodies, the sound of wandering through an empty and dead city, smashed windows like black eyes looking down from above, splintered doors like gaping mouths, the sky unleashing a cleansing rain of soft hiss, doing very little to combat the emptiness and loneliness evoked by Svarte Greiner's delicate doomic drift. And finally, the record fades to black with the doomiest (and weirdly enough, prettiest) track of the bunch, a soft focus smear of effected black guitar shimmer, blurred into a throbbing dronescape, rife with fragmented melody and soft edged buzz, a strange and warm, almost ebullient sonic center, glowing faintly beneath the roiling lowend, a smoldering, crumbling, shadowy,and quite lovely doomdrone coda... Beautiful full color covers, pressed on thick vinyl, and once again, WAY LIMITED!!!

Svarte Greiner is doom. Well, sort of. Maybe acoustic doom is more like it. And this very well may be the first time we've heard a record, or an artist that perfectly captures the sound and mood of the hitherto unexplored world of acoustic doom. Svarte Greiner is the solo guise of Norwegian soundmaker Erik Skodvin, who, when he is NOT Svarte Greiner, channels his less doomy musical emotions into an outfit called Deaf Center. But the dark and doomy loveliness of Svarte Greiner is what we're most concerned with here. And the reason for that is that the music of SG is practically perfect. It's like that sound in our heads we've been imagining for ages but had never actually heard. Until now. The sticker on the cd namedrops Earth, Angelo Badalamenti and Volcano The Bear, which sounds interesting for sure, but doesn't nearly capture how beautiful and wonderfully creepy this stuff is. Imagine the music of past AQ faves like Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Xela, Part Timer, that crumbling, hiss drenched loveliness, but then filter it through some dreary drowsy slowcore, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore or Low, but then loop it and process it and pull it apart until it becomes even more fuzzy and hypnotic, a Basinski or Tim Hecker produced bedroom dark ambient doomfolk record from Bohren perhaps? Sounds impossible, but Knive is all that and still somehow more. From the first track, we were totally hooked. It's like the soundtrack to some ultra abstract black and white film, unearthed and projected in all its decayed and degraded glory. Everything is shrouded in shadow, shades of black and grey, back lit and rendered soft and indistinct. The mood is minor key and ominous. Very epic and cinematic, but somehow still understated and subtle. But definitely scary. And evil. But not overtly so. The record is bathed in tape hiss and record crackle and all sorts of gorgeously textured recording inconsistencies. It's some impossible tangle of mournful slowcore, twentieth century minimalism, and creeping doomy dirge, all deconstructed into abstract and skeletal, Basinski like soundscapes. Strings scrape and squeak, in the distance drift muted percussive thumps. Each track is a droning smear of sound, peppered with bits of random sonic clatter, everything wreathed in smokey cello swells, and soft swoonsome strings. Guitars drenched in reverb offer up the slightest of melodies, riffs are unfurled and left suspended in in clouds of dreamy fuzz, allowed to slowly fade to nothingness. There are melodies, but they develop at a snail's pace, notes stretched to their breaking point, becoming miniature drones of their own, but when viewed from afar, are actually gorgeously rendered, and evoke dark feelings of despair and further define Svarte Greiner's sonic world of wonder. Elsewhere, gristled guitar distortion is dripped onto spare expanses of late night percussion, bells and chimes reverberate over a dense sea of swirling tape hiss, ambient backdrops sometimes surface briefly, rising up through the murk, wind, footsteps, the call of crows soaring far overhead, and amidst it all, haunting female vocals that drift amidst the decayed ruins, small glimmers of light in a world of utter black, giving Knive even more of an emotional intensity. So goddamn good.

