For a while, back in the nineties, AQ was THE place to get your underground New Zealand rock fix. Maybe one of the only stores in the US consistently singing the praises and slinging discs by the Tall Dwarves, the Cakekitchen, the Terminals, Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos, The Dead C, Bailter Space, Nigel Bunn, David Kilgour, The Clean, King Loser, The Great Unwashed, The Bats, Roy Montgomery, The Chills... and actually come to think of it, AQ is still that place, it's just that the landscape of the NZ underground has changed a bit, folks like Birchville Cat Motel, Omit, Pumice, The Dead C (still!), Peter Wright, Antony Milton, Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood, Armpit, Black Boned Angel, Dean Roberts, The Futurians and loads more are now the ones making waves all over the world. The names may be different, and the sounds too, but the current crop owe a huge debt to those that came before, and the sound and energy of those legendary NZ bands most definitely live on through this new blood.
Every time we'd get a new disc from one of those modern NZ outfits, some part of us would begin hankering to hear some of the old shit, but it's been practically impossible to track any of it down, Flying Nun, THE New Zealand label, was still around and releasing records, but seemed to only exist within the confines of NZ itself. But finally after months and months of emailing we managed to find someone who would and could sell us Flying Nun stuff. Our box of NZ goodies finally showed up and we were transported right back to that NZ indie rock heyday, we've been blasting the Chills and Bailter Space, Chris Knox and Toy Love, The Gordons and David Kilgour... but most exciting of all, we were able to get two compilations we'd been hearing about but had been unable to get until now. One is the 25th anniversary Flying Nun 4cd box set, super expensive, but well worth it, we'll try to list it some day, although we do have a few (at the time of writing this review) if you're interested, the other is Where In The World Is Wendy Broccoli, a completely kick ass and mind blowing collection of long out of print 7" singles, released between 1981 and 1996, when Flying Nun were releasing all sorts of crazy cool weirdness on vinyl...
Not sure who Wendy Broccoli is, judging from the liner notes, it seems like maybe she was a Flying Nun A+R person, but it hardly matters, the important thing is, this collection is a knockout. A great overview of the label and the scene, from indie pop jangle to murky grungy free rock and pretty much every stop in between. Like most scenes, there were a handful of key players, NZ was no different, lots of names you would probably recognize: Roy Montgomery, Peter Stapleton, Robert Scott, David Mitchell, Peter Jefferies, David Kilgour, Denise Roughan, Chris Knox, Shayne Carter, Chris Heazlewood and a handful of others, who beyond recording in their own bands and under their own names, would often pair up or group together for one off recordings, single albums or even just a 7" single, that sort of freedom, and the ability to record a track or two and see it actually released, resulted in one of the most vibrant and varied scenes EVER. And the proof is right here...
The mopey, slowcore jangle of Rik Starrr, the cinematic countrified twang of the Renderers, the bass heavy new wave-y gloom of Pin Group, the murky Spacemen 3 like jams of Sssf, the glimmering indie K Records style soft indie pop of The Magick Heads, the minor key melodic pop dirge of Queen Meanie Puss, the gothy dreamy downer murk of The Children's Hour (sounding quite a bit like Joy Division or Interpol), the tripped out space rock of Celia Mancini,� the fuzzed out female surf rock of 25 Cents (covering a Sonics classic), that unmistakable Chris Knox lo-fi perfect pop, and that's just a handful of the twenty tracks here.�
Definitely one of our favorite 'new' comps of the last little while (it actually came out in 2005), and it's done exactly what great compilations are meant to, acting not only as the perfect mix, but also getting us all riled up to hear some of our old NZ faves (most of which sound just as good today as they did back in the day!!). SO RECOMMENDED!
The UK's Shock label, run by cranky aesthete Stefan Jaworzyn (an ex-member of both Whitehouse and Skullflower), was once our go-to source for top notch and occasionally transcendent underground noise/improv/freakery, back in the '90s. So we're stoked that a few of Shock's crucial compact discs from the era have just been re-released (though we rather suspect that these are NOT new pressings - more likely, Stefan found some boxes under his bed!), including two albums by his band Ascension, and two great compilations - the Deep Funnels Of Entry collection of Twisted Village weirdness, and this one, the oddly titled White Trash Motherfuckers. This classic comp of "psychotic sounds" (as it says on the back cover), with its Savage Pencil cover drawing of a crazed, repulsive-looking Edgar Winter, has been a longtime fave of several of us here since it first came out in 1993. There are comps, and then there are comps, this is one that stands up on its own as more than a 'sampler', with all the tracks exclusive to this release as far as we know.
It begins with three tracks of improv skree from an early version of Ascension (sans Stefan), including one titled "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" (bonus points if you remember what that refers to). That's followed by the blown out industrial noise rock ugliness of a mysterious unit called Beautiful Penis, who only ever appeared on this disc as far as we can tell. Fans of abject Swans/Godflesh style clank n' plod n' feedback will want this for their three tracks alone. (Anyone who can tell us more about Beautiful Penis, like if they had other recordings, please get in touch.) Next up, four transmissions from bizarre plunderphonic noisniks Cosmonauts Hail Satan. Very, very '90s sounding of course, with samples of Southern preachers and such, accompanied by isolationist drones and industrial rhythms. We loved stuff like this back then, and kind of miss it now.
Getting back to improv skree territory, the next four tracks are from Derv, the solo project of Ascension drummer Tony Irving. There's drumming in Derv, but also a lot of fuzzed out electric guitar, played percussively. Gorgeously splintery distorted stuff, that fans of Keiji Haino and Rudolph Grey ought to dig. Allan here was so taken by these tracks, back in the day, that he wrote to Irving and interviewed him for a 'zine he was doing at the time. They're still friends on Facebook (hi Tony!).
Already this is well worth the price of admission, but there's still two bands left... three tracks from The MikePostMortem, another clanking industrial noise unit with lots of loops and feedback (and again one that we've only encountered here), and then the finale comes in the form of one long track (11:35) by scumrock purveyors Splintered, a punishing noisy rhythmic attack that's the most 'metallic' thing on here, kind of in the vein of Skullflower, Godflesh, Terminal Cheesecake and the like. Good stuff, listening to all this now makes us want to dig into our collections to spend the rest of the night feasting on early '90s noiserock nastiness, stuff on not just Shock but also labels like Pathological, PDCD, Fourth Dimension, Noiseville, etc.
