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To be blunt, Asmus Tietchens is one of the many prolific experimentalists whose long career (begun in the '70s) hasn't really amounted to much of any great merit. Fortunately, there's at least one disc like "A-Menge" which makes up for all of those other inconsequential albums full of cheap beatboxes and out of key analogue knob twiddling. After so many failed attempts at mimicking the aural plasticity of composers like Vladimir Ussachevsky or Morton Subotnik, Tietchens finally got it right. On the three lengthy pieces, Tietchens slowly phases together layers of processed sine-waves and crystalline bleeps of granular synthesis. The trebly hypnosis spins in syncronicity with the inorganic whir of a mainframe computer's cooling fan or perhaps with the motion of tiny nanotechnic machines. The success of his debut for the Mille Plateaux sub-label is in the subtlety and delicacy in each of the gradual shifts of sound, that relates this work much closer to Bernhard Gunter than the clinical rigidity of the Raster kids. [/cat/experimental178.html]
This is the first in a massive 18 CD reissue campaign from Die Stadt of the German electronic music composer Asmus Tietchens.
"Adventures in Sound" documents some of the earliest recordings from Tietchens dating from 1965-1969. To the best of my knowledge, these had only been released in tiny private editions back in the day; but Tietchens may have transformed some of these on his seminal album "Formen Letzter Hausmusik" released by United Dairies in 1984. Working with two close friends Otto Becker (who to this day still helps with Tietchens' productions) and Hans Deiter Wohlmann, Tietchens offers a messy explosion of freeform experimentation into anti-structuralist streams of sound, playing both with the concepts of free jazz through loose psychedelic improvisations with guitar, flute, bass, piano, trumpet, drums, toy pianos, rubber bands, etc. and through primitive tape machine tricks (i.e. backwards masking, varispeed manipulation, rudimentary splicing, etc.). While not as well developed as Nurse With Wound or H.N.A.S., "Adventures In Sound" sounds not dissimilar to those projects' improv aesthetics, predating them by a good decade.
Originally released in 1980, "Nachtstucke" was the first major album for Tietchens despite his experimentations with music dating back to 1965. It was his one and only album for Egg Records, the shortlived division of Barclay in France specializing in progressive music (i.e. Christian Vander, Conrad Schnitzler, Popul Vuh, Vangelis, Roedelius, Heldon, etc.). This was the beginning of his 'pop' phase which lasted 4 albums, before announcing a dramatic shift towards electro-acoustic experimentation. With "Nachtstucke," he used rudimentary pop structures of simple one-finger keyboard melodies and arpeggiated electronic repetitions to build his obtuse electronic compositions, that fall somewhere between ice-rink music, Vangelis, and the Dr. Who theme.
MPEG Download: "Cripple Story (from Adventures In Sound)" [/audio/tietchenscripplestory.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Cripple Story (from Adventures In Sound)" [/audio/tietchenscripplestory.m3u]
Number 11 in Die Stadt's ongoing reissue campaign of the Asmus Tietchens back catalogue. Originally released in 1988 on Dom America, Aus Freude Am Elend is Tietchens response to the Plunderphonics campaigns of Negativland and John Oswald, sans the culture jamming context. It's all voice stolen from the bargain bins of throw-away pop tunes and re-engineered through looping devices, ring modulators, and pitch shifters into what has long been claimed as one of his better releases.
Die Stadt marches on with the second in the series of CD reissues documenting the unique career of German electronic musician Asmus Tietchens. "Biotop" was originally released in 1981 on Sky Music, marking the second album in Tietchens' self-professed 'pop intermezzo,' before unleashing a torrent of emphatically abstract electronic recordings. Tietchens' definition of pop music was always a bit suspect, as his Moog synthesizer melodies while playful and cheeky are often stiff and lacking in basslines. That said, "Biotop" is a charmingly naive record that is far more suited to the ironic listening experiences within Jean-Jacques Perrey, Dick Hyman, and even some of Atom Heart's clever recapitulations of dorky electronics. Comes with two bonus tracks of likeminded material not found on the original vinyl version.
Over the next year, German electronic / new music composer Asmus Tietchens will be re-issuing many of the vinyl only albums that had been published during the last couple of decades. With a catalogue as massive as Tietchens' (rivalling both Muslimgauze and Merzbow in sheer volume of work), there are bound to be some duds. Fortunately, this 2CD reissue of two limited edition LPs originally released on Korm Plastics 'Ambient Series' is NOT one of those. While the press release describes "Eisgang / Dammerattacke" as "not your everyday ambient music," these two albums fall within the 'classic' definition of ambient as proposed by Brian Eno. Both of these albums use similar tonal palettes with vaguely chilly, but far from ominous electronic washes soaked in blurring reverb, and are slightly more dramatic than Eno's "On Land" or like those darkened Gas albums devoid of their skeletal rhythms.
Up until the release of Formen Letzter Hausmusik in 1984, Asmus Tietchens had released several curious electro-pop albums built upon rudimentary keyboard melodies and jaunty drum machine rhythms. However, this facet of Mr. Tietchens represents a very minor aspect of his entire catalogue; and in fact, many qualified Formen Letzter Hausmusik as the first 'real' Asmus Tietchens record, as some of the material for this album dates back to the late '60s when he first began to experiment with reel-to-reel tape and primitive electronics. When these recordings caught the ear of Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound), he gushed, "I nearly fainted, never before have I heard music which touched my heart, indeed, I would go so far as to say it's possibly the most exciting sound I've heard for at least 10 years!" Woah! Now, that's high praise, and Formen Letzter Hausmusik does not disappoint. Tietchens presents sad accordion droning melodies next to synthetic, post-Dockstoder squiggle and whirling tape machine splutter, occasionally punctuated by Z'ev-ish metallic clanging and feedback squeals. Certainly fits in more with esoteric, post-industrial collage of Stapleton's United Dairies label (which actually released this back in the day) than the more clinical electro-acoustic presentations that Tietchens has produced over the past two decades.
Stalwart German electronic composer Asmus Tietchens presents the third in the 'teilmengen' series. It appears that this series features recordings of generative sound from a computer program called "Perpetuum Mobile", but then again, the broken English from the press-release has the tone of a poor internet translation. Regardless, this album sounds like the infinite variations which can be generated from a granular synthesis patch on Max / MSP.
In what looks to be the beginning of an onslaught of Asmus Tietchens' archival recordings from Die Stadt (who will be releasing 18 of Tietchens early LPs on CD), comes "Leuchtidioten", featuring two tracks that were recorded during the 'Teilmengen' sessions which resulted in the "a-Menge," "b-Menge," and "g-Menge" albums on Mille Plateaux. Comparatively more rhythmic than those compositions of post-'60s computer-based abstraction, the two tracks on this 10" are filled with tense percolations, with one track sounding like a paranoid acid house number run horribly amok, generatively shifting frequencies, adding / subtracting chunks of sound, and devoid of bass drum kicks, mind you. The other track appears as a synthetic reworking of tribal percussion, with tightly controlled flanges and ring modulation. Limited to 500 copies.
Marches Funebres is volume 13 in the ongoing series of Asmus Tietchens reissues from Die Stadt (here, in conjunction with Auf Abwegen). Tietchens, of course, is the experimental electronic krautrock musician who began his lengthy career back in the late '60s and stylistically morphed his compositions from obliterated tape music to coy electronic pop to sterile acousmatic seriousness as well as countless collaborative projects with Moebius, Conny Plank, Thomas Koner, Merzbow, Richard Chartier, Vidna Obmana, Arcane Device, and his long standing partner Okko Bekker.
Originally released on the now defunct Swedish label Multimood on vinyl in 1989 (and later on disc in 1994), Marches Funebres is something of a retrogarde piece of electronics for Tietchens looking back to the cosmic synthesis of his contemporaries in the late '70s. "Linea 5" is a slow-motion 20 minute piece of synthesized tension churning with step sequenced notes whose minor key repetitions ripple further in dynamically evolving delay patterns and aggregated ambience. Composed in '89, Tietchens offered an alternate take on what John Carpenter and Goblin were creating in their electronic sequencing, stripping away the melody and leaving behind the anxiety. The next track "Grunschattiger Nachmittag" is all melody, with Tietchens embarking on an orchestral work utilizing the technological advances in sampling circa 1989, creating a hyperbolic, trashy filmscore music dripping in pathos and saccharine emotion through the simulated timpani, strings, and even fake baritone vocalist. The 1979 version of "Grunschattiger Nachmittag" which is a bonus track on this reissue is far more compelling due to the more limited set-up of a Minimoog and drum machine, resulting in a much more impressive piece of Kraut-electronica akin to the best work of Cluster and Harmonium. The irony which became so prominent in the 1989 version is lost in translation early on, and the piece is better off without it. As a result, this track is probably the best 'pop' track Tietchens did during that spell on Sky Records in the late '70s and '80s.