MPEG stream: The Boat Was My Friend
MPEG stream: Ocean Out Of Wood
MPEG stream: My Feet, Over There

Another fantastic document of Svarte Greiner's abstract ambient acoustic doom. Not doom in the traditional sense, but more a sort of darkly mysterious, slow motion sprawl that shares a mood and sprit with doom music, although sonically it falls more in line with the free noise limited cd-r crowd. This super limited lp captures three long tracks, that all seem to flow together into one epic (or they would if it didn't require flipping the record over), groaning strings, splattery percussion lay out a sort of free jazz / abstract folk drift, fluttery woodwinds, bits of rumble and shimmer, all billow out into a skeletal dronemusic, spare and spacious, that builds in intensity, becoming a brooding slow burning almost post rock, culminating in a thick wash of blurred buzz and textured low end whir, heavy and hypnotic, a little psychedelic and spacey. The flipside begins with a field recording, or what sounds like one, beneath which lurks barely audible tones, shimmery strings strange vocalizations, bleating horns, all super minimal and way off in the distance, eventually all coalescing into a placed stretch of minimal ambience, deep ominous rumbles crumble beneath glassy expanses of glassy glimmer, until finally, another thick guitar heavy drone surfaces, turning he track into a near static downtuned dirge, not metallic, more dense and layered and lush, shot through with streaks of feedback and chunks of looped buzz, crumbling and roiling and slowly fading out. So beautiful. Definitely for fans of Aidan Baker, Xela, Acre, Tunnels, Fear Falls Burning, RST, The North Sea, and other masters of dark droning ambience. Incredible packaging too, two tone printing on heavy chipboard sleeves, LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES.

Latest, crazy limited release from our of our favorite modern purveyor of doom-folk. A genre that seems to have been created specifically to describe the dark, mysterious moodiness this guy creates. And Penpals Forever is no different, beginning with a flurry of percussive guitar thrum, tons of reverb and buzz, a shimmering black forest of metallic shimmer and deep rumbles, all woven into what up close is a dizzying swirl of sound, but step back and the pattern is evident, a slow sprawling minor key melody, a haunting horror movie creep. A roiling black sea of huge slabs of glacial low end, that blot out the sun, swallowing the various guitars beneath it, moving like massive deathships, the shadows only allowing brief glimpses of the melody beneath. Truly ominous and cinematic. Eyes closed, these are the kind of sounds that would give the weak hearted nightmares, while the rest of us luxuriate in its thick blackened drone drenched buzz. Glorious.� LIMITED TO ONLY 150 COPIES. Sold out and out of print at the label. Packaged with a metallic silver and black insert, with metallic silver labels on the tape.

This long out of print cassette, from one of our favorite practitioners of gorgeous and haunting grimdrone doomfolk, finally reissued on cd and vinyl! And with a whole extra chunk of unreleased music... Penpals Forever proper begins with a flurry of percussive guitar thrum, tons of reverb and buzz, a shimmering black forest of metallic shimmer and deep rumbles, all woven into what up close is a dizzying swirl of sound, but step back and the pattern is evident, a slow sprawling minor key melody, a haunting horror movie creep. A roiling black sea of huge slabs of glacial low end, that blot out the sun, swallowing the various guitars beneath it, moving like massive deathships, the shadows only allowing brief glimpses of the melody beneath. Truly ominous and cinematic. Eyes closed, these are the kind of sounds that would give the weak hearted nightmares, while the rest of us luxuriate in its thick blackened drone drenched buzz. The unreleased bonus tracks, which are like a whole 'nother record tacked on, are just as good as the original tape. Three long tracks, all flowing together, the first a Philip Jeck like creepscape, all woozy and otherworldly, warbly tones, warped guitar buzz, everything stretched and smeared into languorous layers, while a fog of distant melody hovers in the distance, peppered with soft focus harmonies, drifting and reflective. Which gives way to a thick heady swirl of muted fuzz and slowed down sound, like some mysterious cityscape field recording played at 16rpm and wreathed in a haze of drone and buzz. Until finally the side finishes off with another smoldering dronescape, beginning quietly, while layers of grinding distorted guitars unfurl heaving blackened whirs and rumbles over a backdrop of streaked feedback and strange sounds buried in the murk.

