THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
From hidden in some dusty vault (we imagine) for lo these past thirty years, Quakebasket -- the label reponsible for that great ongoing series of archival Angus Maclise vinyl-only documents -- has exhumed this beautiful recording by another sixties era musical mystic, the mysterious multi-instrumentalist Christopher Tree. Unfamiliar with Tree until now, we're quite grateful this has finally been released. Recorded live back in 1970 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, "Spontaneous Sound" features the long-haired, bearded Tree as a one-man improvising orchestra, utilizing gongs, cymbals, chant, chimes, bells, tympanis, horns, and some other rather more unusual instruments designed for him by none other than the legendary Harry Bertoia. Apparently, Tree played for children, although this is hardly kids stuff (unfortunately there's no liner notes, but there is a charming children's drawing of Tree and his instruments in action). Tree's music evokes a higher-mind, darkly cosmic spirituality of sound similar to that of AQ-fave '70s Japanese psychedelic experimentalists the Taj Mahal Travellers. We're also reminded of the excellent recent "Solaris" disc by contemporary sonic drone artists Mirror, and of other work from the Andrew Chalk/Christoph Heemann/Jonathan Coleclough/Colin Potter/etc. axis. The cd (or lp) package's rather wonderful photos of Tree surrounded by his battery of instruments -- which fill the stage -- might lead you to expect some sort of percussion frenzy, but that's far from the case. No, this is calm and contemplative, yet powerful. Almost magically, Tree conjures an ancient, droning soundworld of gently melodic, drifting woodwinds, oceanic cymbal washes, and deep gong reverberations...really fantastic. Imagine a more intimate, softer side to Hermann Nitsch's droneworks, equally medieval but not so malevolent. And, to top it off, the guy's name is Tree! We're in love.
Aaah, could it be... the return of the shoegazer? Definite shades of early Stone Roses. A little twee and precious, but pretty, mellow, and easy-going with some lovely lush cello and a little bit of simultaneous English-French male-female vocalising to subtly spice things up. The first track absolutely destroys me, which may be due to me missing all this sort of stuff as a high school hessian.
The second of two new tapes from Black Horizons this week, this one a split with another rad local tape label Merz Tapes, a kick ass cassette reissue of a long out of print 10" originally released on the now defunct Release The Bats label, a soul searingly menacing, ultra grim black industrial ritual from this Swedish outfit, all slow motion churning blackness, creeping bleak ambience, and demonic processed vox. This demonik invokation was inspired by the late '40s Babalon Working conducted by rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons (along with none other than L. Ron Hubbard!!), a series of magic ceremonies designed to conjure up the physical manifestation of the divine feminine archetype. Needless to say, this is some haunting, atmospheric, gorgeously pitch black stuff. Deep rumblings, ominous scrapings, all blurred into a heaving, roiling expanse of sonic malevolence, and all underpinning some intense vocalizations, a harrowing speaking in tongues, wreathed in effects, heavily processed, drifting from bestial gurgle to anguished almost black metal shriek, but smeared into something way less focused, and more impressionistic, the whole thing simultaneously tranced out and mesmerizing, chilling and downright disturbing.
Like all Black Horizons tapes, fantastically and elaborately packaged, this time the J-card, transformed into a deluxe mini-booklet, aping the package of the original 10" screen printed on thick cardstock and printed in metallic silver ink. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!
The latest missive from this sinister spectre, broadcast from whatever shadowy corner of the netherworld this guy calls home. Like the previous two tapes we reviewed, Prefection & Permanence is an exercise in blackened ritualism, extreme minimal dronemusic fused to grim black ambience, an unholy hybrid spawned from the deep, a sound that is both malevolently mesmerizing and deeply sonically terrifying.
This Swedish sonic shaman who we most recently observed collaborating with local blacknoise terrorists Sutekh Hexen in the woods at Stella, conjuring up one of the most intense performances of that entire festival, delivers here an equally intense experience, one that along with the usual tropes of black ambient music, delivers a lots of sonic surprises, like on "Black Egg", wherein the grim black noise is sculpted into a pulsating, murky rhythmic throb, an avalanche of rumbling, whirring synths, accompanied by hellish vokills, the end result surprisingly musical, and in its own unlikely way, strangely catchy. And that's actually a template that many of the other songs hew to, rhythmic, hypnotic, a sort of hypno-grimnity, with some of THEE sickest vocals we've ever heard, gargling, demonic, monstrous bellows, alien murmurs, all over beds of grinding noise, clouds of static, of swirling black shimmers, and all manner of muted/mutated rhythms, a strangely mesmeric black industrial that sans vocals, could very well be are new favorite minimal blackened techno record, but with all the noise and vokills mixed in, it's transformed into something else entirely. But seriously, check out a track like "Alone/A/Cross/Abyss", it's like an impossible collaboration between some obscure grim black metal band, and some minimal techno producer, fans of some recent aQ faves like Record Of The Weekers Akkord, might find much to love here, and might find themselves lured to the (even) dark(er) side. That said, let's not downplay how dark and sick the sounds are here, this is suffocating, abject, miserable and bleak, harrowing and hellish, the vocals alone are the stuff of nightmares, but approached as some weird black industrial techno record, or at least understanding there's a strange, and to a degree out of place rhythmic element, which is how we've decided to, it becomes something even more avant / experimental / unique / bizarre, and is most definitely one of the coolest records we've heard in ages.
Latest chunk of blackened cinematic industrial ambience from this Swedish one man band, whose sound continues to explore the darkest recesses of some hellish subterranean underworld, like the last tape of his we reviewed Deathward To The Womb, the sound here is equally uplifting (read: sarcasm), a creeping militaristic pound, over wheezing synth shimmer, wreathed in a mysterious crackle, in the distance what sounds like anguished voices blurred into smears of softly undulating texture, and over the top, a demonic voice, oozing malevolence, delivers some sort of arcane incantation, chilling and harrowing, the voice dripping with menace, the background sounds appropriately ominous, but strangely, for all it's grim intensity, it's also quite melodic, sans the voice, it could be a more dreamy bit of dark ambience, but the vocals manage to transform it into something downright chilling.
The rest of the tape is not so melodic, instead slipping into an ultra abject minimalism, that almost sounds like some hellish set of field recordings, all creaks and groans, distant thumps, faraway pulses, industrial clatter muter and blurred, as if heard through a wall, or from below ground, the sounds coalescing into deep dense swells, washing over the listeners like some fetid black tide, the sounds building to intense washed of black sound, peppered with garbled voices and buried barely there rhythms, and just as often slipping into near silence, a creeping hushed drift, that in it's minimalism, exudes just as much malevolence as the heaving swells of black noise.
Housed in a printed vellum tray card with several small inserts. And yeah, VERY VERY LIMITED.
Latest from local label comes this reissue from the before now unknown to us Trepaneringsritualen, who hail from Sweden, and who most definitely sound Swedish, unfurling a sort of bleak black ambience, a drifting Cold Meat Industry style grim malevolence, underpinned by woozy snake charmer melodies, muted skeletal rhythmic pulses, croaked, FX heavy vokills, all over a washed out shimmery haze, this is the sort of ritualistic soundscapery that relies more on texture that sheer power, but in that respect, it manages to conjure up something more more harrowing, a haunting, hypnotic chunk of blackened tribal psychedelia, sounding a bit like No Neck or Sunburned Hand if they were on Cold Meat, but for every bit of tripped out, pulsing, abstract krautrock flecked black mesmer, there's a churning sprawl of low end thrum, or a dense layered stretch of blurred soft focus ambience. Those sounds more often than not mixed and matched, fused in strange, and fantastically disturbing combinations.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!! Packaged in beautifully silkscreened gold inked three panel J-cards.
There's very little that we can discern about who Triangles are. The purposefully crappy drawing on the cover (by Leif Elgrenn and Kevin Drumm!) could be portraits of God Albino from the Hawd Gankstuh Rappuhs and Phil Manley from Trans Am... but I wouldn't put
Tribes Of Neurot began as a means for Neurosis to explore ideas and musical forms that existed outside of the signature parameters of Neurosis: hammering tribal rhythms, thick slow motion grind/metal, and an apocalyptic urgency. Often referred to as Neurosis' ambient side project, Tribes of Neurot explores the more spiritual and ethereal concepts of a broader tribal atavism. "60�" is a collection of compilation tracks, rare vinyl-only pieces, and unreleased material that has been organized into an excellent album that doesn't sound like a crappy collection of throw-away pieces. Bleak isolationist washes, hypno-drone guitars & bass, creepy horror filmscore piano tinklings, female vocals in the throws of agony and/or ecstacy, and occult bells make for quite an exceptional record.