Two NYC labels - Minimal Wave and Wierd Records - have been at the forefront in energizing a resurgence in minimally sculpted synth pop that harkens back to the late '70s and early '80s of synthpunk, darkwave, and industrial sensibilities. Where Minimal Wave's focus has been on digging up the lost gems from that seminal time period, Wierd actively supports those working in the field today, with a weekly club in New York and with well-curated albums including recent releases from Xeno & Oaklander and Led Er Est. Back in 2006, Wierd released a massive 3lp set, showcasing some of the best and brightest who had passed through their doors. That first set was a magnificent find, filled with misanthropes in black leather making dirge-crusted ambience, grinding dark-disco anthems, and sexy goth electronics sporting uncanny melodies. Unfortunately that set is currently out of print, although we're hoping to secure some copies anyway.
This, the second set, was completed at the end of 2008 and took a slightly different approach than the first, as the curatorial direction was clearly to dovetail Wierd's tastemaking aesthetic of coldwave synth pop with the perpetually moving US underground of noise-induced powerdroning. In many ways, what Wierd was doing in this compilation parallels what Carlos Giffoni has been doing with his No Fun Festivals, but from the other end of the spectrum.
So what you get here is a beautifully packaged collection that brackets a darkly propulsive synth-pop number with an abrasive noise-drone piece, with the linking factor being that all of the sounds have been made on analogue synths. Xeno & Oaklander, Martial Canterel, Three To Forgotten, Tobias Bernstrup, and Epee Du Bois belong to the former camp; and Demons (featuring Nate Young of Wolf Eyes fame), Envenomist, Cadaver In Drag, and even the aforementioned Mr. Giffoni represent the latter. Sleep Museum, Charlie Draheim, and Wave Tank seem to be the artists that do their part to marry the two, especially Draheim's piercing synth Leather Nun-ish anti-tune "Guts On The Dancefloor." Oh yeah, all the tracks here are exclusive to the compilation. Great. Great. Great.
Essentially, "Windswept Trees And Houses" is a Jewelled Antler Collective primer. The Jewelled Antler Collective (Loren Chasse, Glenn Donaldson, Jason Honea, Steven R. Smith and Rob Reger) rotate through a number of wholly unique manifestations of psychedelic improv in Thuja, Blithe Sons, Child Readers, Knit Separates, and The Skygreen Leopards. With all of those outfits present, this album encapsulates the Jewelled Antler ethos in parallel with a handful of like minded artists who share their host's metaphysical glee and earnest investigations into the mysterious. Amongst the guests on "Windswept Trees And Houses" include the amazing film / installation collaboration Silt who has recently been awarded with a showcase at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, offering a very nice piece of ephemeral vocal incantations swathed in Zoviet France delay tricks. There's also New Zealand's Entlang (featuring members of Dress and Garbage From The Flowers) presenting a disjointed track of avant-hillbilly strum. But the highlight of the compilation is The Billy Crosby's whose stunning cover of Current 93's "The Signs Of Emptiness" sublimely matches a warbling Appalachian finger picking with a rough-hewn male / female vocal duet.
While most compilations suffer from poor throw-away tracks, "Windswept Trees And Houses" is a great listen throughout, and certainly gets a strong recommendation as with the rest of the Jewelled Antler releases.
Curated and published by Ninah Pixie of the Bay Area neo-Dada ensemble Big City Orchestra, Women Take Back The Noise is a triple cd compilation that's long overdue, standing as an almanac for the ladies out there wandering through the nether regions of experimental music. It should be noted that the 'noise' which the title refers to is more of a convenient placeholder for glitchey-droned-electroacoustic-field-recordings-and-a-smattering-of-volcanic-noise, as the compilation has a pretty wide assortment of aesthetics and strategies. The big names include Cosey Fanni Tutti, Fe-Mail, Blevin Blectum, Jessica Rylan, and Maggi Payne; and there are some lesser known women who we here at Aquarius have long been fans of such as Kadet and Cheryl E. Leonard. The three discs revolve around distinct themes, whose orbits often cross and mingle. The first disc leans toward the drone based electronics, highlights including Aedria Hughes' spectral guitar drones and long-stringed scrapes, Kadet's fizzing granular synthesis dappled with viola squiggle, and Maggi Payne's recontextualized household appliances transformed into oblique soundsmears with haunted aspirations. The second disc sports a bit more of a post-industrial agenda, with bouts of looping syncopation, malcontent electronics, and shadowy atmospheres. The highlights on this disc include Analog Tara's droned chorus for vibrating organs, the grey phase pattern shifts of Choronzon, and Cosey's mechanical rhythms and divebomb guitar riffs that harken back more to Throbbing Gristle circa 1978. If any of the three discs on Women Take Back The Noise embody the noise of the title than it's the third disc, with Jessica Rylan's 8-bit tirade of squiggle and bleep, further circuit-bending assaults from CJ Reaven Borosque, and the unholy cacophony of Fe-Mail that obliterates most everything in its path.
The three discs come packaged in an oversized plastic pouch and sports a circuit-bending flower through which anybody -- woman, man, girl, boy, dog, cat -- can make their own damn noise record! There's only a handful of these in stock, and it's hard to say if we'll be able to keep this around for long. So act fast!
This is a nice one. The Locust label has gathered together a quartet of today's notable, underground guitar experimentalists, all of whom are quite fond of the classic Takoma label solo guitar sound -- the "deltadelica" (their word) explored thirty years or more ago by guys like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke. Paying tribute to that Eastern-tinged, American-folky tradition, there's Virginia's Jack Rose, whom you might know from drone-psych outfit Pelt and Appalachian folk twangers the Black Twig Pickers; obvious choice Steffen Basho-Junghans of Germany; Japanese "onkyo" guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama; and Sun City Girl Rick Bishop, excuse me, Sir Richard Bishop. During the 70 minutes of "Wooden Guitar" each one of 'em provides a lengthy, hypnotic acoustic guitar performance, totally unaccompanied. Actually Basho-Junghans appears twice, everyone else just once. Let's take a look-see... Rose's "Red Horse II" is a sad and lovely 14+ minutes of vaguely raga-like 12 string strumming n' picking, densely textured yet light and exactingly pretty. That's followed by the first of Mr. Basho-Junghan's two contributions to this compilation, which continues in much the same vein as Rose's -- it's even called "A North Thuringian Raga". The Berliner is a virtuoso and this is a fantastic, meditative track indeed. Next up, Tetuzi Akiyama's piece is a lot sparser and more "abstract" sounding than what's come before, less in the Takoma style (yet still in its spirit, and latter-day Fahey would certainly approve). Appropriately, it's called "Time Between" and is the longest cut on here, at over twenty minutes. It slowly, stumblingly, somberly unfolds. Haunting, raw, and quite beautiful, it's a masterful centerpiece to this collection. Basho-Junghans checks in again with a shorter piece, the five-minute "Smiling Penguins". Repetitive and bright, it sounds like some sort of thumb-piano minimalism. Then, we're into the home stretch with the final piece on "Wooden Guitar" -- Sir Richard Bishop's quarter-hour "Corpuscle" which encompasses dusty spagetti western Morricone, acoustic Jimmy Page, and flamenco flourishes. It's a grand finale for this disc for sure, and this disc itself is grand. Essential to anyone into sheer impassioned, inventive, gosh-darn gorgeous solo acoustic guitar playin'. And it's packaged with an eye to the old Takoma LPs -- this cd comes in a embossed, silkscreened cardboard sleeve, very nicely done.