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Two more brief blasts of creepy crawly doom folk from former AQ record of the week-ers Svarte Greiner. Packaged in a plain white sleeve, with a weird cartoony ghost screen printed on the plain white label, these two tracks are just as dark and delightfully doomy as anything on the full length. Abstract low end moans, disembodied strings, a creaking abandoned sonic ship, a haunted house of sound, crumbling distortion and little bits of melody creep along through wide expanses of space. Lurching forward in slow motion doomy bursts, like Bohren with all the jazz sucked out, each song stretched out into barely discernible rhythms. It almost sounds like a recording of an orchestra tuning up, slowed waaaaaay down and stretched out into some sort of abstract acoustic classical doom. Awesome.

This long in the works vinyl project finally sees the light of day, and the results are more fantastic and striking, both sonically and visually, than we could ever have imagined. We'd been hearing about this series of boxed sets of vinyl records, each with one side of music, one side of field recordings, a sort of physical extension and manifestation of a long running podcast, both the podcast, and these lps, an experiment in the art of listening. Cool to now have the first few installments in stock (however briefly). Each lp is limited to 300 copies, comes housed in an oversized box, with a gorgeous actual photographic print affixed to the cover, inside a metallic inked, letter pressed insert. You have to see them to believe them, well worth the price, as they are visually stunning, and the music is breathtaking. Of the three initial volumes in the A Room Forever vinyl boxset series, The Svarte Greiner seems to be the one generating the most attention. Which makes perfect sense when you finally get to see, and hold and especially hear this amazing piece of sound and art. Svarte Greiner handles both the music side, and the field recording side, the music darkly mysterious and quite lovely as always, but the field recording side a strange blend of both. More on that in a second. The A side, begins all deep and glimmering, a lush hushed ambience, warm shimmers, softly moaning strings, distant streaks of whir and muted melody, the sound feels underwater, underground, lots of delay and reverb, mournful super minimal pizzicato melodies, low end rumble, deep and ominous and mysteriously beautiful. The second half of the A side is super tranquil and spare, soft washes of sound drifting in and out, warm chords, fragments of reverbed melody, all very soft and sweetly hushed. Definitely not as doomy as past releases, but much more hushed and haunting. The field recording side here is quite strange, but in a way that is endlessly appealing, beginning with a sea of crackle, of record static, hiss and pops, fuzz and buzz, while WAY beneath the surface, deep tones whir and rumble, later on, there appears much more distinctive clatter, thumps, and bumps and rattles, all the while, a dreamy dronemusic seems to drift and pulse beneath the layer of static and hum, it may be a field recording, but to our ears it's the sound of the A side of this disc, being played on a dusty old Victrola, in a garage or a workshop, while someone tinkers and shuffles about, the whole thing recorded on an old wax cylinder. A gloriously fuzzy and crackly expanse of field recorded dronemusic for sure. So excellent. The cover photo is fantastic, an overexposed, washed out image of branches, in bright oranges and reds, looking like some sort of lava flow, the insert is gold ink on letter pressed textured black paper. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. We got a LOT of these, but a bunch were pre-ordered and were spoken for before we even got them in, the rest are going fast, and once the batch we got is gone, we most likely will be unable to get any more�

These two aQ faves spent several months touring together, and would finish off each show with a collaborative jam, one of which is captured here, in two parts. The first is all deep blackened shimmer, soft swells of feedback, dark rumbling pulsations, bleak and austere, laced with shards of high end melody, and softly grinding whirs. The second part is much more delicate, breathless and hushed, distant hums and keening fragmented melodies. Both sides are dark and beautiful, abstract and droney, and definitely remind us of Jasper TX and Machinefabriek. Nice stuff. Housed in a plain black sleeve, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!