'Tis more instrumental drifting drone from thee Tribes Of Neurot, in the "ambient outerspace backwards transmissions from the planet of feedback" genre. Meridian is a little bit harsh, a little bit lovely. We can imagine that if these guys weren't so well known (as an experimental side-project of the mighty metallers Neurosis), and if this was released as a limited edition cd-r in handmade packaging on some New Zealand label, there'd be dark drone fans in droves going gaga. But although they're not that obscure, they sound like it. Recognizable elements (piano, guitar, and what we're guessing is a bowed cymbal) and less-distinct sound sources (all manner of whooshing and whirring, and also something we know is not a purring cat, but must be some sort of electronic simulation) are all a part of these ten, interestingly varied tracks, several of which include some actual "music" moving in and out of the mix, amid the pulsing drones, spectral washes, and sun-arising synth-scapes. The only drawback is that this is perhaps a bit too "active" for those that like their drones purely as background, falling-asleep music.
When Thomas Ankersmit performed in San Francisco a few years back while opening for Phill Niblock at 23five's Activating The Medium festival, he stood behind a Serge Modular Synth housed in a modified suitcase. At a rapid-fire pace, he tugged at the nest of patch cables before him, plucking just the right one that he would then move to a different input. Despite this frenzy of activity, Ankersmit mustered an intense, blossoming swarm of electrical noise, thrum, and buzz. We had known of his long-standing collaborations with Phill Niblock, as the stalwart minimalist had employed Ankersmit's circular breathing techniques on the saxophone for a number of performances and compositions; but this electronic side of Ankersmit certainly piqued our interest.
This collaborative album with Valerio Tricoli (of 3/4hadbeeneliminated) finds Ankersmit in this electronic framework. Ankersmit and Tricoli have been making the rounds of the European festival circuit, making this album the refinement of their live presentations - working with that aforementioned modular synth, laptop trickery, overdubbed sax-driven minimalism, and some rather obtuse field recordings as well. Compositionally, Tricoli and Ankersmit adopt the decentering approach to structure that the Hafler Trio mustered on his most complex collage works, although Tricoli and Ankersmit give the impression that their jaggly spliced electronics could have been generated in a live setting. Eerie passages of dissonant tones crackle with electromagnetic static and puretone chirpings of vibrating signals, shifting from insectoid chorales to spluttering polyphonic bloop circa 1965. When the sax comes out, Ankersmit molds longform, harmonic drones into metallic planes of shifting timbres and tonal dissonance, much more in keeping with his work with Niblock than anything normally sourced from a sax. But especially when it comes to the electronics, there is a sophistication to all Tricoli and Ankersmit's arsenal of noises that's miles beyond so many of today's retrogarde synthesists, and Forma II is all the better for it! One of the best electro-acoustic records to come along in quite some time.
Crunching clicks, beats and blips form the varied (noisy to noir-ish) setting over (or, under) which French female vocals sometimes reach our ears. Formed by formerly metal- now ambient/experimental- guitarist James Plotkin (OLD, Flux, Joy of Disease, Romance, many many collaborations) and some French friends, including the guy from Celluloid Mata. Dark electronic "surf" music? Six tracks, twenty two and a half minutes of mysterious electronica that Plotkin fans (like us) will enjoy.
First we've reviewed from this Midwestern misanthrope, a one man, synth swinging, electro-punk, garage pop wrecking machine, who sounds little bit like some musical DNA splicing experiment gone fantastically wrong, equal parts Suicide, Thee Oh Sees, David Bowie, Fabulous Diamonds, Chrome... well, you get, seriously twisted and WTF, darkly sci-fi, a little bit droney, spaced out and psychedelic. Opener "Fashion Has Happened To Fashion" sounds like Bowie's "Fashion", and not just because of the "Fashion" in the chorus/refrain (although that helps), it's stripped down and refashioned into a psychedelic kraut-garage groove, and the follow up also sort of sounds like the same Bowie jam at first, but it's soon pulled apart and reconstituted by some sonic mad scientist, into something much more sinister, wrapped in pulsing, pulsating FX drenched guitars, and tethered to a hypnotic robotic rhythm, with a killer recurring melodic flourish that will get stuck in your head like crazy.
The sound is all fuzzy, crumbling guitars, swirly sci-fi synths, skeletal Casio beats, and yelped, occasionally almost falsetto vox. It's dirgey and murky one second, frenetic and frenzied the next, the sound simultaneously spacey and futuristic, raw, primitive and retro. There's an awesome pic of Mr. Trin Tran himself on the sleeve, jamming on synths, guitar strapped across his chest, weird mic contraption hung around his neck, a strange sort-of-Batman mask (of course), with some cymbals, seemingly strapped to his synths, all set up in what appears to be the dingy corner of some run down bar, adorned with a sad little string of Christmas lights, and a closet filled with empty hangers in the corner. If we had to imagine what kind of weirdo was making this music, nothing we could have imagined would have been as perfect as that pic. A sonic space alien, stranded in some podunk town, sending these musical distress signals to his home planet hoping to be rescued. We're digging these jams enough, that we're intercepting those signals, in the hopes that help might never come...
These guys kicked out asses recently with the distortion drenched blown out garage rock jangle pop of their debut Sea Things, positioning them firmly alongside sonic brethren like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Sic Alps, Waaves, Surfer Blood, Soft Pack, and all the rest. This new tape offers up a handful of new songs, paired with a selection of tracks from Sea Things, so for those who somehow missed out on that gem, or who were waiting for the cassette version (?), well here's what we had to say about Sea Things (the rest of you can skip this part):
Jangly, super hooky, slightly surfy, psychedelic garage rock. And while there may be a glut of folks going for that sound, these guys do it way better than most, and totally make it their own. Self described as 'trash pop', that's pretty much what this sounds like, trashy and poppy, and loose and super rocking, the guitars are crunchy and jangly, the vocals a melodic yelp, the drums propulsive, reverb all over the place, and the songs are hooky as hell. More garagey and raw, than purely poppy, but that raw garage is infused with plenty of poppiness, reminding us a bit of a slightly more song oriented Coachwhips, you can definitely tell that live these guys probably have the crowd bouncing and sweaty and losing their shit. And it's easy to hear why.
The new tracks here, are as you might have guessed, more of the same, cut from the same sonic cloth, with maybe a bit more production polish here and there, some cool backwards effects, a slightly less lo-fi sound, but then the sound is as much of this music as the songs are, so the sound stays appropriately fuzzy and washed out and reverby, and in places gets even more noisy and crunchy than before, the 4 jams here offering up another heaping helping of gloriously buzzy Sixties influenced surf rocky fuzz pop that could have (and probably did) come straight from the same sessions that produced Sea Things, but hell, we're not complaining, more TRMRS is what we were hankering for anyway, so here it is. And the new songs do kill, hooky and rocking, sweat drenched and distorted, and catchy as all get out. And like we mentioned before, we're surprised these guys haven't yet landed on some big label (Mexican Summer? In The Red?) yet, but we're guessing it's only a matter of time.
Comes with two stickers, one of which has a download code for a digital version of the whole tape! Sweet occultic skull artwork too!
We wrote extensively about this mysterious and bizarre caveman doom duo a few lists back, and plan on reviewing all 4 of their amazing releases eventually, this being the second (we reviewed Forest Of Doom on list #254). And elsewhere on this list you'll also find a review of the equally amazing Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch, a Trollmann side project which is essentially the exact same band. But for those of you who are discovering Trollmann for the very first time, let's recap:
We have been obsessed with this band since the very first time we heard them years and years ago. We have spent the last 6 years or so trying to track down their records, as well as a place where we could order enough so we could review them and share them with the AQ faithful, who like us, truly appreciate the bizarre and the fucked.
And you don't get more bizarre and fucked than Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. Well, to begin with, they're called Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg!! They have record titles like Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars and Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice and Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity and Forest Of Doom. They have a similar sounding side project called Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch! The band members are pictured in drawings on the back of the cd, one as a strange little bearded gnome/elf sitting on a huge toadstool, the other a bearded furclad mountain man leaning on a mighty axe. The gnome is named Belegur and is credited with "Cosmic keys to gates unknown." The mountain man is Thundarr, and is credited with "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." For those of you well versed in that sort of thing, you'll realize that this duo is just bass and keyboards, which is remarkable in its own right. But the fact that Trollmann play a sort of medieval Skepticism style slow motion doom sludge with just bass and keyboards it seems even more amazing.
