The oddly named Bogeyrealm Vessels is the latest solo offering from Mehdi Ameziane, 1/2 of psychedelic drone folk duo Natural Snow Buildings. And like past Twinsistermoon records, the sound doesn't deviate too far from Natural Snow Buildings, if anything, the vibe is more pastoral and dreamlike, all of the soft cacophony of NSB is smoothed out into lush landscapes of dreamy shimmer, and warm chordal swirl, tinkling melodies over sweeping sonic vistas of ethereal glimmer, these lush expanses of bleary ambience laced with lovely moments of fluttery folk and hushed delicate songsmithery, Ameziane's voice plaintive and crystalline, floating weightless above woozy whorls of blurred melody and warbly lysergic thrum. The folkier bits sound like some lost seventies acid folk, unearthed for the first time in decades, impossibly soft focus, gauzy and wistfully washed out, that folkiness gradually growing less and less distinct as each track progresses, the sounds often bleeding and blending into one another, until the delicately strummed guitars and dreamlike vocals, melt into a something much more abstract, a heady minimal psychedelic drift that in places sounds like Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, and in others like the decayed tape loop experiments of William Basinski. So so lovely.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Comes in a super striking full color DVD style digipak, with cool cartoon artwork courtesy of Ameziane's partner in NSB, Solange Gularte.
There seems to be a pattern these days with new bands, specifically the bands who exist in the cd-r underground. The scene is so small and the various labels and groups so closely linked, that it doesn't take much for a new group to blow up, a single well received cd-r on one label, often results in short order in releases on some or all of the various other cd-r labels of note. Sometimes it's frustrating, discovering a band, and then a month or two later discovering that they now have 5, or 10 or even 20 releases. But on the other hand, if it's a band you dig, why the hell not, we would never be ones to balk at more records by a band we love.
Anyway, such was the case with a band called Natural Snow Buildings, who released an insanely limited cd-r, in ridiculously fancy packaging. Practically no one got one, but those who did, raved like crazy, and thus, there are a whole mess of NSB releases about to drop (one elsewhere on this list actually). Not long after that release, half of that duo released his first record under the name Twinsistermoon, and pretty much the same thing happened. Insanely limited, only a few people got it, and word spread, and now TSM are also poised to release a handful of new records. Thankfully, Digitalis stepped in and snapped up that Twinsistermoon recording, and decided to reissue it, so more than a handful of people could hear it, and voila, here it is! Still probably too limited (only 500 copies), but at least briefly, we all have a chance to hear the gorgeous sounds of Twinsistermoon.
Mehdi Amaziane is one half of Natural Snow Buildings, and records on his own as Twinsistermoon. This disc was originally released as a limited run of 36 copies, which says something that it could still create such a stir. But it all makes sense when you finally hear it. This will be like manna from heaven for the dream-drone free noise cd-r set, the perfect mix of abstract folky songsmithery, and abstract raga like buzz, intense minimal tribalism, and shimmering soft focus strum. Even from the first track, imagine the cosmic Ur-drone of a group like Sunroof! intertwined with the fluttery forest folk of a group like Avarus, but then introduce soaring impossible high male vocals, often mistaken for a female, all woven into a buzzing brilliant sprawl. Peppered with bits of percussion, tinkling chimes, backwards guitars, almost Renn Faire like folk, those soaring vocals, hand drums, huge washes of vocal harmonies. Totally epic and expansive, cinematic and grand. And that's just the first track!
The record drifts dreamily from soft folky shimmer, to thick raga rituals. The vocal based songs are uncanny, Amaziane's voice is so high and clear, like Vashti Bunyan crossed with Cat power, the vocals rich and lustrous, emotional and intense, draped over fragments of strummed guitar, and muted percussion. Breathless and intimate, one moment, lush and epic the next, Amaziane could easily have made a record with just an acoustic guitar and his voice, instead, he chose to incorporate a much wider palette, creating gorgeous sweeping soundscapes, washed out drones, thick walls of crumbling distorted sound, steel string buzz would into long stretches of reverberation and shimmer, often erupting into dense tangles of buzz and pound, some tracks sound like a more lo-fi Loop, a sort of rambling forest-ified space rock, others are near static, channeling Sunroof! again as well as folks like Phill Niblock, but as much as we love dronemusic, and abstract buzzing ambience, it's Amaziane's voice that makes this disc so compelling. Anyone can whip up a good drone-y skree, although Twinsistermoon do it much better than most, keeping it musical rather than drone for drone's sake, but very few have a voice like that, and if they do, even fewer know how to use it. In Twinsistermoon, Amaziane transcends the idea of singer/songwriter, creating a gorgeously expansive and organic soundworld, equal parts free folk, abstract noise, minimal drone and hushed intimate songsmithery.
Packaged in a full color, matte finished 6 panel cardstock jacket, with super striking Aztec influence artwork by Amaziane. And again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Soon to be out of print, soon to be only available on eBay, the latest slab of blissed out psychedelic dreamfolk from Twinsistermoon aka Mehdi Amaziane aka one half of underground darlings Natural Snow Buildings, and you know what that means, grab these while you can, cuz pretty much everything NSB releases turns to gold, but not before selling out in a heartbeat. Which, as we've gone on at length about in the past, is a huge shame, as the music they create is positively enchanting. Together as NSB and separately as Twinsistermoon and Isengrind. This here record was originally released as an lp limited to 105 COPIES!! WTF? Thankfully, this cd reissue is limited to 1000, so this will hopefully be around for a while.
The music of Twinsistermoon, while definitely its own entity, is closely linked sonically to the Natural Snow Buildings mothership, from thick washed out drones, to delicate sun dappled folk, to haunting collaged soundscapes, Amaziane is an old hand at conjuring up sweeping cinematic vistas of sound, her voice angelic, her guitar playing lovely, her arrangements ethereal and otherworldly, all the various elements blurred and woven into slow burning and divine dreamscapes. The Hollow Mountain is heavy on the folk, with more than half the songs consisting of super stripped down, just voice and guitar numbers, delicate, crystalline, often wreathed in some sort of subtle sonic glow, or backed by some swirling textural ambience, but just as often stark and spare and simple. The other few tracks here are warm woozy meditative drones, with wheezing organs locked into cyclical melodic loops, various field recordings, and thick corrosive muted hiss and sitar like buzz.
And that's not counting the massive 44 minute 'bonus track', which essentially amounts to an entire extra Twinsistermoon record tacked on to the end of this one. Beginning with another darkly delicate bit of folky drift, the 'track' moves from there to clattery Avarus style free folk jangle, to garbled distorted lo-fi soundscape, to thick blown out sun dappled Sunroof! like ur-drone, to gorgeous soft skeletal Appalachia, to whirring soft focus slowcore, to barely-there hushed ambience. So goddamn lovely. Let's hope this one stays in print longer than the last few releases. 1000 COPIES. Remastered. And as always, super swank packaging, a printed full color sleeve, with a bunch of new artwork as well as the original lp art, housed in an oversized full color jacket / booklet...
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
Mehdi begins the Twinsistermoon record with a sound that perfectly compliments Solange's Isengrind record (and makes it obvious why the two work so well together in NSB), long drawn out glimmering high end tones, draped over a dark minor key folky strum, and simple percussion, while Mehdi's feminine sounding falsetto soars over the top, all infused with some sort of freaky folky Wickerman vibe. Gorgeous and haunting. That track is followed up by a short chunk of perfect dreamfolk, simple folky strum, and Mehdi's crystal clear vocals, ringing out, pure and impossibly high, if you didn't know better you might think this was some rare track by some lost seventies female folkie.
And so it goes, tracks weaving back and forth, from warm washed out blissy dreamy dronescapes, to simple stripped down folk, often the two sounds drifting into each other, cross pollinating, the folk songs short and seemingly serving to separate the longer sprawling expanses of drone and shimmer, the two sounds dramatically different, but somehow complimenting one another perfectly.
The latest criminally limited release from this Natural Snow Buildings offshoot, the work of one half of the NSB duo, Mehdi Amaziane, he of the impossibly high and surprisingly feminine voice, which is in full effect here, soaring and lovely, sounding like some lost seventies folk songstress, while the music underneath definitely touches on classic folk and Appalachia, but quickly moves beyond, culminating in the 25 minute folkdrone epic that takes up all of side two, but more on that in a second.