Another special limited Record Store Day release that we managed to get enough of to review and list post RSD. Aquarius faves Svarte Greiner deliver another dark gem, ominous strings woven into a sweeping cinematic soundscape, laced with plucks and scrapes, distant keening high end tones, plucked pizzicato melodies, a bit like a symphony tuning, transformed into some haunting and harrowing ambience, tense and intense, the creeping low end thrum hovering beneath clouds of cymbal shimmer and splattery percussion, all blurred and smeared into a hazy sprawl of dark sonic mesmer. The flipside come courtesy of a band we'd never heard before, but who definitely exist in the same space as SG, which is obviously why they're sharing this 7", their sound is a lot like SG's only with much of the darkness peeled back, leaving just the hum of strings, and a minimal orchestral arrangement of plucked melodies and drifting chords, that is until the sudden surprise of a super distorted, crumbling doom riff, wrapped in a warped production, the sound is suddenly caustic and crunchy, the second 'movement' finds that riffage reigned in and transformed into a tense dronescape of rumbling metallic guitar buzz and longform Niblockian tones, all wreathed in streaks of feedback and underpinned by buried melodies and slow shimmering textures. Definitely need to hear more from these guys (this guy?). Once again, this was a Record Store Day release, we have a tiny handful left, it's unclear whether once these are sold if we'll be able to get more, so your best bet is to act fast and grab one before they're gone!

We had never heard Canadian black metal horde Svetovid before, but we got this, their debut full length, from the same place we got recent BM cassette faves from Surt, Sunchariot, Gnieu, and Lascowiec, so were pretty excited to check them out, and weren't sure what to expect from the haunting acoustic folk intro, a lilting and slightly stumbling bit of Appalachian sounding fingerpicked melancholia, which lead directly into an avalanche of crumbling blackness, a swirling, whirling wall of sound, infused with a surprising amount of melody, the drums buried in the mix, the vocals a reverbed croak, but the guitars, dense and lush and layered, and while buzzy, almost more soaring and shimmery, the blackbuzz blossoming into something almost shoegazey, that minus the vox, might be something you'd hear on Starlight Temple Society. Blissed out blackened heaviness that is as poppy as it is buzzy, whether it's intentional or not, but we're digging it a LOT. And actually, maybe not all of the record is that poppy or blissed out, once we got done listening to that first track about ten times, the sound gets darker and meaner, chugging and churning, the vocals a sinister monstrous bellow, but somehow, the sound is still melodic, almost as if someone was used to the chordal structure of pop music, and was applying it to black metal, but the result is something grim and black, but warm and fuzzy and washed out, that track, not at all blasting, instead swirling and shimmery, the guitars tranced out and cyclical, the sound nearly psychedelic. We could go on and describe all the tracks here, but the sooner this review is done, the sooner we can strap on our Walkman, get away from this computer and dig in to the rest of this tape. LIMITED TO 320 COPIES! Each one hand numbered.

Yet another backroom discovery, found a stash of this mysterious missive from someone calling themselves Swagger Jack, some sort of hillbilly drunken pirate, armed with a busted up old acoustic guitar, a jaw harp, a harmonica, maybe some busted up old keyboards, but very little else. A little digging is all it takes to discover that Swagger Jack is in fact long time aQ fave / pal Antony Milton, head honcho of killer cd-r label PseudoArcana as well as a member of various awesome groops (The Stumps, AM, The Nether Dawn, Mrtyu, Glory Fckn Sun, etc.), but as Swagger Jack, Milton is in full on hillbilly/folk/bluegrass mode, laying down simple lilting chunks of slo-mo Appalachia, lo-fi and hazy, druggy and minimal, simple steel string buzz augmented by jaw harp twang, harmonica wheeze, some minimal percussion, and a ramshackle backing of creaking, groaning whir and shimmer. The whole record sounds as if it was recorded on a rickety old porch, or in a forest clearing, like a more songy Avarus, or Tower Recordings with a backwoods hillbilly twist, some Velvet Underground druggy drift stripped down and recast as some sort of Fahey-esque dronefolk, bits of classic NZ soundmakers like Roy Montgomery, The Clean, Alastair Galbraith, and the like, woven into rickety backwoods twang flecked drone laced zoner country ballads. Pretty incredible stuff for sure, listening to this now, we're sort of surprised more folks didn't go crazy for this, and surprised that we somehow missed listing this completely, but better late than never, gorgeous stuff, and way recommended.