So there it is, if you're anything like us, it almost doesn't even matter what they sound like. But thankfully they are just as amazing and fucked as all that would lead you to imagine. While ostensibly Trollmann are a doom band, their peculiar brand of doom owes as much to William Basinski and Philip Jeck, at least sonically, as it does to Skepticism or Thergothon. Part of that is due to the incredibly lo-fi recording quality, tape hiss, and amp crumble, distortion that threatens to fall to pieces, a slow loping dronelike dirge that traverses strange landscapes of grit and glitch, of rumble and murky murmur. It's almost like Skepticism recorded by William Basinski, the tapes shoved in a box and stashed in an attic for 30 years, only to be rediscovered and released in all their slow motion crumbling drone doom glory.
Just bass and keyboards, Trollmann trudge through 4 songs in 51 minutes, huge sprawling expanses of murky muddy black ooooooooze, Black Mayonnaise cover Burzum? Maybe, if the results were then dubbed hundreds of times onto the crappiest tapes imaginable. But this is almost too delicate and dark, too lilting and lovely to be doom. But doom it is. A glorious soft focus dreamlike doom. Way less melodic than Forest Of Doom, Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars just might be our favorite Trollmann yet, imagine the songs of SUNNO))) and Thergothon and Skepticism reimagined by Tim Hecker, William Basinski and Philip Jeck. A late night, moonlit, drift through the branches of a black forest, the crackle of dead leaves, the creaking of bare branches, the black cloak of night a thick fuzzy shroud. So completely and utterly mind blowing. One of our all time essential 'doom' discs for sure.
Not sure what else to say about these guys that we haven't already said. If you've somehow managed to miss our reviews of their first couple records, Forest Of Doom and Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, as well as the Trollmann side project Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch, for chrissakes, do yourself a favor and just order all three. And this one while you're at it. Check out the other reviews for a more in depth history of what has to be our all time favorite caveman doom duo, but to briefly recap:
Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. C'mon, they're called Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg!! They have record titles like Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars and Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice and Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity and Forest Of Doom. They have a similar sounding side project called Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch! The band members are pictured in drawings on the back of the cd, one as a strange little bearded gnome/elf sitting on a huge toadstool, the other a bearded furclad mountain man leaning on a mighty axe. The gnome is named Belegur and is credited with "Cosmic keys to gates unknown." The mountain man is Thundarr, and is credited with "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." For those of you well versed in that sort of thing, you'll realize that this duo is just bass and keyboards, which is remarkable in its own right. But the fact that Trollmann play a sort of medieval Skepticism style slow motion doom sludge with just bass and keyboards it seems even more amazing.
Phew, there's more of course, but that's it in a nutshell. Not only are they mysterious, and weird, and possessing a what-the-fuck quotient that's through the roof, the music is fucking amazing! This is not that so weird it's good, or so retarded it's amazing kind of thing, this is absolute genius. Dark and creepy, heavy and sloooooooooooooooow, minimal sludge soaked abstract ambient doom. Or something. Just bass and keyboards, spewing an unholy flow of low end throb, and grinding downtuned slither. The keyboard drones and spreads out in a fuzzy blur, only occasionally offering up some sort of melodic counterpoint to the bass, as it trudges sluggishly onward.
Of all the Trollmann records, Dark Clouds is probably the heaviest, the meanest, the least melodic and the most intense. The first two tracks, both shockingly under 3 minutes, set the tone, the first, is some sort of slow motion post rock drift, a thick wash of grinding low end sludge beneath garbled demonic whispers while above drift absolutely dreamy slow drifting harmonics. The second track is a stunner, almost 'rocking', at least by Trollmann standards, some sort of primitive caveman hardcore, huge throbbing, ultra distorted downtuned buzz, with fuzzed out Butthole Surfers-ish guitar leads, and super distorted death metal grunts a stumbling hyper aggressive pummel. But after that, it's back to business as usual. Long slow extended doomy drifts. Average track length hovering at about 15 minutes, the bass a throbbing, glacial presence, the riff stretched out into eons, each note reverberating and pulsing into oblivion before the next kicks in. The keyboard just adding another layer of buzzing sludge. The bass sometimes starts to stutter and pulse, creating some sort of super blown out low end rhythm, stumbling over a thick wash of keyboard buzz, before settling back down into its glacial groove.
Epic and massive and bewildering, hypnotic and bizarre and fucking brilliant!
We have been obsessed with this band since the very first time we heard them years and years ago. We have spent the last 6 years or so trying to track down records by this band, as well as a place where we could order enough so we could review them and share them with the AQ faithful, who like us, truly appreciate the bizarre and the fucked.
And you don't get more bizarre and fucked than Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. Well, to begin with, they're called Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg!! They have record titles like Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars and Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice and Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity and Forest Of Doom. They have a similar sounding side project called Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch! The band members are pictured in drawings on the back of the cd, one as a strange little bearded gnome/elf sitting on a huge toadstool, the other a bearded furclad mountain man leaning on a mighty axe. The gnome is named Belegur and is credited with "Cosmic keys to gates unknown." The mountain man is Thundarr, and is credited with "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." For those of you well versed in that sort of thing, you'll realize that this duo is just bass and keyboards, which is remarkable in its own right. But the fact that Trollmann play a sort of medieval Skepticism style slow motion doom sludge with just bass and keyboards it seems even more amazing.
How can you not love this band already? It gets even better when you finally face their dreamy doomic meanderings. Huge downtuned bass, long stretches of droning crumbling low end. Minor key guitar lines drifting lazily over the top. Playful Renaissance faire style melodies hover over super doomy slow motion bass riffs. Long stretches of massive funereal sludge, each one a lower register death march like trudge, but with creepy quivering keyboards above the roiling blackness. Deep spoken vocals intone mysterious wisdom, over simple wandering bass lines and fluttering flute like synth. Once in a while, the keyboards and the bass will sync up and begin playing the same melody, which turns the song into some weird sounding caveman classical music.
This band is so totally out there. So gorgeously lugubrious and depressive, but with strangely cheerful and sometimes completely incongruous keyboard melodies. It's like wandering through some ancient world, wandering from tiny village to creepy haunted woodland and back again. So totally amazing. One of our favorite bands EVER. We'll try to review all the other records soon as well as the Trollmann side project Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch!! Stay tuned.
If Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg were a cult, a shadowy forest horde of trolls and cavemen, like we had always imagined (hoped?), we would be right there beneath the heavy canopy, eyes wide in the arboreal darkness, bowing before Thundarr and Mordraaneth, trudging through the woods all glassy eyed, chanting in unison, letting Trollmann's subsonic vibrations lull us into a strange doomed trance, filthy and unkempt, clad in loin cloths, faces painted with black mud, spears in hands, first-borns sacrificed, we would gladly give up our daily lives, to serve their trollish dominion. But instead, Trollmann are just a human UK doom duo, keyboards and bass, and if our wild obsession alluded to in the above ramblings didn't clue you in, we LOVE these guys, and for now, will have to make do with raving maniacally about how awesome they are and getting our hands on every possible shred of recorded music they've produced. At least until they actually do become a cult.
To be honest, we were always sort of convinced that Trollmann was some bedroom recorded side project. Some metal guy just sort of experimenting and exploring sounds and soundscapes. The purported facts were just too good to be true, a caveman/troll duo, one member named Thundarr, responsible for "Rumblings of doom" and "Prophecies of times to come", the other member called Mordraaneth, he responsible for "Cosmic keys to gates unknown". The band members always pictured on the record sleeves in drawings, bearded, carrying clubs, seated on huge toadstools. Album titles like Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars and Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice. It all seems sort of absurd, until you actually hear the music, then it all suddenly makes some sort of impossible sense. It's like a doom metal Land Of The Lost. We all headed down to the club to see some doom band play, but got sucked into some other dimension, and ended up prostrate before Thundarr and Mordraaneth, as they proceeded to create a music, both beautiful and otherworldly, heavy and dreamlike, spreading over us like a black cloud.
So imagine our surprise when we discovered, there was a LIVE recording of Trollmann. Performing on this plane, in this time, to be witnessed by mere mortals. How could that be possible? And where could such a momentous performance take place? Well, here it is. Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg's very first live Aktion, a low end doom drone ritual performed where else but... IN A PUB!!! That's right, the Tut 'N Shive. The good ol' pub down on the corner.