The first half is a collection of shorter songs, beginning with a smoldering prismatic buzz, a layered raga like drone, slow building and subtly epic, which gives way to something much more stripped down, tinkling folk melodies and Amaziane's sweetly crooned vocals. The sound so dreamy and sun dappled and washed out. The record switches gears and suddenly our ears are treated to thick swaths of soft noise drift, swirling voices, a little bit noisy, but it gradually grows more and more orchestral and melodic, before settling down into some tranquil new age shimmer, eventually slipping into delicate Appalachian dreamfolk, crystalline guitar figures, and that voice again, so dreamy and divine.
Then the flipside, and the aforementioned epic 25 minute sidelong dreamdrone, a constantly shifting dronescape rife with swirls of warm whirring buzz, shimmery streaks of fuzzed out melody, soft focus chordal smears, layers and overtones, woozy and softly psychedelic, flecked with fragments of steel string guitar, disembodied voices, a gloriously dense and ultra lovely ur-drone that sounds like a folkier, prettier, more delicate Birchville Cat Motel, droney and dreamy and divine.
Pressed on incredibly heavy vinyl, in a tip on style sleeve so thick, it's almost impossible to get the vinyl out, LIMITED TO 979 COPIES this time around, we got a whole bunch, but 979 is still apparently not nearly enough as once our copies go, this record will most likely be sold out at the label...
A super limited (only 100 copies!) dvd-r from film maker Paul Clipson with music by Tarentel's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. The film is a beautifully abstract and paranoid impression of Southern California, filmed on grainy Super8, with lots of dizzyingly hypnotic footage of telephone wires, helicopters, cityscapes, gorgeously blurred out traffic lights and tail lights and street lights. There's late afternoon silhouettes, fuzzy smears of neon, rain drops on glass, cranes and docks, abstract streaks of passing cars and slick roadways, hillsides covered in windmills, the sun reflected on the sea, highways and green hills. So lovely. And haunting. As are the accompanying sounds created by Cantu-Ladesma, an ominous, buzzing, vocal drone, affected to the point that it still sounds organic, but not like a voice, more like streaks of sound, greys and blacks and browns, all smeared into blurred soundscapes of purr and whir and thrum, that perfectly compliment the shaky camera work, the grainy film stock, and the gorgeously and ominously mundane subject matter.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES. WE ONLY GOT 20 COPIES SO ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOREVER.
Latest in the ever expanding sonic microverse that is the Mystery Sea label's super limited, gorgeously curated and meticulously assembled series of night-ocean dronemusic cd-r's. Each limited to 100 copies, and presented in beautiful full color packaging, and every one, a breathtaking disc of dark and meditative minimalism. Fans and obsessive collectors of releases from folks like Jonathan Coleclough, Andrew Chalk, Mirror, Ora, Organum, anything on the Drone Records label and other like minded dronelords, should absolutely consider every Mystery Sea release required listening.
From the Basque region of Spain comes the one man soundscaper known as Tzesne, with previous releases on Drone, Antifrost and a handful of other small labels, this is his first for Mystery Sea, and it's a perfect match. A deft blend of deep billowing blackness, and subtly processed field recordings. Of whispery ambience, and soft focus atmosphere. Three long tracks, that sprawl and drift, dense and ominous, pulsing clouds of muted black buzz, a sonic black cloth draped over a slowly undulating sea of dreamlike murk, and mysterious indistinct sonic activities. It's like laying on the ocean floor, observing life and movement above, all filtered through the dim prism of the constantly shifting waters, everything rendered in smeared streaks, and softly wavering shapes. All three tracks are ultra minimal, near static stretches of deep layered drone. The most musical moment being the second half of the second track, where the various layers coalesce into one thick ribbon of sound, a very Niblockian drone, huge layers all tangled and interwoven, rife with microscopic overtones that transform static shimmer into an intensely (yet still subtly) active sonic swirl. Then it's straight back into the gauzy blurred abyss, underwater, underground, a sleepy staticky world of whir and hum wrapped around the ghostly traces of barely perceptible melodies. So gorgeous. Another disc of perfect late night drift.
Beautiful packaging as always, and again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
Drone Record marches on with their impressive series of obscure projects presenting their post-industrial drones on the unlikely format of super limited edition 7" singles. Tzesne hails from Spain, and that's pretty much all we know about them / him / her. Whoever this is, Tzesne has presented an exceptional twin set of eerie sweeping drones derived from radio transmissions filtered through customized audio software. Much like Andrew Lagowski's paranoiac SETI albums of mutated radio signals and the Kallabris recordings of submariner ambience, Tzesne's Huffduff (which may be the shorthand for High Frequency Direction Finder, lending a cryptographic allusion to the work) stands out as a bleak WWII soundtrack of ghostly communications haunting the ether of the radio spectrum. Limited to 350 copies!
The last U.S. Girls record, U.S. Girls On Kraak, found Meghan Remy, who IS U.S. Girls, pushing her sound ever/even further from the gnarled low fidelity roots that seemingly defined it, claiming that those lo-fi records were that way based entirely out of necessity. And as we mentioned in that review, she said that if she could, she would make a super glossy commercial pop record. And while it may have been her intention, U.S. Girls On Kraak was most definitely not that record - Gem however IS.
We were actually pretty shocked when we put this one. The record opens with some warped music box melodies, wreathed in weird industrial scrapes, the sound panned woozily from speaker to speaker, so we were thinking that maybe all that talk about glossy pop was a put on, that she had reverted to her early experimental floorcore sound, and were just beginning to luxuriate in those woozy soft noise, when the sound suddenly transforms into something MUCH poppier, and MUCH more polished, simple stately drumming, wheezing organ, and Remy's vocals way up front, soaring dramatically, the vibe very sixties girl group, positioning this new version of U.S. Girls alongside some other Girls, namely Dum Dum Girls, and Best Coast, and while it's not nearly THAT poppy, it definitely sounds like that's what Remy is shooting for. More minimal, and a bit more droney and psychedelic, but ultimately a dreamy organ driven sixties style fuzzy pop, and heck, it definitely suits her. The next track adds some skittery programmed drums, which gives it a bit of a cold wave vibe, but still poppy and almost torch songy, her voice sounding a bit like Zola Jesus, there are horns (or what sounds like horns), some serious girl group vocals, it's weird, and surprising, but cool. Track three might be the straight up poppiest of the bunch, and listening to that, it's hard to conceive of the fracture fucked up sounds on past U.S. Girls records.
"He Who" though might be one of our favorites, harkening back to the more experimental USG recordings, brittle machinelike rhythms, haunting pianos, lots of echo and reverb, cinematic and creepy, darkly dramatic and psychedelic, we could easily listen to a whole record of just that. The rest of the record unfurls similarly (to the poppier opening salvo), and then something weird happens, with Remy seeming to try her hand at different sounds, echo drenched garage pop on "I Don't Understand That Man", or most surprising of all, some big guitar Gary Glitter style classic glam rock on "Slim Baby", or the groovy almost calypso sounding "Down In The Boondocks", and it all sounds pretty great. There's one more short experimental track, all stuttering programmed beats and looped and layered vocal samples, murky and muted, but those moments are few and far in between. The new sound is definitely well removed from the U.S. Girls sound of old, but for fans of Dun Dum Girls, Best Coast, and other sort of sixties girl group jangle pop, this will very likely hit the spot! And who knows, might get some pop kids to check out the way more warped early records too!
From the same label that brought us the killer 7"/cd from Spanish electro punk outfit Der Ventilator (reviewed elsewhere on this list), comes this killer split, featuring long time fave US Girls, and new super hyped combo (or one man band, we're not sure), Dirty Beaches.
US Girls, aka Megan Remy offers up another fantastic batch of lo-fi psychedelic greywave, all murky and muddy, haunting and ritualistic, a strange drum driven vocal chant starts things off, her voice witchy and warped, all wreathed in a cloud of whirring low end, before the sound blossoms into a weird electronic groove, all minimal programmed percussion, beneath a soft haze of distortion and tangled psychedelic guitars, before launching into the final and longest track, a sort of creepy underwater goth dub workout, that sounds a bit like a more minimal avant lo-fi Zola Jesus, a looped sonar rhythm, Remy's vocals chant like and mesmerizing, eventually the beat and vox are swallowed up by a cloud of electronic squiggles and warped spaced out FX. Dirty Beaches is similarly murky and echoey, but instead of witchy electronic minimalism, he/they offer up a moody croon over a super minimal bit of rhythmic crunch, and some barely audible melody, the sound a woozy, warped bit of washed out drift, the rhythm more like a distant chugging train, a hushed pulse, there seems to be some super minimal guitar too, an almost Johnny Cash bit of low slung strum, but it too is wreathed in murk and transformed into just another warped undulating throb, the whole thing dark and dreamily dubby.