Holy crap, another compilation from everybody's favorite electronic superstar Kid 606 and friends. Compiled by Andrew Nosnitsky, the concept behind "Wrong Application" was to create audio tracks resulting from non-audio, pure data information origination.
Yasijiro Ozu was a Japanese filmmaker (1903-1963) who had emphasized restraint throughout the 54 films of his career, offering emotionally rich, if purposefully understated narratives about the simple pleasures and pains of everyday life. This compilation is a tribute to Ozu's tableaux; and given that Ozu quietly punctuated his tales with shots of clouds, arrangements of bottles, industrial landscapes, and other environments, the tribute features a handful of suitably quiet sound artists who often use field recordings or environmental space within their work. Steve Roden is the perfect artist for such a tribute; and fittingly, he opens this compilation. His circular softness for chimed guitar and tapped drum patterns is a wonderful departure in which Roden pushes his sound design closer to the post-rock elegance of Bark Psychosis. Roden's piece is one of the better tracks on this compilation, with other highlights including Keith Berry's mournful grayscapes of drone and slow-motion crackle, Toshiya Tsunoda's impeccable recording of aerated hiss, a series of lilting lullaby chimes from John Hudak, There's plenty of raw phonography from the likes of Hitoshi Kojo (aka Spiracle), Kiyoshi Mizutani, Michael Shannon, and Ralph Steinbruchel. Taku Sugimoto's piece has to be noted for its sheer blankness except for six piano notes that emphatically emerge after 3 and a half minutes of silence.
This happens to be the second tribute to filmmakers from And/OAR, following the now out-of-print compilation homage to Tarkovsky Another Kind Of Language.
Kind of a weird concept for a compilation. Track titles were sent out to a handful of artists who then wrote songs based on or influenced by those titles. One quibble though. A lot of the song titles are really kind of dumb and joke-y: "Tickle Party #2", "Gameshow Contestant Flip-Out", "Not Enough Crayons For Everyone", "Sign Language Tourettes", "Hot Licks For Shredders", etc. Definitely the result of an evening of "You know what would make a funny song title?" and perhaps some serious drinking. That said, there are some pretty cool tracks on here. House Of Low Culture contribute a freaked out drone-y dirge, Mark Arm gives us an ultra lo-fi drum machine metal guitar organ dirge sounding like a teenage Mudhoney practicing in your basement, Godstomper thrash through their 30 second track with a bass that sounds like a washing machine and carboard box drums, and Hella do their hyper spastic cartoon metal blur. The bands that are instrumental fare way better than the rest, since they aren't forced to come up with lyrics for "Dance Of The Drunken Siberian" or "Smut Merchant Of Venice", which in a way is kind of a drag as I think we would have been way more intrigued by artists forced to actually come up with intense serious songs based on concepts not their own, instead of just coming up with noisy funny craziness. But maybe that's for a different compilation. Also features Nels Cline, Bluebird, Twink, Weasel Walter, Bliss Blood, Beehive And The Barracudas and more!
The latest cd release from this stalwart Bay Area indie label and webzine features much more blistering and caustic music than their last compilation did back in 1998. The focus in the first half is squarely on noisy dissonance. Lots of experimental blasts and occasional propulsive no wave-iness from the likes of Channel 3 And 4, Beak Full Of Rubies, Coughs, Child Abuse, John Weise, Silver Daggers and Lakes. Then at the eighth track the sonic storm suddenly eases to a considerably more subdued drizzle with TG's gently plucked "La Nuit Version" and Hut's droney pulse and percussion track "Camp Along Young Oxen". Antifamily brings the energy level back up with their angular "Rome Is Not A City", and from there the comp is mixed (albeit like-minded) bag that includes more familiar faces Deerhoof, KIT, Stefan Udell, Yellow Swans and Axolotl. 23 track total.
The "Oacis" 4cd box should be confused with the "Oacis" book that Raster-Noton released earlier this year, though both featured the usual suspects in Byetone, Komet, Coh, and Alva Noto. Remixing source material from someone named Lumen (no, not the post-rock
Thus, the "Oacis" box is quite solid on the musical front; however, the packaging holds some unfortunate design oversights. First off, the box is housed in the same industrial strength zip-lock bag as the book, which fit the 8.5" x 6" book rather snugly, but overwhelms the 5.5" x 5.5" box. Secondly, the designers had obviously taken great cares in die-cutting all of the innersleeves, but included a lone piece of card stock which inhibits a direct line of sight through the package. Very disappointing design execution from a label that has prided itself on its perfect packaging (like the "20' to 2000" series). Oh well.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We'd been hearing about this lp for a while, a very unlikely gathering of four black metal or tangentially black metal outfits, including two of our favorites, alchemical post rockers Aluk Todolo, and spaced out psychedelic black metal outronauts Nightbringer, along with Nihil Nocturne and Saturnalia Temple. And while all four bands explore dramatically different sonic territories, the disparate sounds and philosophies seem to merge into one mysterious and abstract whole.
Saturnalia Temple start things off in a decidedly UN black metal fashion, thick lugubrious riffs, spacey and druggy and woozy and sprawling, laced with soft psychedelic leads, Very early Earth sounding, until the riffs begin to gather momentum and take shape, and then suddenly it sounds like Kyuss at 16 rpm, some sort of sun baked desert rock, slooowed waaaaaay doooooown, lysergic and hazy, a sort of blackened and metalized slow blues, that just crawls and creeps until the drums finally kick in, and then it's some stoner doom, but with the groove dialed way down, a trancelike churn, peppered with bits of minor key melody and deep chanted monklike vocals.