In their ongoing series of Asmus Tietchens reissues, Die Stadt presents Seuchengebiete, an album which originally came out on A-Mission Records back in 1985. For this album, Tietchens used recordings of water as the sole source material in composing this album of electro-acoustic minimalism, predating the reductivist methodology espoused by current dronescapists such as Aube, Jonathan Coleclough, and Paul Bradley. Judging from the rudimentary diagram included alongside the liner notes, Tietchens positioned several hydrophones in a sink basin with a contact microphone on the drainage pipe below and recorded the fluid motion of water spiralling through the sink. As commonplace as the source material is, Tiecthens renders these metallic drips, klangs, and aquatic surges into throughly alien soundscapes thanks to his deft application of ring modulation, delay, and reverb. On "Hydrophonie 2" (actually the first track on this album), Tietchens sets up his aquatic parameters and lets them do their own thing, allowing the tactile sounds to plink and plonk within the web of electronic effects. Yet on "Hydrophonie 5" and especially on the bonus track "Hydrophone 4," Tietchens extracts choice moments from these recordings out of which he clinically orchestrates repetitive surges of watery tones. Well done!
Asmus Tietchens albums are uniformly austere, and his collaborations with Thomas Koner are no exception. Those two pioneers of German sound-art have collaborated over the years under the banner of Kontakte Der Junglinge, whose title itself is an homage to Stockhausen, another German artist with a penchant for austerity matched only by his gravitas. Sinkende Schwimmer dates back to 1991 and marks the earliest collaboration between Tietchens and Koner, as the elder statesman processed and manipulated source material from the younger Koner. While the ghosts of a glacial ambience trace from Koner's source material (whatever they might have been), Sinkende Schwimmer is very much a Tietchens productions, described through his serialist actions for electronic mark-making and mathematical formalism collaged into an exacting piece of abstraction. Tietchens has long been an advocate of 'absolute music' implying that there are to be no external references interfering with the sounds themselves. Sinkende Schwimmer fights with this definition somewhat as the irregular pointillism, ring-modulated atonalities, and sterile grey drones deflect much of the signifiers; but the gasping shadows that haunt this album (perhaps thanks to Koner's presence) speak to a vacancy and an isolationism that hold a subtle poetry at the edges of these complex compositions. Limited quantities on this original pressing from back in the day!
The catalogs of both Asmus Tietchens and Richard Chartier deservedly have reputations for stoic minimalism. But even so, there are plenty of differences between these two exemplars of contemporary electronic music, with Tietchens embarking on a 40-year adventure of post-Krautrock experiments refined into barren, microsonic transmissions and Chartier distilling composition into elemental tones whilst maintaining a grasp of emotive impressionism. Tietchens has never shied away from the collaborative process, and his work is often better for it. Take his impressive Kontakt Der Junglinge project with Thomas Koner, for example; this (hopefully ongoing) collaboration with Richard Chartier is another.
The first disc is the source material that Chartier composed for Tietchens to rework. Had Chartier not mentioned that this was his own material, it would be easy to qualify the disc as a happy marriage between the two stalwart composers, as the rhythmicist patterns and generative forms which seem so much the signature of Tietchens are fused upon hushed slippages of tone and the faintest whisper of a half-melody. Perhaps Chartier did compose this specifically with Tietchens in mind, although he does state the piece was "an unusual improvisation," however that may be interpreted. It's a damn fine piece of microsound composition, no matter how you look at it. The second disc finds Chartier's work deconstructed and augmented by Tietchens, who also seems keenly aware of Chartier's aesthetic and seems to slant his contributions more towards that end of the spectrum. In the accumulated digital dust, sinewave obfuscation, granular synthesis, and glitched errata, Tietchens constructs glacial piles of filtered hiss pocked with enigmatic electronic glistenings and repeated mechanoid phrases, occasionally consumed by subharmonic rumbles. Like many of the best works from both catalogues, you'll find plenty hints of grandiose drama expressed through electronic gestures of shadow and innuendo. Very well done.
We were WAY skeptical of the claim that Tiger Throat sounded like "an Instrumental Bone Awl thrown into a blender with Mono and HEALTH", but it kind of really does, and even though such a description would piss off the misanthropic Bone Awl, we're pretty into it.
This are only three songs (even though there are 10 actual tracks, the rest are weird noisy interludes), but those 3 songs cram in a crazy amount of wild spastic drumming, frenetic buzzing riffage, and all manner of blown out glitch and skitter. The record opens with a soaring almost Cave-like fuzzy hypno krautrock workout, pounding and epic and melodic but still pretty raw and frenzied, until part way through the track crumbles, the song lurching through a field of downtuned guitar groan, grinding effects, backwards drumming, only to explode in an almost D-beat blast, while somehow remaining poppy as fuck, like a more fractured and melodic Ancestors? Whatever you compare these guys to, it works, the track winds down into something more slowcore and post rock, all loping drums and sprawling downtuned buzz. All kinds of sounds worm into the mix. And even though it thrashes pretty hard, it's also catchy and sort of fun. Plenty of weird electronic parts (the HEALTH influence) mixed with the aforementioned thrashy, punkish energy. Pretty unique in parts, pretty psychedelic and very melodic.
The second track is way more dirgey and doomy, but in a sort of spaced out post rock way, the guitar shimmering and ringing out, not really distorted, the drums WAY in the red, very practice space sounding, until the track shifts gears and the guitars explode, and vocals come in, super processed and warped, the whole track music and vocals seems to undulate and twist, like a sonic funhouse mirror, but it's also probably the blackest moment on the record, it goes on for a few minutes, but we were sort of wishing it would KEEP going. So rad.
The final track opens with a mathy manic start stop, you can hear a band member breathlessly counting it off in the background, the result is a lurching squelchy skronky no wave-ish electronic noise rock jam, that gets more and more dense and harsh as the track progresses, finally spilling into a rad hypnotic dirge, the guitars are all overblown while the drumming is teetering on the edge of distorting, the track winding up with a cool staccato grinding metallic outro.
Probably not metal enough for most metal heads, even with the Bone Awl / Ancestors references, it's obvious from the artwork and band name that the black metal influence, while definitely there, is more sort of abstract and just another part of the noise, that said, adventurous metalheads line up here, and for the rest of you, who dig noisy, hooky, electronic, metallic, psych rock weirdness, this is WAY recommended.
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Is there no end to the wonderful musical mysteries Finland has to offer? We sure hope not. Whether it's demented black metal, crushing doom sludge, freaky forest folk, or shimmery pop, Finland never disappoints. And now you can add, ultra minimal outsider solo guitar to that list.
Topias Tiheasalo, who we know absolutely nothing about, and google searches also reveal practically nothing, other than the fact that he is 29 years old, is less of a "guitarist" and more of a guitar explorer, a guitar experimentalist. Falling somewhere between the abstract scrabble of Derek Bailey and the moody minimalism of Loren Connors, Tiheasalo, crawls all over the guitar, spending as much time thumping the body, scraping the bridge, and coaxing all manner of buzz and rattle from his guitar as he does either picking or strumming. The opening track is a strange percussive soundscape, punctuated by an awesome deep reverberent buzz drenched throb, as well as some fragmented chunks of slide. While all around these almost-melodies, lurk tons of black space, and all manner or subtle shuffle and accidental squeaks and creaks. Later on, some deliberately stumbling strum becomes a harmonic drenched melody, lurching and stuttering along a very abstract path. Elsewhere the guitar is rubbed to create strange whispery ambience, notes are hurled violently from the guitar, left to flutter to the ground, where they are sprinkled with glistening flurries of harmonics. Lots of angularity and atonality, but their are bits of delicate beauty tucked amidst the twisted and convoluted guitarscapes.
A strange strange record. Not beautiful in any sort of typical way, but damaged and difficult and in that musical obstinance, quite lovely indeed. Fans of Bailey, Connors, Taku Sugimoto, Fabrice Eglin and of course Keith Rowe as well as other atypical six stringers will find much to explore and enjoy...
A few weeks ago we got a killer batch of 'metal' tapes from Hospital Productions, two of which we reviewed, the 2nd album from Vegas Martyrs, and the debut from death-obsessed doom flecked black metal weirdos Curved Blade, both of which sold out and went out of print crazy quick.