Super sweet packaging, full color cover in a thick plastic sleeve sealed with a sticker, pressed on green vinyl with a download coupon too.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
"We created a Unix software agent that sat along a high bandwidth backbone pipe, essentially eavesdropping, gathering data, writing out a soundfile of everything it saw... The different tracks represent different states of the network - at different times, and different kinds of data passing by". UBSB is the collective project from Ulf Bilting, Zbigniew Karkowski, Atau Tanaka, and Edwin van der Heide, which presents a simple transcription of a data stream into sonic attributes, which in the end could be a textural mirror of Merzbow's noise tracks.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Previously cd-only, here's the lovely picture-disc gatefold vinyl version of this, the only full-length recording by the incredible uber-Boredoms offshoot band UFO or Die (Yoshimi and Eye of Boredoms, plus the bassist from Leningrad Blues Machine), described by Eye as Blue Cheer meets the Shaggs. A feast for the eyes and ears, arguably better than the best Boredoms records!
There's a Cyrillic transcription affixed next to the name of this project, which is even more cryptic in appearance than the onomatopoetic moniker Uhushuhu, rendered as Yxywyxy. Supposedly in both languages, this transliterates somewhat close to the call of one of the larger predator owls bellowing to another owl in the forest. U'hu! Shu'hu! - or the Boy Scout mnemonic "Who Cooks For You?" asks the Barred Owl (whose habitat includes both Russia and North America, fyi). But taken outside of the context of avian communication, the hushed blur in whispering Uhushuhu could easily stand in as a whoosh or hiss as pure description of their dreamy, forest-dwelling drones. And yes, the Uhushuhu collective have been known to perform and produce their work under the canopy of the Russian forests outside of St. Petersburg, making them something of a Russian reincarnation of Jewelled Antler. There's much more of an electronic underbelly to Uhushuhu than Jewelled Antler, while retaining the pine-cone drone ethos of luminously radiant psychedelic dronescaping. The first track actually holds a number of aesthetic similarities to the long form works of Motion Sickness Of Time Travel - sinewy, seductive, and slippery passages of intertwining synth melodies softened through reverb and spaciousness, furthered along by watery field recordings and damp ruminations on subterranean lairs, wormholes, and caves. Each of the album's three tracks clock well past the 15 minute mark, leading towards deeper, more shambolic explorations of sublime atmosphere. Quite a lovely piece of work, but it's limited to just 77 copies!
By now you probably realize, that it's easy to win us over with the right band name, at least initially. Fuck I'm Dead, Bathtub Shitter, Throne Of Blood... Tempting and tantalizingly teasing us with whatever weirdness may lurk inside. Often, it stops at the band name, as if in a single burst of creativity, the band came up with THE NAME, and then were forced to soldier on with the whole job of writing songs and recording a record, made even more difficult by the completely drained reservoir of creative juices.
So as always, we were immediately tickled by Uke Of Spaces Corners County, but then entered with a certain amount off trepidation, having been burned before. Thankfully, So Far On The Way was anything but a disappointment, in fact, if anything, not only did it manage to not disappoint, it also didn't sound anything like we expected.
It's on Corleone to begin with, home of Landed, The Body, Throne Of Blood, Mindflayer and plenty of soundfuckers, so we were sort of expecting something, noisy maybe, and there's the band name, but instead, UOSCC are some sort of folk music, damaged and what-the-fuck enough to seem right at home on Corleone, but undoubtedly folk music, of the freaked out, stumbling and strange weirdo outsider stripe that we dig so much.
The opener, "Dead Pens", is downright gorgeous, minor key distorted main riff, the vocals plaintive and emotional, lyrics appropriately bizarre and random, the track a convoluted crawl, peppered with sound FX and finishing off with a haphazard choir of back up vocalists. But for all its weirdness and musical damage, it's totally beautiful, like Bright Eyes on some brain melting cocktail of Thorazine and peyote...
Things continue on in the same druggy musical haze, on the verge of falling apart, but without losing any emotion or becoming any less catchy. From the distorted beat driven folky strum jam of "Today The Mirror", with it's strange staccato break down, and awesome juxtaposition of damaged drum machine sounding beat and steel string riff. To the hiss drenched Appalachia of "This Old World", an old timey classic transported direct from some a Southern homestead in the thirties, to some broken 4-track in a musty old warehouse in New Orleans today. And like all the tracks, it's the vocals again, tying it all together, soaring and crooning, sometime slipping into a haunting and wavering falsetto, cracking here and there, but always weaving a mysterious and powerful spell.
In some ways it reminds us of a less Brit obsessed Strapping Fieldhands, a lo-fi bedroom folk, strangely lush for all it's lo-fi-ness, and filtered through classic back porch twang, spacy reverb drenched drone guitar, sweet major key melodies, and of course random streaks and squalls of psychedelic noise, angular guitar scrape, splatters of percussion and random other bits of sonic detritus.
Something even freakier than all that freak folk, original, heartfelt, ramshackle, and so goddamn good.
By now, we should be able to safely assume that most AQ list-readers know who Steven R. Smith is. Not only that, but we know a lot of you are in fact big S.R.S. fans, of his solo projects under his own name and as Hala Strana, as well as for his participation in such outfits as Mirza and Jewelled Antler flagship Thuja. Certainly this should be the case after the last few S.R.S. releases. First there was his Owl album that came out a month or two ago, with his first ever vocal performance to go along with his lovely psych-drone guitar. Then two lists ago we had the cd reissue of his Anchorite album, which we made Record Of The Week in fact. And now there's Ulaan Khol. On it you can almost imagine that Steven has donned the black shades and leather jacket of the Tokyo psych underground scene, as this sounds like something that LSD-march, Up-Tight or even Keiji Haino himself might conjure. Acid Mothers Temple's Kawabata Makoto too. But even then, it probably wouldn't be this cosmic and bleakly beautiful.
Suitably majestic sounding, as part of a proposed three album trilogy, Ulaan Khol I consists of nine untitled, instrumental tracks made with guitar and organ. It's a spacious drift of big fuzzy distortion and fragile drone bliss... utterly entrancing. The sort of thing that you just want to keep going, and going... well thank god there's another two volumes of Ulaan Khol yet to come! Recommended.
It may be odd to single out one component of a series for Record Of The Week, especially when it's the second of a proposed three record trilogy. It's not that we didn't love the first installment, we did very much! And it's not like the Academy Awards where we're belatedly acknowledging the first installment by rewarding the second. It might be just that we didn't realize at the time the magnificent depth and far reaching direction in which Steven R. Smith would take his latest project. And as we have heaped tons of praise on his past work, we wanted to single out this project and particularly this installment as something utterly amazing and wholly breathtaking.
Despite the tons of killer music that goes in and out of the aQ doors, it's not everyday we get an album that really lifts us out of our seats and straight into an alternate dimension. The latest release under the Ulaan Khol moniker is a celestial trip into desolate plains where the water rises and the skies are ripped open.
A prominent member of the Jeweled Antler family, Steven R. Smith has been seriously influential in defining the California psych/drone sound for over a decade. We've mentioned it in plenty of reviews, so folks gotta be by now pretty aware of Smith's extensive discography, ranging from countless solo records to his releases as the Eastern European-tinged Hala Strana or with the famed JA flagship act Thuja.
The first Ulaan Khol record, though made up of nine untitled tracks, felt like one spacious drifting piece of big fuzzy distortion and fragile drone bliss. Something like the gorgeous feedback-laden free music of Les Rallizes Denudes or others from the Japanese Underground scene. We loved it a lot, but didn't go into extensive detail about it, probably because we had also just reviewed his Owl record (released under his own name) around the same time.
On II, we hear a lot more range. There are still the big swaths of massively distorted psych heaviness, but the eight untitled tracks feel more distinct and structured. Some tracks have faster Spacemen 3-like tempos and fuller driving progressions with pummeling drums mired way deep in the mix, while others feature more calm, drifty drones made up of intimate guitar, electric violin and organ passages that conjure up gorgeous swells of luminous sound. The pieces are more varied and layered, dense yet melodic and at times more rock-ish. The majestic guitar radiance Smith manages to create is not unlike the solo work of Kawabata Makoto or Tom Carter, but here we also hear shades of Roy Montgomery, Flying Saucer Attack and even Asa Osbourne from Zomes and Lungfish (Zomes being a recent Record Of The Week too).