Nightbringer step up, and explode in frenzy of whirling spaced out blackness, soaring frantic riffs, blasting black beats, the sound more astral and celestial than grim and frosty, the track constantly shifting, from lightning speed blast to warped midtempo moodiness, wild leads tangled up everywhere, haunting chanted vox, totally majestic and epic, even at its doomiest, the sound transcends, the guitars stratospheric, the arrangements lush and sprawling, a total heart of the black sun blast of galactic black bliss.
Nihil Nocturne offer up yet another black facet, theirs a midtempo blackness, digey and Burzumy, with just a little groove, giving their track a very Khold like vibe, a sort of modern Moonfog band feel, but with a surprising twist, the track shifting abruptly, into something much more abstract and un-metal, with glimmering clean guitars, electronic rhythms, the stereo super panned, the sounds swooping from ear to ear, speaker to speaker, major key melodies, until a super creepy processed voice begins to intone ominously, and the track begins again, a black metal Godspeed slow build epic, finally finishing off with a frenzied chaotic climax.
And finally the mighty Aluk Todolo, who do their own thing, and manage to evoke as much mood and mystery as any of the other bands, even working with a WAY more stripped down and minimal sound, that sort of post noise dark rock kraut drone they seem to have conjured in some strange ritual, and the sounds is indeed ritualistic, but also utterly hypnotic, and mesmerizing, all motorik rhythms, simple serpentine basslines, clouds of keening feedback, and abstract guitar crunch, swirls of effects, drifting fragmented melodies, but the drums driving everything, holding it all together, loose and tight at the same time, locked in, but drifting occasionally. Can, Faust, This Heat, German Oak, not black metal, not even remotely, maybe it's the vibe, or the mood, or the band pedigree, but it hardly matters, this is blackened and heavy totally enthralling dark and mysterious minimal hypno rock and it RULES.
Gorgeous packaging, super striking artwork and a massive 12 page 12" x 12" booklet, and yeah, SUPER LIMITED.
This is one of those records that is either one of THEE most amazing and bizarre collections of random and far out archival sounds and recordings, or it's one of the most meticulously assembled sonic hoaxes EVER. And as it usually is with records like this, it almost doesn't matter. If it IS real, well then WOW. How some of these recordings exist, and have never been heard, hard to fathom. If it's all fake, then WOW again. Gorgeously presented, the liner notes detailed and super informative, complete with archival photos, and all presented in a jacket that looks like one of those classic collections of library music. BUT. This was compiled by weirdo outsider musician Felix Kubin (whose career retrospective compilation cd we raved about recently), which makes us think this is just the kind of thing he would think up, and actually create. Plus, some of these recordings are so impossibly bizarre, and some of the sounds are so weird, and often don't sound at all like what they purport to be.
So let's dig in. A recording of a demonstration record, demonstrating a mechanical automatic speech apparatus, lots of talking in German, then the actual demos, a weird mechanical series of tones, meant to be vowel sounds, the first step in a machine that will emulate human voice. Next is a lost recording of a Finnish telephone exchange from 1938, that sounds more like some strangely musical bit of dronemusic, all reverby and woozy and washed out, haunting and soundscapey. Up next is some music from a Norwegian Whaling Festival, in 1948, a surprisingly high fidelity blast of what could be Avarus, a cacophony of crowd sounds, voices, clanging metal, all nearly drowning out the skronk of various horns. Then there's a recording from a fraudulent attempt to raise money for a new '16 track tape' (twice as good as the 8 track that was so popular at the time, 1967), a recording of what we presume to be the factory where they make the tapes, all industrial whirs, voices, clanks and rumbles, the tape having remained unheard due to the fact that it was an obsolete format.
Up next, a supposedly early piece by David Tudor, possibly his first, a stretch of near silence punctuated by bits of crunch and glitch, weird warped tape sounds, it could be Tudor, hard to say. Then comes a hydrophone recording of a project to record plankton, capturing the plant's electronic impulses and converting them into sound, this recording however is from the cockpit of a submarine, so everything is murky and muddy, voices and underwater warble, quite an awesome recording, genuine or not. The side ends with what might be the most bizarre track of them all, a recording of a man performing with barnyard animals in the UK, a part of variety shows that were apparently quite popular at the time, the man beats a drum, his rumbling voice soon joined in by mooing cows, oinking pigs, meowing cats and clattery horse hooves percussion.
The second side doesn't get any less far out, beginning with what is meant to be a recording of a Pygmy hunting ritual, recorded in 1934 in Africa, and again, it sounds almost like some modern lysergic forest folk weirdness, super distorted, lots of percussion, wailed voices, super dense and chaotic, definitely raw and primitive sounding, but definitely suspect. Then comes another demonstration recording, this one from Oskar Sala, who created the soundscapes for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, here he demonstrates the Volkstrautonium for the infamous Joseph Goebbels of the Third Reich. Then there's an early early 'remix', created in 1965 from wax cylinder recordings of Persian foot soldiers in 1921. Next up, a found reel to reel tape, that came with a player, and was discovered to contain what is purportedly a recording of a Situationist project to construct a non authoritarian kindergarten "aimed to engender a spirit of subversion in children", and is essentially a recording of a man and a child, interrupted by various strange sounds. Then comes an unknown tape recording "presented here as a curiosity", a twisted blast of mysterious voices and garbled analog electronics, a technical experiment perhaps, we'll never know. And finally, an untitled player piano composition by Hans Henny Jahnn, a "playwright, novelist, organ builder, music publisher and polymath", and his masterpiece was apparently about a man who tried to notate the grain of birchwood into musical notation, and it seems Jahnn tried to do the same in real life, using birchwood grain as a blueprint for musical notation. Wow.
Incredible. And incredibly strange. A fantastic, and fantastical listen for sure. Everything here so bizarre and baffling, and in most cases almost TOO bizarre and baffling. But like we said, it hardly matters, regardless of their provenance, this is an amazing document of some truly wondrous sounds, recordings that if not genuine, are at least genuinely freaky and fascinating. And, unfortunately, we have but a handful.