In the same batch we also got two other releases, twisted lo-fi outsider sci-fi death metal weirdness from a band called Time Crypt, and super blown out noise metal damage from Terrorism. The bummer is that we intended to check these out, and then order more to review, but before we knew it, both of these were sold out and out of print as well. But we do still have THREE copies of each, they're both bizarre and baffling and perfect for folks into fucked up confusional metal, so at least a few folks will get to check them out...
Time Crypt unleash a stumbling blast of midtempo lo-fi blackened death metal, the guitars jagged and buzzy, the drums buried in the mix, the vocals a snarly grunt one minute, a reverbed bellow the next, there are occasional bursts of frenzied blast, but they quickly collapse into more lurching lumbering chug and churn, some weird little bits of keyboard surface here and there, the production is damaged and off kilter and perfectly fits the music, which is chaotic and trancey and buzzy and bizarre. We're digging this big time. Too bad we only have 3 copies...
Also features some killer dead astronaut artwork! ----* ----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed : ----* If you want to order one of these, just search for the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart! A SUNNY DAY IN GLASSGOW "Autumn, Again" (self-released) lp 15.98 AGALLOCH "Marrow Of The Spirit" (Profound Lore) cd 11.98 ANBB (ALVA NOTO & BLIXA BARGELD) "Mimikry" (Raster-Noton) cd/2x12" 17.98/25.00 ANWORTH KIRK "s/t" (Pre-Cert) lp 19.98 ASSS "August 2010" (self-released) cassette 5.00 AVEY TARE "Down There" (Paw Tracks) cd/lp 14.98/17.98 BAD TRIPS "Open" (Rocketship) lp 15.98 BEACH FOSSILS "Face It / Distance" (Captured Tracks) 7" 6.98 BIRKIN, JANE "Di Doo Dah" (Light In The Attic) cd/2lp 16.98/22.00 BLACK HEART PROCESSION, THE "Blood Bunny / Black Rabbit" (Temporary Residence) cd/lp 12.98/14.98 BLACK MOUNTAIN "Wilderness Heart" (Jagjaguwar) cd 14.98 BLANK DOGS "Land And Fixed" (Captured Tracks) cd/lp 13.98/16.98 BLUE WATER WHITE DEATH "s/t" (Graveface) cd/lp 13.98 BROKENCYDE "Will Never Die" (Breaksilence Recordings) cd 14.98 CALL BACK THE GIANTS "s/t" (Kye) lp 16.98 CINDYTALK "The Poetry Of Decay" (Editions Mego) lp 32.00 CRAFT SPELLS "Party Talk / Ramona" (Captured Tracks) 7" 6.98 DOLPHY, ERIC "Out To Lunch" (Blue Note) lp 12.98 DRUIDS OF STONEHENGE "Creation" (Axis) cd 17.98 ENO, BRIAN WITH JON HOPKINS & LEO ABRAHAMS "Small Craft On A Milk Sea" (Warp) cd 14.98 EXCEPTER "Late" (Woodsist) 12" 14.98 FAUST "71 Minutes" (ReR) 2lp 38.00 FENN O'BERG "Live In Japan Part One" (Editions Mego) lp 21.00 FENN O'BERG "Live In Japan Part Two" (Editions Mego) lp 21.00 FJELLSTROM, MARCUS "Schattenspieler" (Miasmah) lp 19.98 GAUNTLET HAIR "Out...Don't" (Mexican Summer) 7" 5.98 GIRLS AT DAWN "Call The Doctor" (Norton) cd 14.98 GIRLS NAMES / BRILLIANT COLORS "I Lose / You Win" (Slumberland) 7" 4.98 GREEN, CEE-LO "Lady Killer" (Elektra) cd 16.98 HOLTKAMP, KOEN "Gravity/Bees" (Thrill Jockey) lp 14.98 HOWELL, PETER & JOHN FERDINANDO "Tomorrow Come Someday" (Acme) cd+dvd 17.98 IMAGINARY SOFTWOODS "s/t" (Digitalis) lp 33.00 INTERNATIONAL HELLO "s/t" (Holy Mountain) lp 14.98 INVADERS "There's A Light There's A Way" (Fresh) cd 17.98 IRON BUTTERFLY "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (Atco) lp 12.98 JEFFERTITTI'S NILE "Hypnotic Rivers Of Sound" (Jnile) lp 9.98 KAREL, ERNST "Heard Laboratories" (And/Oar) cd 14.98 KRIEG "The Isolationist" (Candlelight) cd 14.98 LAZER SWORD "Batman" (Innovative Leisure) 12" 9.98 LAZER SWORD "s/t" (Innovative Leisure) cd 15.98 LEE, DAVID JR. "Evolution" (Universal Sound) cd/lp 19.98/24.00 LESSER / MATMOS / WOBBLY "Simultaneous Quodlibet" (Important Records) lp 17.98 LOWBROW READER OF BASEMENT BROW COMEDY "Issue #8" zine 3.00 MADLIB "Medicine Show No.10 - Black Soul" (Madlib) cd 17.98 MELECHESH "Epigenesis" (Nuclear Blast) cd 15.98 MONARCH "Sabbat Noir" (Heathen Skulls) cd 14.98 NADJA "White Nights / Drone Fields" (Beta-Lactam Ring) 2xdvd 22.00 NECROMANDUS "Orexis of Death & Live" (Rise Above Records) cd 24.00 OLYMPUS "Bob Mould" (Soft Abuse) lp 14.98 PHANTOM PAYN DAYS "s/t" (De Stiijl) lp 17.98 RUNNING "s/t" (Permanent) lp 16.98 SETI-X "Scrambles Of Earth" (Seeland) cd SHINDIG! "#19" magazine 8.98 SISTOL (VLADISLAV DELAY) "Remasters & Remakes" (Phthalo / Halo Cyan) 2cd 14.98 STELLAR OM SOURCE "Trilogy Select" (Olde English Spelling Bee) lp 17.98 STEVENS, SUFJAN "The Age of Adz" (Asthmatic Kitty) cd/2lp 14.98/29.00 TOBACCO "La Uti" (Anticon) 12" picture disc 15.98 TORSKE, BJORN "Kokning" (Smalltown Supersound) cd 17.98 UNTOLD "Come Follow Me" (Soul Jazz) 12" 10.98 V/A "Great Googly Moo" (Ace) cd 16.98 V/A "I Love Techno 2010" (Lektro) cd 17.98 V/A "Peruvian Funk" (Secret Stash) lp 20.00 V/A "Riddim Box Vol.1" (Soul Jazz) 2lp 24.00 V/A "Riddim Box Vol.2" (Soul Jazz) 2lp 24.00 V/A "Riddim Box" (Soul Jazz) 2cd 21.00 WILD NOTHING "Golden Haze" (Captured Tracks) cd 10.98 _______________________________________________________________________ Please place your order via our website. [1] We will contact you to verify your order and let you know when it will be shipped. Please note that occasionally it may take a day or two for us to reply. We are not a faceless bunch of computers replying to your order -- we are human beings! [2] If we are out of some of your items and we think we will get them within the same week, we can wait to ship. Or... If it's going to be more than a few days to complete your order, we will ship what we have and then will contact you as the remainders arrive. [ note ] Due to the everchanging nature of the independent record business, we are not responsible for listed price changes (due to supplier price changes) and often cannot update our site fast enough to reflect these changes, but we will always try to let you know of any differences.
A while back, we reviewed a cd by an SF outfit called Burial Tree, who trafficked in a sort of dusky deserty twang (a la Earth, Barn Owl) fused to a heaving churning mathy postmetal crush (Neurosis, Isis, etc.), well it seems when BT mainman / aQ pal Monte is not doing Burial Tree, he spends his time meticulously crafting a whole different world of sound, under the monicker Time Spent. Four sprawling tracks of haunting rhythmic ambience, sounding at times like Brian Eno jamming with Muslimgauze, especially on the opening track, which unfurls gradually in softly shimmering swells, buried melodies, everything panned and woozily drifting from speaker to speaker, with simple spare percussion surfacing a few minutes in, and transforming the vibe into an almost sort of spaced out dub, we hear hints of African Head Charge too, but Time Spent is much darker, more sonically sinister, the opening track very cinematic evocative of late nights, and cities lit by moonlight, a world in shadow. The second track, the comparatively tranquil/meditative "LaurenClaire", takes the same synth shimmer, but spread it out into soft ethereal billows, more major key, softly sun dappled, a hushed new agey drift, that also finds itself melded to a rhythm, which instead of adding propulsion, seems to add a delicate framework, turning the middle portion of the song into a sort of downtempo shuffle, before drifting into an ether of blurred thrum and field recordings.