As with the first disc, there are no liner notes, just an abstract painted cover, this time in bleak blue-grey winter tones. And inside the sleeve is an awesome painting of a lamp-holding monk (perhaps the same skull contemplating monk from the first disc) at the mouth of a giant cave! Yes!
Finally, the third volume in Ulaan Khol's epic free-psych-drone trilogy. For those who don't already know, Ulaan Khol is in fact Steven R. Smith, a beloved core member of the Jeweled Antler family, who has recorded on his own as Hala Strana, and with the first JA outfit Thuja, among many, many others. Much of Smith's music is hushed and darkly romantic, folky and introspective, he does know how to rock though, and Ulaan Khol is where he really lets loose. The first two installments in the series were both loud and heavy and psychedelic in their own ways, but number three definitely pushes the sound about as far as it can go. The opening track is a dense shapeless cloud of furious effulgent psychedelic guitar, warm and thick and gnarled and epic, the kind of guitarnoise that could fill up a whole record, but there's more to Ulaan Khol's third outing, as is evidenced by the second track, an incredible, super rocking, crazy catchy burst of blown out psychedelic stomp, the drums pounding, beneath a sea of swirling guitar buzz, while way over the top, Smith unfurls wild soaring leads, pealing feedback, dense tangles of notes, long drawn out wailing tones, it's like the perfect frenzied end to some classic space psych jam except it's the whole song.
But fear not, III is not all blown out psych rock for headz, some of the tracks are humid, smoldering raga like dronescapes, buzzing guitar swells, spidery melodies, delicate and crystalline, others take that same ambience and wrap it around urgently strummed acoustic guitars, creating a sort of dark psychfolk, but it's not too long before the record explodes into another incendiary blast of full on speaker shredding freakout.
The second half of the record is heavy on the dark blissy drift, the slow burning drifts, the blurred desert-y shimmer, all of which culminate in the super melodic 10+ minute closer, which sounds poised to explode, but instead channels that energy into something much more sublime, a long drawn out spacedrone/krautrock drift, the guitars thick and distorted, churning and roiling, but laced with gorgeous streaks of melody, dreamy, but still heavy, and pretty much the perfect way to close out Ulaan Khol's epic psychedelic songsuite. Even though this is the third in a trilogy, we're hoping S.R.S. will do an Ulaan Khol IV anyway, or maybe start making prequels, or something, 'cause we want more!
Huh, what, wow!? A fourth album from AQ fave Steven R. Smith's AQ fave epic free-psych-drone Ulaan Khol project! After the "Ceremony" trilogy of I, II, and III released on cd by Soft Abuse circa 2008-2010, the 2nd volume of which we even made a Record Of The Week, we thought that's all we'd be getting outta Ulaan Khol. It was a trilogy after all. But lo and behold, Soft Abuse now brings us a new album, this time cassette only, that once again sees S.R.S. exploring the spacey outer limits of droned-out guitar psych in his Ulaan Khol guise. The six smouldering tracks here, with titles like "And I Dreamt the Sky Was a Great Ocean of Blood" and "Watching From the Cave of My Skull" are quite lovely, actually, with lots of "the dark blissy drift, the slow burning drifts, the blurred desert-y shimmer" we heard on the second half of UK's III.
Uber-limited to just 200 copies. Comes with a digital download for those times when you don't have your Walkman handy.
Two new releases this week from aQ pal, and longtime favorite Steven R. Smith, in his latest Ulaan guise, the other is a reissue of a long out of print double cassette originally released on Brave Mysteries, and this one, which is a brand new recording, two sprawling, nearly twenty minute tracks. The first opens with a soft cacophony of bells, before some mournful fiddle, wreathed in reverb, and set atop soft billows of low end thrum, a gorgeous, haunting threnody, which gradually blossoms into a sort of swampy folky dirge, immediately reminiscent of Woven Hand / Sixteen Horsepower. But soon, the strum dissipates, leaving, long tones, lushly layered atmospheres, abstract percussion, and soft shimmers, the vibe dusky and windblown, a little bit twangy, easy to imagine, a landscape painted in reds and oranges from the setting sun, and the slowly encroaching shadows. Soon the strings sweep back in, and the sound is transformed into an almost baroque sounding darkfolk drift, underpinned by swoonsome chordal swells, and sitar like drones, giving the sound an almost raga like vibe. After a bit of distorted psychedelia, the sound settles into a strummy, drifty finale, again, lots of twang, and some crackling electric guitar buzz. Moody and mesmeric. The second track starts off all campfire Appalachian folk, before quickly mutating into a droned out tribal drift, muted pulsing rhythms, beneath soft swirls and layered drones, another sort-of-raga, but with some psych-kraut like propulsion, which gives way to some broody gypsy folk, still wreathed in drones, washed out and woozy, a hazy sprawl of dark dream-drone psych folk ambience, that gradually becomes more and more Appalachian again, lots of buzzy twang, long tones, and lush overtones, all over a bed of softly roiling rumbles, and a hushed, distant, slow fading soft psych finale, before those opening bells return...
Housed in super swank, silkscreened Stumptown cardstock sleeves. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered.
Originally released as an ultra limited (just 100 copies) double cassette on Brave Mysteries in 2013, this sprawling songsuite from longtime fave and aQ pal Steven R. Smith, gets new life in the form of this not so limited cd, and finds Smith, slightly altering his constantly in flux Ulaan monicker, conjuring up 4 side long (at least on the original tape) sprawls of haunting, contemplative, abstract, psychedelic drift. Fans of Smith's other recordings will immediately feel right at home, plaintive piano, soft shimmering swells, chiming bells, softly moaning strings, the sound slowly unfurling and blossoming, moving from a freeform psychedelic dronescape, to a brooding dark folk balladry, to a murky minimal softnoise drift, to hushed droned wreathed steel string strum, a sort of droned out Appalachia, to lush string swaddled epic psych folk majesty and finally to a lush, layered raga-like ambience, that gradually fades into silence. And that's just the first side/track! The other three tracks are equally epic and mesmerizing, darkly melodic, hauntingly psychedelic, lush and lovely, the sort of endless epic psychedelia that is so easy to get swept away by, a few minutes into any of the tracks here, you'll find yourself gloriously lost in Smith's mysterious soundworld, drifting weightlessly above fields of Appalachia flecked droned, or softly submerged beneath dreamlike billows of serene psychedelia, or propelled by heady sprawls of minimal psych-kraut mesmer. As always, FANTASTIC!
Housed in super swank, silkscreened Stumptown cardstock sleeves. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered.
This French post-rock band remixed by an all-star cast of characters: Japanese turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, the ubiquitous electronica fella Scanner, French turntablist Erik M and local computer music maven Carl Stone (our favorite mix here), each revising using his respective set of tools. The result: post-post-rock, all hacked and chopped and stuttery. Really quite nice.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
After several releases for the labels run by Telepherique and Troum/Maeror Tri (Drone Records), Ultra Milkmaids was commissioned by VPRO radio in Holland to broadcast their isolationist drones redolent of Main or Rafael Toral with odd electronica bits of processed field recordings that end up sounding like a slow and sparse Matmos. Very nice and very limited.
I've always wanted to give Ultra Milkmaids the benefit of the doubt. They've started out on the wrong foot by acquiring such a horrible name, but like Terminal Cheesecake, have been able to transcend their crappy moniker. Their contribution to the Drone Records singles series was a beautiful cascading guitar drone rippling with subtle melodies. I wish I could say the same for "Peps," but honestly I can't. Ultra Milkmaids has joined the increasing exodus of post-industrialists to the powerbook set (another example Mikael Stavostrand). This is Oval without the detail. Then a questionably used lounge sax solo adds that lost detail. Hmmm... But, that aside, much of this is quite lovely, just nothing super new.
The latest in Noiseville's Outer Bounds Of Sound series (past installments have come from Wicked King Wicker, Burnt Hills, Kleistwahr) comes from Ultrabunny, aka the trio that was borne from the demise of legendary noiserock freaks the Bunnybrains.
Ultrabunny are heavy and minimal, repetitive and super rocking, a bit like a krautrock Harry Pussy, after a slow build, the band lock into a super repetetive single riff groove, solid and mesmerizing, the sort of sound you wouldn't mind filling up the entire side, soon the vocals come in, a feral caterwaul, the band lurching and pummeling, a sort of looped sounding drug rock, that pounds away, those cracks in your skull slowly spiderwebbing, your grey matter dribbling from your ears.