Attention Buddha Machine obsessives, here's another sonic artifact / fetishistic release from Buddha Machine masterminds FM3 to collect and obsess over, and yeah, it is still Buddha Machine related. In fact it's another collection of Buddha Machine derived soundscapes, with FM3 removing the loops from the machine, and passing them around to various contemporary Chinese musicians to remix, rework, reinterpret and re-envision, there are a few names we recognize, like Li Jianhong, but so many that we don't, all offering their own interpretations, and the sonic breadth is fairly stunning.
From haunting folky drifts, to groovy Chinese pop, to gorgeous rhythmic percussive workouts, to crackly Philip Jeck like dronescapes, from haunting field recording flecked, reinterpreted traditional Chinese music, to hushed swirling ambience, from actual recordings of a Buddha Machine being played in a remote village, replete with the sounds of insects and wildlife, to minimal abstract dronemusic, from electronic flecked folk pop, to looped rhythmic post industrial electronic skitter, from mysterious spoken word to strange soundtracky sci-fi ambience, and from traditional sounding fluttery flute to super commercial electro pop, and that's just a sampling. It's a pretty amazing listen, varied to be sure, but it all works pretty well together as a whole, and in many cases, especially for the Buddha Machine obsessed, it becomes a game of spot the Buddha Machine loop, not always an easy feat in many cases.
And then there's the packaging. Totally over the top, and in many ways, subtly beholden to the machine that inspired it. First, everything is houses in a printed metallic oversized gold bag, normally used to hold oolong tea, sealed of course, it has to be torn to get inside, but fear not, there's another bag inside, however, that one is sealed too, so to reuse it, you'll have to tear open that one too. Along with the spare bag, there's the disc itself, which is mounted to a heavy textured board, printed front and back with Chinese characters, with a hole punched out of one corner, in which is mounted a metal coin, bearing an imprint of the Buddha Machine, and the coins were apparently cast in metal from the same factory that makes designer buckles, rings and necklaces, the label pointing out that "Your coin could have been a Gucci!", there's a little sticker, featuring more Chinese characters, and then there are a handful of members only "VIP" cards, which look like blank credit cards, and which are apparently ubiquitous in status-conscious modern China, each on a different color, the colors of the original Buddha Machines of course.
LIMITED TO 2000 COPIES.
Dronevolk is a new documentary focused on the burgeoning underground dronefolk scene in Belgium, made up of a handful of bands, aQ customers will no doubt be well familiar with: Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Bear Bones Lay Low, Silvester Anfang and Ignatz. By now, most faithful readers of the aQ list own at least one record by some or all of those groups, but this disc takes advantage of the format, not only offering up more of the music we love so much, but glimpses into the creative process, allowing the viewer to see how and where the music was recorded, to see the groups perform live, on big stages, in little clubs, in bedrooms and practice spaces, and allows the groups themselves to discuss their music and influences.
Kiss The Anus start things off, recording track by track, tambourine, guitar, vocals, harmonium, watching the song slowly take form. From a bedroom and a computer, the disembodied parts coalesce becoming something more magical and mysterious, eventually taking form as a song, being performed by a full band on stage. Plenty of interview footage, live performance, home movies, backstage, on tour, and like us, you probably wondered where the heck he came up with that name, well now's your chance to find out.
Up next is Bear Bones Lay Low, a super young guy, moved from Venezuela to Belgium, he now also plays in Silvester Anfang, but for Bear Bones it's serious floorcore, hunched over a bank of effects and keyboard, swaying back and forth, hair in face, black pants and a green Izod (!), the sound a thick coruscating drone, haunting vocals drifting in and out, cool to see those sounds coming from such an unassuming figure, the transformative power of music. Other footage of him kneeling with a guitar, unfurling wavery fractured folk, shots of practice space sessions, recording and rehearsing, some super intense live performance, or at as intense as one mop topped dude kneeling on the floor can be, but the music is dark and drone-y and intense!
Then along comes Silvester Anfang revealed to be much more of a proper rock band, and a bunch of goofy dudes judging from their interview, especially considering their provocative cover art and mysteriously heavy sounds. Much of the interview concerns metal, specifically how there is NO metal in Silvester Anfang, and how just because they LIKE metal, does not mean that they play metal. Also discussion of the artwork, and how it gives people the wrong impression, and how FUN is a big part of what they do, no matter how dark and intense the music is. Lots of pre-show ritual, setting up, tuning up, eventually giving way to full on dronejam, with nearly the whole band hunched over on the floor, strange, but sort of ritualistic and cool looking. Also some improv street corner jams, with kids and homeless folks, all super percussive and chaotic and exuberant
Last up is Ignatz, another pretty unassuming dude, his segment opening with a gorgeous live performance, on a stage in the woods, afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees, the vocals a ghostly mumble, the guitar ragged and abstract. Exactly how you might imagine it would be. Some very low key interview footage, and a glimpse of the home, the studio, where this mysterious music takes shape, which then helps you realize that these places are not so different than where we live, and play, and that much of the mystery comes from the person, and their connection to whatever spirit compels them to make these sounds.
Beautifully packaged in a slimline dvd case, full color covers, the opening and closing credits feature some amazing black and white animation, and for those of you who still aren't sure you need one of these, it also includes bonus unreleased MP3's from all four groups!
All region. NTSC.
We often lament the fact that many of our favorite bands predate the list. Bands we love and obsessed on, but whose records, and often entire careers, came well before we began our bi-weekly chronicling of musics weird and heavy, dense and brutal, lovely and catchy. Slint's Spiderland has a one line review ferchrissakes!!!
And then there's Man Is The Bastard. The supreme rulers of West Coast Power Violence. A throbbing, churning, dual bass-ed behemoth. A crushing low end onslaught, double basses, crushing drums, howled vocals, swirls of caveman electronics, amazing graphic design (that ubiquitous MITB skull!), political lyrics, challenging subject matter, intense artwork, they were the ultimate D.I.Y. punk rock dirge metal outfit. If you don't own any MITB records, stop right now, and make it happen, any one into heavy, thoughtful brutality, or into experimental and extreme outsider punk rock, needs to own every bit of Bastard they can get their hands on. It's hard to imagine a punk rock band who hasn't been influenced by MITB. In fact the crustcore back pack crowd that you most often equate with legendary epic metal lords Neurosis, you'll find are almost ALL sporting the MITB skull somewhere on their persons, back patch, button, tattoo, it's probably more ubiquitous in this generation than the Black Flag bars or the Einsturzende Neubauten figure. And for good reason. MITB were not only heavy, they were fucking weird, not metal, not punk rock, not noise, but all of those things. And not only did MITB leave an amazing musical legacy, the various members all continued on, taking various bits and pieces, vestiges of what once was Man Is The Bastard, and incorporating them into a whole new world of noise and sound.
