THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Multiple turntables and trumpet, very interesting. Bastien takes portable turntables and attaches pieces of metal below, and directly to, the tone arm, causing the record to skip and forming simple and hypnotic loops. He then plays trumpet melodies over the looped records turning these disparate ingredients into sleepy, hiccuping lullabyes.
We sure are suckers for unconventional music making. Be it accidental (ice melting, applause, junkyards, metal rusting, fire burning) or environmental (elephants, sled dogs, cats purring, FROGS!, bats) and most especially the mysterious or unexplained (the sounds of the dead, breaking through the radio waves, haunting shortwave spy transmissions). Then there is a whole other realm of unconventional music making: the mad scientist. Why form a band, when you can construct robots and machines to play all the instruments? Why actually play the piano, or the guitar, or the drums, when you can construct an elaborate set of pulleys and levers and gears and axles that will play them for you? Why be happy with a turntable that plays records with only one stylus when you can make music with a turntable equipped with multiple needles? We can only assume Pierre Bastien asked these same questions, and the answer he came up with is Pop. Forty five minutes of simple, repetitive, hypnotic and mesmerizing machine driven minimal krautrock. That's right, krautrock is what this sounds like.
In lesser hands a room full of self playing instruments would most likely result in a sterile series of sound events, but Bastien has a deft hand and a keen ear, and breathes life into his automatons, delicate contraptions that each contribute a unique element to a song, not just spitting out sounds -- strange gadgets that play simple chords on a keyboard, an apparatus to beat out simple insistent rhythms, all manner of haunting minor key plinkety plonk, crisp windup toy clickety clacks and disgruntled grinding large machinery groans and whines, some strange warped turntablizations, wearily wheezing woodwinds, all woven into spare stretches of minimally propulsive ambience. Sounds a bit like an army of tiny wind up toys assembled in an automated sonic ballet, an inhuman menagerie making music more human that it seems possible. The vibe is very fuzzy and washed out, droney and dolorous, smeary and sepia-toned, definite shades of Philip Jeck and Tim Hecker, with plenty of creak and crackle surrounding the minimal melodies and subtle rhythmic pulses within each song. It's easy to become obsessed with the method behind the music, and the amount of obviously painstaking preparation that went into creating these machines. And why not?! It's absolutely mind boggling to be sure, but even beyond the mere construction of these music making mechanisms, imagine figuring out how to get these 'things' to make these sounds, and THEN somehow to compose music this lovely and captivating. Seems impossible. Surely, Pop is too perfect to be accidental, too beautiful to be pure luck, too musical to be anything other than the work of a brilliant mad sonic scientist. Or better yet, and possibly more likely, imagine Bastien is nothing if not lucky, a man who somehow stumbled upon a secret world of machines, in some mysterious forgotten warehouse, in some dark overlooked part of town, an insulated little world populated by these devices, not a living breathing creature in sight, just shelves full of strange little contraptions, all running endlessly and self controlled, creating this beautiful music as if that's what they were designed to do, and he was just the first to stumble upon this place, these things, and was able to capture these mysterious sounds before one night, that building and those things were nowhere to be found. Sounds farfetched, maybe a little silly, but it's the sort of romantic story that befits music this warm and beautiful and mysterious, whether it was ultimately the work of a man, or the just the serendipitous sounds of a room full of machines.
Oooh. We're always excited about any new releases from French automated-instrument builder and trumpeter Pierre Bastien. How often do we get records featuring music made (in part) by robots? Not often enough. And such lovely music too. All these tracks were originally composed as soundtracks to projects by a Dutch experimental filmmaker by the name of Karel Doing (hence the title). But Bastien's music so readily stokes the imagination than Doing's cinematic visions are not necessary accompaniment.
We said 'automated-instrument builder', those instruments being what Bastien calls his 'Meccano', simple sound-making robots or kinetic sound sculptures, that make looping music box melodies and provide a backing of slow, steady mechanical clank for Bastien's own wheezing, muted trumpet. Bastien plays in a smokey jazz mode, breathy, beautiful, oh so melancholic, that in the this context reminds us of Chet Baker in some sort of Tom Waits-ish instrumental junkyard. The gamelan or thumb piano like plinkings of Bastien's Meccano - exotica for scrappy homebuilt robots - are rendered somehow more human by the sweet sighs of Bastien's trumpet. He also makes use of field recordings, unidentified underwater warblings, and other mysterious textures in constructing these tracks. Wonderful stuff, so languid and relaxed and full of life, animated indeed by Bastien's Visions Of Doing. Bastien's previous discs for Rephlex, and others, have all been 'late night faves' here at AQ, and this latest gentle gem from Bastien joins them for sure.
Another gorgeous collection of Buddhist based modern minimalist compositions from one of our favorite contemporary 'classical' composers/performers. We recently made another Batagov release our Record Of The Week (Music For The 35 Buddhas), and we sold tons of Batagov's sprawling three disc minimalist masterpiece The Wheel Of The Law, which had we been able to get more, would also have been a Record Of The Week. And for some of us, ranks as one of our all time favorites, classical or otherwise!
Bodhicharyavatara is breathtakingly beautiful, and once again demonstrates Batagov's ability to fuse his Buddhist practice, with his unique compositional style, informed by so much of what came before (Glass, Feldman, etc.) but definitely something wholly original, especially here, where the sound takes on something more akin to post rock, incorporating warm smoldering guitars, even some actual drumming, into his already achingly lush palette of piano, bells and percussion.
All of the tracks here are tranced out and hypnotic, delicate slow building swirls of sound, constructed from lush resonant piano, warm wistful woodwinds, chiming bells, the guitars more like swirls of smokey shimmer, the tones stretched out into warm, chordal streaks, with Telo Tulka Rinpoche, the Supreme Lama of Kalmykia, reciting ancient Buddhist texts over the top. It's very reminiscent Of Godspeed! You Black Emperor, especially in the way Godspeed used to employ samples of spoken word, but here, that same effect becomes something much more spiritual, haunting and heady. While it's definitely more droney and dirgey than other Batagov recordings we've listed, it's still quite meditative, the lush backdrop of sound, broods and pulses, tones moan and soar, the piano alternates between low end flurries and pointillist crystalline melodies, and then part way through the second track, in come the drums, and the song blossoms into full on post rock, pounding drums, wailing guitars, all over that darkly swirling bed of bells and piano. Super intense, and the sort of thing Godspeed freaks will flip over.
The third and fourth 'movements' return to a sound much more restrained, but like the first few tracks, continue to explore a brooding, post rock flecked modern minimalism, the sung/spoken texts truly mesmerizing, woodwinds drifting in, bleating horns, blurred into softly churning backdrop, all of this adding a haunting melancholy to the already moody minor key sound, and while the drums are still present, their presence is much more abstract, their rhythmic colorations more spare, skittery for the most part, but with brief moments of bombast. Batagov has always professed a love of collaborating with rock musicians, and many of his records display the fruit of these collaborations (there's even been talk of a drum / piano record, with our very own Andee!), but few reveal his mysterious musical mastery, better than this one. Stunning.
We first discovered Russian pianist / composer Anton Batagov via his breathtaking triple cd release The Wheel Of The Law, a record EVERYone here loved, and one that we sold tons of and realized in retrospect, really should have been a Record Of The Week. Much of what made that record special was how rooted in Batagov's Buddhism the music was, a mesmerizingly hypnotic arrangement for organ, glockenspiel, xylophone, piano and percussion, it conjured up a tranquility and otherworldliness that we found quite moving, the various movements offering up gorgeously rhythmic and almost looped sounding figures, the sort of composition that we presume is how he ended up being described by some reviewer as "Reich on vodka". And while he is most definitely influenced by Reich and Riley and Glass, his sound is definitely something unique, we find ourselves sometimes reminded of another aQ favorite, Lubomyr Melnyk, the two have a similar flair for lyrical melodies and lush arrangements, although where Melnyk fills all the space with flurries of notes, Batagov is as much about the spaces between the notes as the notes themselves. Batagov is also quite the collaborator, often teaming up with rock musicians and other non classical performers, and has produced all manner of releases from straight up classical to soundtracks. Needless to say, we are obviously big fans.
So in the process of trying to track down more Wheel Of The Law cd sets, we discovered another Batagov record that we found equally amazing, from back in 2001, another composition based on Buddhism, which is obvious from the title, Music For The 35 Buddhas and like Wheel, it's another fantastic and dreamlike composition, mixing Batagov's lovely piano playing with vibraphone, Javanese gongs and antique cymbals. There's definitely a gamelan vibe, but in a whole different setting, the interplay between vibraphone and piano, deft and effortless, producing a dreamily cinematic sprawl of notes floating weightless in space, a sort of tranquil soundscape, that seems perfect for meditation, contemplation or even just relaxation. The tones ring out, the extended decay as much a part of the composition as the initial notes, making the whole thing sound very fluid and organic and full of a hopeful energy. Delicate and divine. And even at 40 minutes, way too short, the sort of piece that we imagine playing on forever.