All the tracks here were improvised and recorded live, most are a single riff, maybe two if you're lucky, the vocals yelp and howl, sometimes moan, on one track they just sort of hold a single note, adding another layer of drone to the proceedings, it might be a guitar too, but either way, the track just churns and pounds, the various elements subtly shifting and tangling, creating a sound that seems slightly warped, as if some greater power was holding his finger down on the band, as if they were a record, altering the speed, making everything seems woozy and melty and tripped out and WAY psychedelic.
The B-side is a lot heavier and more distorted, wild and on the verge of collapse, channeling some of that classic Japanese psych noise, but still filtered through a cracked lo-fi dirt rock vibe.
Killer noise drenched spaced out psychedelic hypnorock, which tells you all you need to know, us, we're digging this big time, especially the B-side.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
Noisy jazz skronk from Noxagt members, on Load.
New on Rune Grammofon, the latest relaxed blast of atmospheric instrumental improv from Ultralyd, the Norwegian extreme "jazz" outfit that features folks from Load label noiserockers Noxagt (old AQ pal, bassist Kjetil Brandsdal) and Rune G electronic spazzcore duo Moha! (guitarist Anders Hana and drummer Morten J. Olsen). The quartet is rounded out by another Kjetil, last name Moster, on saxophones. Together they stir up some trouble in the vein of countrymen Supersilent, Shining, and Jagga Jazzist, filtered through several spins of John Zorn's Morricone tribute The Big Gundown, perhaps. Ultralyd swing haunting cinematic soundscapes packed with percolating grooves and eerie drones, tense guitar skree and jaunty horn tootin'. We like.
Noxagt-connected Norwegian skronk jazz band!!
While previous albums from this extreme Norwegian instrumental ensemble could be kinda be considered (skronky) jazz, and their previous cd release, 2007's Conditions For A Piece Of Music had its moody, Morricone-ish elements, this one is not so jazzy and not so melodic, coming closer to bass player Kjetil Brandsdal's noiserock act Noxagt in brutal effect. Make no mistake, jazz instrumentation (sax, vibraphone) is still present, but takes a back seat to the heavy duty, and ultimately hypnotic, repetitive rhythmic assault laid down by the bass and drums, over which the synth, electric guitar, sax, and vibes provide additionally apocalyptic coloration, but never truly sidetrack or slow down the chaotic yet cyclic rumble and tumble of these six lurching, long tracks. If it's jazz, it's droog-stomped jazz, muscled up with crunching low-slung bass, and martial, punishing drum beats... imagine maybe if 16-17 and Supersilent teamed up to do something that sounded like Circle... but scary. There's skree and squall, for sure, but it's all focused on the rhythmic imperative, and damn if this isn't as utterly enthralling as it is urgent and ugly. Except that it's not really ugly, just distorted and oppressive. As Rune G's "jazz" bands go, Ultralyd is the one for those who hate jazz, and love hate. Or something like that. Recommended to all you sickos, go on, get it out of your system!
Lupine Norwegian tricksters Ulver have been around for 10 years now, and mark the occasion with this invitational remix album, something very appropriate for a group whose whole career has been about morphing and reinventing themselves, remaining weirdo outsiders in whatever genre they visit. A decade ago they started out (and still have some residual allegiance to) the Nordic black metal genre, but today we're not sure what genre they claim, certainly it's not metal anymore. Glitchy electronica and downtempo beats took over from buzzing guitars and blast beats, but there's a definite connection between the two as this project proves.
Remixers include Ulver themselves (whose track goes way back to their Vargnatt demo tape from '93 for source material) and an international cast of experimentalists: Merzbow, Fennesz, Stars Of The Lid, Neotropic, Bogdan Raczynski, Third Eye Foundation, Information, Upland, Pita, V/Vm, Jazzkammer and a few others. An impressive and unusual line-up, certainly not entirely what we expected. Some do drones, some delve into beat-scapes, while others go for the raw black stuff, such as Merzbow (of course) whose ten-minute "Vow me Ibrzu" is one of the highlights, being a properly scary and noisy trawl through the evil riffage of Ulver's metallic past. Quite a few of the mixes are drawn from Ulver's more recent electronica efforts (Perdition City, the Silence eps, and the Lycantropen Themes soundtrack), but not all -- early stuff from Ulver's classic lycanthropian "Trilogie" of black metal albums (Bergtatt and Nattens Madrigal specifically) makes it on here as well. Several more mixes derive from Ulver's industrial version of William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the double cd that was an early signpost of Ulver's willingness to violate genre norms and musical categorization. Like it says here, wolves evolve...
MPEG Download: FENNESZ "Only The Poor Have To Travel" [/audio/ulverfennesz.mp3]
MPEG Stream: FENNESZ "Only The Poor Have To Travel" [/audio/ulverfennesz.m3u]
MPEG Download: UPLAND "Lost In Moments Remix" [/audio/ulverupland.mp3]
Now available on vinyl for a limited time, this strange little moody ep From Norwegian horde Ulver, no black metal here though, this is later, the ambient electronic mysterious side of the band that created the grim blackbuzz classic Nattens Madrigal.
Red vinyl, printed inner sleeve. And of course super limited...
The title doesn't lie. This 2003 transmission from those Norwegian eccentrics Ulver consists of but four songs, a sampling of gothic glitch rock, the sad-synth-symphonic soundtrack to a ghost story left to you to imagine. The melodies and electronic beats give little clue to Ulver's origins as a vulpine black metal band, although the final track is in fact a rearrangement of a piece from their 1996 Kveldssanger opus, and makes an ominous, distortion-filled ending to the ep without altering the mood already set by the chamber strings and doleful male singing of the previous three tracks. With this ep, Ulver continue their ectoplasmic existence as a restless spirit that filters through many musical bodies, fully possessing none but leaving weird nightmares behind...
Well it's pretty clear that these Norwegian weirdos will never be a "black metal" band again. Following the industrial and techno experimentation of their last two releases comes the new disc, "Perdition City" (pretentiously subtitled "music to an interior
We managed to get a few of the LIMITED EDITION version (same price) for the moment. The music is the same, but the booklet is bigger, with more photos, and it comes in an oversized weird sort-of-jewel case. But once they're gone, they're gone for good, and then we'll have to sell you the not-limited normal version.
The band formerly known as a black metal band Ulver, now known as arty WTF? band Ulver, has morphed and morphed again over the years. Black metal, folk, electronica, pop, techno... some of Ulver's metamorphoses have worked better than others. They've gone through phases influenced by both Portishead and Radiohead. But lately these Norwegian tricksters have seemingly settled down to something stable, an avant-garde, electronica-infused, gloomy pop-prog identity. Their previous album Blood Inside was a bit too Tears For Fearsy for our tastes, unfortunately (though we know lots of folks loved it). Or maybe that would have been ok, but the circus-y bits really lost us. However, Shadows Of The Sun, while charting a similar course, veers mostly to the languid and lovely, which we rather like. The nine tracks here tend to flow together calmly, never breaking the twilight mood. Hints of glitchiness and distortion are interwoven with yearning melody, smooth almost New Agey blissfullness, deep breathy baritone vox. Also, a warning (to some): saxophone. A little. And at this point, needless to say, there's nothing remotely metal about any of it. Well, there is a Black Sabbath cover, but they chose one of the Sabs' most delicate and torpid songs, "Solitude", in keeping with this album's sad mood, Garm's vocals wearier even than were Ozzy's originally, uncheered by the jazz inflections included in Ulver's arrangement. Those who have followed and remained fans of Ulver thus far, though, should find this latest melancholic manifestation quite satisfying. Oh, and considering his following among the AQ crowd, we should note that Christian Fennesz makes a cameo appearance on this record.
Formerly black metal avantgardists Ulver of Norway present 24 minutes of electonic experimental improv, a slowly-unfolding collage of organic drones and beats and clicks and field recordings and post-rock piano melody etc., that might remind you of everything
The long, lone track on this limited edition ep was constructed from material recorded in a one-night "Dead City Centre jam" last February during the sessions for Ulver's most recent full-length, the love it or hate it "Perdition City". Unlike that album, though, this ep benefits from a lack of horrendous vocal and saxophone contributions! While some of Ulver's past attempts to branch out into non-black metal genres have been, as just alluded to, kinda shaky (if commendable in spirit), this stands up well in the "experimental/electronica" category. Recommended, as possibly Ulver's best post-metal effort.