Thus we have No Skull Left Unturned. A triple cd collection of mostly new recordings from all the various Man Is The Bastard offshoots (only the Sleestak tracks are previously released). An eclectic bunch for sure. From drone to noise, to ambient to post rock and every possible hybrid in between. Some groups we already know and love, some we're only just discovering, others we're re-discovering and digging all over again. Even if you're new to the world of Man Is The Bastard, this is a killer comp, that will definitely appeal to folks into noise, drone, punk rock, metal, but for MITB fans, this is the motherlode! About the coolest thing short of a reunion or a brand new MITB record.
Before we talk about the bands, let's discuss the packaging. HOLY SHIT. We've seen amazing packaging, but this is so deluxe, and so gorgeously and meticulously hand assembled, true to the D.I.Y spirit for sure, but so over the top. It would be worth it for the packaging alone. Let's start from the outside and work our way inwards.
An oversized grey envelope, sealed with a metallic silver wax seal, bearing the imprint of the MITB skull, affixed to one side of the envelope is a library card pocket, inside, a card with the names of each band typewritten. Flip it over, the MITB skull is printed in black metallic ink, and a clear transparency is affixed over the top. Inside, there are FOUR zines, each with a hand printed silkscreened hard cardstock cover, printed in oranges and blacks. Inside the first, Sounds, are the three cds, a track listing, liner notes, photos and track info for each band on the comp, in the back are two pages of stickers, one with stickers for the comp and all the various bands, one a whole page of MITB skull stickers, along side the cds, are an embroidered patch and a pin, both bearing the same skull image. The set is numbered on the inside of the cover. Limited of course. The second zine, also housed in a silkscreened card stock cover, Discography, is just that, a complete discography of Man Is The Bastard and MITB related bands, including tons of reviews from various zines and magazines, as well as a full color poster featuring the covers of every single MITB and related release. Zine number three, Interviews, is ultra thick, packed with tons of interviews with all the various members of MITB, discussing everything from music to politics, touring, art, reviews, Japanese fans, drugs and loads more. Also included in this zine is a hand screened MITB bookmark, no doubt to use as you work your way through all of this text. And finally, zine 4, Images, is even thicker than the Interviews zine, with tons of images, photos, posters, interviews as well as most, if not all the liner notes and inserts from all the various MITB releases. All 4 zines tied together with a piece of twine and sealed in that envelope.
Phew! And we haven't even gotten to the music yet. Which is just as intense and impressive as the packaging:
Let's start with Amps for Christ who are probably the most well known of the bunch, at least around here. Henry Barnes was the noisemaker for Man Is The Bastard, with his homemade amps (Amps For Christ!), lo-fi duct-tape electronics, screwdrivers and bastardized circuit boards, he added a weird caveman lo-tech sheen to MITB's churning bass heavy power violence, but post-Bastard, Barnes took his Amps and created a strange world of jangle gypsy folk, lilting strum and soaring joyful bagpipe like buzz. A glorious field of fuzzy sonic flowers and sparkling sunshine, all woven into bouncy jigs, doleful drones, simple strum and dreamy childlike melodies, but peppered with strange spoken word, machinelike robotic, murky loping krautrock, and raga like buzz. The tracks here run the gamut, featuring the usual Amps guests contributing dreamlike female vocals, keening violas, and extra strum and pluck, all woven into a constantly confusional world of bent circuits, blown out guitar buzz, summery afternoon folk flutter, and ominous dirgey strums.
Then there's Unicorn, who have been a big favorite around these parts, with their washed out minimal ambience, dark drones and atmospheric drift. The Unicorn tracks here are much more varied, the first a strange electro soundscape of crunchy beats and distorted vocals, feedback squiggles and damaged synths, the second more of the Unicorn we're used to, barely there drift and shimmer, a faraway pulse, then the third a murky midnight forest jam, recorded from beneath the earth, everything muffled and muddy, smeared rhythms, and mysterious insect sounds, like No Neck doing Chain Reaction.
Probably the most prolific and most direct of the MITB offshoots is Bastard Noise, whose output has been nearly impossible to keep up with, and who embraced the noise side of Man Is The Bastard (hence the new monicker) ditching most of the bass and rhythm in favor of a much more static and generally harsh sound. That said, their blend of caveman electronics and black ambience is quite compelling, from huge ambient sprawls of softly shifting black whir, to freaked out walls of pure fierce sound, a thick swirl of soft white noise and manufactured alien soundscapes, harsh and brutal, noisy and intense, but also weirdly inviting and impossibly listenable.
Bastard Noise teamed up with Japanese junk-noise unit K2, for long stretches of chaotic, kitchen sink, electronic noise freakouts: malfunctioning electronics, damaged amplifiers, squalls of loops and stuttering glitch and buzz and grinding crunch.
Antennacle are a new name to us, not sure which Bastard is involved, but they contribution to this collection is one epic 20+ minute soundscape, ominous expanses of insectlike buzz, spare percussive rattle, low end hum, blessed out shimmer, brief stretches of glimmering outer space FX, chunks of feedback, occasionally assembled into strange alien rhythms, a constantly shifting soundworld dipping into territories as far reaching as Dead C murk, Keening Sunroof!-like ur-drone, No Neck style folky clatter and Wolf Eyes-ian electronic landscapes.
Hierophant is another new name to us in the field of post Bastard offshoots, this one another American / Japanese team up, all electronics and field recordings, woven into a jagged field of low end thrum and hissing high end buzz, abstract percussion, and clouds of Merzbowian rrroooar, swirls of spaced out FX, a discordant din, the sound of a noise rock band crashing headfirst into a junkyard gamelan. Long stretches of what sound like field recordings of some alien swamp, all indescribably chirps and croaks, suspended in a muddy viscous black bog, over which thick sheets of coruscating high end feedback drift like storm clouds.