The second piece is a bit darker, and is more overtly linked to the record's theme. Batagov unfurling darkly melodic figures, gamelan like melodies draped over the top, deep resonant tones, and tinkling chimes, over which two different voices deliver prayer-like incantations to each of the 35 buddhas by name, the music brooding and minimal, but utterly entrancing, and with the voices, it only becomes that more powerful. This is probably the most listened to record in the store recently, and it's easy to see why, Batagov achieves the seemingly impossible, creating a piece of music that is both tranquil and soothing, but one that still manages to be active, and engages the listener in active listening, if they so desire, the main melody/refrain is the sort of melody, that will stick in your head, and will surface constantly, which in a way seems like the perfect accompaniment to the Buddhist teachings that accompany it, a sonic mantra, that can be revisited throughout the day, to help the listener remain lost in the music, and perhaps help achieve a degree of inner peace, even when, or maybe especially when, the outside world seems to be at utterly at odds with such a state.
We continue to dig ever deeper into the catalog of Russian composer / pianist Anton Batagov this week, with two different, and extremely different sounding titles. The other (elsewhere on this week's list) is one of the strangest recordings we've heard from Batagov so far, which finds him paired up with a musician called simply XMZ, for a gorgeous record of piano and electronic sounds/treatments, and this one, Passionate Desire To Be An Angel, which once again finds Batagov's pushing beyond the idea of standard classical music, and expanding that music's typical palette, to include not only cello, harp, vibraphone and samplers, but also guitars, and not delicately arranged 'classical' guitars, we're talking chugging distorted rock guitars, just check out the opener here "Can You Feel The Rhythm?", which pairs chugging rock riffage, with delicate flurries of piano, a strange combination to be sure, and a bit jarring at first, but after a few minutes, it somehow makes some strange sort of sense, but then it gets even weirder, with mournful trombone melodies, and finally, after a brief respite, the riff swoops back in, wreathed in pointillist piano, but now accompanied by some seriously belted out soulful female vox. Woah. We can definitely see classical nerds being a bit confused, but we're pretty into it, Batagov to at all afraid to mix his love of classical music, with rock, and an obvious joy in strange collaboration.
The rest of the record is not nearly as bizarre, but is, like all the other Batagov records we've reviewed, gorgeous, "Cunjunctio", a sweeping near 30 minute epic, that begins as a series of solo piano vignettes, which are soon joined by organ, and celesta, transforming the sound into what could be some seventies E.L.P. style prog epic, but instead of exploding into tangled rock bombast, the tones are drawn out into meditative drones, and lush layered textures, over which angelic female choral vocals soar, sounding almost liturgical, and it's at this point that we first realize how much of this record, sounds almost Christmas-y, the sort of fanfare you can imagine hearing at midnight mass, or as the soundtrack to some strange art film, all snowy vistas, and glimmery lights strung from houses, Batagov's love of Philip Glass evident here as well, with the busy organ chorale very reminiscent of Glass's score for Koyaanisqatsi.
"Opus Alchymicum" starts out with a very Vangelis feel, pizzicato strings, chiming melodies, all wrapped in swirls of reverbed piano melody, pulsing and propulsive, the song shifting from softly churning and rhythmic, to emotional and darkly hauntingly melodic and back again, those chugging guitars from the first track making a return appearance, and again the vibe is very wintery, and soundtracky, and really quite lovely.
The record finishes with "Umbra Solis", which begins all stately droned out mesmer, whirring organs, and long layered tones, minor key and wistfully minimal, before blossoming into another wintery chorale, swirling washes of organ chords, and harmonized operatic vocals, almost like the score to some time lapse film, of the end of winter, snow melting, falling from branches, buds and shoots pushing their way through the icy ground, the sun bathing everything in its hazy springtime glow. So good.
The accompanying booklet, includes all sorts of alchemical diagrams as well as various bits of text (including some quotes from Manly P. Hall), speaking to a deeper philosophical/alchemical/ideological subtext to these works, which only makes the sounds here that much more moving and powerful.
Yet another breathtakingly beautiful release from Russian composer/pianist Anton Batagov, the fourth we've reviewed, and another recording/composition inexorably tied into Batagov's Buddhism. The Monk Thogmey's Thirty-Seven Precepts, like Batagov's other compositions, unfurls a lush, luxurious sonic backdrop, over which sacred Buddhist writings are sung/spoken/chanted, in this case, it's Gyalsey Thogmey Zangpo's titular poem chanted by Lama Tsering Dondrub, and the subtly sing songy delivery is mesmerizing, quite trancelike in fact, drifting serenely over the brooding, hypnotic, darkly lovely shimmer beneath.
A slow series of sonic swells, constructed from piano, organ, vibraphone, guitar, bass, cello and percussion strike the perfect balance between the meditative mesmer of Batagov's Music For The 35 Buddhas, and the almost Godspeed like post rock / modern classical minimalism hybrid of his Bodhicharyavatara. The record starts off very much like Batagov's masterwork The Wheel Of The Law, delicate piano, muted melodic percussion, a dreamlike sprawl of hushed, haunting rhythmic melody, before the vocals come in, accompanied by a lush almost wall of sound, swirling pianos and shimmering gongs, moaning strings, dramatic and majestic. The whole of the subsequent 21+ minute first movement seems to follow a similar sonic pattern, weaving a gentle, delicate sprawl of washed out and woozy, soft focus melody, chiming and lilting and dreamlike, before shifting to something ever so subtly darker, adding guitar and bass, and infusing it with some of that post rock brood, while the vocals drone prayerfully over the top, before slipping back into the more melodic ambient first half, the cycle continuing for the duration, a slow motion sonic seesaw, that in its structure is also quite meditative and trancelike. The second movement adds more shadow to the light, big booming drums, more guitar, melodically and structurally similar to the first part, but a bit more intense, darker and dronier, but equally as mesmerizing.
Finally, the record resolves with an instrumental epilogue, that fuses the two parts into a slow, dolorous piano driven post rock minimal drift, guitar strums drift weightless over pointillist piano, organs wheeze out lush softly undulating drones, that main melody woven deftly throughout. Fantastic stuff as always. The liner notes describe the record's arrangement as relating to seventies rock music, and although we're not sure we would have picked up on that, it is part of what makes Batagov's compositions and performances so singular, and so unlike the rest of his minimalist peers.
Fans of the other Batagov records will definitely want this one too, this could very well be our favorite recording of his (after Wheel Of The Law)...
Super elaborate packaging, a gorgeous full color slipcase, enclosing the cd in a jewel case, and a thick full color booklet, beautifully laid out with liner notes, in Russian and English, as well as Thogmey's poem in Russian and Tibetan.
This is not actually new, but this is the first time we've been able to get this, and the moment we heard it, we knew it was something we had to list! Recorded in 1999, and orginally released in 2002, The Wheel Of The Law compiles three epic pieces of gorgeous minimalism from Russian composer Anton Batagov. Three discs, three tracks composed for organ, glockenspiel, xylophone, piano and percussion, inspired by Buddhism and the Quest for Nirvana, and the practices involved: peace, meditation, deep thought, breathing, conciousness. Repetitive and melodic, lush and so so beautiful. Someone once referred to Batagov as sounding "like Reich on vodka", not sure we hear the vodka, or even any sounds distinctly and immediately recognizably Russian, but there is certainly plenty of Reich here, as well as Riley, and most definitely some Harold Budd, especially in the delicate, spare piano arrangements. The first disc, "Circle Of Time" is four long movements of warm rich swells of organ, flowing lazily beneath delicate cyclical chimes and abstract piano figures, very dramatic and hypnotic. The second disc, the 4 track Voidness cycle: "Appearances And Voidness", "Clarity And Voidness", "Bliss And Voidness", "Mind And Voidness", introduces the same delicate chimes found on the first disc, but this time over a repeating series of haunting moaning violin melodies. Minor key and mildly atonal, the melodies are spread out over a spare background of complex overtones, all drifting dreamily into space. The final disc: "Liberation Through Listening In The Between" is again a massive sprawl of lush static organ drones, wavering and subtly pulsing, with simple three and four note melodies played out over minutes instead of seconds, chiming and ringing, resonating above the organ's mesmerizing drone, the whole thing supported by a barely there framework of simple percussion, so subtle and simple that it's basically a single drum, muted and way down in the mix, offering a sort of pulse for the piece, a musical heartbeat, slowed down, as if in meditation or contemplation.
So completely an utterly breathtaking.
On the last list, we reviewed the first collaboration between Russian composer / pianist Batagov and the mysterious XMZ, which resulted in a strange sort of post-classical Batagov, with swirling atmospheres, dense drones, and perhaps strangest of all beats, Batagov's ethereal, dreamlike pianoscapes transformed into something much more rhythmic and electronic and 'modern'. For their second collaboration Batagov augments his usual piano with one that has been prepared, as is evidenced in the picture on the back cover, which features a shot of the strings inside the piano, augmented by screws, dowels, quarters and allen wrenches, with Batagov not just playing that prepared piano, but also the strings inside, adding plucks and scrapes, haunting pizzicato melodies, and all manner of percussive textures.