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Brand new tape from LA's� indie headquarters, Not Not Fun, this time a debut cassette from SF's own Swanox.� We've seen a couple live sets from Anthony Bourch, aka Swanox, and he's also a regular here at aQ, so we're happy to finally give this stellar, drugged-out, cosmic-pop opus a home in our humble tape case. Dawnrunner unfolds with deep, distorted guitar ringing out into a wash of cavernous reverb, crumbling minor leads luring you further into utter darkness, sporadic riffs and low-end sizzle offer up the perfect dose of atmospheric haze.� A dash of light leaks from the cavern's end as a shimmering guitar line fades in, the piece shifts from dark to light as the sounds gradually grow into a dense cloud of Popul Vuh-ish bliss. Just when we thought Dawnrunner was solely instrumental, "Through the Alders" rolls along with looong, Daniel Higgs-type vocal chants, slightly discernible lyrics buried in layers of distorted organ (sort of reminds us of the organ on the recent German Oak album we featured last list), moments of spritely flute and layers of murky droning build into a wall of weirdness until a quickly picked, uplifting guitar lead lifts over the psychedelic wash, the perfect summit to this monolithic track. While there's a hefty dose of washed out weirdness and droning decay, there's also a catchy, pop undercurrent flowing throughout, each song perfectly crafted with just the right amount of structure, falling somewhere between Night Control and Flying Saucer Attack, definitely not your run-of-the-mill home spun tape.� Noisy, psychedelic and super distinct, this will no doubt satisfy your fill for far out, loner bedroom weirdness.�Limited to an edition of 100, you know these will be gone in no time, so don't miss out!

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. A beautiful and harrowingly dark cassette release from the mysterious new tape label, Caligulan! Based right here in not so sunny these days San Francisco, Caligulan brings the droney, woozy, doomy skull fuck sounds that make a tape head cringe with sorrowful delight! The Swanox side is one long track, called "Forests Of Pluto", and indeed sounds like an exploration of some alien, yet wooded planet. Deep and dark doomy folk, other worldly voices emmanating from blackened caves, the sounds of ancient trees creaking in the haunted winter winds, reverb drenched guitars plunked by some wraithy wood elf of the unspoiled natural landscape of old. The sounds of Swanox on this release are both haunting and contemplative, letting the mind drift off into the spectral world of tones. Spooky and strangely beautiful music! The Scraps Of Dogs side is also a dark beauty, but much nosier and much heavier. The first track, "Nag Hammadi" is sort of a metallic drift. The sounds of metal scraping against metal, churning and contorting itself into every changing sonic shapes. Bass tones rumble in a deathlike scree, creating beautifully distorted drones and thick swells of darkened texture. The second track, "Leave Your Body Behind", Is all fuzz and rumble. It sounds like an Orcish army on a death march, in blizzard conditions. The distorted textures undulate in a syncopated way, while more high end elements swirl around your head, like some cold blowing, northern wind. Drifting drones made up of thick fuzz and crackle, mixed up in some evil witch's cauldron, along with a few blackend frog gullets, filtered through the grimmest, most kult coffee machine you could imagine, till it fills your sonic pot with oozing nefarious soundscapes. The coffee machine of grimnity! The packaging on this fella is beautiful! Much like the Robedoor tape featured on this list, which is also on Caligulan, The cover is adorned with a gorgeous photo of the Northern Woods. More accurately the Pacific North Western woods, where these two doomy bummers originally hail from. The inside is spraypainted to look like some far off galaxy, and there's a beautiful handmade insert to boot! Along with this tape, and the Robedoor, we got the last 10 copies of this gem, so act now or forever hold your deathlike peace!!!

NOW REISSUED ON VINYL!!! While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years. At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking. Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointillist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did. And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely. And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...