"Memories Drift & Fade", begins with a stretch of grey noise static wreathed in sci-fi swirls, before the track blossoms into something blissed out and kosmische, the guitar figures drenched in echo and floating on streaks of spacey shimmer and soft focus cosmic hum, the track, gradually growing less abstract and more guitar driven, the second half sounding like Expo 70 at their most Eno, softly tangled guitar melodies, over swells of prog like synth, all hazy and dreamily druggy, too short even at nearly ten minutes. And finally, the record finishes off with the relatively brief "Warm Chatter", which sounds a bit like one of the more experimental Teenage Filmstars jams, garbled found sounds and random voices, buried beneath a warm liquid swirl of melodic murk and glacial chordal creep, totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, and again, way to brief. Fantastic stuff, and recommended for fans of spaced out kosmische drift, Eno-like new age ambience, and dark, dreamlike dronemusic.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
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I'd be hard pressed to believe that Time's Up has nothing to do with Stock, Hausen, & Walkman, as the outfit replicates the ironic digital cut'n'paste ethos of SHW with surprising ease. This cute little three inch presents a rather nostalgic view of obsolescence in constructing a festive collage of electronic beats littered with samples of early arcade games, Commodore 64 muzak, and Atari bitmap music. "Obsolete" is the science fiction of youth having grown up with Pong, Tron, and Space Invaders. Totally great.
Hard to believe it's been nearly a decade since we first heard Timesbold, and come to think of it, it's been almost as long since we've heard any new recordings from these guys. We originally discovered them, when aQ fave Greg Weeks was performing in town, and the opening act was none other than Timesbold, whose sound was a dizzying hybrid of mournful dark country dirgery, lush experimental pop, and a certain classic country rock vibe. We compared them to Palace, Songs:Ohia, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Neil Young and the Band. And somehow these guys did channel all of those, into something entirely their own.
This record is not new, it's from 2008, and we can't tell when it was recorded, could be even older, and heck, we're not even sure if these guys are still a band, but what we do know, is it's so good to hear them again, and these songs take up right where their self titled record on Blue Sanct left off.
Lush instrumentation, banjo, organs, big guitars, slippery slide, moaning cellos, crystalline harmonics, urgent steel string strum, the drums slipping from shuffle to pound and back again, the sound warm and lush, twangy and surprisingly rocking, a darkened country drift melded to an apocalyptic swamp folk, the vocals super distinctive, emotional and heartfelt, very reminiscent of Will Oldham and Jason Molina (of Songs:Ohia), fragile, often on the verge of cracking, yet still powerful, the songs smolder and brood, occasionally introspective and minimal, but also occasionally explosive and intense, the songs rife with subtle hooks, all the hallmarks of classic country folk, but wreathed in experimental tendencies, and a wide reaching sonic palette. It's a shame these guys aren't more well known, these songs, all of their records, this is most definitely the kind of thing that would inspire some serious obsessiveness in fans of Palace, Souled American, 16 Horsepower, Woven Hand, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Munly, the Decemberists, Low Anthem, Sparklehorse, Giant Sand and other purveyors of dark twang...
Really fantastic!
Lucid dreaming and hypnogogic mirroring of a drift towards unconsciousness. These are the goals presented through the electronic experiments from Timm Mason and Cathartech, two artists operating under the banner of conducting a "Sleep Study" through sound. The Seattle based electronic artist Mason set up his modular synths with a series of augmented circuit patches that he manipulated and modified over a series of 10 nights attempting to find a set that mimicked his own dissolve from a waking state into the earliest stages of sleep. While there is a bed of hushed white noise slowly pulsing like a slightly snoring bed partner above a placidly undulated set of sustained sawtoothed tones, this is not the banal, braintuning drivel of much of the '80s / '90s new age and ambient poppycock. Mason's hand-off patches allow for very slow cycles of squelched blurts and whirring clatter to burst forth throughout the piece. Cathartech on the other hand wanted to work within the liminal state of dreaming and being awake, thanks to a holistic recipe of various chemicals, tinctures, and yes stilton cheese (!!!) that promotes the recall of dreams. Cathartech woke himself up after two hours of deep sleep over the course of several weeks to capture whatever automatic writing may come through him in that state and be recorded through his gear of electronics, contact microphones, etc. By comparison to the electronic sequences and sci-fi rigor of Mason's work, this is far more of an abstracted cauldron of drone, smoke, and dislocation not at all dissimilar to those recent collages from irr. app. (ext.). Limited to something like 60 copies.
Viktor Timofeev is probably better known as a visual artist, this NYC resident hails from Latvia, and has been making a name for himself in the art world, but he also counts himself a member of electro synth-wave downer poppers Nihiti (whose new surprisingly folky ep is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) and painted the very distinctive cover of the first Nihiti, his solo record is something totally removed from Nihiti, both the electronic and the folkier versions, on his own, he instead traffics in expanses of layered drones, and looped riffage, of atmospheres and ambience, but active ambience, with sounds blurred and tangled, rhythmic without actual rhythms, the label drops names like Stars Of The Lid, SUNNO))) and Godspeed, and we do definitely hear elements of all of those, it's droney and dirgey and haunting and almost classical sounding in places, but the tracks are super varied, while retaining an oblique cohesiveness, the opener is all dirgey blackened atmospherics, reminding us a little of Blackwolfgoat, looped and layered riffage, lurching and stuttering but super hypnotic, ultra lo-fi, muddy and murky, but the sort of thing we would have been into seeing fill up both sides of the record. The second track is totally different, instead it's lush and shimmery, a dreamlike dronescape laced with streaks of feedback and a haunting distorted melody that runs throughout. The final track on the A side begins with field recordings, birds and running water, all beneath a series of warped and woozy tape experiments, lush chordal swells, repetitive and mantra-like, finally transforming into an almost orchestral looped industrial outro.
The flipside is separated into three tracks, but they seem to be woven into one sidelong epic, a cinematic symphonic landscape of drone and melody that almost sounds like a black metal Arvo Part, droney and dirgery and dramatic, sinister and ominous, the vibe menacing and super intense, the sort of track that broods malevolently, but is totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, the whole side is like a sonic black hole, the listener immersed in the dense deep blackness, until the last few minutes, where the track finishes off with a strange bloopy almost new wavey sounding outro.
Definitely recommended for fans of dark drones and droney darkness, and for sure has us wanting to hear more sounds, and see more art from Timofeev.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Blankets of thick analog buzzes and hums weave around more delicate ambient tones, textures and vocals. With its repetitive keyboard melodies, at times this brought to mind a tiny, entranced, mad organist in a very large ancient cathedral. Very textural, melancholic and relaxing. A great follow-up to the Mort Aux Vaches cd on Staalplaat. For fans of Spacemen 3!
Every once in a while, we find ourselves missing the sound of classic math rock. The sound of late nineties post rock. Oh hell, who are we kidding, we're ALWAYS missing that stuff. Slint, Rodan, Bastro, Bitch Magnet, Breadwinner, Dazzling Killmen, Hurl, Crain, heck, even Andee's old band A Minor Forest. Mathy, convoluted, serpentine, minor key, weirdly catchy, strangely structured, lots of starts and stops. As much as we're loving the new breed of metal bands gone post rock or math rock. They definitely tend to lean toward the post side of the equation, preferring to bliss out rather than math out. But for any one who finds themselves getting a little chill when reading the above list of bands, Tiny Hawks are the band to give you everything you've been missing. Tiny Hawks are a duo from Rhode Island, but don't be expecting tangled Lightning Bolt spazz, or stripped down guitar and drums duo rock, this is a huge sprawling explosion of gorgeously melodic and deftly complicated math rock. You'd never know this was a duo (the drummer plays bass on the record) as these guys create a huge sound, thick and textured, dense and dreamy. Some tracks are spastic freakouts, all chaotic drum splatter and manic riffing, others are shimmery expanses of muted strum and dreamlike shuffle. There's definitely an early nineties Dischord element to their sound as well. Intricate, erratic, experimental, bits of jazz and metal twisted into post rock shapes and then set in a dizzyingly mathy framework. Convoluted minor key workouts peppered by sudden bursts of jagged aggro crunch and pound, and plenty of loping blissed out mellowness, drifting harmonics, clanging guitars, all drifting in a jangly haze. This is ALL the shit we love about the genre, all tangled up in a hugely fresh sounding kick ass blast of super aggressive, sweetly melodic, math rock anvil to the head. So goddamn good. Like your favorite band from 1996, got in a time machine, got a practice space down the hall from yours, and invited you over to stand around a sweaty, stinky practice space, get drunk, bounce around and have your mind and ears fucking blown!