Even just listening, you can practically hear the pub slowly transforming into some vine draped cave, dank and dark, lit from within, some unearthly glow, while two shadowy figures lurk on a small stage-like outcropping of rock. And proceed to fill the room, with viscous black beauty. The only real distraction from this sonic transformation is the between song reaction. 20 or 30 punters, pints in hand, cheering, clapping and hooting, laughing and talking before the next huge wave of black bile comes washing over them. It's not so much distracting as surreal. To imagine this music actually being performed, in a pub, in front of a crowd. It's actually pretty amazing, if not a little unreal.
Three looooooooooooong tracks. The first, begins with a strange throbbing bass, pulsing beneath a glimmering, shimmery keyboard drone, the bass slowly transforming into a huge lurching bass riff, repeated over and over, a totally mesmerizing slow motion doom groove, with huge monstrous guttural vocals all wrapped in thick sheets of amplifier buzz and cavernous reverb. Most definitely the heaviest Trollmann yet, but as it progresses, the sound becomes more fuzzy and the notes less distinct... eventually fading into black.
The second begins with a thick swirl of rumbling low end, glowing and growling, shifting glacially, the overtones beating against each other, a thick dense black cloud of sound, slowly modulating and subtly changing shape. While beneath the roiling blackness, the keyboard offers up a drifting melancholy shimmer, simple mournful melodies that hover and slowly fade, Trollmann at their most dreamlike and ambient. But before long, this droning black shimmer begins to build, slowly swelling into a super majestic, cinematic dirge, massive soaring low end melodies, howled anguished vocals, like Moss playing Godspeed, but then slowed down and somehow rendered impossibly fuzzy and blissy, while remaining intense and threatening.
The final ritual, sounds a bit like Total or Sunroof!, but only if their instrumental arsenal consisted of nothing but bass guitars and HUGE Stonehenge like speaker cabinets, a near static wall of throbbing low end sound wrapped like thick black drifts around a soft shimmery, distant melody, a melancholia drifting well beneath the rumble and whir, eventually becoming more and more tangled, the track becoming so blown out and blurry, so grainy and soft focus it almost sounds like some sort of Pop Ambient Doom.
As disappointed as we are, that Trollmann do in fact exist in the mortal plane, and do practice their strange sonic alchemy in local pubs, the music still compels us, mesmerizes us, possesses us, it blackens our ears and our souls, and thus we are at the ready, to gather up an army, to slip free of this world, to strip off our clothes, to paint our faces and march bravely into the black forest, to serve the mighty Trollmann...
The time has come. Hard to believe. Trollman in the flesh. Live. Their mortal forms revealed to all. Thundarr and Mordraaneth. Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come, Cosmic Keys To Gates Unknown. All before our very eyes.
Not sure what we were expecting, so much of Trollmann was mystery, those strange drawings on the cds, the bizarre monickers, the lengthy song titles. And hell, the sound. Huge expanses of slow motion doom. Hellish drones spread out like a black fog. We were sort of expecting some sort of SUNNO))) thing. Dry ice, hoods, robes, back lit shadows. But nah, that's a little too contrived. Maybe they would be hidden behind some stones, or huge curtains. Or maybe they would be monsters, creatures of the night, exposed for the very first time, a horrific but impossibly compelling sight.
No matter how you slice it, with a mysterious band, it's hard not to be disappointed, and to be totally honest we were a little at first, but then, the whole thing became more and more surreal, and it was hard not to love these guys even more.
It starts with skeletal, taciturn looking long hair man in a long sleeve Burzum t-shirt, seated at a keyboard in front of a huge black tapestry of a long haired, mustachioed skull wearing an Indian headress above crossed swords. Beside him, stands another long haired fellow, in jeans and a black t-shirt, holding a black bass. All to the strains of a skull rattling low end doomdrone. But then the camera pulls back to reveal the fact that they seem to be outside, DURING THE DAY! They also seem to be under a bridge. Beneath a brick arch, with a muddy hillside in the background, trees and bushes. On the wall behind the band in the background a strange brass plaque, and what appears to be a pig's head on a stick. The whole thing is filmed with a super jittery camcorder, sudden unexpected zooms, face, fingers on strings, the dirt hillside in the background, the skull on the tapestry, and while the band plays, you can hear people talking, obviously not that into the band, one guy even comes to the front of the stage, beer in hand, and begins to taunt the band, making hand gestures and mugging fro the crowd. Someone in the audience yells "You're fucking SHITE!!!". People laugh, but the band remain expressionless, intent on the harsh soundworld they're weaving beneath this bridge.
The second track begins the same way, the taciturn man seated at his keyboard, beneath the Indian skull, but at this point, either the cameraman is getting bored, or has gotten too drunk to really keep the camera still or keep his attention on the band. Lots of jittery shots of the floor, the wall beside the band, the band members' feet, the crowd, drunk dudes and cute metal girls, amps, the trees behind the stage, the houses on the other side of the bridge, and most bizarrely of all, a couple of little dogs, one of whom proceeds to run back and forth in front of the stage, seemingly unperturbed by the roaring doomic dirge emanating from the speakers. And the cameraman seems unduly interested in the dog, considering he is meant to be capturing the slow motion might of Trollmann. Much more crowd chatter this time around, but somehow it just adds to the sound. Laughing and inane drunken conversations are inadvertently woven into the black fabric of Trollmann's sound. A bespectacled man mouths "Awesome. Fucking awesome... " Someone holds a cigarette beneath the camera letting the smoke whip by the lens like the world's most inexpensive special effect. All the while, Trollmann remain impassive, statue like, emitting an impossibly gorgeous ambient dirge, chanted vocals, over a pulsing bass drone and shimmery keyboards. Almost like Moss crossed with SUNNO))) only with Gregorian chant-like vocals. The whole thing is incredibly surreal, the camera bobbing from the ground to the sky to the band to the crowd and back again, the sky darkening behind the band, the crowd growing less and less distinct, and more like featureless shadows, wraiths... it's somehow sort of perfect.
Outside of the camera panning back to reveal a troll atop a toadstool clutching his keyboard, and a huge furry caveman with a club in one hand and a bass guitar in the other, performing on the edge of a fiery abyss, wreathed in clouds of vampire bats and thick curls of black smoke, we really couldn't have wished for more...
It's finally here. The fourth part of the Trollmann quadrilogy, a mysterious assemblage of four recordings, once kept together in a hidden temple, far beneath the Earth's crust. But over millennia, scattered far and wide. We have long been searching. It took us years to find all four. We first searched in the Forest Of Doom, and soon discovered the first recording, wrapped in a blood soaked cloth and kept at the bottom of a deep well, protected by a strange group of deformed bear like creatures. Once this was in our possession, we struck out in search of the second piece of this mysterious dronedoom puzzle. We soon discovered the second sacred recording by reciting a series of Arcane Runes which Adorned The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars. We holed up in our secret lair, every time the two recordings were brought together they gave off an unearthly glow and emitted some impossibly slow heavy dirgelike sound. We knew we were on the right path.
Years passed, and we found ourselves in a truly strange land, arid and barren, always dark and freezing cold, when suddenly, Dark Clouds Blackened The Sky and it became apparent that it was in fact The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice, and had we tarried a moment longer, the third recording would have been lost to us. Three pieces collected, each recording, a bleak rumbling world of black sound leading us closer and closer to whoever, or whatever is Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. Perhaps we will never know. We may perish before we have discovered the truth.
Here it is, seemingly ages since we first set out upon this quest, with our final breath, our last ounce of strength, we began Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity, and lo and behold, there it was, the fourth part, the key, the last part of the fourfold sonic grail that is Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. We may be bidding farewell to this plane, and it may have taken us many lifetimes, but we shall die with a smile on our lips, and ears full of black buzz and cavernous rumbling. Adieu.
What the hell are we talking about? Well, if you're just tuning in, only our most favorite, caveman ultra doom duo EVER, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, who we first discovered years ago and as the story above suggests have ever since been trying to track down the rest of their recordings. Recently we finally did, and have been wallowing in Trollmann's peculiar brand of funereal ambient doom ever since. Just bass and keyboards, no drums, no guitars. Each record sonically similar, but each with its own particular sound, every one a different facet of Trollmann's strange sonic world. First their was Forest Of Doom, then there was Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, after that there was Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice, and now, we have Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity, quite possibly the prettiest and most ambient of the four, but no less ominous and dark.