Here's another limited edition ep from the impossible to classify Norwegian band Ulver, following up their similarly titled (and similar looking) "Silence Teaches You How To Sing EP" from earlier this year. Again, about a half hour of music, this time broken
Ulver of course originally made their name in the black metal scene, with such classic the-forest-is-my-throne-style albums as "Nattens Madrigal" and "Kveldsanger", full of church-burning riffs and wolverine vocals (and acoustic folk music in the case of "Kveldsanger"). And we won't deny that that's some of their best stuff, it is. But since those days they've abandoned black metal and morphed into some sort of odd electronic/experimental band -- and as well, Ulver leader Krystoffer "Garm" Rygg started up the Jester label to release music by all sorts of likeminded (i.e. fucked) Norwegian artists (including When, Bogus Blimp, Esperanza, and of course Ulver).
And while their black metal past isn't overtly evident on this recording, we could suppose that Ulver's earlier appreciation of the grim, lo-fi, trance-like ambience created by their (former) heroes Darkthrone and Mayhem is still a part of Ulver's sound, explaining their music's current immersion in a grimy (if not grim) background of constant crackle and buzzing drones. Well, that and the fact that such sounds are now as hip in experimental/electronica circles as they are cult in metal.
Speaking of cult, the cryptic as always liner notes claim "Ulver do their best to show you the wall in every door". Not sure what that means, exactly, but that statement still seems to sum up their history of willful genre-shifting and puzzling abstraction, of which "Silencing The Singing" is only the most recent, and one of the most enjoyable, examples. Get it while you can. And look forward to Ulver's next project, which is promised to be an Apocalyptica-like orchestral remake of their dirtiest sounding, most mean and metal disc, "Nattens Madrigal"!
This new cd from Norwegian avantgarde ex-black metallers Ulver isn't really new, as it actually is a reissue compilation of their two limited edition, now out of print eps "Silence Teaches You How To Sing" and "Silencing The Singing" on one handy, domestically issued disc (by a new label run by Aaron of tUMULt's noise-pop artists Iran, who met Ulver while in Norway filming a documentary about the black metal scene!). So, you don't need it if you already have those two import discs, but if you don't, we most certainly recommend it -- both eps are two of Ulver's best post-black metal efforts to date, as they move into unclassifiable experimental/electronica realms. To sum up our previous commentary on these eps: "Silence Teaches You..." is a single, 24 minute track of electonic experimental improv, a slowly-unfolding collage of organic drones and beats and clicks and field recordings and post-rock piano melody etc., that might remind you of everything from Tarwater to Philip Jeck to Fennesz to Mogwai... Quite mellow, dark and beautiful, a soundscape composed, in part, of static-y electro-grime overlaying scratchy vinyl looping with occasional wordless drifting vocals. It was constructed from material recorded in a one-night "Dead City Centre jam" during the sessions for Ulver's previous full-length album, the love it or hate it "Perdition City". Unlike that album, though, this ep benefits from a lack of horrendous vocal and saxophone contributions! The similar in method/sound "Silencing The Singing" follows, three tracks providing another half hour of music, constructed of repetitive melodic and non-melodic loops (some notes on a piano, scratchy vinyl surface noise, what might be far-off voices), gradually joined by electronic blips and beats. The mood is quiet and languid, as are the rhythms, although the last track builds into a lovely few final moments of loud distortion.
Ulver of course originally made their name in the black metal scene, with such classic the-forest-is-my-throne-style albums as "Nattens Madrigal" and "Kveldsanger", full of church-burning riffs and wolverine vocals (and acoustic folk music in the case of "Kveldsanger"). And we won't deny that that's some of their best stuff -- it is. But since those days they've abandoned black metal and morphed into some sort of odd, willfully abstract electronic/experimental band -- and as well, Ulver leader Krystoffer "Garm" Rygg started up the fab Jester label to release music by all sorts of likeminded (i.e. fucked) Norwegian artists (including AQ faves When, Bogus Blimp, Origami Galaktika, Rotoscope, and of course Ulver).
And while Ulver's black metal past isn't overtly evident on these recordings, we could suppose that their earlier appreciation of the grim, lo-fi, trance-like ambience created by their (former) heroes Darkthrone and Mayhem is still a part of Ulver's sound, explaining their music's current immersion in a grimy (if not grim) background of constant crackle and buzzing drones. Well, that and the fact that such sounds are now as hip in experimental/electronica circles as they are cult in metal.
The latest chunk of seventies/eighties faux giallo soundtrack John Carpenter / Goblin worship from longtime aQ faves Umberto comes in the form of this EXTREMELY limited one-sided silk-screened 12". Umberto, aka Matt Hill, who is one half of psychedelic spacekraut explorers Expo 70, offers up another glorious slab of brooding cinematic ambience, this one a lot more ambient that past outings. More on that in a second. Final Exit is packaged in a super striking fold over sleeve, which features the image of one unlucky man's final exit, laying on a bed, suffocated with a plastic bag over his head, the sleeve also bears the legend: "This record is intended to accompany the last moments of your suffering." It also features a seal, adorned with a flower, and the words "good life / good death". The record itself is one sided, the flipside featuring another image of that same man, this time eyes opened and bulging! Morbid for sure. And the music follows suit. Sort of. In some ways it almost sounds more like a slightly more sinister and soundtracky Expo 70, with warm swoonsome synth swirls, a sort of darkly new age-y drift, moody and broody, with lush swells that sound almost choral, the vibe is definitely majestic and cinematic, but is also minimal and restrained. A few minutes in, percolating synth melodies surface amidst the dark swirls, and then a simple heartbeat like pulse, motorik and minimally propulsive, near the end the sound changes tone and timbre becoming much more gristly and distorted the hum and thrum transformed into a crumbling buzz, ominous and sinister, the whole sound hazy and gauzy, and gradually fading to black.
The record sounds great at both 33 and 45rpm, but we tend to like things slower, so at 33 it definitely sounds much creepier and gloomier.
LIMITED TO JUST 150 COPIES!!! Each one is hand numbered. When we run out, we will NOT be able to get more, so if you want one, act fast.
Word of warning: These come in those super brittle plastic picture disc sleeves that, to be blunt, kinda suck, so every single one of the sleeves is slightly damaged, whether it's cracked on the corner, or with a seam split, it's the nature of those sleeves, and of having them shipped from overseas too (which also resulted in some some bent corners and so forth), so if you're super anal, or a nit picky collector, you have been warned, everyone else, you should be fine, they're all housed in a second polybag anyway, and the records themselves are in perfect condition (and look amazing!), so grab one before they're gone!
We LOVED the previous Umberto album, From The Grave, and are stoked that he/they/it have finally returned with another full length packed with oodles of Goblin-y goodness, just in time for Halloween!!
But the sound of the Expo 70-associated Umberto is not strictly that scary, at least not all the time, in fact, like Goblin and other '80s Italian fright-film soundtrackers, most of the scary stuff here is really just an *underlying* un-ease, a sinister suspenseful undercurrent over which more "groovy" stuff gets down. And way more groovy this one most definitely is, some serious haunted dancefloor action, or horror movie disco, or whatever you want to call it, but Umberto has for sure upped the funk/groove quotient, lacing the usual cocktail of thick, tense, pulsing synth throb, minimal motorik rhythms and heavy ominous drones with plenty of funky basslines, crunchy modulated keyboard buzz, soaring synths, chanted voices and propulsive grooves... Here and there, the sound gets all stripped down leaving just gurgly, crumbly distorted low end peppered with spaced out booming rhythms, or creepy ambient atmospheres, but the songs tend to slip quickly back into haunted shuffly rhythms, woozy horror movie atmospherics, ominous strings laced funky grooves and dark descending bass blarp.
The second side begins with one of those tracks that sounds like the music that always introduces us to the main character in all those seventies thrillers, the little girl playing with her dollies, the old woman in the garden, the sound is tranquil but subtly sinister, here it's a music box like melody, plinking dreamily beneath haunting strings, and soft swirls of creepy voice like synth, total horror movie soundtrack shivers for sure.
After that it's back to wah guitars, chiming bells, groovy Italo funk haunted dancefloor grooviness, but this time with some cool washed out M83 style female vocal textures, a shoegazey gauze over that propulsive Goblin-y groove.