Tired Tape Machine is a Swedish one man project, who, based on the moniker, we initially expected to sound LIKE a tired tape machine, all warped and warmly, garbed and faded, maybe a little Philip Jeck, a little Caretaker, in fact the record was recorded in a cabin in the Swedish forest! But instead, TTM sounds more like a mini orchestra, unfurling dreamy swaths of hazy, sixties drone-pop shimmer, all baroque and wistful, a sort of chamber folk, rife with slow smoldering builds, some classic psychedelia, plenty of swirling strings, folky acoustic guitars, space-y FX, the sound slipping from brooding downer pop to soaring almost Stereolab groop sounds in fact, on first listen, we found ourselves thinking 'Low meets Stereolab', but that shorthand doesn't do justice to the sound here.
We hear shades of Cardinal and Witch Hazel, and other practitioners of timeless baroque pop, but it all has a slightly sinister undertone, a mysterious cinematic ambience that seems to infuse even the poppiest moments. The more we listen, the more the moniker makes sense, it's a music out of time, and this strange dusty old tape machine is in fact more than what it seems, pulling in these transmissions from the ether, the moody poppiness, laced too with stretches of haunting, near choral drift, pocked with squalls of psychedelic freakout, all the various disparate sonic elements distilled into a dark, gauzy, softly psychedelic chamber folk, retro pop that we can't get enough of. Fans of aQ faves Death & Vanilla, hankering for some similarly ghostly, symphonic, dreamy-downer, sixties style pop, this will definitely hit the spot.
Probably extremely limited, grab one now just in case. You won't be sorry.
We first heard these New Zealand psychedelic loop-noise, beat wrangling weirdos on a split 7" with Whirling Hall Of Knives released on Trensmat, and one of the tracks from that single opens up the group's debut lp, with a glorious, dizzying blast of abstract psychedelia, looped and rhythmic, rife with woozy low end synth buzz, swirling tangled melodies, a robotic rhythmic pulse, sounds swirling and beats stuttering, like we mentioned in the review of the 7", we're reminded a bit of a more electronic, slightly less noisy Our Love Will Destroy The World, or a way noisier, beat driven High Wolf. The record flits from woozy groove to almost jungly skitter, from pulsing spaced out psychedelic electro, to crunchy, churning soft focus noisiness, churning industrial dub to tripped out cosmic alien dancefloor destroying, noise drenched, house music of a sort, only house music as it has that 4 on the floor pulse, but otherwise it's some sort of cracked and freaked out avant kitchen sink home brewed weirdo electronica. "Wild Rent" is one of our favorite jams, a slow building chaos of colliding beats, and looped melody, that eventually transforms into a super tripped out minimal dub, but that dub is buried beneath a cascade of sonic swirl, "Cassini Tubs" is a good one too, a spare bit of skitter, that is soon surrounded by thick buzzing synths, gradually transforming into a sort of alien M83 slowgroove shoegaze dubstep. The record finishes off with the 10+ minute "Tropfend Platz", which starts out as the prettiest, dreamiest track on the record, all glimmering looped high end, and whirling soft focus thrum, and then the drums kick in, a super spastic sort of fucked up and fractured drill and bass, with thick squelches of low end buzz, the whole thing gradually surrounded by a hazy cloud of shoegaze-y shimmer, becoming a dense chunk of beat heavy bliss, that's as psychedelically mesmerizing as it is infuriatingly groovy.
Pressed on splattery clear gold vinyl, housed in hand silkscreened red and white jackets, and includes a link to a digital download of the whole record, which includes two bonus tracks, 16+ minutes, not on the lp!
One of three new releases on Don't Fuck With Magic, Campbell Kneale's (he of Birchville Cat Motel and Our Love Will Destroy The World) new post Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, the others being an archival sonic blast from the now defunct BCM, and a killer collab between OLWDTW and Finnish noisemakers Tomutonttu (both reviewed elsewhere on this week's list). We're the only source for these in the US and we have HALF the already small pressing, of which we've already sold half before even reviewing, which means these are going quick, and will be gone before you know it, so act fast if you want any/all of these.
The consonant heavy Tmpls is yet another Kneale project, and you thought his other projects were noisy, whoo boy, they ain't got nothing on Tmpls, a nearly 47 minute blast of ear shredding, head melting, speaker destroying white noise sound, a heaving wall of crumbling sound, blown out and distorted, crunchy and corrosive, on the surface, pure Merzbowian brutality, and heck even a little bit below the surface too, but in places you can definitely tell this started out as maybe something a bit more melodic, or something(s), in fact it sounds a bit like multiple Kneale jams laid on top of each other and then sent through a battery of malfunctioning distortion pedals, only to come out the other side a roiling chaotic crush. The timbre and tone constantly shifts too, from warm and warbly, with what could actually be buried melodies, to pure rhythmic crunch, as if any bits of melodies were stripped away, leaving a strange bit of glitched out garble, and elsewhere the sound is infused with undulating sheets of lowend, as if the noise component might be shed at any second, leaving a woozy warbly thrum, but it never does, it's a continuous sprawl of wild noise drenched sound, that is about the most intense and brutal thing Kneale has ever whipped up. You have been warned, only the iron eared need apply.
And as mentioned above, we have a handful left, but odds are even these noisy little buggers will disappear in a flash.
The world needs another SUNNO))) or Earth like it needs� well, it doesn't. Nor does it need another Slint, or a Mogwai, or a Justice, or an Animal Collective. Every time a band blows up, suddenly a million bands are there to get sucked along in their wake. But never was this phenomenon more egregious than with the new wave of doom/drone/dirge outfits. At the risk of repeating ourselves again, it seems like every band, heavy or otherwise, that features at least one member with a "drone side project" or a "minimal doom side project", barely keeping ahead of the various people dabbling in back metal, but we digress.
Like most things, it probably seems easy, but isn't. The whole leaning your guitar against the amp and letting it go, sure we joke about that in reviews, but it's way harder than that. Compare the millions of ho-hum guitardrone cd-r's to something like the last amazing record by Vulture Club (we still have some, if you haven't bought one, you should, really). It's like night and day. So we're always pretty cautious when we hear about a new guitar drone group or some doomdirge record we oughtta dig.
But once in a while, a group comes along, who only just barely fit into that whole genre, skirting it, creating something totally their own, with just the merest hints of sounds more familiar, like all great bands, borrowing and stealing freely, but not just regurgitating those sounds right back at us, instead, spreading them out in some underground lab, pulling them apart, exploring how they tick, dissecting them, then attempting to put them back together again, with some of their own parts, some sounds and songs that have been fermenting in a dusty corner of said lab, the results then something new, a patchwork of sounds, that in the right hands, can be deftly woven into something beautiful, something dark and mysterious, something like this.
A Semblance Of Something Appertaining to Destruction is the latest from the mysteriously monickered To Blacken The Pages, part four of an ongoing series in sound, a sprawling dirgescape that owes much to meandering post rock, downtuned slow motion sludge, drifty abstract doom, and the sort of heavy doomic countrified sludge that Earth has been exploring over the last few records.
Three tracks, the shortest 11 minutes, the longest nearly 18, each a dusty, moonlit drift, simple minor key twang, slowed down space rock riffage, streaks of feedback and buzzing distant drones, swirling FX, layers of guitar fuzzy and druggy. The opener, more than Earth or SUNNO))) or any of those, sounds much more in line with Loop or Spacemen 3, a drugged out soporific riff, that lumbers a little too slow to rock, even a little too slow to constitute any sort of groove. Instead, it's a dreamy droney drift, heavy and mutedly chuggy, churning onward through a sky of whirls and swirls and rumbles, underpinned by plenty of buzz and fuzz and blur. It's like a super slowed down way more abstract Loop, which we probably don't need to explain to you is in fact a very good thing.
The second track introduces drums, which do little to up the propulsion, this is still weary, dreary and delightfully spaced out. A super spare, abstract doomy lope, the sky above criss crossed with high end guitar skree, the drums supporting another blown out slow motion space rock riff, the whole track trudging across an endless expanse of shimmery buzz and swirling space-y effects. Everything muted and mumbly and lazily mesmerizing.
The final, longest track, ditches the drums, returning to the lazy smoky sprawl of the opener, but this time even more abstract, the central guitar part, drifting well below the constantly shifting layers of sound, coruscating high end, over billowing deep rumbles, a glacial, stately, almost funereal anti-groove, perfect late night, drift off, trip out slow motion space rock krautdrone. Fans of Earth and Expo '70 will dig especially, as in some ways, this does sound like a strange hybrid of the two, although all of you into the slow dreamy droney heavy minimalism would do well to check this out.