Tolling begins with a simple, subtle slow motion bass line, over which drifts a dreamy melancholy synth melody. Dark and mournful and vaguely foresty, this drifts on and on an on, very trance like, until about half way through the track's 15 minutes, the bass suddenly becomes distorted, and the track becomes somehow creepier and more intense, the same melody, the same loping rhythm, but wrapped in a tattered cloak of crumbling distortion. Some strange blend of new age, dark ambience and doooooom. At times it almost sounds like a doom metal Three Mile Pilot.
Track two is another epic, 17 minutes, beginning with a simple buzzing low end, a rumbling drone, that seems to spread like some viscous black liquid, gradually growing more and more dense, the low end pulses closer and closer together until a rhythm seems to surface. The keyboard joins in, offering haunting atonal notes, that hover and drift above the monotonous throb, angular and ultra creepy. The bass and keyboard all tangled up in unlikely melodies and weird dissonant tangles, almost like abstract free jazz Trollmann if you can imagine such a thing. But even at its most jagged and atonal, it still manages to be dark and droney. And really really creepy.
The album closer, the 11 minute long title track, begins with some shimmery harmonics, before the bass kicks in, all super fuzzy and ultra blown out, not so much weaving a melody, as laying down layer after layer of thick fuzz, a haunting black riff stretched out into long stretches of rumbling whir, while the harmonics in the background become more and more dense. The entire track building in intensity, a furiously buzzing lugubrious crawl, that suddenly fades to silence.
We've written plenty about the mysterious men behind Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, Belegur on "Cosmic keys to gates unknown" and Thundarr on "Rumblings Of Doom and Prophecies Of Times To Come", and the other recordings, just check elsewhere on the AQ site, but Tolling is as good a place to start as any, and if you're anything like us, you too will be mesmerized by the strange sounds of Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, and will embark on your own spiritual quest to track down all of their sacred recordings (we've made it a bit easier, as we carry 'em all! Including an amazing live record, AND a live dvd, where the men of Trollmann reveal their mortal forms!)
Needless to say, utterly recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Ultra limited picture disc from AQ faves Troum. Limited to 444 copies, this gorgeous picture disc (which comes with a swirly numbered magnet as well!) is two blasts of rumbling chaotic drone, occasionally harsh and almost industrial, but more often absolutely dreamy and otherworldly.
For many years now, Troum has been mining one particular sound with few deviations from a signature of darkly smeared drone-instrumentals for guitar, bass, and other sound making machines. Their sound developed out of the post-industrial ambient arena populated by Zoviet France, Lustmord, and Hazard; yet, at the same time, Troum's billowing shadows of mournful melody and subharmonic rumble acted as something of a prototype for the ephemeral metal dirges conjured by the likes of Nadja and SUNNO))). As much as Troum's work has been at the center of a Venn Diagram that overlaps not only those aforementioned projects but also the post-rock dronscapisms of Machinefabriek, Stars Of The Lid, and Jasper TX, Troum (as well as Maeror Tri, the project which preceded Troum) has always sounded like Troum. Their signature is quite unique; and this uniqueness is only trumped by the remarkable consistency in the quality of their recordings. Because of this consistency and because of their ability to bridge the numerous signposts within the increasingly splintered network of drone music, Troum have earned themselves a loyal fanbase.
So for those of you who have been smitten with Troum (like many of us here), save yourself the trouble of reading this missive and just get this album. Their signature sound is firmly entrenched upon Aiws, making the album as good as the best parts of the Tjurkurrpa series and their remarkable collaboration with All Sides. Much has been said about Troum's spiralling grey kaleidoscopes of melancholia and crepuscular fogginess; and all of the hypnotically simple melodies dripping with dronecast effects that have made Troum's previous work so good are all present here on Aiws. Slow building, majestic crescendos steadily evolve out of an expansive dronescaping that Troum have long mastered. Don't expect anything new from Aiws, but who the hell cares when it sounds this great!
It's a bit hard to concentrate with the huge spinning eye at the center of this gorgeous picture disc watching me, though gazing into the swirling eye has a strikingly similar affect to listening to the music on side one of Ajin, a propulsive, sort-of-industrial dronescape, a bit removed from the thick swaths of layered guitar we've come to expect from this German duo. The drones are not static or slow shifting, no they are a swirling, active whirl of abstract melody and subtle sonic swoops, a background blur underpinning the propulsive krautrock rhythms that are the focal point here. Imagine a snippet of Can, or a brief snatch of classic Faust, chopped and looped into a totally mesmerizing sonic mantra. The rhythm shifts subtly, from murky to crystal clear, but never wavers, a rhythmic trip to the outer reaches of the universe or the inner reaches of the soul. The other side (the artwork is subtly and appropriately altered so that now the eyes is closed) is more of Troum's classic minimal whir, the first track, a rumbling slow moving flow of muted guitar and teutonic thrum, dark and thick and ominously tranquil. The final track sounds almost like chamber music Troum, sweetly mournful melodies swoon and keen, haunting and darkly romantic. So lovely.
Gorgeously packaged and designed, ultra thick vinyl picture disc, with the eye image and all manner of design filigree, in a heavy guage plastic sleeve, sealed with a full color sticker, and includes a full color numbered insert.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES WORLDWIDE!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Here's the latest lp from AQ faves Troum, and according to the band themselves this is perhaps their most fully realized work to date. Dark reverberant drones, rich and gorgeousy layered. Everything we've come to expect from Troum. Too bad (or too good, depending on how you approach things like this) it's only been released as a very expensive and very limited picture disc. But it's a super gorgeous disc, the artowrk is a dense and super complex collage of lines and dots and colors and swirls designed by Seldon Hunt, in a silkscreened clear plastic sleeve. Beautiful, both visually and sonically. And if you somehow missed the above warning, this is quite limited and once we run out they are most likely gone for good.
This disc collects two very hard to find pieces of vinyl from this aQ beloved duo, with the 2005 LP Nahtscato first issued by the German imprint Paranoise in an edition of 300 copies and Autopoiesis being a 2004 picture disc from Small Voices. As nice as it is to hear Troum material on vinyl, sinking into 75 minutes of Troum's vast, darkened dronescaping pocked with cinematic, intense loopings and dramatic melodies is a very good way to experience their work. We've carried both of these pieces of vinyl way back when and neither of them are currently available. On both of these records (it's hard to tell where one album ends and the other begins) the billowing dark clouds of ominous guitar drones that have been the trademark of Troum (and their earlier incarnation Maeror Tri) continue unabated in a thick morass of chorus, delay, and reverb effects boxes with occasional accompaniments of pounding tribal rhythms. Troum navigate through cavernous, subterranean spaces where thrumming low end engulfs everything in a blackened pit of emptiness, then dramatically lifts off through their cyclical drone-riffs that build towards impressive crescendos of icy noise and luminous drones. There's also two bonus tracks not found on the original pieces of vinyl. If you missed the opportunity to pick up the vinyl back then, this cd isn't going to be around for terribly long either as the bulk of Troum's catalogue tends to get snatched up in Russia and Eastern Europe.
While always flirting with post-Industrial references through the mechanical resonance of ominous drones, on this limited 10", Troum further explores post-Industrial rhythms as the template for a 'pure emotional expression'. The thick swarms of guitar drones, which dominate the aesthetic of both Troum and their previous group Maeror Tri, are present; however, the a-side to "Darve Sh" is centered on a dense drum machine loop that rumbles forward like a hydraulic engine and has been engulfed in Troum's signature density of miasmic sounds. If my memory serves me right, this track is very similar to (if not taken from) one of the tracks performed at the Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco during their first tour of the US, although there is no information supporting this claim on the record itself. The b-side to "Darve SH" mutes the drum machine, but doesn't remove the rhythm structure, as delay loops and hypnotic samples drive through the buzzing, multi-verb laden guitar drones. Limited and numbered to 500 copies.
Dreaming Muzak was the very first release from Troum, not long after the two members of Troum had disbanded their previous project Maeror Tri in 1998. Originally released as a cassette housed in a tiny pillow in an edition numbering a scant 100 copies, Dreaming Muzak is now available as a cd-r edition, although its long term availability remains unknown. That said, Dreaming Muzak does what Troum and Maeror Tri have always done so very well: drone-on with gritty, psychological undercurrents. If the intent for Troum was to put the listener to sleep, the lulling vibrating patterns certainly have the capacity; but the overall darkness of these sounds will never inspire the most pleasant of dreams. These are shadowy, bleak, and cold sounds which permeate the album, and lend themselves to images of desolate factories spewing a constant stream of black soot in some wintery post-Soviet country. A very nice document from one of our favorite drone acts.