The mood this time around is much more somber, and soundtracky, XMZ adding thick swirls of rumble and whir, of lush chordal thrum, and slow shifting shimmer, drifting clouds of soft-noise blurred into washed put prismatic smears, over which Batagov unfurls stately, melancholic melodies here, creepy atonal plinks and plonks there. The first few tracks are hushed dark drifts, moody and murky, Batagov's melodies floating weightless amidst streaks of grey and woozy burbling whirs and hums, the result is darkly dream, and mysteriously meditative, it's not really until the fourth track that the sun begins to shine through, that track unfurling like a Philip Glass / Oval mash up, the backdrop a murky swirl over which Batagov flits elegantly. But those moments of light are fleeting, as the mood darkens almost immediately after, Batagov and XMZ weaving a hazy dirge, tense and minor key and quite dramatic, which is only magnified on the follow up, which seems to blur and bleed and ooze into something much more abstract, and nearly terrifying, a could-be score for some lost arty seventies giallo, sinister and smoldering.
The last few tracks mix it up a bit, slipping from Caretaker like haunted ballroom shimmer, to something surprisingly almost flamenco sounding, the first beats we've heard so far, a shuffling skitter, underpinned by a house music like pulse, if Batagov was playing synths instead of pianos, it could almost be some strange sort of Umberto / Zombi retro-soundtrack thing, but instead, it's much more moody and measured. And finally, the two finish off with another Caretaker-ish bit of ghostly drift, the prepared piano sounding almost zither like, the piano proper unfurling gorgeous dreamy melodies, all swathed in a softly swirling cloud of gauze-y ambience.
Another winner from Batagov, and yet another sonic side to this aQ beloved modern classical master...
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One of two releases on this week's list from Russian composer / pianist Anton Batagov, this one the first in a series of collaborations Batagov produced with a musician called XMZ, who according to the liner notes, contributed 'sounds' the the project, and what sounds they are. We shouldn't need to go into too much detail about how much we love Batagov, his piano playing fluid and lyrical, expressive and emotional, every record we've heard has been stunning, and while this one is no different, it definitely casts Batagov's playing in a whole different light, with XMZ leaving the piano alone for the most part, but creating a lush, and layered, super varied landscape around Batagov's piano, the opening track alone perfectly demonstrates this strange partnership. Batagov unfurls lovely, haunting melodies, which at first are underpinned by strange percussion, and slow shifting textures, but quickly those textures build to soft swirls of chordal color, and underneath, rhythms begin to surface, skittery and barely there at first, but soon, those too become more driving, and eventually almost bombastic, the surrounding ambience too, becomes darkly dramatic, majestic swells of post rock like shimmer, the final minute, pounding, dramatic and so epic!
The second track is much more atmospheric, near ambient, and very cinematic, with XMZ doing most of the heavy lifting in the beginning, Batagov left to unfurl stately chords, and little melodic flourishes. Eventually, the background noise coalesces into another rhythm, and Batagov's piano becomes more forceful, the whole track gaining momentum, becoming a sort of dreamy, soundtracky krautrock flecked new age. The rest of the record unwinds similarly, from moody, darkly dramatic soundtrack like refrains, and strange crackling background textures, disembodied voices, moody rumbling drones, shuffling beats, lush clouds of chordal piano shimmer, sometimes sounding a bit like DJ Shadow, a sample heavy sprawl of beat driven classical piano, but elsewhere, it's a dramatic, dreamy melancholic ambience, and finally, a brooding, lovely, slo-mo sonic elegy, XMZ letting Batagov finish things off, adding very little, just some subtle sonic colorations, and some deep background thrum. As always, fantastic stuff, this one especially sounding like something you might hear on Type or Miasmah or Time Released Sound. Needless to say, absolutely recommended.
Tayatha is the latest release from aQ beloved composer/pianist Anton Batagov, and it just might be his loveliest and most haunting work to date. Which is saying a lot, considering how much we love pretty much everything we've heard from him, we've even made several of his records Record Of The Week, before this one, and his triple cd Wheel Of The Law remains one of our favorite modern minimal releases EVER (and would have also been a Record Of The Week, had we been able to get more). But this new one is something else entirely.
On past records, Batagov has enjoyed the act of collaboration, and has explored playing with rock bands, with experimental electronic musicians, incorporating electric guitar, pounding drums, different vocalists, Buddhist recitations, all a part of Batagov's idiosyncratic approach to modern composition, but never has one of his collaborations been so potent, and so moving, as on Tayatha. Yet another Buddhist based composition here Batagov is joined by Tibetan vocalist Yungchen Lhamo, and that's it, just piano and vocals. And it's stunning. Absolutely. Some of the most beautiful and lyrical piano playing we've heard from Batagov, the sound so rich and emotional, moving and personal, even sans vocals, Tayatha would be a revelation, but Yungchen's voice is a marvel, lush and lustrous, but super distinctive, slipping from rich throaty croon, to something more abstract, and back again, and similarly sans piano, this would be a gorgeous a cappella performance, in fact, Lhamo has been performing solo and a cappella for years, but it's how Lhamo's voice and Batagov's piano fit together so perfectly that makes this record so special.
It's hard to put into words what exactly it is about this record, but without sounding overly dramatic, we got chills the first time we put this one. It's lush and lovely, but definitely haunting, and subtly harrowing, Batagov and Lhamo somehow imbuing the sound with intense emotion, the music surprisingly personal and intimate. We won't pretend that there wasn't a potential for new age schmaltz, what with the female vocals and piano, and the rather new age-y looking cover, but don't be misled, this is a powerful collection of dark, dreamy, moody and meditative music that is truly transcendent. Might be best to just listen to the samples below, we find it hard to imagine you won't be immediately smitten.
And what's even cooler about Tayatha, is that the sound and the compositions are super varied, tracks like "Medicine Buddha" are almost poppy, it's not hard to imagine someone like Tori Amos or Regina Spektor performing the same song, but with dramatically different results, yet even in the hands of Batagov And Lhamo, the song swells dramatically, the piano melodies super intense and strangely catchy, the vocals too, since we don't speak the language, often act like another instrument, imbued with the power of the human voice, but not beholden to any sort of lyrical interpretation. Other tracks are more tranquil and meditative, some are lilting and and dreamlike, others brood and pulse with a mysterious dark energy, and at least one, "Flying Dakini", almost sounds like some 'Nighthawks At The Diner' Tom Waits style balladry, albeit in Tibetan and a bit more modern minimalist. But all the tracks here, every one, is heartbreakingly beautiful, the whole somehow is so much more than its constituent parts, repeated listens have transformed Tayatha into more than just voice and piano, it's almost liturgical, a mysteriously lovely spiritual sonic journey, that manages to turn sound into something divine.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
For those well acquainted with the prose of Aquarius Records, the German duo Troum should be a familiar reference to any one keen on dark dronescapes; but Martyn Bates is something of an enigma to us despite being a stalwart of neo-romantic British art-rock thanks to wealth of recordings with his group Eyeless In Gaza. Blessed with the angelic voice of a classic crooner, Bates certainly fits in with the theatrically inclined singers such as David Sylvian, Scott Walker, and Gordon Sharp. Even when Eyeless In Gaza began under the banner of post-punk, Bates' impassioned delivery enveloped the anti-pop sensibilities with a majestic aura that probably repelled just as many potential fans that might be swayed by his rapturous clarion. To be completely honest, we've never been entirely convinced by Bates or Eyeless In Gaza, despite numerous attempts by lifelong fan and AQ pal Loren Chasse to convince us otherwise. In working with Troum on To A Child Dancing In The Wind, Bates has presented himself again as the occultish troubadour, but with Troum's dark elegance wrapped around his voice, we may need to reconsider. Nocturnal for sure, but hardly as overwhelmingly dark as some of the other Troum records (i.e. Tjurkurppa 2 or Sigqan); To A Child Dancing In The Wind has Troum wrapping shadowy drones and their slow motion churn of heavily processed guitar, accordion, harmonica, and bass as the tapestry for the celestial hymns scribed by Bates. For those transfixed by David Sylvian's collaborative efforts with Fennesz on Blemish, we would hazard to guess that you'll find this album equally as emotive and beautiful.
Yep that's Masaki Batoh, the visionary leader of Japanese modern day hippie psych legends Ghost, looking rather more futuristic than his usual shamanistic self, on the cover of Brain Pulse Music, his new solo album for Drag City. The elaborate science fictional headgear Batoh is wearing, a tangle of wires, electrodes, metal bands, and for some reason goggles, is the eponymous Brain Pulse Music machine he helped invent. Apparently in clinical trials for therapeutic medical use, it somehow helps to stabilize one's brain waves, by electronically transmitting them in the form of audio signals that can be controlled via a biofeedback procedure. So this high-tech augmentation of Batoh's traditional acupuncture practice has applications to his musical activities as well, as heard here on this disc dedicated to the victims of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and ensuing nuclear disaster. According to Batoh, the BPM machine can promote healing for both the user employing it, and hopefully more widely as a tool for literally higher-minded music making.