The return of Irish one man guitar dronedoomdirge noisemaker, Paul McAree aka To Blacken The Pages, with his first vinyl release, and to commemorate, McAree mixes it up a bit, offering up at least one side dramatically different from what we're used to hearing on TBTP records up until now.
Originally recorded for a sound exhibition in Dublin, "Crow's Nest" strips away most of the thick rumbling distorted guitars we might have been expecting, leaving a strange haunting bit of effects drenched shadowy sound in their place, the result though is quite pleasing, much more mysterious and otherworldly, lots of delay and reverb, bits of clang and crunch sent spinning into the ether, here and there long notes ring out, the overall sound is super spare and abstract, soft tangled melodies, the guitars smolder instead of roar, plenty of scrabble and scrape but smeared and blurred into solar flares of Sunroof!-ed sound, but unlike the raga-like ur-drone of Sunroof!, the sound and sounds here are way more spaced out, both figuratively AND literally. Warm washes of feedback bathe the whole track in a rich glow, and strange little flutters surface here and there, like some alien birdsong.
The track on the B-side is more similar to past TBTP outings, but McAree manages to meld the old sounds, with the new sounds found on the flip, the same strange assemblage of high end crunch and scrape and squiggle, but set in a landscape much more black and buzzy, thickly layered, undulating sea of sound, blown out an streaked with feedback, the weird effected shards of melody, drifting on that thick, rumbling undercurrent. Dense and drone-y looped and hypnotic sounding here and there, but for the most part a massive organic sprawl of minimal psychedelic guitar drone dreaminess.
Housed in a simple black 12" style sleeve with the middle holes cut out, a printed obi with all the artwork and liner notes, and comes with a black cd-r, packaged in its own sleeve with a proper insert, containing, both the tracks, but a WAY extended and remixed version of the B-side!
Highlighted last list, we had A Semblance Of Something Appertaining To Destruction, the most recent disc from Dublin, Ireland's To Blacken The Pages. Now we've got their prior release, None, released just a month or two earlier in 2008, which is essentially the part I to A Semblance's part II. Don't get 'em confused (and we'll try not to, too), 'cause they do look virtually identical, the same almost-black-on-black no-color scheme for the cover photo and logo. The black-on-black music is similar too, of course, but different and equally essential for anyone who loved the minimal doomdrone instrumental ambience of that other disc. And again, there's three tracks. 13:45, 16:10, and 8:06. Each stately, somnolent, fuzzed out and, this time, drumless... heavy in a restrained, spacey, spacious way.
Track one, "Alien", tiptoes in, super slow, individually suspended guitar notes one at a time connecting the dots of melancholic melody over a void of silence. Then, suddenly, the needle jumps. DISTORTION. An electric crackle and buzz. The song is still super sloooooow and sparse, but each note is now planetarily weighted with rumbling vibratory effect, surely speaker shredding if it all happened at once, and at volume. An underlying howling hum begins, buried beneath but gradually filling all that empty space with its own not so silent emptiness. The next piece, "None", starts with an eerie electric wind, and some sparse Earth-style guitar strum over it, reverberant and lonely, before sheer fuzzdrone kicks in, fuzzdrone nirvana to our ears, that continues in like manner on final track of the disc, "As If Forever"... Ah, yes, so glacially good. For fans of Earth, SUNNO))), Expo '70, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, Slomo, Boris, Skullflower, Nadja, etc. All at their darkest yet dreamiest.
To Blacken The Pages is actually a solo project, the work of one guitar wielding, amp abusing man, Paul McAree. We're told he has a non-solo side project coming up, a band called Slaves Of War Orphan Farm (!) that is supposed to be a worthy offering of Les Rallizes Denudes worship! Can't wait to check it out...
The third part in an ongoing series of blackened drone guitar missives from Irish one man slow and low wrecking crew To Blacken The Pages. Fans of the first two TBTP records (None and A Semblance Of Something Appertaining To Destruction) are already well versed in the bleak abstract soundworld this guy can conjure, fusing the low end explorations of groups like SUNNO))), Expo '70, Bohren, Slomo and the like, with something a bit more psychedelic and space-y. Sure, TBTP is capable of unfurling some planet crushing black hole heaviness, but also of tossing handfulls of notes into crystalline expanses of murky reverb, letting the various notes flutter and fall, before tossing out another handful. The first two tracks on North are perfect examples, "Crossing" and "I Am Screes On Her Escarpments", the first begins as a swirling almost static field of slow shifting reverb and delay, peppered with percussive thumps and creaks, sent careening into the ether, while shards of clean guitar, sounding a bit like super mellow Keiji Haino, unfurl like clouds of grey smoke, while underneath, a guitar rumbles and whirs, gradually becoming more and more rifflike, ringing out a bit chaotic and noisy, before slipping into the second which begins with the same sort of reverbed stretch of echoey thumps and creaks, before the guitar thickens into a crumbling corrosive wall of swirling chordal hum and keening feedback, a roiling blackened bit of guitar ambience, infused with melody and moodiness and shot through with strange high end streaks and swoops that are probably effected guitars, but almost sound like children's voices here and there. Quite haunting.
The next few tracks take TBTP's sound in a different direction, the root again being shimmering guitars, but this time the focus is on the voice, a lazy drawled croon nestled down in the mix, that drifts along side the increasingly caustic guitar buzz resulting in a sound not unlike some strange Dead C / Roy Montgomery hybrid, a sort of sun baked noise drenched dronedirge slowcore. Dark and woozy and melancholy and way druggy and drowsy sounding. Later, "To Be Dead" introduces actual drums, and gets all propulsive, a lurching noise rock take on spaced out krautrock, but with the guitars in full on overdrive, a constantly swirling squall of feedback and psychrock freakout. And then the last two tracks are massive billowing clouds of coruscating buzz and skree, blurred into gorgeous multi hued smears of blown out guitar and a gorgeous hazy shoegazey drift, in fact the nearly 15 minute "Night Drive" might be one of the prettiest heavy guitar tracks we've heard in ages, anyone into Nadja or Jesu, will love it, it's like the slow motion metalgaze of those two outfits but stripped of drums and allowed to just sort of hover. So nice.
Needless to say, the drone and dirge and doom obsessed out there probably already added this to their shopping cart (or if they didn't yet, probably should now), anyone who bought the other two records definitely NEED this too, and folks not necessarily into metal, but who still dig on dark drifty hazy heaviness might be pretty into To Blacken The Pages, North in particular...
It's been close to a year since we've heard from Irish one man doomdronedirge guitarrorist To Blacken The Pages, we've been pretty obsessed with every record we've heard so far, this being number FIVE, which is also notable for being a collaboration with Korperschwache, an Austin based Skullflower style guitar noise juggernaut, long time faves of some of us here, who somehow has never made it onto the aQ list, even with a ton of strange and limited releases over the last decade, but we'll solve that problem right... Now.
Regardless of the collaboration, a new To Blacken The Pages is always cause for celebration around here, TBTP continually manages to conjure up all sorts of low end fury, from blown out shoegazey drift, to crushing SUNNO)))-like dirgery, to harrowing black ambience, to spaced out kraut drone, more often than not some dizzying mix of all of those. Korperschwache is similarly versatile, leaning toward the noisy and heavy, dipping into extreme harsh noise, but also gorgeous guitardrone ambience, UK industrial style skree, and rhythmic hypnorock riffery. So what this collaboration would actually sound like was pretty much a total mystery.
What we did know, was that this would be some mysterious, dark and heavy shit, which we're happy to report is indeed the case, but there's much more to the gorgeous blackened soundworld these two sonic soundscapers have conjured up here...
Thick swaths or rumbling low end fog underpin delicate fragmented shards of softly reverbed guitar, almost like some sort of SUNNO))) / Scenic mash up, a little Earth twang, a lush, ominous churning driftscape that builds to a full on doomic crush, all hazey and blown out and in the red, before drifting into more slowcore territory, a simple motorik drum machine laced stretch of hypnotic post rock, with swirling melodies and buried in the mix deep vocal croon. Big billowy sheets of black crush splinter into feedback drenched noise rock, the drum machine cranked way up, the guitars corrosive and caustic, like an ultra heavy Loop track gone haywire. The first disc finishes off with two extended tracks of guitar drone, "A New Seat In Hell", and "Shallow", the first muted and murky and minimal, the second exactly the opposite, like recent Skullflower, a speaker shredding onslaught of full on psychedelic guitargrind freakout.
The second disc begins all dreamy and washed out, the drum machine set to lope and lumber, the guitars warm and gauzy, infused with tendril like melodies, the Jesu comparison is certainly apt here, hazy shoegazey and druggy, the perfect lead in to the "Inside The Mariana Trench", an even more spaced out bit of reverb drenched psychedelia, guitars spitting out blinding gouts of keening high end tones, laid over skeletal programmed drums, and a bleary eared swirl of delay and echo and smeared effects, so nice.