Eald-Ge-Streon reveals a much different Troum than we're used to. This German duo, long time favorites of folks around here (ever since their pre-Troum outfit Maeror Tri) has always delivered gorgeous guitar driven drone music, dark and haunting and hypnotic, which makes sense since Troum also operate the quite excellent Drone label, which specializes in, yep, you guessed it, drones.
Eald-Ge-Streon is a strange record in that it's a sort of odds and ends collection, various recordings begun years ago, left unfinished, or reimagined for various live performances, many finally finished here for the first time, and while the sound is still essentially dronemusic, it's much less guitar driven, much more ethereal and shoegazey, reminding us of Jesu and Nadja and Lovesliescrushing more than the usual suspects. Which is not a bad thing at all.
Epic, majestic, fuzzy, dreamy, washed out, the first track sounds almost pop ambient, thick gauzy swaths of sound drifting, layers upon layers, totally mesmerizing, ethereal, ephemeral, quite beautiful. The second track takes a looped machinelike rhythm, and builds a doom bliss dirge around it, a sort of post industrial shoegaze, that ends up sounding like some recently unearthed gem, except they never really made music like this. "Eolet" is deep drones, but infused with lots of melody, the sound cinematic, soundtracky, dreamy and pretty, not at all gritty or underground, which again is not at all a bad thing.
The rest of the record slips from motorik rhythm driven doom bliss, to soft billowing dreamlike ambience, to tangled blown out almost new wave sounding post industrial crush, to the 16+ minute closer "Crescere", an epic bit of muted drift, that slowly builds to a blackened heaving slab of pulsing pop ambience, laced with gorgeous psychedelic backwards guitar flutter, processed percussion, distant almost new age melodies, all building to an epic, super emotional climax of metallic buzz and sweet swirling shimmer. Fantastic. Comes housed in a super deluxe gatefold digipak designed by Stephen O'Malley with photos by Seldon Hunt.
And while they last, the compact disc version of Eald-Ge-Streon comes with a bonus disc, featuring a brand new 33 minute track, another gorgeously epic chunk of dronemusic, the first nearly ten minutes, a hushed barely there whisper, before the sound thickens, and dark wisps become haunting melodies, the soft buzz grows more rough and dense, transformed into an extended stretch of crumbling distorted low end drift, before the surprisingly melodic, washed out dreamy outro.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Troum is the dronological duo that was born out of the dissolution of Maeror Tri - easily one of the most emotive drone ensembles ever. Troum's "Framapeis" is a lengthy two track 12" that picks up where Maeror Tri left off, with lumbering dark ambient passages built out of layered guitar washes that slyly provide a semblance of simple melodies and tenative rhythmic structure. These shimmering apparitons of basic song structure gently pass through the thick sonic haze as if they have been sent down from the heavens and filtered through the sediments suspended in the atmosphere. Beautiful, majestic, and haunting, Troum (and the preceeding Maeror Tri) have set the bar very high for drone artists in the future... "Framapeis" is limited to 500 copies.
The title Grote Mandrenke comes from an archaic Saxon dialect, meaning 'the great drowning of men' and refers to a historic storm that struck Europe in January 1362. This Atlantic storm raked across the British Isles and Northern Europe, killing over 25,000 people and creating such a deluge across the coastline of Holland as to aid in the formation of the Zuiderzee, a large inland sea which later became crucial for the political and economic fortunes of the Dutch Empire by the 17th Century. The aQ-endorsed drone-duo Troum takes up this subject with the same allegorical grandeur as Goya or Gericault or Turner might apply to such a subject through their historical paintings. It's all fury and bluster in the huge blasts of droned dissonance leading towards majestic overtures and ethereal gaspings in describing this event of meteorological violence.
In recent years, Troum's shadowy expressionism has developed greater and greater degrees of musical clarity with their pieces aligning closer to the drone-metal dirges of Nadja or Barn Owl. That holds true for the highly dramatic Grote Mandrenke. Emotionally saturated melodies tumble from a buzzsaw take on shoegazed guitars and lurching drum machine rhythms, shifting from one mighty orchestration of processed guitars into another. The mood of Troum's melodies is mostly somber although the sheer beauty of many of their phrases and slippages can considerably brighten the overall atmosphere of this album. One can easily see these torrents of darkened guitars as the manifest force of that 14th century storm, with the beautiful swaths of melody as the Pyrrhic visions of those who may have survived the storm but have a countryside of corpses, debris, and brokeness to sift through. A potent album to say the least.
It goes to show how prolific Troum can be, if we missed the first two entries in the 'power romance' series, which were granted ocean/sea titles and based (in part) on samples from J.S. Bach. This 52 minute piece features multiple movements that ebb and flow into each other. The opening phrases ascend from pastoral orchestral samples (presumably those aforementioned Bach samples) into a soaring crescendo of swirling, emotionally bright tones and loops from trilling strings, girded by those luminously flanged guitars that Troum has mustered for years. Then comes the anthemic surge of a big back-beat from programmed rhythms that sound more like a live drum kit than they've previously produced, giving this movement a feel more like those grand early tracks by Sigur Ros or even Godspeed! You Black Emperor. A subdued melancholic passage of lugubrious murk follows before the duo reprises their classic Troum / Maeror Tri sound of deep, doom-paced basslines and goth-drone melodies which churn through the guitars. The bass climbs to the foreground some 30 minutes into the album with those weeping guitars settling into the distance before another fantastically mesmeric rhythmic blast kicks in. Admittedly, we've been critical of Troum and Maeror Tri for some of their programming choices in the past; but this is a high caliber set of sampling here, with a mid-tempo breakbeat laced with overblown cymbal crashes that has more in common with the complex patterns of Squarepusher than the earlier tribal-industrial rhythms. The finale pools into those saturated drones of evanescent bass and guitar, scraped with just the right amount of distortion. Another great album from these perennial aQ faves...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Troum (Traum is "dream" in the duo's native German, but Troum is ?) mines the nether regions of the subconscious to create waking replications of their nightly visions. Their recordings are far from mere transcriptions of dreams to tape; they are the gossamer residues of once vivid memories, passed through mesmeric filters to slowly dissolve present reality into soft focus fragments of thought. Musically, these translations fall both on the sublime and, at times, on the malevolent side of the ambient divide.
"Sen" -- Troum's contribution to Staalplaat's luminary-laced live-radio-recordings "Mort Aux Vaches" series -- seems fixated on the North Sea, where sheets of black ice creak under the tidal currents that roll onto a rocky beach. Troum sees no need to make any direct references to that imagined metaphor, rather it's implied behind a bleak drone haze of guitars, bells, voice, and keyboards treated with a heavy dose of synthetic cathedral reverb. Troum's post-industrial background is revealed with a churning drum machine which rumbles underneath their complex tonal patterns like an antiquated seaside factory.
Troum, more so than in their previous incarnation as Maeror Tri, has the potential to invoke awe through their hypnogogic expanses of droning sound. Here they push beyond their potential. Also, please note that this only their second cd, and the first is out of print (this is limited as well!), so get it while you can.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! We managed to get a handful of this vinyl-only release from the German dronescapists Troum. The billowing dark clouds of ominous guitar drones that have been the trademark of Troum (and their earlier incarnation Maeror Tri) continue unabated in the thick morass of chorus, delay, and reverb effects boxes with occasional accompaniments of pounding tribal rhythms. Three lengthy tracks pressed on bright red translucent vinyl.
Latest slab of guitar based whir and drift from these masters of the drone (they do in fact run the DRONE record label after all). Formerly Maeror Tri, Troum�embody the drone, they live, breathe, eat and sleep drones. And it shows. Their records are gorgeous and epic, but seem so effortless, as if the sounds they create are simply channeled through their corporeal forms, but have been created in some fiery forge at the center of an alien planet.�
The first half of this single still sounds like Troum, but is unlike anything we've heard from them, strange looped high end guitar, what sounds like backwards chords, almost choral vocals, dramatic and haunting and cinematic, very much like some super stylized horror movie music almost, warbled and wavery, over a distant grinding low end tone drifting way off in the background, washed over by epic sweeping swells..
The other side is a bit more raw and intense, a seriously corrosive guitarscape, distorted and crumbling chordal buzz, looped and layered into a strange glacial riff, strewn over deep dark swirls of slow shifting sound and haunting minor key melodies. It manages to be intense and fierce but also gloriously washed out and blissful.�
Super�swank, full color covers, full color inserts, and pressed on nice thick vinyl. And of course limited, just not sure -how- limited...