So, what's it sound like? High pitched electronic drone-tones, rising and falling, sometimes soothing, sometimes noisy, not unlike the "onkyo" music of fellow Japanese experimentalists such as the sine-wave artist Sachiko M, for instance. We'd assume that depending upon the brains involved (of both user and listener!), the sounds the BPM machine produces could be perceived as either blissful or possibly piercingly aggravating. But, Batoh includes a lot more than straight BPM recordings on this album. The machine's drones are (usually) mixed with more traditional, ethnic Japanese acoustic instrumentation, such as wood block percussion, drums, gongs, bells, and shakuhachi flute. While some tracks are all about the BPM whines, others foreground the simple ceremonial ancient sounds (indeed, a few omit the BPM machines entirely), with the disc's 10+ minute final cut utilizing two BPM machines at the same time, alongside plasma theremin, springer FX, and shinto chant. That one is particularly amazing, pulsations indeed, by the end sounding like at least one of the BPM machines must have been plugged into Merzbow's brain.
Interesting stuff conceptually of course, but also the BPM meshes well with Batoh's less high-tech, more timeless Ghost-like musical rituals.
Nice silver-and-black graphics and design, with personal liner notes from Batoh himself.
Back in 2012, we raved about a cd from some mysterious French instrumental math/post/noise rock combo called Poles. At the time, we compared them to Psychic Paramount, Dazzling Killmen, Laddio Bolocko, Don Cab, Breadwinner, needless to say, these guys fit perfectly amongst those math/post rock elite. We had been hankering for more ever since, and recently, the band got in touch to let us know, that there might finally be more on the horizon, but in the meantime, one of the Poles had a new record under the name Batwan, but warned us right up front it was NOTHING like Poles, and he was not kidding. Instead, the music of Batwan is a sort of blackened industrial soundscaping, the opener a long sprawling field of pulsing guitar thrum, and dense sweeps of gnarled noisiness that ebb and flow, all over a constantly roiling field of ambient noise, and industrial whir, but that noisiness soon abates, leaving hazy drifts of softly reverberating thrum, shot through with barely there melodies, and buried percussion, not to mention what sounds like human voices processed into a chorus of croaking frogs, not to mention what sounds like some scissor snipping, some abstract drumming, some keening sine wave tones, little electronic squiggles, bells and chimes, all woven into what eventually becomes a sort of Caretaker-esque bit of faded melancholic drift. And that's just the first track. The rest of the pieces are much shorter, but share a similar sonic palette, from a throbbing sort of minimal industrial house music, all muted and muddied and draped with cleaning metallic melodies, to a blurry little stretch of kosmische synth swirl, peppered with bits of crunch and clatter, to creepy haunted house noisescapes, to hushed minimal avant rock creep, to warped electro weirdness, to harrowing cinematic ambience, and finally to a harrowing, droned out slow build, that takes an unsteady raga, and transforms it into something woozy and melty, and gradually more and more soul stirringly ominous, before finally fading out completely.
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Second of two releases on the newly launched UK label Tapeworm, the other being a killer solo bass record from long time aQ fave and turntablist, Philip Jeck, while this one, well, this one is a bit harder to describe. A spoken word record by two mysterious ladies called Patrica And Ellen, reading a work by legendary (anti) post modernist Jean Baudrillard. Recorded By Vicki Bennet of People Like Us, these readings are riveting, due in no small doubt to Baudrillard's tangled wordplay, but also due to the strange delivery of the two women, who take turns, in their thickly accented voices, reading the texts, sounding like they're perhaps seeing those words for the first time, struggling through pronunciations, little giggles and asides, brief breaks as one hands the text to the other. We'll be the first to say, that we're not much for 'spoken word' records, but somehow this transcends, becoming some sort of art, or sound poetry, especially when the two are reading together, those moments are fantastic, playful, silly, and the delivery of the two, slightly off, with both randomly dropping out, or stopping for a breath, makes the reading sound less 'read', and more weirdly musical.
Obviously, this won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it's definitely fun, and interesting, and quite strange! Like the Jeck tape, LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, we got about a dozen...
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Found a little stash of these. Already out of print so these are the last copies...
Another strange (but then again, maybe not so strange) collaboration. Karl from Axolotl and Elisa from Magic Markers get together to make some beautiful and slightly noisy music together.
Elisa's guitar seems to be taking center stage on the A side, scrabbly and angular, chaotic and scarping and grinding, dense tangles of high end squiggle and scrape laid over a distant hum of tape hiss and other abstract ambience.
The flipside is more bluesy, kind of. A sort of ghostlike disembodied folk, a bit of twang, lots of clunk and clatter, stumbly and spacious, the notes and melodies gnarled and twisted into strange atonal shapes, deep rumbling swells here and there, clouds of high end shimmer, soft washed out buzz, a dreamy creaky blissed out noiseflecked abstract guitarscape. Haunting and strangely pretty.
Oslo meets the Bay Area in this cross-continental collaboration, first brought to our attention by bay area drummer extraordinaire Jacob Heule, who also tears it up in both Basshaters and Ettrick, two bands particularly known for their explosive live shows and improvisational finesse. The Bay / Oslo Mirror Trio chronicles an exceptionally fierce meeting of 3 Norwegian improvisers (Guro Skumsnes Moe, Havard Skaset, and Kyrre Laastad) and 3 Bay Area improvisers (Jacob Heule, Ava Mendoza and Tony Dryer). Don't be fooled by the "trio" tag, really this is a 6 person collaboration that covers all kinds of sonic territory. The disc opens with low electronic rumbles, metallic drones and shimmering percussion that chime and corrode into demonic clatter and wailing distortion. The instrumentation becomes less mysterious as the album unfolds, spastic drum fills flutter beneath walls of guitar feedback and head-splitting noise, sizzling electronics burn holes in amps and glimpses of double bass peer through the mix. While we definitely love the moments of chaotic bombastic whirl, we can also hear the group's careful attention to space and detail as moments of quiet restraint offer shelter from the storm. So nice! An impressive showcase of modern improv, we can't get enough!
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If we didn't know better, we'd think that Australia and New Zealand were both made up of nothing but experimental musicians and dudes who run cd-r labels. How else to explain the seemingly endless supply of weird and wonderful music coming to us from those two places. Here's another new name to add to the rapidly expanding roster of enigmatic soundmakers from down under, Blarke Bayer. Sharing a label with US noisemakers Yellow Swans and Aussie powerviolence outfit Agents Of Abhorrence, Bayer aligns himself more with the processed guitar soundscape school of folks like Fennesz, Ambarchi, and the like. Gauzy strips of sound, layered into drifting waves of gentle feedback, warm fuzzy swells of muted guitar growl, distant keening melodic fragments, occasionally disrupted by cavernous resonant rumbles or tiny glitchy squalls, but for the most part, The End Of You is one long languorous sea of tranquility, a washed out dream world of layered guitar warmth and shimmery ambience. Quite beautiful.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! Packaged in a cool mini 3" printed gatefold sleeve.
A while back we reviewed a super limited tape from this local axeman, who at the time had a backup band made up of members of local psych rock heavies Comets On Fire, and whose sound, on that tape at least, fell somewhere between the brooding post punk of the Wipers, and the rough, ragged twang flecked crunch of early Uncle Tupelo, most definitely a sweet combo. We've been sitting on a couple copies of this 7" for ages now, and only just recently got enough to list, and like the tape before it, these two tracks offer up more of Beach's distinctive twang flecked songsmithery. The A side is a stripped down bit of folky psychedelia, dark and moody and countrified, again reminding us of Uncle Tupelo, not hard to imagine the song blossoming into some sort of guitar heavy crunch, but instead, it's a gorgeously cyclical and dreamily mesmerizing.
The flipside is a bit more droned out, with a softly churning electric guitar, backed up by minimal skeletal drumming, a series of slow brooding swells, Beach's vocals a bit more rough and ragged, the song mostly two parts, slipping back and forth, giving the track a definite hypnotic vibe, during the second half of the song the tempo gets cranked, the sound growing more and more frantic, ratcheting up the tension, with no release, a slow build all the way to the end. Cool!
Who hasn't been moved by the churning, blanketing, droning, tickling, swooning sounds of an organ? A staple in retro garage pop outfits, tiki lounges, churches and skating rinks, under capable fingers it can be one of the most expressive and versatile instruments around. Jared Blum (the man behind the Beaks Plinth moniker) shares the love, exhuming an assortment of wildly varied vintage records featuring said instrument. On Organo Saturado (inspired by Juan Torres' Organo Melodica Volume 11), he's Frankenstein'd them into something very very different from their origin. One step in the process was adjusting the RPM speed of many of the pieces waaay down to a snail's pace. It is as if the vinyl itself has been melted into some molasses or clay-like substance, but with some texturous grit embedded in the mounds, courtesy of the old record vinyl's inherent scritchy crackles. Sounds are stretched, smeared and layered almost beyond the point of recognition. What once might have been a sprightly ice skating accompaniment or a solemn chord sequence rattling the stained glass panes of a cathedral has been dragged into the murky dyspeptic depths of Beaks Plinth's lair. As always, otherworldly atmospheres are stirred up to wonderful effect, shuffling unpredictably between the haunting, the rubbery, and the strange.