"Absent Friends" is a haunting post industrial bit of minimal dronemusic, again peppered with bits of guitar melody, and streaks of mysterious effects, hushed vocals, simple strums, the root sound a lush layered metallic whir, which leads to the final track, the nearly 40 minute "Stranded In The Hertzsprung Crater", a sprawling spacious, abstract epic, which beings thick and distorted, but soon evolves into something much more spare, effected guitars careening over a bleak landscape of hiss and whir and hum, soft arcs of feedback, a haunting barren world of drift and shimmer, a pretty perfect way to end such an epic sonic journey.
Needless to say, totally and utterly recommended, for fans of minimal guitar music, dirges and drones, dark ambience, doom, outsider metal, shoegaze, whatever, this stuff is dark and blissed out, ominous and abstract, dense and heavy and gorgeous.
Will do our best to get more Korperschwache to list, and we'll of course wait patiently for the next To Blacken The Pages, but in the meantime, we'll just stay gloriously lost in the epic and sprawling soundworld of A Way Dark.
We haven't ever heard any of the other records by this strangely monickered duo, and in some ways it's probably that name that kept us from exploring their music in the past. We know, book, cover, band name, check. But with so much stuff to listen to, it's inevitable that something like album cover or band name or label, will influence what you listen to first, or maybe even at all. But heck, it's Kranky, and the album cover is pretty cool, so two out of three ain't bad. And we have to say we're glad we did finally decide to take the plunge, cuz the world of TKAPB is a gorgeously gloomy one, a haunting and otherworldly late night drift through a world dark and ominous, and occasionally downright frightening. Think Grouper, Mazzy Star, Kuupuu, Valet, that sort of gauzy dreaminess, murky and muddy, spacey and druggy, with ethereal female vocals, barely there drum skitter, warm languid bass, the instruments less recognizable as instruments, and more as sound generating devices, each emitting long tones, or soft rhythms, the result is a slow burning jazzy drone-y drift, but TKAPB seems a bit more sinister than the rest of those bands, imbuing their hazy midnight drift, with some deep drones, some jagged shards of distorted crunch. A creepy dreamy slowcore, with hints of something darker, heavier, and noisier. Just check out "The Needle", a loping slow groove, minor key and tense, the vocals sultry and smoky, creeping and crawling, until suddenly something hellish surfaces, a squall of demonic buzz and noise, only a second or two, but it adds such menace to the track, as does a swirling sea of cymbal sizzle and what sounds like a moaning string section. Almost like some sort of doom torch song.
The rest of the record is maybe not nearly so intense, but it is a very dark record, think Portishead, Grouper, Skepticism, and Bohren all wound up in a sprawling songsuite of drummachined black ballads, harrowing love songs, grim ambience and blackened downtempo electronica, with a sound so gauzy and washed out and murky and psychedelic, and yeah, occasionally menacing, that it's impossible for us not to give this our highest recommendation.
Brand new remix ep (featuring a clutch of new jams as well) from Tobacco, the weirdo psychedelic synth electro hip hop side project of long time aQ faves Black Moth Super Rainbow, on which a handful of past Tobacco jams get reworked and revved up, and handed over to some of the world's weirdest and most warped MC's: Anti-Pop Consortium, Doseone, Rob Sonic, not to mention some rappers we've never heard of: Serengeti, Height, Icicle Frog, Zackey Force Funk.
The new tracks kill, the old tracks sound new, a dizzying, over the top, twisted avant hip hop blowout, synths buzz and twist and get all tangled up, the beats skitter and stutter, guitars crunch and shimmer, samples are chopped up and looped and layered, sounds buzz and crunch and whir, a swirling ever shifting backdrop for some seriously out there flows.
"TV All Greasy" buzzes and warbles while Anti-Pop go nuts over the top, the vocals riding on the undulating synths, "The Injury" sounds like an eighties educational film soundtrack wedded to crunchy fuzzguitar, the beats primitive, Doseone's whiny flow perfectly balancing Tobacco's shimmery vocodered croon, "Lick The Witch" is classic old school hip hop slathered in synth buzz and swirling effects, and Rob Sonic's bad ass versery, "2 Thick Scoops" is a dirgey almost metallic bit of shoegaze doompop hip hop freakiness, with some slithery flow and some woozy synth filigree, and so it goes, the rest of the record playing out in similarly blown out, synth heavy fuzz guitar drenched stumbly outsider hiphop radness.
Makes us think how cool it would be if all the boring radio rappers who shell out thousands of dollars for boring beats, got Tobacco to whip up some of his weirdness instead. We can't help but imagine Jay-Z or Eminem spitting rhymes over some of this stuff. If only!
Features some disturbing Tobacco style basketball headed milky cereal garish colored eye popping artwork on a 12" picture disc!
Perhaps this could be seen as a response to all of the haunted ballroom and sunken ship metaphors that The Caretaker has been producing through his reverb-soaked appropriations of old '78s, as Ocean Drama creaks and crawls with tactile, crusty sounds that give this album a waterlogged mustiness. In fact The Tobacconists' Scott Foust collected numerous recordings from a boat, which Foust and fellow Tobacconist Frans De Waard manipulated into a poetic excursion of overlapping creaks, groaning tension put upon the wooden hull, gentile lapping of the water upon the underbelly of the boat, and various clatterings of unknown origin. Upon this stream of activity, the two build a slow-moving melodic excursion, which could have originated from a particular vibration from that ship's guy-wire to the mast, or then again it could be from a guitar (as the sound does have a lovely resonant vibrato about it that isn't too far from a low-slung Morricone guitar swagger). As the guitar / tension-wire melody dissolves after about 25 minutes, the various creaks and groans move to the foreground above a glassine drone which fragments into a series of precious synth-tone melodies, only to sink into the depths of the ocean below.
Both Scott Foust and Frans De Waard have been around forever, with too many projects to even begin to list (even for us!); but the two will be releasing an album as The Tobacconists through Hanson sometime in the future. The material on Ocean Drama is pretty damn amazing, and stands as some of the best work that either has done throughout their career.
Praise be! Steve Austin and co. are back, delivering another dose of their unique brand of Satanic math-metallic noise. Sprawling over two discs (labelled X and Y), these tracks are less like songs proper than sonic symptoms of Today Is The Day's aesthetic and philosophical ideas -- and, especially, their darkest emotions.
With wretched rasping vokills, crushing doom riffs, maniac outbursts, and scary, atmospheric sample-littered soundscapes (normally we frown on samples we can recognize, but it *was* neat to hear the bit from Coven, y'know, from American Movie), Today Is The Day convey some dark feelings indeed. The metal parts are quite devastating, but it's perhaps the moodier elements that make this album so striking and creepy. Bass rumble and glitchy electronic synth noise are paired with sad piano tinklings, acoustic guitars are strummed in a backwoods night-time ritual, and there's even some honest-to-god melodic singing (as on the deathly-piano-ballad "Death Requiem" or the great Alice Cooper/Devil Doll styled track "Invincible", reprised from TITD's split cd with 16).
Several of us here at AQ have been TITD fans for a long time, all the way back to their sadly out-of-print "Supernova" debut on the Amphetamine Reptile label. Their rebirth on Relapse (three albums ago) moved them in a decidedly heavier, brutal direction, but, as made plain on "Sadness Will Prevail", their experimental, artistic impulses remain strong.
In some ways, the closest thing we can compare this to is the mighty Oxbow, colliding with the likes of Coalesce and Old Man Gloom perhaps. Easily a contender for "metal" (but not at all entirely metal) record of the year. There's certainly a lot here to like. Some of the production is more lo-fi than we'd expect from Mr. Austin (a well-known producer outside of this TITD career) but still manages to dangle us dangerously at the gaping mouth of hell! And wait for the hidden track at the end of disc two, wherein Austin fucks with some brutal black metal, which just happens to be from the upcoming Leviathan album on Andee's tUMULt label!
We've been digging this band for a while, but weirdly enough this is the first record of theirs we've reviewed. When we first heard about Toil, they were described to us as a band that sounded "exactly like the Cure, only with harsh black metal vocals," which sounded pretty good to us, gloomy gothic, new wave indie rock with black metal vocals? Awesome. And it was!
Things have changed a bit on Lullabies For Insects, the Cure vibe is still there (they do a Cure cover after all, more on that in a second), but the sound is more metal, more rocking, and if anything, Toil sound quite a bit like Lifelover, the same sort of strange juxtaposition of howling harsh vox and melodic almost indie sounding black metal. In fact, opener "Moth With Fractured Wings" is a dead ringer for Lifelover, which is not at all a bad thing, c'mon, there are a million bands who sound like Darkthrone, and more keep popping up every day, we're pretty psyched on all these bands exploring their poppier side.