A couple years ago, we started to regularly carry the releases from Mystery Sea, a Belgian label who only release cd-rs of "night-ocean drones" in editions of 100 copies. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of those micro-edition releases that we never managed to get a hold of: Rapoon, Mnortham, Coelacanth, Spiracle, and Troum being some of those we wish we could have tracked down. The good news is that some of these Mystery Sea discs have been resurfacing as proper cds on various labels around the world, both near and far. Troum's contribution to the Mystery Sea project was rumored to be out of print right when it was released; and it's a very good thing that the Russian imprint Faria has made this available again.
Nearly 10 years ago, Troum emerged from the ashes of the post-industrial project Maeror Tri. In this incarnation, the Troum duo focused their sound upon amorphous drone compositions for guitar, bass, accordion, and a shitload of effects boxes. We've long long championed Troum as one of the pinnacles of dark, heavy, guitar-driven dronemusik alongside the likes of Aidan Baker / Nadja, BJ Nilsen, Oren Ambarchi, and SUNNO))). Objectlessness is a mighty fine entry in Troum's storied discography. Two long tracks of deep narcoleptic whirs, marked by Troum's signature infernal rumble, out of which radiant drones soar towards the heavens. They's always balanced the sublime and the nightmarish, the beautiful and the malevolent; and such dualistic metaphors play themselves out within the shadowy cascades of their dronemusic.
The Russian version of Objectlessness features new artwork in a slightly oversized cardboard sleeve with 4 postcards. Limited to 750 copies, which should last a bit longer than the original cd-r, but probably only a little bit longer.
I believe it was 1997 when a small posting came my way stating that Maeror Tri had dissolved. At the time, this German trio had become one of my (Jim's) favorite ensembles alongside the likes of Organum, Skullflower, and :zoviet*france:. Maeror Tri's dedication to grimly focused atmospheric music harbored all of the things that succeeded in the campaigns of industrial and ambient music; and the Maeror Tri anonymity (or at least a mysteriousness about the group that lead to such a reading of their collective persona) certainly enhanced their charm. Albums such as Emotional Engramm and Multiple Personality Disorder had achieved heavy rotation status on my stereo (and still get pulled from the shelves quite often in this day and age); so the news that Maeror Tri was no more was met with sadness. Fortunately, two thirds of the Maeror Tri ensemble had decided to continue on but under the moniker Troum. While the name of this duo was an archaic German word for dream, Troum's pursuit of unconscious symbolism through their heavily processed guitar drones still maintained the ashen darkness that Maeror Tri perpetuated, as was evident on their first CD release Ryna, which originally came out in 1998 on the Belgian label Myotis. It should be noted that Ryna is not the first Troum recording; that honor is held by a cassette called Dreaming Muzak that came housed in a tiny pillow. Ryna quickly went out of print, along with much of the Maeror Tri back catalogue; but thankfully, Troum have repressed this early gem through their own Transgredient imprint. An album of constantly billowing black clouds, Ryna achieves the same dark ambient / dronescape signature that had marked so many great Maeror Tri / Troum releases. On occasion, cracked / decayed loops of rhythmic surging emerged from beyond the horizon of Troum's guitar suites, alluding to a Norse mythological bellow of impending doom and apocalyptic battle. While I've not done the side-by-side taste test of the two albums, the 2007 redux of Ryna appears to much louder and cleaner. Regardless, it's a pleasure to hear this record once again!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Wow, is this a doozy of a reissue. The long out of print Sen record, from guitar drone outfit Troum, originally released as their entry in the Mort Aux Vaches, gets an ULTRA deluxe double vinyl reissue courtesy of the always amazing Equation label.
Before we get into the record itself, we have to talk about the packaging. Especially because the version we got is limited to 97 copies, and except for copies to the band, and a handful of Equation mailorder customers is EXCLUSIVE to aQuarius!! Two lps, both pressed on heavy vinyl, the vinyl is clear with a sepia haze emanating from the center. The lps are housed in a SUPER thick clear PVC gatefold that is sealed with a little velcro button. Inside the gatefold, a thick 7" pouch, which houses three 7" circular 2-sided satin-finish heavy-card inserts along with a sticker and all sealed with a hand-numbered oval sepia sticker. Phew! It really is one of the most breath taking chunks of vinyl we have ever seen. So gorgeous and it weighs a ton. And if that weren't enough, the music inside is equally fantastic.
Troum (Traum is "dream" in the duo's native German, but Troum is ?) mines the nether regions of the subconscious to create waking replications of their nightly visions. Their recordings are far from mere transcriptions of dreams to tape; they are the gossamer residues of once vivid memories, passed through mesmeric filters to slowly dissolve present reality into soft focus fragments of thought. Musically, these translations fall both on the sublime and, at times, on the malevolent side of the ambient divide.
Sen, originally released as part of Staalplaat's luminary-laced live-radio-recordings "Mort Aux Vaches" series, seems fixated on the North Sea, where sheets of black ice creak under the tidal currents that roll onto a rocky beach. Troum sees no need to make any direct references to that imagined metaphor, rather it's implied behind a bleak drone haze of guitars, bells, voice, and keyboards treated with a heavy dose of synthetic cathedral reverb. Troum's post-industrial background is revealed with a churning drum machine which rumbles underneath their complex tonal patterns like an antiquated seaside factory.
Troum, more so than in their previous incarnation as Maeror Tri, has the potential to invoke awe through their hypnogogic expanses of droning sound. Here they push far beyond their potential.
And again LIMITED TO 97 COPIES!!! So get it while you can.
No sound clips, but check out this gorgeous promotional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1BhFZM6MM
Finally, the first Troum record to be widely available in the United States, released through Relapse subsidiary Desolation House, and we're pleased to say it's maybe their best yet. Troum are the ambient-drone ensemble that emerged from the dissolution of proto-industrial dronesters Maeror Tri. Unlike the primarily guitar based whir and rumble of Maeror Tri, Troum obfuscate their sound sources, laptops, found sounds, accordians, guitars too maybe, and the results are timeless, mysterious, haunting, ethereal and utterly breathtaking dronescapes. Sigqan is a lengthy three part epic, beginning with rich sonorous foghorn like swells, that ebb and flow, separated by near silence, and slowly building in intensity from warm crescendos to huge doomy pulses. Eventually, these roaring rumbles joined by complementary shimmers of high end, that sound out, and then dissipate like sonic ripples, fading into blackness. The swells slowly grow closer and closer until the edges begin to blur and a subtly more continuous melodic framework begins to emerge and so begins the second movement, a creepy and slightly ominous, slowly fluctuating slow-motion-melody, whose lazily shifting notes keep the sonic landscape dense and rich, and keeps the sounds from flatlining into monochromatic drones. As the piece winds down, the dynamics and melody start to smear together into a warm, diffused fuzzy hum, with the subtle traces of melody sinking deeper and deeper into the dark warmth. The third and final movement was a sonic afterthought, added/recorded later than the first two, but is a pleasantly dreamy coda, with a slightly sunnier tone, a keening upper register melody, stretched out into subtly slithering iridescence with a shuffling, staticky rhythm just below the surface. So nice.
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Already in its second pressing -- as the first had been released in an elaborate pyramid and sold out very quickly -- "Symbiosis" is a brief excursion into the dreamily expressive guitar drones of the AQ-favorite, German duo Troum. Well versed in psychoanalysis and its history over the past decade, Troum qualifies their music as a liminal space flickering with the urges and pre-cognitive thoughts of the unconscious part of the brain. Troum manifests these ideas as waves of guitar drones processed through a weighty bank of effects, offering melodic fragments that slowly tumble into repetitions of their saddened forms through vast fields of ambience. "Symbiosis" is certainly another great offering from Troum, with the small twist on their unique sound in that each of the members have produced solo tracks; however, since all tracks are untitled and uncredited, which is which is any one's guess.