We know close to nothing about this band, other than it's the work of an 18 year old Venezuelan kid who lives in Belgium (and is now a member of Silvester Anfang) and who in addition to having a cool and mysterious name, has managed to whip up a pretty seriously blissed out and beautiful record of gorgeous psych-drone.
Two sidelong krautrock drone jams, mining similar territory as fellow noisemakers like Astral Social Club, Hototogisu and Burning Star Core. The first side begins with glistening streaks of fuzzed out synths and decaying tape loops, all wrapped in smeared clouds of blissy FX, but it quickly transforms into a very SUNNO)))-like low end dirge, bombarded on all sides by hiss and glitch and crumbling effects before building into a fuzzed out epic, a wall of rich, thick, subtly shifting sound, droney, dreamlike and sort of cinematic.
The flipside is another slow building epic, this time a wash of fuzzy warble and layered drones, voices and melodic fragments all processed and blurred into a gorgeous abstract soundscape, peppered with bits of percussion and all sorts of swirling sonics. Eventually, the track begins to fall apart, until all that is left is a strange chaotic swirl of percussion, hissy and buzzy and murky, while a ghostlike super distorted melody drifts and sways in the foreground.
LIMITED TO 525 COPIES! Each cover is signed and hand numbered. Super striking paste on covers, SUPER thick sleeve, pressed on 180 gram vinyl, with a photocopied insert.
It's been ages since we last heard from Bear Bones Lay Low, and that review mentions us knowing nothing about the man behind BBLL other than he was an 18 year old Venezuelan kid living in Belgium, who had just become a member of aQ faves Silvester Anfang, which is all we needed to know. Ever since, we've done our best to track down anything we could find, which was not much. But now BBLL is in the US, touring with another aQ favorite, Jooklo Duo, so obviously catch them both if you can. To commemorate the tour, BBLL put together this ultra limited (66 copies!) cd-r, available only from the band on tour, or from aQ, while they last.
Like the other Bear Bones recordings we'd heard, Recalentaitos, is another dreamily psychedelic collection of psychedelic vibrations, rhythmic pulsations, blurred chordal textures, ritualistic and avant, primitive and home brewed, opener "A Fifth Ring" sounds like some Finnish forest folk outfit doing krautrock, all buzzing synths, minimal percussion, a sort of pulsating kosmische via campfire jam, hazy and druggy and drifty, which leads right into the even more spacey "Lacreo", an undulating field of reverb drenched rhythms, soft swirls of sci-fi FX, again, a weird sort of motorik propulsion driving the track, but buried beneath layers of murk, and tangles of atonal distorted psyche guitar, that's woven into the gristly fabric of the song.
The other three tracks continue to delve deeper into some subterranean soundworld, from the bird call flecked muted creep of "Perdido Entre Las Ramas", to the mutated varispeed collage of "Name Game", which sounds like Monopoly Child Star Searchers doing their best Tangerine Dream, to closer "Green Temple", which sounds like some alien horror movie circus music, puled apart, and blurred into a mysterious sprawl of glitch-drone shimmer and crumbling space-drift ambience.
As we mentioned above, SUPER DUPER LIMITED! Only 66 copies, each on hand numbered, housed in a plain brown sleeve, with a full color printed insert. Once these are gone, they are gone for good!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We were able to get Bobby Beausoleil's legendary Lucifer Rising soundtrack on cd for a brief time, but it seems to be unavailable again, so for now, this super limited picture disc may be your only chance to hear this awesomely freaked out music. Side A was recorded live in San Francisco in 1967, and features a killer live version of "The Magick Powerhouse of Oz". The B side is a different version recorded a decade later, in Tracy State Prison where Bobby and and least one other Manson family member was doing time. Here's a truncated version of our review for the now out of print cd version to give you more background on Beausoleil and the Lucifer Rising soundtrack:
The rare soundtrack to cult underground director and Crowley-ite Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising (begun in the mid-'60s, completed in 1980). Originally Jimmy Page was supposed to do the score, but he bowed out and the music was instead handled by another cult figure, the musical visionary and imprisoned killer Bobby Beausoliel, who composed and performed this spacey psychedelic opus with his Freedom Orchestra (presumably all fellow prisoners with Bobby).
Bobby and the Freedom Orchestra play electric guitars, Fender Rhodes electric pianos, some synths and bass...there's two drummers, and a trumpet player. The result is a sometimes sinister, sometimes blissful, always beautiful and "cosmic" drifting soundscape. Gurgling old-school electronics blend with propulsive rock drumming, while psychedelic guitar soloing tears across the sunset horizon created by the synths...The combination results in what you might imagine an early '70s Tangerine Dream/Ennio Morricone collaboration might have sounded like. It's indeed a lost classic. And the composer's life story is at least as weird and interesting as the music...
In the late Sixties, Bobby was a rising star in the LA rock-pop scene, hanging with Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Love. But then a drug deal went bad and he was sent to death row for murder, arrested 3 days before the Manson killing spree. Fortunately for him, his sentence was eventually commuted, but he's spent like the last 30 years in jail. He's been a model prisoner, pursuing his talents in music and art despite his incarceration, and you'd think that the parole board would have let him out by now (he's been paying his debt to society longer than anybody else has for a similar crime, we're told) but sadly for Bobby, he's got to deal with his association with the notorious Charles Manson. While never a member of Manson's Family (a common misconception), he did play in a band with Manson, and the media hype surrounding anything to do with Manson hasn't helped Bobby's case, as you might imagine! (At least that's the way Beausoleil tells it. But the more one delves into the story of "Lucifer Rising", the weirder things get -- for instance, apparently Bobby was supposed to PLAY the role of Lucifer in the original 1966 version of Anger's film, but the two had a falling out and Bobby allegedly stole the footage and buried it in Death Valley! How this jibes with him later writing this soundtrack, we don't know.)
Although for obvious reasons Bobby wouldn't probably approve of the use of the word to describe himself and this soundtrack, in the Aquarius Records' musical context it's quite appropriate: Cult!
We've carried this longtime aQ fave several times over the years, in multiple formats, in varying degrees of availability, unfortunately, it never seemed to stick around for long. For a while we were even in contact with Beausoleil himself via his wife who was handling his business for a while, trying to get copies. Well, now you can thank the fine folks at Ajna, who have not only reissued it again, but added TONS of unreleased material, included all sorts of new, original artwork, pressed it up on VINYL and packed it all in a super deluxe box. These are expensive, but so worth it, after all, it's the only way to currently get Lucifer Rising, and of course it's a limited pressing, so these won't be around forever...
Ahhh Lucifer Rising, the rare soundtrack to cult underground director and Crowley-ite Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising (begun in the mid-'60s, completed in 1980). Originally Jimmy Page was supposed to do the score, but he bowed out and the music was instead handled by another cult figure, the musical visionary and imprisoned killer Bobby Beausoleil, who composed and performed this spacey psychedelic opus with his Freedom Orchestra (presumably all fellow prisoners with Bobby).
Bobby and the Freedom Orchestra play electric guitars, Fender Rhodes electric pianos, some synths and bass...there's two drummers, and a trumpet player. The result is a sometimes sinister, sometimes blissful, always beautiful and "cosmic" drifting soundscape. Gurgling old-school electronics blend with propulsive rock drumming, while psychedelic guitar soloing tears across the sunset horizon created by the synths...The combination results in what you might imagine an early '70s Tangerine Dream/Ennio Morricone collaboration might have sounded like. It's indeed a lost classic. And the composer's life story is at least as weird and interesting as the music...
In the late Sixties, Bobby was a rising star in the LA rock-pop scene, hanging with Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Love. But then a drug deal went bad and he was sent to death row for murder, arrested 3 days before the Manson killing spree. Fortunately for him, his sentence was eventually commuted, but he's spent like the last 30 years in jail. He's been a model prisoner, pursuing his talents in music and art despite his incarceration, and you'd think that the parole board would have let him out by now (he's been paying his debt to society longer than anybody else has for a similar crime, we're told) but sadly for Bobby, he's got to deal with his association with the notorious Charles Manson. While never a member of Manson's Family (a common misconception), he did play in a band with Manson, and the media hype surrounding anything to do with Manson hasn't helped Bobby's case, as you might imagine! (At least that's the way Beausoleil tells it. But the more one delves into the story of "Lucifer Rising", the weirder things get -- for instance, apparently Bobby was supposed to PLAY the role of Lucifer in the original 1966 version of Anger's film, but the two had a falling out and Bobby allegedly stole the footage and buried it in Death Valley! How this jibes with him later writing this soundtrack, we don't know.)