After a cool 5 minute noisdrone piece, the band launch into a depressive dirge, that musically reminds us of Urfaust, or Hypothermia, lilting, loping, the vocals still frayed and maniacal, but the music, so warm and melodic, with some cool breaks with clean guitar and drums. And then finally, the Cure cover, a pretty straight version of "Love Song", except for the vocals, which are insanely over the top, a shrieky demonic falsetto, totally at odds with the music, which is what makes it so ridiculous and so awesome!
Cool packaging, one of those 3" cd's embedded in a normal cd sized plastic disc, with the artwork printed over the whole thing!
Long lost legendary slab of classic British industrial music, originally released in 1986 on the amazing Broken Flag label. The most noteworthy thing about Toll, besides it being a killer record, is the fact that it just so happens to feature a pre-Stereolab Tim Gane (!) as well as Paul Lemos from Controlled Bleeding. But Stereolab fans won't necessarily dig this, Toll is grim stuff. Cold and harsh, lots of metallic percussion, looped rhythms, skipping records, bits of shortwave radio, disembodied voices, plenty of metal on metal clang, thick distorted drones, all held together by huge lurching basslines, that give the whole thing a definite depressive miserablist vibe, like a seriously industrial Joy Division.
At their most musical, like on the loping mantra like "Broken Frame", they do sound quite a bit like the darkest of Factory bands, with simple plodding percussion, and hypnotic low end throbs, all beneath a dramatically crooned vocal line. Imagine any of the current crop of new wave revivalists, Interpol for example, slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaay down and wrapped in plenty of rumble and clang, and you'll get an idea of the sound of Toll.
But that's only one element of their sound, the other being much more abstract, epic, wide open expanses of industrial crunch and shimmering drone, mournful melodies drifting in and out of machinelike rhythms, and crumbling landscapes of sound, wheezing hisses and keening feedback, jagged shards of buzzing electronics, all sorts of strange vocals, dripping with reverb and delay, grinding whirs and thick moaning low end, very dark and dreary and very prescient of the whole modern Wolf Eyes and friends noise scene.
In addition to the entire Christ Knows LP, the cd includes 3 bonus tracks, two that sound like they could be lost Wire jams, all blown out and relentlessly throbbing, with wild squalls of feedback and buzzing guitars over bouncy bass lines and simple propulsive rhythms, while the other is an epic drone-y crawl, thick with layered voices, pulsing bass lines, muted percussive thumps and shuffles and tangled guitar scribbles, all swirled into a dense cloud of slow shifting sound. So awesome.
Fans of old school industrial (Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Nurse With Wound), classic post punk / new wave (Wire, Joy Division, the recently reviewed Arkansaw Man, etc) as well as mode modern outfits like Skullflower, Wolf Eyes, Dead C and the like, will seriously dig!
Allan has long claimed that Miguel from Reynols sounds a lot like Brak from Space Ghost Coast To Coast (also the star of the cd "Brak Presents: The Brak Album Starring Brak"). Of course, Allan does not in any way mean for this to be an insult as he loves
Tombi may be no more, or at the very least, he's keeping a crazy low profile. We carried a Tombi tape years ago that we absolutely loved, and Black HumidMist is more of the same, thick glacial drones constructed from electronics and old synths, a heady mix of soft shimmery and corrosive crunch. The first track here is a brief four minutes of glistening sympathetic tones, beneath a strange oscillating low end whir, quite tranquil and spaced out, before slipping into the 29 minute second track, which begins with a super hushed distant tone, soft focus and warmly woozy, before the low end surfaces, and the track is dramatically transformed into a thick wall of corrosive crumbling synth damage... The cool thing though is that beneath the blackened smoldering surface, major key melodies spiral out, long tones overlapping and intertwining into warm rich chordal shimmer, turning white noise into a thick wash of prismatic noise drenched mystery. Partway through, the noise component falls away, leaving a warm, rich rumble, but gradually, the edges begin to fray, and the sound explodes once again, going through various stages eventually arriving at a state of total grinding black bliss. Definitely noisy, but really quite pretty, worht getting lost in Tombi's corrosive din, to discover the blackened gem lurking inside.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, loooong out of print, we have barely ten of these, so once these are gone, they are gone forever...
Mysterious purveyors of grungy sludgy subterranean murk, take a slow motion creepy crawl through slime encrusted caves, and black pits filled with bones and rotting flesh. Huge static walls of guitar fuzz smear into Sunroof! like ambience, melodies drift and shimmer, pinned to the moist ground by the oppressive cloak of suffocating guitars and dense swirls of subterranean sound. The finest moment comes when Tombi channel that one break, in "Shoot Me A Deer" by Bastro, where the guitar sort of distorts, blows out, a sort of rhythmic riffing that just goes haywire, it's like THAT part timestretched into infinity and then roughed up a bit. before blissing out into more guitar buzz serene drift. Awesome.
2ND EDITION, LIMITED TO 25 COPIES!!!
Volume two in the planned monthly twelve volume Jewelled Antler "Library" series of 3" cd-rs (a format for which we are suckers -- they're just so cute, darn it) is the debut recording from a group called Tomes, who are, as it turns out, basically Jewelled Antler flagship group Thuja (Rob Reger, Loren Chasse, Glenn Donaldson, absent Steven R. Smith), letting themselves get a little bit louder and noiser than they usually do in Thuja, harking back a bit to precursor band Mirza in fact. Probably the main reason this wasn't put out as a Thuja release is because Tomes' title and artwork are in fact the Jewelled Antler collective's knowing nod to a black metal aesthetic (which has fascinated Glenn particularily of late). But while intended as a tribute of sorts to black metal, the psychedelic drone music found here only holds subtle echoes of dark Nordic woodlands and burning churches. The twenty minutes of abstract heavy improv of "The Dreadful Gift (parts 1 and 2)" is darn good stuff regardless of the tangential conceptual framework. With noisy phantoms clanking chains, groaning drones, tell-tale heartbeats and and distorted freeform guitar feedback, this does achieve a dark n' dirgey but beautiful atmosphere. Too beautiful perhaps to leave the black metal hordes quaking in their corpsepaint, it still could be a Jewelled Antler Halloween soundtrack of sorts -- I wonder why didn't they wait 'til the October Library installment for this? Definitely recommended.
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This reserved young Japanese fellow can also be seen and heard in a number of local bands (two that spring to mind are the raucous postpunkish The Boy Explodes and Willpower, the new wave-y side project of Imperial Teen's vocalist Will Schwartz). This is his first solo release, and it sounds like neither of the above. No, it's a playful array of electronic, sample-laden tracks -- sometimes light and ticklish, sometimes stuttery drum'n'bass-y, sometimes downright funky, sometimes chiming and musicbox-y. The latter forms the basis for one of the album's brightest points, the giddy fifth track "Ritual Of Bubble" which incorporates some very Cornelius-esque chopped up vocal samples. Tomo's music bears a striking resemblance to a slumber party / wrestling match between a bunch of tipsy arcade games. Absolutely delightful!
Another reissue from Finland's Tomutonttu, the solo guise of Jan Anderzen, better know as a member of Avarus, Anaksimandros, Kemialliset Ystavat and about a million others.
Tomutonto (notice the slight difference) as originally released as a super limited lp on Ultra Eczema back in 2006, and is now available on cd for the first time. Anderzen explores all sorts of sonic space as Tomutonttu, on the recently listed self titled cd, another reissue, the sounds was a kaleidoscopic tripped out primitivism, a stumbling forest folk, ritualistic and abstract, and while this disc offers up some similar sounding jams, it's much more out there, much more unhinged and experimental.
What songs there are, end up fragmented and all tangled up in a squirming heap, droned out organ tones, squeaks and creaks and thumps and clangs, muted percussion, processed vocals, hiccupping loops, bursts of distorted voices, damaged effects, malfunctioning electronics, fractured loops, swirling filed of spaced out buzz and birdcall like flitter, chant like vocals over Spanish sounding guitars, all wrapped in weird murk, reverb drenched operatic howls and moans, over distant creaking, and warm riffy humming, sped up strings, rhythmic clickings, all twisted and tweaked and warped and warbly.
Definitely on the TRIPPY end of the Finnish free rock underground foresty freak folk spectrum, but anyone into the rest of the Fonal catalog, and other Finnish weirdness should for sure check it out, give the sound samples a listen, that should decide it or you lickety split.
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