But probably the most exciting stuff here are three previously released tracks from Man Is The Bastard noiserock side project Sleestak. It exciting to hear what a more mellow MITB might have sounded like, an ominous low slung brutality, bass heavy dirges, moody malevolence, more a sort of beautiful brutal post rock. A loping bass line wanders through a field of hiss and hum and buzz, spacious and spare, almost like a meaner more malevolent Low or Bohren. Slowcore peppered with bursts of twisted noise freakouts, and distant bits of shortwave squiggle, a very Slint-like vibe, with the guitar locking into super hypnotic loops, over lurching downtuned bass, drifting detuned melodic fragments, if someone didn't know better, they could definitely mistake this stuff for some super obscure Touch And Go or AmRep noiserock band. Killer stuff. Previously released, but we'd never heard these tracks before, and will absolutely be hunting down everything we can find. In fact, this whole comp will have most of you digging for discs by all these bands. And our waning love of Bastard Noise has most definitely blossomed again after digging into these tracks. Absolutely and totally recommended. And of course the best part of a comp like this is that it got us all excited about Man Is The Bastard again, and that shit sounds as good as ever.
Man Is The Bastard! Crossed Out! Infest! Spazz! No Comment! Capitalist Casualties! All hail WEST COAST POWERVIOLENCE!! And the glorious sounds borne from their legacy...
Killer quadruple cassette tape box, featuring a handful of amazing sound and noise makers, some definite aQ faves, as well as a whole bunch of names ne to us, each band was instructed to compose a single sidelong piece, representing either light or darkness, and as the Earjerk website mentions, it's really no surprise that most bands chose darkness (either that or they have a weirdly skewed idea of what constitutes 'light').
Up first, long time aQ fave Sorc'Henn, who in the past has dabbled in buzzy black metal, shimmery deep ambience, here it something else entirely, a thick caustic fog of hiss and buzz and grit and grime, buried melodies swirl beneath a constantly shifting layered soft blackened noise. Grim and haunting for sure.
Teeth Collection are a name we know, but we'd never heard their (his?) music until now. A strangely haunting soundscape of reverbed clatter, truncated melodies, distant hiss, muted rumble, all slowly building to a cathartic swirl of blown out heaviness.
We had a Drunjus cassette ages ago, and had always wanted to hear more. Here, the sound is a crystalline web of haunting synths, of keening long tones, of muted melodies, bowed gongs (courtesy of one of the guys from Pelt), this is some mysterious otherworldly cinematic drift for sure. Like a way more minimal abstract Goblin almost. Then comes Crystal Dragon, awesome name, and even more awesome sound, a super raw and primitive chunk of outer space sci-fi weirdness, grinding synths, wound into whirring dronescapes, thick and undulating, warm and luxuriously textured.
Then we have Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby, who also does time in Jex Thoth and Wormsblood, but Burial Hex is his ritualistic black ambient project, and that's precisely what you get here, a super raw recording, distorted and effected, the tape seeming to crumble, plenty of low end warble, clang and clatter and crunch, doused in effects, like a madman locked in a dungeon, dragging chains, and assembling some unholy machine, super creepy and pretty hard to describe. Black Sparrow are another group we'd never heard of, but they fit pretty well amongst this esteemed brotherhood of sound, an ethereal ephemeral shimmer, made from crumbling effected guitars and processed synths (we think), woven into a soft almost serene bit of buzzy drift, peppered with bits of glitch and squelch, but smoothed out into a blurred bit of mesmer.
Then some Finnish weirdness from Taikuri Tali, definitely a band we're gonna have to hear more from, some random bits of conversation, before the trio launch into a gorgeously tweaked bit of mad scientists soundscaping, squeaks and rattles and scrapes and whirs that get more and more abstract as the track progresses, eventually transforming into some sort of alien shortwave broadcast.
Finally, Pan To Scratch, another new to us outfit, they finish things off with a super old school bit of layered dronemusic, letting the overtones crate strange and subtle rhythms, intertwined with what sounds like birdsong, tape manipulation, lots of tape hiss, and random bumps and thumps, weird and pretty wonderful.
Which is a pretty good way of describing this whole collection, weird and wonderful, as well as abstract and haunting and dark and buzzy and raw. The usual suspects should freak for this, SUPER LIMITED of course, handsomely packaged as well in one of those oversized molded plastic booklike folders, the kind of case instructional language tapes usually come in. Cool!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Until the day when Jay Lesser is recognized as the genius of sonic terrorism that he really is, there's V/VM. Now only down to one member (as Janski Noise has permanently joined forces with DJ Speedranch), V/VM mixes junk store gems (e.g. Donald Duck's sputtering quacks, tabernacle choirs, marching bands, MSR style renditions of Elvis songs, crappy star-search pop songs, etc...) with the awesome power of the Chaos Pad and an array of distorted breakbeats.
Right from the get-go, the V/VM compilation "Hate You" is easily the most enjoyable (read: not annoying or irritatingly ironic) and well executed collection from this Stockport collective. The basic premise here is, well, pretty much the same as any other V/VM project: take any "shite" track and slice, dice, shred, add tons of distortion and completely destroy the shit out of it.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
V/VM's prankster electronica furrows its brow for "Masters Of The Absurd" -- a far more seriously minded vinyl-only release of digital crunch and mind-erasing distortion than is ususal for these guys, who are normally so worthy of the album's title. Yes, absurdity has always had a place within the work of this Manchester duo; but here, their anarchic glee in atomizing sound information has released a malevolent alter-ego who has little patience for the silliness of their earlier work crafted from digitally damaged thrift store vinyl. V/VM's grand absurdist gesture on "Masters Of The Absurd" is the assignment of a pig farmer and a butcher as the protagonists in their electronica drama. Beyond that, there isn't much logic to V/VM's assaults: just thick layers of overloaded digital noise, decomposing tonal drone haze, stolen fanfares of bombastic almost Wagnerian scores, and an obliteration of George Michael's "Careless Whisper" for those wanting a smattering of V/VM giddiness. Willfully difficult data jamming and blistering electro-shock treatment!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh no. V/VM has too much time on their hands. "Sick-Love" is a collection of their warbled hard disc edit / hack jobs that butcher top 40 love ballads from The Spice Girls, Simply Red, Lionel Ritchie, Berlin, etc... This record is a really bad joke that goes on too long...which maybe puts it into the good joke category. Wait a minute, shouldn't V/VM and Neil Hambuger get together for an all star comedy album?
V/VM was the first project that forced sonic hermit Leyland Kirby into the public eye, when he emerged as a giddy figurehead for the amphetamine-amped drill'n'bass that blossomed around the likes of Hrvatski, Aphex Twin, and Atari Teenage Riot in the late '90s. For all of the hype that surrounded him, Kirby's 'sound' was essentially, a purposefully aggravating, immature brand of cheap musical humor by turns, brutal, noisy, dumb and occasionally sort of genius, although it mostly tended toward the goofy - which included shameful plunderings of '80s dreck ballads, by running a Chris Deburgh or a Lionel Richie song through a ring modulator. Yeah, much of the V/VM material was ridiculous, puerile, and lots of times borderline unlistenable. But that sort of seemed like the point...