If the opening track to this album sounds awfully familiar to the customers here at aQuarius, that's because "Ater" was originally commissioned for the Painted Black compilation on tUMULt - an album of radical demolitions of the Stones' classic track "Paint It Black." The devilish chords from that song loom as a majestic overture above an insistent, infernal cauldron displaying Troum's darkest, most malevolent dronecraft. Troum, being the duo of Stefan Knappe and Martin Glitsch, eschew the vocals and the drums of the Stones' number for just those chords that collapse wearily into a black hole of negative energy. It still sounds as amazing as when Andee issued it on tUMULt back in 2003 (and we still have copies, if you haven't heard it, it's FANTASTIC!!!). As you might guess, Syzygie is a collection of the compilation tracks that Troum produced at the turn of the millennium. This track is a great opening number no matter how you slice it, leading immediately into a comparably pretty track "Makaria" from the Walls Are Whispering compilation on EE Tapes, with a pastoral shimmer from maudlin guitar chords awash with Cocteau Twins' tears. This, like the Painted Black track, is one of the few tracks on this compilation that we were fortunate enough to hear; but much of this material was released on super obscure compilations. Another highlight here is the slow-burning "Fantauma" which predates much of the Nadja crush of doom-drone guitars and machined drum loops by a couple of years. Amidst the cold drone and heavy hypnosis, Troum's consistency is really notable, especially when so many artists release throwaway tracks for compilations; and it makes for a very solid album. It would have been great if Syzygie included their version of "Cold" by The Cure, from the Pornography cover album on Fear Drop; but we suppose we'll have to wait for the next Syzygie volume.
Stefan Knappe of Troum has started the Transgredient label as an outlet for CD releases, thus preserving the vinyl-only purity of his Drone Records label and its ongoing series of seven inch singles. Troum is the extention of the Maeror Tri project which was an incredibly prolific isolationist / post-industrial group throughout the '90s. Armed with a barrage of guitars, miasmic loops, and tricked out reverb / echo / delay effects, Maeror Tri undertook a bleak and at times nightmarish route in search of the drone supreme. While culling from Maeror Tri's extensive drone production techniques, Troum's sound is far lighter -- but still never sounds as gentle (or space-rock-y) as something like Windy & Carl or Roy Montgomery. Repetitive and subtly beautiful melodies rise out of the waters of Troum's cold swirling ambience, which grow in intensity throughout each of the seven lengthy pieces on this disc. While the members of Troum have been recording for well over a decade, it is still a wonder to hear new material as they continue to challenge themselves to improve on the what they seemingly have already perfected: the task of creating the ultimate drone.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Yes, it is stating the obvious; but the AQ endorsed dronologist duo Troum does in fact round out their Tjukurrpa triology with an album centered upon their use of rhythms, loops, and percussive mantras. Given their prediliction for post-industrial sensibilities, sonically represented on their Mort Aux Vache album and in their previous incarnation as Maeror Tri, Troum's ritualist approach toward percussion makes sense. Within the first couple of tracks, Troum condense a tight mechanical loop from a metal bashing clamor in line with Test Dept and early Einstuerzende Neubauten. When Troum introduce their effects laden guitars to those rhythms, they come up with a weird fusion of My Bloody Valentine's heavy-lidded distortion and Throbbing Gristle's rhythmic palette. After these tracks, the rhythms drift into the background where aqueous fluctuations become the foundation for their guitar excursions. Here, Troum are far more successful, where their ominous drones can really take off and rival such dronecore guitar gods as Sunn O))), Earth, Main, and Boris. The percussion returns on the album's finale with considerable more panache than the album's earlier workouts. Looping a simple pattern from a set of hand drums, Troum sweep guitar drones and sublime melodies like the best work of Muslimgauze or Rapoon.
Troum's second installment in their "Tjukurrpa" trilogy is self-evidently subtitled "Drones" (and makes us ask, the first one wasn't?). Since their days in the prolific isolationist ensemble Maeror Tri, the two members of Troum continue to masterfully
For their first full length since 2003, German instrumental organic drone alchemists Troum have teamed up with Nina Kernicke aka All Sides to create one of the most amazing records we've heard in ages. A gorgeously expansive single track, epic and cinematic, dark and delicate...
Beginning life as the guitar based drone unit Maeror Tri, the band morphed into Troum and expanded their sonic palette to include all manner of instruments including guitar, bass, voice, accordion, balalaika, flute, mouth-organ, melodica, gong and even field recordings. Every record since has slowly expanded their sonic universe, but Shutun is a revelation.
The sound is dramatically different from past Troum outings, so one has to assume that Ms. Kernicke has something to do with the new direction. That said, it's impossible to tell who is doing what. This single 51 minute piece is like an organic entity, a living sound, shifting and stretching, subtly changing shape assuming new forms. From the strange processed voices that open up the piece, creating a strange pagan sort of ritual, the voices are quickly subsumed by soft metallic shimmers, that seem to materialize from out of nowhere. A hypnotically looped refrain that glistens and glimmers, the sound is not dense at all, but nearly weightless. Within these delicate shimmers are darkly melancholic melodies that repeat mantra like, creating super intense emotion, and occasional muted bursts of resonant sound, huge billows of metallic rumble like massive bells slowed way down. The result is impossibly lush and dreamlike. cinematic and dramatic. It's like an impossible blend of Oval's Diskont, the blissed out blur of Pop Ambient, and the sepia toned fuzzscapes of Tim Hecker. But Troum and All Sides, take those sounds and blend them into something new and unique, looping certain parts, stretching out others. Drone music can be dark and ominous, but to imbue it with such emotion and such intensity, is a rare thing indeed. About 11 minutes in, the whole piece becomes saturated with some intense minor key miserablism, it's impossible to not get chills, or to imagine the music as the backdrop for some incredible tragedy. The sound of terror, heartbreak, loneliness, it's amazingly powerful. And that's just the first half of the record.
About halfway through the record, the lush sonic backdrop recedes, leaving a slow shimmery landscape of bleak minimal rumble and slow droning swells. The creaking and groaning in the background are definitely reminiscent of the ghost ship minimalism of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. And this portion of Shutun plays out as a similar sonic journey. A creeping musical terror, an endless walk into a grey nothingness. But before everything fades to black, a strange pulsing machinelike throb surfaces, a crumbling, heroin house pulse buried beneath roiling swirls of hiss and creaking ambience. Eventually, the clouds clear, the strange relentless murky rhythm becomes more sporadic and scattershot, and the gloom dissipates, leaving warm muted streaks of color in the sky, with the haunting looped melody from the beginning resurfacing, but just briefly and barely as a not-really-there ghost-like coda. So completely spellbinding.
Packaged in a printed metal canister with a textured paper and silver ink insert.
Christian Renou and Troum are veterans of the post-industrial / avant-garde cassette culture from the '80s, as the members of German drone outfit Troum previously recorded as Maeror Tri while the French composer Renou produced countless cassettes as Brume back then. The two received a commission from Fario to join forces for their first collaboration, which they developed from the weighty themes of melancholia and death. Renou begins the album with a four part solo series entitled "Himmelweg" (Way To Heaven), stretching metallic chimes and musique concrete abstractions into ghostly melodic drones. As grey and rainy as Renou's compositions appear, Troum's expansive ambience on Dissolution is all the more grim, morose, and blackened. Their heavy ominous sounds of guitar, voice, and accordion cycle through doomy melodies erupting over atavistic percussive loops, expressing a far less optimistic outlook on life and death. On the two collaborative tracks with Renou, Troum remix and manipulate source material from Renou's "Himmelweg" tracks, imploding those dreamtime sounds with nightmarish rumblings and subterranean echoings. Troum conclude the album with the darkest track on the album, an extended, all-consuming drone-mantra whose gravity field slowly sucks everything into its monochromatic void. Bleak to say the least.
The Germanic and dark drone outfit Troum embark on a collaboration with the equally dark, Russian ensemble Reutoff, although the conceptual framework of their album isn't one wholly wrapped in mystery, occlusion, and shadow. Creatura Per Creaturam Continetur is based upon the cosmology of Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th century German abbess, whose richly detailed visions through her unshakeable Christian faith offered feminine descriptions of the cosmic order sprinkled with sexually charged metaphor. In addition to her writings, Hildegard had developed an impressive musical canon of monophonic chorales and plainsong melodies, whose recursive elements certainly look forward to all sorts of drone-based musics of the 20th and 21st centuries.
While the drone connection is easy to make, how Troum and Reutoff view Hildegard von Bingen's faith and art is unclear. Regardless, the majestic swells that immediately surge at the introduction of this album are some of the most beatific and heavensent that either project has produced to date. Troum have always been known for their glacial pacing of drone crescendos for spiralling guitars heavily processed in effects; and on this album, they leave no doubt that they excel at their craft. For those seeking the dark, almost blackened ambience that both Troum and Reutoff have mustered in the past, there's plenty of industrial bellows, clanking rhythms, creepily whispered vocals, and subaquatic reverberations to cast a somber pall across these recordings.
This is a Russian import, and may be very difficult to get back in stock once we sell out of this initial batch.