If we had to pick a single song that was THE ONE here, it would probably be "Someone Chasing Someone Through A House" which sounds exactly LIKE THAT, pulsing throbbing synths, electronic squelches, deep ominous drones, dark swells, foreboding and creepy and tense and SCARY!
The album ends with an upbeat track entitled "Everything Is Going To Be Ok", all sun-coming-up, yay we survived the zombie onslaught good cheer & cheesiness. The sort of music that plays over the closing credits, or even better, over the final shot which lulls you into a sense of false security, before a decaying hand bursts through the ground, or a beast explodes from the water and drag our heroine out of the boar, some sort of shock to let you know that evil won't stay buried... which of course usually leads to a sequel, and we are definitely looking forward to the next installment of groovy Gobliny sonic scares from Umberto!
You're not imagining things, that skull in the rearview mirror is looking at you. Expo 70 sideman Matt Hill, aka Umberto, is back... eerie as ever! Following his recent, limited, and now out of print one-sided 12" entitled Final Exit on Italian label Black Moss, comes this strikingly-sleeved 45rpm 12" via UK label The Great Pop Supplement, also quite limited (500 copies only), vinylizing a cassette put out by Solid Melts in an even scarcer edition a year ago. Welcome To The Chillzone consists of two tracks of equal 10:03 durations, really one piece split over two sides, both quietly brooding and creepy, side A slowly unfolding, building up to the somewhat more intense but still restrained side B... which ends, though, as side A begins, the whole composition looping like the original tape. Umberto's sinister sonics are indeed chilling here, full of blissful yet shivery synthwork, like hushed melodic whispers drifting above an ominous hallucinatory hum... eventually there's sequenced rhythmic pulsations, but gentle, this 12" as compelling and effective as any suspense film soundtrack we can think of. As with Final Exit, 'tis more ambient and icy than the deathly disco of Umberto's more electro beat-driven earlier efforts, so next to Goblin and John Carpenter among the giallo-obsessed Umberto's influences, have been added the zoned out cinematic synths of Tangerine Dream, perhaps.
As we said, limited edition of 500 copies, already sold out at the label!! We got a couple dozen, but when they're gone, they're gone, we won't be able to get any more...
Here's some uneasy listening courtesy of Finland's Umpio. We had discovered the work of Umpio by way of a collaboration with the long-time aQ-favorite irr. app. (ext.), upon which Mr. Umpio (nee Pentti Dassum) reconstituted a bunch of irr. app. (ext.) material into an album that sounded remarkably like irr. app. (ext.) - profoundly strange collages of mudsucking torpor and psychically unstable gloominess. Muelas is none of that, standing in fully erect glory as a throttling, self-perpetuating explosion of noise-junk, signal-overload, and gleeful sonic destruction. The album's artwork connects the dots of the noise to the phobias and fears of going to the dentist, only to discover the man behind the dental drill is quite the sadist. There's a faux-outsider-artist drawing of phallic creatures with equally phallic dental drills who are converging on the poor patient suffering from some unfortunate tooth malady. There's the standard dental X-ray; and then there's a strange photograph of what actually looks like a dismembered jaw floating in the bottom of a jar, complete with fleshy tissue and decayed molars. Gross. Suitably, the noise that Umpio generates is sharp, crackling, and brutal, with plenty of cut-up configurations that sit somewhere between the pre-digital work of Merzbow and the scatological aktions of Runzelstirn & Gurglestock. Somebody on the internet postulated that the track "Night Goat" might be an uncredited Melvins cover. Why not?
Those unsettling squiggles, those psychic discharges, that automatic writing, those surreal if furtive glances that we have come to expect from M.S. Waldron / irr. app. (ext.) can be heard loud and clear on Observation Affects The Outcome. The other half of this collaboration is a character named Pentti Dassum, whose come up with the so-absurd-that-it-must-be-Finnish proposal (see Circle's recent Incarnation / Falcon scheme) that Umpio is neither an 'alter ego' nor an 'artist name'. Translated as vacuum from Dassum's native tongue, Umpio is described as a mental / physical location of profound isolation where his experiments with sound can take place. We suppose that could be anywhere. His kitchen. A tent in the woods. An empty swimming pool. A hobbit hole for a long since vanished race of dwarves. A blown out crater from a recent UFO crash. Okay, that sounds about right for Finland. Presumably, Waldron gave a bunch of material to Dassum for him to do with as he saw fit. Whatever Dassum did in his place of isolation, he ended up creating a really great irr. app. (ext.) album. The album lurches through the audio equivalent of a boot-sucking mud, with a gurgling ooze and slimy textures; and it trudges along with a woozy, unstable pace furthered along by moldy prescription drugs with all of the bad-trip attributes that would come from taking such medicines when you might be hoping for relief from some gastrointestinal ailment. Worms boring into your eyeballs up through bloodstream from gashes in your foot. An aktionist unveiling of the four humours through rotten vegetables, dead fish, and crystal-powered radios. Any of these could be right, or none. It's a great album of sonic surrealism no matter who you slice it.
Whatever this final question is that Paul Bradley and Colin Potter are asking, it is fucking deep. The stalwart British drone artists Bradley & Potter (the latter of whom is also known as being a long-standing member of Nurse With Wound) have collaborated a number of times in the past; and here they present their latest work under the new moniker Un. Not to be confused with the pre-Double Leopards / pre-Fursaxa audio narcotic, this Un brings Potter almost full circle to his early '80s explorations of cosmically tinged synth music, which was marvelously anthologized on his 4cd set Ancient History. An ominous, sawtooth drone sets the stage for an analogue synth take on dark ambient tension, with plenty of ghastly cascades recalling a chilling John Carpenter horror sound design that's been getting quite the workover as of late. But when the arpeggiations begin to come into focus, Bradley and Potter deflate the claustrophobic drones that opened the record, spilling forth an emotive smear of glistening synths and buried melodies orchestrated out the same infatuation with Klaus Schulze, Cluster, and Manuel Gottsching that spawned Emeralds, Outer Space, etc. By the end of the longform drifting, the Final Question becomes beautiful, maudlin, and rapturous. Quite a trip Bradley and Potter have engineered!
Holy shit, this is so fucked up, but in all the right ways. And thus, becomes our first ever CASSETTE Record Of The Week! One of those records that had EVERYone here sorta freaking out. And on it's first spin in the store, had all the folks in the back rushing up front to see what the heck was playing!
Un Festin Sagital are an occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra out of Santiago, Chile that can strip down to the touring essentials of just flute, acoustic guitar, and voice, when need be, in bellowing their complex tales of a forthcoming lysergic apocalypse. But here, it's the full sonic onslaught of Satanic chanting, frenzied tribal rhythms, heavy anthemic riffs, acid-crazed arrangements, and witch/warlock vocals that sound as if they were recorded at the wrong speed, all dotted with some rather pretty moments of psychedelic impressionism. Diabolically strummed flamenco guitar riffs erupt into blisteringly rhythmic assaults of start/stop rhythms that are equal parts King Crimson, Comus, and Uz Jsme Doma. Or imagine Dutch punks the Ex crossed with aQ Record Of The Weekers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan!! A sound that somehow simultaneously reminds us of bedeviled Eastern European peasant folk songs that could very well be possessed gypsy curses from some remote old world village in a muddled sonic palette that also evokes the Art Bears mixed with ritualistic Hindustani vocal modulations, or the Vietnamese girls on Holgar Czukay's "Boat Woman Song". The sound washed out under layers of tape decay and warble, the music seemingly patched together and reassembled in beautiful, yet twisted psych-folk interludes which meander between the volatile rhythmic outbursts with wah-wah inflected, acidic guitar lines and long dizzying sprawls of cinematic creep and kosmische electronics, creating spellbinding atmospheres and gorgeously stunning modern avant heaviness. Strange, fucked-up stuff. Supposedly a full length is in the works for Beta-Lactum Ring. C40. Limited to 100 copies! And so totally recommended!!