Yet, not being one to simply sit in his cell and rot, Bobby has, as we said, kept quite busy within the clutches of the California Penal system.
This new vinyl box set, includes all the music on the various versions we've carried over the years, plus SO MUCH MORE.
This version includes newly remastered recordings spanning 11 years, from the original 1967 recordings to the Tracy Prison recordings in 1978. 4 lps, 2 of which are entirely unreleased material, nine new pieces of art by Beausoleil, 8 on the printed inner sleeves, and one 2 foot by 3 foot poster, a second poster, a massive booklet, with tons of new liner notes, and loads of photos, the box gorgeous and hefty, full color outside and inside, this is THE outsider lost seventies occult rock soundtrack holy grail for sure.
And although for obvious reasons Bobby wouldn't probably approve of the use of the word to describe himself and this soundtrack, in the aQuarius recOrds' musical context it's quite appropriate: CULT!
When we first heard a track from this album a few months ago, our immediate reaction was A) wow, we really had better find a way to get it for the store and B) if and when we do, it'll probably have to be a Record Of The Week. And that was just from hearing ONE song. Fortunately, we did manage to get some of these imports, and the rest of the record only confirmed and amplified our first impression. Record Of The Week it is! (Actually, some of us here, like Andee, were already Bebey fans from way back, but for others of us, gosh, what an introduction...)
As you know, we've certainly seen a bunch of great groovy African reissues lately (in fact, there's a couple others elsewhere on this week's list). But this collection of the late Cameroonian composer & writer Francis Bebey's music is rather unique, to say the least. And it's got something in common with another cool item we're reviewing this week, the vintage "electronic soul" compilation Personal Space. As the title indicates, the focus here is on the especially electronic side of his discography, from the era when multi-instrumentalist Bebey experimented with the latest gear - tape recorders, keyboards, drum machines - to record his own music at home in Paris, making for delightfully dancey, avant-garde Afropop.
The track we had heard was the first one here, "New Track", an over 8 minute long number that starts off with tinkling thumb piano before blaring synth stabs, burbling keys, and ticking drum machine rhythms kick in... pretty soon, the song has become dense with loops and layers, repeating vocals about bananas and potatoes and politics creating a kind of cheerfully confusing mantra. It's as fresh and charming and mesmeric and groovy today as it was when Bebey recorded it in back in '82.
Though this would pretty much be worth it just for that memorable song alone, the rest of this 14-track collection is full of further futuristic Afrofunk highlights. Meaning, more blurting synthesized horns, head bopping basslines, thumping electronic beats augmented by hand percussion, and laidback vocals - some spoken, some sung, in various languages (Duala, French and English). Bebey's talent on classical guitar is also evident. It's quite an amazing mix altogether; 'makossa' music from Cameroon meets "Blow Your Head" style Moog outbursts (as on the woozy instrumental track "Super Jingle", with its skronky synth shiver set amidst hypnotic percussive pulsations). Sometimes the mood gets emotive in other ways, Bebey bringing the beats down and singing sadly in a soft, ragged voice... Here we will go out on a limb, and make a wild hypothetical rock crit "cross between this and that" equation, of Konono No.1 + Arthur Russell, whattya think?
Basically, this is as cool as anything you could imagine something called "African Electronic Music 1975-1982" might possibly sound like! And maybe even cooler than that.
Packaged with liner notes in both English and French.
Rashad Becker is a name most folks are probably more used to seeing on OTHER people's records, he is, and has been for the last decade plus, THEE go-to guy to have your record cut for vinyl. A master of his craft, who is able to produce stunning results in the analog realm, massive bass, deep layered sounds, lush and spacious, gritty and grimy, Becker was often the last step in a meticulous process, resulting in some of the most incredible records of the last few years. Check your collection and we guarantee you a handful were cut and/or mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, where Becker has been plying his trade for the past fifteen years. And we'll be the first to admit that technical mastery does not necessarily translate into creative genius, but in the case of Traditional Music Of Notational Species, Vol. 1, an argument could definitely be made that Becker's talent is not limited to the mastering lab.
In fact, Traditional Music is far from traditional, and is quite difficult to describe, although a faithful long time aQ customer already proclaimed it his record of the year hands down, and we have to say we're inclined to agree. Split into two sides, the first, 'Dances', the second 'Themes', the record opens with a dense constantly shifting landscape of grinding textures, mutating electronics, synthy squelch, deep rumbles, skittery rhythmic pulsations, the vibe is almost playful, but that playfulness is definitely tempered by a dark shadowy moodiness, it's wild and loose, free and abstract, melodies blossom and fragment, collapsing into swirling tangles, it's just on the verge of noise, but instead, remains textural and atmospheric, almost like a modern day Perrey & Kingsley, deconstructed, the various elements recombined as some mutant modern minimal electroacoustic experimental electronica. That pretty much sets the groundwork for the first side, we're reminded of some past aQ faves like Roly Porter's Aftertime, or any recordings by Ben Frost, this sounds less like 'music' and more like some avant sound design, "Dances II" expands on the opener, weaving what sounds like fragmented vocals, and dark spidery melodies, into something strangely brooding, wreathed in a caustic cloud of flitting molecules of crumbling noise, and burbling underwater shimmer, all seemingly digitized and then corrupted, processed into something approaching a much more angular and aggressive Oval, overlapping layers, stuttering non-rhythms, it's expansive and cinematic, but at the same time dizzyingly dense, driven by thick rib cage rattling swells of low end thrum. The sound grows gradually more industrial, sounds slip backwards and swoop and swirl, a sea of squelches pinging from speaker to speaker, buried Morse code melodies, lots of hiss and hum sculpted into sheets of dark energy, and a blissed out barrage of blackened crumble, building to a near psychedelic squall, before closing out the side with a dark rhythmic sprawl, that touches on the hauntological electronica of Demdike Stare and the like, but so much more sinister, and woozily warped, a mad scientist reinterpretation, recasting the moody lope, as something feral and fracture, peppered with deep sub-bass pulsations, and drowsily fluctuating rhythms, it's like Stockhausen jamming with Demdike Stare, which is about as great, and as fucked up, as it sounds.
The flipside, made up of four 'themes', dials back some of the crunch and buzz, opening with a dreamy field of alien electronics, fluttering and flitting, still gritty and crunchy, the sounds organic and analog, rough around the edges, but deftly woven into choir of electro-chirps and woozy moaning chordal swells, laced with burst of laser beam FX, but then a super heavy bass crunch creeps in, and it's stunning, it's meaner, and more brutal, and more physical that most dubstep drops, but with a totally different effect in this context, adding some seriously sinister heft, but before you know it, it's disappeared, leaving just a field of electronic firefly flutter. The rest of the 'Themes' play out like some mysterious soundtrack to a documentary about alien life, you can almost imagine the camera panning over strange sprawls of gnarled landscape, or drifting through the bottomless abyss of some alien sea, the electronics often sounding like the chitter of insects, again like some twisted field recording captured elsewhere in the galaxy, slipping from hushed skitter to epic avant kosmische and back again, culminating in what sounds like some warped choral piece, a gnarled choir of 'voices', sounding like field recordings captured in some Victorian mental institution, and then processed into something even more warped, all laid over a roiling sea of electronic gristle and industrial clatter, all held together by sheets of blurred buzz and ominous insectoid thrum. Strange stuff for sure, but in its own weird way, hauntingly and confusionally lovely.
Cut and mastered by Becker himself of course. Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, and like all Pan releases, housed in a super striking, screen printed heavy plastic PVC sleeve.
This is such a strange cd. And we've all become completely obsessed with it. A bizarre series of spoken instructions and long droning notes. Easier to just share Forced Exposure's description:
"The playing directions for the instrumentalist on this CD are derived directly from the so-called sucking stones sequence in Beckett's Molloy, where the author has his protagonists invent three variations of the correct way to suck 16 pebbles -- distributed between two coat or trouser pockets. Everything takes place inside the head, and yet these image provoking speech rituals find their way to the outside. Everything becomes the listener's projection room. We look on the speakers as we would an open, exposed interior. Speech is
its own dissecting instrument. Existence is transferred into speech, being is removed from its time. The images remain, the sound of speech remains -- in which the secret of an entire world is concealed." Simply, it's 3 actors, reciting instructions like: "Take a stone from pocket one. Put it in your mouth. Suck it. Suck it...." and so on. With the occasional moaning horn. Totally surreal and creepy and super great.
We managed to get a small handful of these from a distributor, they're priced super cheap, as the label has since folded, so these are the very last copies we'll ever be able to get, and we just have SIX of these...