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The latest masterpiece from these aQ-beloved musical misanthropes has moved well beyond the already boundary stretching sound of their previous album The Seer, and continues in a similar direction, shedding elements of song, and moving closer and closer to pure sound, with most of the tracks here unwinding like free form / free rock explorations, with only the barest hint of structure to keep them from drifting into utter shapelessness, but even then, whatever sonic constraints that are put in place, seem to be disregarded most of the time, the resulting records is hardly a rock record at all, but a gorgeous collection of brooding soundscapes, allowed to sprawl and ooze and drift and build, almost like an even more ephemeral / abstract Godspeed, and yet somehow, the tracks here are infused with an intensity, and sonic dread, that marks this as pure Swans. That said, the opener "Screen Shot" might be the most curious of all the tracks here, as it's centered around a baseline, and drum part that are without a doubt, bordering on 'funky', so much so that before we even heard the record, people we posting online that the new Swans sounded like Primus. Which weirdly enough just made us want to hear it more. And when we finally did, well, we could definitely see that, but only Primus slowed down and stretched out and infused with a terrifying malevolence, and really, that funkiness become something else in a matter of minutes, some mutant strain of grim grooving bunkurfunk, that sounds more to us like Skull Defekts, and Michael Gira's vocals a dead ringer from the shamanistic conjuring of Defekts collaborator Daniel Higgs, but before you know it, the song blossoms into something even more tripped out and psychedelic, a swirling piano loop, jagged shards of guitar, eventually exploding into a wild cacophony that could go on forever, but instead burns bright and quickly fades out. An intense, invigorating start to what just might be the best of the modern Swans records. There's not a track here that's less than 5 minutes, with the bulk closer to 15, and one clocking in at a stunning 34, and as mentioned above, they've done away with traditional compositional concerns, and have instead endeavored to craft their own modern minimalism, and it's truly stunning, from the slow core creep of "Just A Little Boy", that sounds a bit like the Necks via Woven Hand, but stretched out into one extended slow motion balladic dirge, laced with some truly terrifying vocals, to the atonal lope of "A Little God In My Hands", which sounds like multiple New Orleans jazz bands playing at once, before settling into a gorgeously creepy march, all glimmering electronics and swirling melodies, and some twisted call and response vocals. Then there's the record's centerpiece, the 34+ minute "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L' Ouverture", which lurches right out of the gate as maybe the most rocking song here, a lumbering drum heavy riff, that instead of turning into a song, just locks into an endless hypno-rock cycle, that you never want to end, and for a while, it seems like it never will, before eventually setting into another apocalyptic swampy creep (and again reminding us of Woven Hand), before beginning and epic, majestic slow build, a vocal chorale draped atop a dark cacophonous roar, that gets almost metallic before dissipating into a free rock sprawl, all long tones, and drones, moaned vocals, and warm electric piano shimmer, as well as some FX heavy percussion, and finally a wild freaked out psychedelic squall. Disc one ends with a hushed horror ballad, all moaning distant horns, and sinister vox, and atonal melodies swirling throughout. And most bands would hang it up there, but this is the Swans after all, so we're only halfway there. The second disc begins with a twisted bit of malformed Tom Waitsian weirdness, all groovy percussion, swirling junkyard ambience, and some strange vocals refrains, before erupting into some swampy garage rock swagger, slithery and sinister, distorted and psychedelic, the sound layered and dense and seriously fierce. From there on out, To Be Kind seems to open up into some sort of alternate universe rock opera, brooding ballad gives way to horn flecked death march dirge, wild kraut-funk groovery grows more and more atonal, pocked with elephant bleat blasts, and feral vocal bellows, long stretches of kosmische drift, and jazzy piano shimmer slowly evolve into another bout of swampy swagger, "Nathalie Neal", a piece that's drum driven and intense (and named for an aQ pal!), before finally finishing off with the title track, a haunting, subdued finale, all dramatic croons and whispery chordal drift, that bursts into a full on freakout, blistering arcs of distorted guitars wreathed around pounding drum damage, and billowing swirls of psychedelic noise, the rare piece of music that is as exhausting and exhilarating to hear, as it presumably is to play. Totally transcendent, dizzyingly ambitious, stunningly executed, and thus utterly and totally recommended. Creepy baby face cover art too! And, while they last, we've got the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a live dvd, featuring performances of several songs from this album along with renditions of "Coward" and "The Seer". That's if you get the double cd, your other option is the swank triple vinyl, but no dvd with that, but it does have a download.

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