This Chilean band holds the distinction of being the first band to get an Aquarius CASSETTE Of The Week award. Their Bestias Solares tape on Black Horizons so blew everyone here away, we couldn't not make it thus. And we later reviewed their double cd on Beta-Lactam Ring too, both of those records displaying this strange group's sound, a sound which found us describing the group, not at all succinctly, as an "occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra". That's a pretty crazy and over the top description, but the this is a pretty crazy, over the top outfit, and we're happy to report, that they haven't gotten any less crazy this time around, in fact, to these ears, they keep getting weirder and weirder. The brief opener is all chanted monk-like vocal harmonies wrapped in warped, woozy electronics, hand-clappy drum machines, witchy female vocals, garbled speaking in tongues, strange FX, and while you might think it was just a weird intro, the next song continues down into the sonic rabbit hole, murky bass squelch, a pulsing almost techno beat, more swirling electronics, grunted demonic vocals, accompanying atonal piano pound, that piano exploding into wild psychedelic squiggles, while the rest of the track sounds submerged in fields of static, the result is a sort of warped, woozy, blackened, electro avant techno chamber music? Or something. It's sort of gothic, definitely freaky and fucked up, sort of electronic, whatever it is, we dig it, a LOT!
The third track is a creaking, crumbling drone, that sounds like it could be some lost Nurse With Wound outtake, all deep dirge-y tectonic thrum, sounds like recordings of motorcycles or moaning docks, blurred into dense sonic swells, shot through with distant minor key melodies, dark and meditative, and a bit haunting as well. And finally, things finish off with another brief blast of WTF weirdness, deep drone-y thrum, under spacey synths, plucked pizzicato melodies, swirling wind like whirs, bizarre glitchy percussion, and near the end, primitive drum machine, and glimmering fields of sci-fi planetarium show electronics. So twisted. And so good.
And like all Black Horzions tapes, super fancy packaging, four panel J-card, offset silver printing on bronze metallic paper, purple tapes, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
This South American blackened dark-prog doom-noise psychedelia collective holds the distinction of having been the very first, and to this day only, CASSETTE Record Of The Week. And at the time, we were so blown away, we really had no choice, everything about Un Festin Sagital pushed all of our (and presumably your) buttons, occult prog metal meets creepy black ambient soundscapery, haunting minimal moodiness meets, propulsive post punk crush, howling metallic heft meets gently psychedelic folkiness, all wound up into one dizzying tangle of heady heaviness. Since then, we've dug deeper into the bands catalog, with much help from local label Black Horizons, who brings us yet another amazing collection of the group's tripped out sound, this one not that far removed from the others, if anything more of an extension, the sound sprawling and expansive, the opener especially, the group slipping into something more space rocky and dreamy, sounding almost like something you might expect to hear on Cardinal Fuzz, loping sinewy basslines, clouds of cymbal shimmer, fluttering flutes, minimal percussion, almost like a jazzier, soundtrackier Spacemen 3, hazy and hypnotic, before the sound builds to some seriously lysergic heavy psych, billowing clouds of FX drenched melodies, the drums more driving, eventually swathed in some seriously caustic noise guitar crunch. Holy shit, fans of the Heads and Carlton Melton and White Hills and all the rest, you might just want to check out these weirdos too.
Cuz goddamn if the rest of the record doesn't fall in line, the second track two, laying down a dark, motorik groove, wreathed in sonic swirls, and with a huge krautrock vibe, again, following that tried and true space rock sonic template, the sound eventually building to a wild freak out, but instead of straight up shred, it's all wild scrabbly tangles, and distorted chugs, roiling piano rumbles, scalding arcs of white noise psych swirl, seriously epic space/psych rock for sure. But these guys are NOT space rockers, they just happen to do it better than most. So there's plenty of other mysterious moodiness happening. The sound devolving into some churning slo-mo-doom, still folk flecked, a cinematic sprawl that lurches from noisy crashing pummel, to hushed whispery drift, the whole second half sounding like the score from some lost Italian seventies giallo. From there on out, the band whip out some mathy stop start post punk angularity, more distortion drenched spaciness, some groovy organ soaked fusiony prog-jazz, again pocked with bursts of wild distorted noise rock crunch, until finally, things finish off with the epic 21 minute title track, the unfurls like the bastard child of all those space rock bands we love, the usual zoner drift, is transformed into what sounds like 3 or 4 bands playing at once, a frenzied cacophony, somehow held together but a buried rhythm section, the end result a sort of kraut-noise, that about halfway through settles into one final stretch of noisy, motorik kraut-prog mesmer, psychedelic and hypnotic, and really fucking great.
As with all the Black Horizons tapes, super fancy packaging, this time an 8 panel J-card, silver metallic ink on green matte paper, inside a folded up mini-poster/insert, and as always, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
Last list, you may recall, we had as one of our Records Of The Week, what was more precisely a Cassette Of The Week, a tape on the Black Horizons label by a band of sonic surrealists from Santiago, Chile known as Un Festin Sagital. In that rave review, we mentioned that Un Festin Sagital had a full-length upcoming on the Beta-Lactam Ring label - which made perfect sense, what with Beta-Lactam putting out such weirdness as Nurse With Wound reissues among other things. Well, what we hadn't realized, is that Un Festin Sagital ALREADY had a couple Beta-Lactam cd releases to their credit, that we'd somehow overlooked. So, naturally, we need to review those too. This one's their most recent, from actually just a few months ago - a sprawling double cd set, one studio, one live, packaged in nice gatefold mini-lp style sleeve.
And it's just as crazy and compelling as that tape that turned us on to 'em. We previously described UFS as a "occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra" and that's still a good, broad description of what this experimental musical collective is up to - namely WTF? weirdness with a dark, moody vibe to it.
The first disc's epic eight-part, 22+ minute opening track, "El Nino Ateo" should thoroughly infect you with Un Festin Sagital's lysergic musical sickness - or else cause the less stout of heart and eccentric of taste to flee in terror! It's like a sinister soundtrack, part symphonic 20th century classical, part distorted industrial churn, part krauty synth throb. There's eerie Magma-esque choral parts, mumbled incantations, screams, Satanic-sounding chant (shades of Igor Wakhevitch for sure); ominous haunting stretches of avant-classical murk replete with groans and drones and sudden, stabbing piano chords... Clearly "RIO" avant-prog chamber rock a la Art Zoyd is an inspiration, but Un Festin Sagital take it to absurd extremes. You could kind of imagine this is what modern-day aQ prog faves Guapo (who also have a fine new album reviewed this list) might sound like, if only they dwelled in some far off South American mountain village, wore animal masks, and chewed on hallucinogenic jungle plants all day.
"El Nino Ateo" ranges from sheer mesmerism to utter mayhem and back again, as does the rest of this disc, the other three tracks dabbling in gentle acoustic folk ritual, exploding with spastic prog nuttery, and experimenting with atmospheric neo-classical soundscapery. And then there's the second disc, entitled La Muerte Solar, which was recorded live, but you wouldn't know that but for the occasional outburst of applause from the audience - which in UFS's strange sound-world, could easily be mistaken for just another intentional, sampled element of their collage-like compositions. Their 12+ minute rendition of "El Nino Ateo" here is a true tour de force, and the whole disc is easily the equal to the set's studio half.
At their heaviest, they kind of remind us of Orthodox or Blizaro, at their spazziest of Uz Jsme Doma or The Ex, and at their weirdest of NWW or even Reynols (whose Alan Courtis has in fact guested on one of Un Festin Sagital's other albums). Throw in some Circle at their most "operatic", and one of Tatsuya Yoshida's improv groups, roll all that into a ball and smoke it, and you've got some idea of how freaky this shit is! Not every single moment here "works" but overall, yeah, it sure does.
This is quite possibly the most insane outsider-weirdo-grind-metal-what-the-fuck record we have ever heard. Imagine a super lo-fi grindcore, cobbled together from blasting lightning fast drum machines, shredding super tech lead guitars, super processed, almost mechanical riffs, and Melt Banana-like high pitched yelping vocals, all tossed in a blender and spat out at a million miles an hour. Only sometimes all you can hear are the vocals, or the drums disappear underneath an avalanche of guitars, or everything is so amped up it becomes a buzzy blur, topped with high pitched squeaks and yowls. Totally nuts. Imagine Arboga Teenage Riot jamming with Brutal Truth. Or two lps, one a Melt Banana, the other a Deerhoof, both being played simultaneously at 90 rpm, then chopped up and slowed back down to about 60 rpm. So completely dementedly amazing. 46 tracks, most between 30 seconds and 1 minute, no titles, just numbers, 33601 to 33640, except for the last few tracks numbered 1365Y-13659. Wonder if that means that before this lp, the band had already recorded 33,600 songs. We'd believe it! Fans of all the above mention bands and folks who just love the weirdest shit imaginable, this is definitely for you.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, we only got 8... Pressed on clear red vinyl. Includes a printed insert, with a DVD of live performances. It's PAL though, so for those of you without the ability to play PAL discs, there's also a free video download of all the same footage.