We reviewed a double disc by this Italian composer a while back (we still have a very few copies left!), working under the name Kinetix, which was a heady chunk of musique concrete, that definitely owed much to Lucier, Ashley and Ferrari, and while his approach seems to be similar here, the sounds are definitely distinctly different, Becuzzi offering up a series of sonic palindromes and recurring phrases, beginning with an anerated dronescaping, one that takes after The Hafler Trio who in turn was looking to Roland Kayn, long stretches of hushed static, and garbled muted thrum, peppered with bursts of white noise, soft swells of industrial whir, at least initially, eventually, the drones recede leaving what sounds like a scratchy violin playing mournfully inside some abandoned warehouse, laced with distant tinklings, bits of mysterious spoken word, and a final burst of staticky buzz. That's just the first track. The second track offers up some dark rumblings, pockmarked with bits of click and glitch, and over the course of its 18 minutes, slips from differently textured drones, deep low hum, high end flitter, and laces these long sprawls with melancholy trumpet bleats, long stretches of near silence, and thick cavernous blackened drones that evolve into strangely decaying symphonies of creak and crumble. Finally, the disc finishes off with the prettiest of the bunch, still super varied, and constantly shifting, but this time the various elements are more tranquil and serene, slipping into an almost lullaby at one point, but elsewhere offering up glistening streaks of barely there high end, swoonsome chamber like streaks, washed out muted shards of feedback, and lovely fields of metallic shimmer. A challenging listen for sure, but also quite rewarding, and quite lovely in their own abstract non-traditional way.
Chris Madak is the man behind the Bee Mask, a project with several dozen cassette releases issued over the past couple of years. Madak should also be noted as the principle behind the exceptionally curated Deception Island tape label, which had the foresight to release Oneohtrix Point Never's Betrayed In The Octagon as well as a handful of killer Emeralds related side projects. That said, not much from Bee Mask's own discography has made it through here, with blister popping electrical noise and synth sequencing seeming to be par for the course. Yet through those circuit bent experiments, Bee Mask emerges fully evolved as a master synthesist of all things elekronische and kosmische circa 1975. Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico is a wonderfully varied album whose hallucinatory narratives speak to a purposeful and thoroughly intelligent design in its creation. Throughout you'll hear distinct references to the likes of Roland Kayn, Tangerine Dream (e.g. Electronic Meditations), Jean-Claude Eloy, Francoise Bayle, anything from Sky Records you could think of in the mid to late '70s, and even the more bombastic electronic interludes offered by Pink Floyd for that matter. The album opens in a more studied fashion through a sequence of carillion bell tones backmasked with a series of soft vocal grunts and gradually building set of electronic percolations, but all of this is engulfed in a tidal wave of polydactyl synth sequencing and brainfried electronic percolations only to morph again into a cavernous expanse of elongated tone and drone. The album's numerous detours and labyrinthine structures twist and devolve constantly across both sides of the record, delving into melodic phrasing in the electronic sequences only to shift deftly into plunging electrical vibrations of pulsing synth noise and delirious crescendos popping throughout.
The fact that John Elliott of Emeralds has brought this to vinyl after a release on Gift Tapes a while back should not go unnoticed. Spectrum Spools is his new imprint, released through Editions Mego, and this should be a label not to be missed. Certainly not this release, that's for sure.
Here stands the monumental anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!
"A Touch Of Brimstone" was intended to be the 10th anniversary release for the Dutch ambient / industrial duo Beequeen (Frans De Waard and Freek Kinkelaar), but the nature of Beequeen's extensive side projects delayed the anniversary by almost 4 years. Nevertheless, this album collects a number of (mostly) unreleased tracks from 1989 to 1995, with the one previously released track coming from their debut recording "Scala Destillans" which was issued in a whopping pressing of 250 copies. The Beequeen sound has been and probably will always be a synthesis of a number of pre-existing ideas. At this time, those references for Beequeen were the phasing ambience of Klaus Schultz and Brian Eno, the isolationist practices of Maeror Tri, the clinical feedback noise of early SPK, and the magickal psychedelia of the Legendary Pink Dots. Thus, soft drones, ghosts of songs, and distant drum machine pulsatsions structure Beequeen's ongoing activities.
This happens to be the fourth and most comprehensive edition of the best album from Beequeen, the ephemeral drone project spearheaded by Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar. Der Holzweg was originally released by Anomalous Records back in 1993, housing the disc in a smartly designed wooden sleeve. At the same time, a tiny cassette edition made its way into the world. Many years, later a vinyl edition of the material was issued; and now the Russian imprint Tantric Harmonies has thankfully reissued this album once again, with all of bonus material found on the cassette and vinyl versions as well as three additional tracks from some contemporary seven inches. Whew! Beequeen's musical output is emblematic of the dreamy, soft focus ambience that emerged out of a post-industrial framework back in the early '90s. Zoviet France, Paul Schutze, O Yuki Conjugate, Christoph Heemann, and Cranioclast were some of the more obvious influences on Beequeen, whose backwards masked guitars and ambling tape loops flicker across grey, synthetic drones. It's very nice to see this back in print, one more time!
Beequeen is the duo of Freek Kinkelaar and Frans De Waard, whose name you might recognise from his other projects, Goem, Shifts, Kapotte Muziek and a bunch more. Can't say I have been all the taken with most of De Waard's projects, but for some reason Beequeen records always hit the spot. The sound of Beequeen has been anything but static, with two musically restless souls exploring all aspects of sound and recording, coming up with extremely varied results, most actually quite appealing, but Gund, a collection of old unreleased tracks finds Beequeen at what I think is their perfect sound, dreamy drony, hypnotic, minimal throbbing shimmerscapes of dark rumbles, ethereal wisps of high end incandescence, and subtly shifting, distant low end murmurs of rustle and thrum, that will most definitely tickle the cochlea of even the most discerning of drones fans, and of course folks who can't get enough Coleclough, Mirror, and the like. This collection assembles four tracks from a proposed 12" where all four tracks were to be cut at different speeds, 16, 33, 45, and 78 RPM (eventually scrapped due to the difficulty in pressing such a record) as well as two tracks from an aborted collaborative split with MSBR. Really beautiful stuff. Limited to 500!
Beequeen is but one of the many sides to Frans De Waard - the Dutch vangardist who has also explored post-techno minimalism in Goem, blissful guitar drone work in Shifts, musique concrete in Kapotte Muziek, and about a half-dozen other smaller projects. As with all of those aforementioned projects, De Waard typically follows the lead of a 'trendy' line in experimental music -- PanSonic, Main, Pierre Henry, etc. For Beequeen, it's a little more vague, originally taking off from the Legendary Pink Dots (as De Waard met fellow Beequeen member Freek Kinkelaar out of their mutual admiration of Ka-Spel and Co.), but more recently picking up cues from the Temporary Residence aesthetic of quiet guitar led introspection and moody post-rock atmospheres espoused by Sonna and Tarentel. As with the majority of the De Waard projects, Beequeen mimics its influences remarkably well.
Frans De Waard and Freek Kinkelaar have been very active in the Dutch experimental sound community for well over two decades in far too many projects to count. Beequeen was one of those projects, having originally producing some lovely post-Eno driftwork ambient pieces; yet, over the past three album, De Waard and Kinkelaar have steadily pulled atmospheric songs and folk structures out of that ambience. Sandancing is the latest venture and really seems to be mining the same skeletal songwriting as Low had on Secret Name. It doesn't hurt that the two have recruited vocalist Olga Wallis to join their project, as she's got a voice eerily similar to Low's Mimi Parker.
Pete Swanson's post Yellow Swans trajectory into the uncharted realms (at least uncharted by most other noise making weirdos originally from the "floorcore" scene) of twisted, noise drenched avant techno, takes a not entirely drastic detour here. On the oddly named Hobo On The Face Of Music, Swanson joins up in a duo with his pal Brian Sullivan, adopting the moniker Beer Damage, and proceeds to lay out a slab of churning rhythmic noise, warped industrial ambience and dense textured experimentation, a sound that most definitely harkens back to the days of his old duo, but pushes the sound way further, into the furthest reaches of garbled, rhythmic, free-noise psychedelia. Sonically somewhat aligned with an outfit like, say, Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World, Swanson and Sullivan take a similar tack, of burying rhythms and distorted melodies, beneath thick, roiling, chopped up layers of sound, stuttering and dizzying, some serious WTF? sonic carnage, that occasionally coalesces into dark beauty, or driving rhythmic churn. The A side launches directly into a jumbled Jeckian soundscape of warbling loops and woozy tangled melodies, splintering into squalls of haywire machinery, spewing, bleeps and bloops and sheets of crunchy gristle. All eventually buried beneath a cascade of glitched out whir and swirling collaged plunderphonia. There are still lots of rhythms going on, what sounds like primitive beat-boxing at one point, accompanied by detuned drones, a barrage of twisted babel-like vox, a crumbling soundfield pelted by squelches from all sides. Amidst all this chaos lurks some loveliness too. Blurred sprawls of smoldering jazz-noise drift, wistful and melancholic, but doused in grime and grit, but even the pretty parts, eventually transform into stuttering grooves, dementedly chopped and looped into haphazard blurts of murk and twisted melting sound effects.
The flipside seems a bit more tranquil and serene, but really only a bit, starting out super pretty, but still plenty warped and warbly, detuned varispeed plucks hurled from on high and landing with a series of sonic splats over looped swirls of cosmic garble. The side begins to drift into rhythmic territory again, with some clipped and glitched out weirdo grooviness, before crumbling into a blackened decaying noisiness, wreathed in muted guitar freakout, all blurred into prismatic psychedelic smears. Finally the record ends not with a bang, or a whimper, more like a strangled, demented sprawl of stumbling, collaged lysergia, a sample-delic robot-noise, that sounds almost carnivalesque, with truncated voices, and even some harmonica (?), a twisted finale, that sounds like it was filtered through a malfunctioning transistor radio in the hands of a restless toddler with ADD. Phew! Warped, and weird, and really kind of dementedly wonderful.
Before, After is a collaboration between Mike Pollard (Pale Blue Sky, Treetops, the owner of Arbor Records), and Jon Borges (Pedestrian Deposit, Emaciator, the owner of Monorail Trespassing), the two working together bring to the table their mutual aesthetic appreciation for a world of post-noise dronescaping. In the cold oscillations of electrical hum and arcs of dual-tone ambience from all sorts of synths, pedals, and whatnot, it's easy to put these sounds in the orbit of Emeralds / Outer Space / Mist / etc.
Pollard and Borges affix a fluctuating halo of electricity to all of their subtle oscillations, and all of this voltage, wattage, and ampage is somewhat threatening, but presented at a relatively safe distance. Sort of like a live wire that's been dropped into a pool of water. The thrum and glow is seductive, but deadly to the touch. This isn't to say these tones are the stuff of death ambient engineers, more just to marvel at the amount of electricity that has been wrangled, harnessed, and turned inward to provide a radiance that's somewhat beautiful, as captured in emergent, ethereal fluctuations and accretive drones swarming into a series of Jeck / Basinski loops. Another exceptional tape from what has become the preeminent cassette label in the US.
Michael Begg offers us another magnificent piece of occluded ambience by way of his Human Greed project. As we mentioned before, Begg's name first came to our attention through Fovea Hex, a dreamy avant-folk project spearheaded by Clodagh Simonds and droned out by such heavyweights as Brian Eno, Colin Potter, and Andrew McKenzie alongside Begg. The Human Greed sound parallels Fovea Hex's arrangements with strings, guitar, piano, and field recordings blurred into arctic electronic symphonies, with Dirt On Earth being the best album we've heard so far from Human Greed. Half-remembered / half-forgotten melodies slip in and out of focus on the introductory track "An Innocent In The Aisles," floating thoughout Begg's hypnotic drone-centric composition. The following pieces adopt similar strategies but through the sharp tones from a bowed psalter that amass into dissonant swarms. Begg treats such sounds with harmonic shadows, echoes, and dopplegangers that twist the piece from being a gasping piece of minimalism and closer to the 'moon musick' of Coil's ritualized ambience. Cold rumblings, uneasy vibrations, and heavily processed bell tones intensify the proceedings of the aptly named "Invocation Of The Scottish Winter" which swells towards a grandiose crescendo of stretched and shifted drones. The pieces get longer and longer as the album unfolds, leading to the 20 minute conclusion of "Scenes From A Carefree Life" - a snowblinding piece of glistening tones, flecked with tone-bent flutterings and stratospheric droning arcs. A brilliant album that reminds us in equal parts of Andrew Chalk, Brendan Murray, and The Caretaker.
A few lists back we reviewed a one sided 7" square plexiglass lathe cut from Death Cheetah, aka local visual artist / musician Kevin Taylor, and it was a doozy, a twisted mix of electro-black metal, all pounding drums and blooping synths, we found ourselves listening it over and over like crazy. Apparently, that was just the first in what is looking to be a series of super limited, handmade lathe cut 7"s, the latest being this, the first we've heard from a group called Beheadings, which comes complete with super illegible black metal logo, in a hand screened, hand numbered sleeve. The group, includes Taylor of course, but also Tim Cohen, he of The Fresh & Onlys and Amocoma (whose record is out on Andee's tUMULt label), and while they're not quite as metal as the Death Cheetah, this record is a pretty fantastically twisted slab of experimental sound, all pulsing synths, weirdly programmed drums, woozy twang flecked riffage, lots of cool effects, everything dubbed out and droney, the sounds panned and constantly shifting from speaker to speaker, some wordless vocals wrapped in reverb and left to drip in the background, some cool blasts of zoner guitar buzz, and wild effects drenched squiggles, dizzying backwards swoops... And then toward the last few minutes, things begin to go nuts, the vocals effected in real time, swooping and swirling, speeding up and splintering into crumbling shards, a second vocal yelping wildly over the top, while the music grooves and pulses, before everything seems to collapse in a swirl of dubbed out chaos. So cool. We want these guys to make a whole album of this stuff.
But remember this is a lathe cut, so the above mentioned sounds are buried under a layer of crackle and hum, of buzz and rumble, adding a patina of hazy, gauzy washed out whir to the proceedings, that somehow makes it sound even cooler, all blurry and blissy and dreamily drugged out.
And as mentioned above, it's LIMITED TO JUST 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, in hand screened sleeves, we have about a dozen copies, but like that Death Cheetah lathe cut, these probably will go fast (though, we do have one or two of those Death Cheetahs left, if you're quick).
It's funny that we mentioned the Dead C in describing the last blackened missive from the mysterious outfit known as Behemothaur, since we later discovered that there was in fact a definite New Zealand noise rock connection. Some very well know dudes from some very well known NZ outfits (well, at least around here) apparently spend their nights lurking in caves, and in dark woods, performing unholy blacknoise rituals, the latest of which is presented here in all it's filthy, hellish buzzing droning noisedrenched glory.
While Behmeothaur is presented as a sort of outsider black metal project, they really hew closer to good old noise rock, or some sort of post industrial freerock. The darker dronier tracks sound a lot like the various members musical day jobs, soundscapes of rumbles and whirs, shimmering and throbbing expanses of crumbling low end, the sound that has become ubiquitous among cd-r labels. That said, these guys do add some blackness, some serious grimnity, their own take on the abstract drone is appropriately dense and heavy.
Then there's the other side of the band, their more 'rock' side, more abstractly 'metal', and this is where the bands NZ noise lineage really shows. Huge grinding slabs of blown out, slightly blackened lurching noise rock, the guitars ugly filthy squalls, the bass a rib cage rattling throb, the drums blown out and chaotic, the entire sound so in the red, the production sounds like another instrument, the Dead C are of course an obvious comparison, so is Wolf Eyes, a massive crumbling noisy doomy dirge.
The band do spit out a brief blast of buzzing blackness near the end of the disc, but even then it's so doused in fuzz and hiss the fidelity is so low, that again it ends up sounding like some super obscure nineties noiserock outfit, albeit with some definite blackened tendencies.
Awesome stuff, just fair warning to black metallers to be prepared for some abstract noise, but the rest of you, who are into all that sort of cd-r style droning and bashing and buzzing, this will obviously, and summarily kick your ass.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Packaged in a cool oversized screenprinted cardstock sleeve, with creepy red ink blood splatters all over the front, inside a 12 page printed black and white booklet packed with creepy images and some liner notes.
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
The first in the series comes from the very strangely named Behemothaur, and their even more strangely named record Necroglacial Enema. With a name like Necroglacial Enema, you might expect this to be a joke, some sort of goofy pisstake on black metal, but there's nothing finny about these three songs. All three are dense and heavy and noisy and chaotic. The opener, the shortest of the three, clocking in at 8+ minutes, is the noisiest of the bunch, the drums blown out and in the red like a rehearsal recording, the guitars moaning and keening, lots of crumbling low end and squealing feedback, there might be riffs but if so, they're hard to follow, instead it sounds more like some noise rock blow out. Dead C, Harry Pussy, locking into stumbling jams, hurling cymbals, blowing speakers, all maybe wreathed in just a bit of murky blackness.
The second track, clocking in at a whopping 21 minutes, is a strange looped guitarscape, coruscating angular chiming crunch, looped into grinding arcs of moaning guitar howl, like jagged shards of Keiji Haino blow outs hurled into an expense of noise rock sprawl, a furious roiling concoction of psychedelic skree and smoldering deconstructed riffage, that eventually gives way to a surprisingly serene stretch of murky whir.
The closer is another downtuned noise rock murk fest. This one WAY heavier on the low end sprawl, lots of crashing percussion, splattery snare, cymbal sizzle, all draped over a slow lava-like crawl of doomy riffage, and all of THAT, wrapped in thick swirls of crumbling distortion.
While this is definitely heavy, it seems like this stuff might be a bit abstract for most metalheads, but fans of stuff like Heavy Winged, White Heaven, Fushitsusha, Dead C and the like will most likely dig big time!
SUPER LIMITED. ONLY 73 COPIES!!!! Packaged in a full color, oversized jacket, with a full color insert, housed in a plastic sleeve, with two crossed twigs like nature's crossbones!