Not surprisingly, we avoided much of the early V/VM stuff, circa '90s and '00s; but those glimpses of genius, would later blossom into the sublime transcendent beauty of Kirby's Caretaker persona, and we were not alone in finding Kirby's work as The Caretaker thoroughly sublime, a stunning haunted ballroom approach to ambient composition through massive amounts of cathedral reverb and ample chorales of surface noise from antiquated '78s.
That said, The Death Of Rave project is perhaps the one body of work from V/VM that should most certainly be heard. And which maybe not surprisingly ran concurrent with some of the earlier explorations as The Caretaker, first being released online as a massive archive of over 200 dancefloor anthems being time-stretched and reworked into rave's anti-apotheosis. No rhythm, no release, no exhilaration, this was all grey sculpted noise and decommissioned electricity. This 'partial flashback' represents the best material from that unwieldy catalog which now seems to have vanished from the internet. (Long live the physical medium!) The Death Of Rave cultivates a slow, almost industrially-minded tension of granular electronic noise, with a sense of fictional memories similar to those created in Kirby's dilated 78 recontextualations as The Caretaker. Here, those would be the fabricated memories sought by Roy Batty and his fellow replicants in Blade Runner, flickering repetitions of pixels into dense networks of cold data that in another context would be a jacked-up acid track or a sensual deep-house groove. But here, it's poetically and poignantly vacant - a residual memory recoded as the empty warehouse itself, where a party once happened, with the floor covered in crushed plastic cups, two-day old vomit-n-beer, broken high-heels, and cigarette butts. And in the maudlin mind of Kirby, that's something quite beautiful.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
V/VM's humor requires that their audience not just be familiar with the artists they appropriate but already be over exposed by their insipid pop songs. It may be a delusional agenda, but V/VM's total destruction of such chart toppers as Elton John, Posh Spice, Lionel Ritchie, etc... is swathed in the righteousness of a dadaist salvation: that the world will be much better off if every pop hit has its obliterated V/VM twin. On paper, that sounds like a great idea; but the realization on a Fisher Price turntable and a Kaoss Pad is less than ideal. But it is funny...sort of.
"Join the team as they uncover the secret of the three-hundred year old Spanish mummy, solve the riddles of the scary old woman, help Gert-Jan face his fear of water, and try to save the city's pets in an adventure of endless twists and turns, laughs and rock n' roll!"
When I was younger (no seriously, much younger) I liked to read books about kids who started their own detective agencies, Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators, that sort of thing. Indeed I tried to set myself up as a detective too (I had a fingerprint kit and a magnifying glass and even a deerstalker hat) but sadly if unsurprisingly had trouble finding clients with crimes to solve, unlike my fictional counterparts. So I was immediately taken with this new Fire Inc. release, the booklet of which contains Episode Four of "The Secret Of The Haunted Spanish Galleon", a mystery story featuring those precocious kids turned detectives turned rock n' rollers, The Vacuum Boys. Very cleverly presented, with appropriate artwork and graphics. In reality, The Vacuum Boys aren't kids, mystery-solvers, or a rock band. They're Heimir Bjorgulfsson (of Stilluppsteypa), Girt-Jan Prins (MIMEO, solo electronics), Guy Amitai, and Dan Armstrong (Central 87), and deal in electronic clicks and cuts, not clues, and certainly not rock n' roll. Sure there's guitars on here, and drums (Girt IS a real drummer we know, and Dan does guitar and electronics improv), but there's a lot of computer processing involved as well -- and maybe a Hoover. Recorded live at Prins' studio in Rotterdam February 2002, it's a noisy (but pleasantly so), chopped-up glitch-fest of crackle, distortion, whoosh, and bleep, sounding more akin to Merzbow than the Monkees.
Of the current spate of experimental electronic releases, this one is not only pretty great but definitely gets points for being packaged in such an imaginative and thankfully not over-intellectualized way. Go Vacuum Boys! We look forward to their next adventure!
Reissue of a 1978 album, originally released by the Italian avante garde label Cramps in their Nova Musicha series, of almost maddeningly repetitive electronic music by Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione. Spacey, cosmic, "multilayered sci-fi epic glop"
There's two LP-side-long tracks here. Track one is seventeen minutes of relentless burbling, recorded in 1971 with an IBM computer. Track two is a duet for mini-Moog and Yamaha organ that takes off from the madness of track one to end with a pretty keyboard fanfare of near prog-pop proportions, which in 1978 could have potentially been a hit, with heads anyway.
This disc drove Andee insane (he thinks it sounds like Tangerine Dream on speed), but Allan liked it quite a bit (he also thinks it sounds like Tangerine Dream on speed)!
Oooh. Nice one, this. If you dig psychedelic dronemusic, heavy on the guitar, that is, 'cause it's the 2nd album on the ever-reliable Utech label from this droney duo from China, one half of which is none other than freeform electric guitarist & sculptor-of-feedback Li Jianhong, whose solo album on Japanese psych label PSF, Classic Of the Mountains And Seas, we made a Record Of The Week a few years back. The other half of the band is laptopper Vavabond, and together they create a dark and disturbing, yet sometimes somewhat soothing symphony of cosmic sci-fi space drone (VagusNerve are kind of big into UFOs and flying saucers), full of strange sounds. Layers of Jianhong's whale call guitar and swarms of other unidentifiable electronic drones (from keening high end to bassy lows) are ofttimes joined by weird wordless vocals, druggy mumbles, the guttural moans of some human creature. This devolved baby-babble is however buried beneath the burbling electronic FX and quasi-melodic guitar wail. What sound like distant air raid sirens rise and fall, as abstract alien transmissions from across the galaxy shower down over the three loooong tracks here, "The Memory Of Light", "The Exiled Life", and "Go Back To The Sirius" - as in, this is sirius tripping balls music!! To be played LOUD, if you dare. These aren't airy ambient drones. It's all quite dense and physical and maybe even frightening, with Jianhong's amp burning blackest on that third track, at times coming close to Keiji Haino in an echoing realm of insane video game zips and zaps.
Recommended drones for sure, a no-brainer if you trust us, or Utech, or are already a VagusNerve and/or Li Jianhong fan. Comes in a nice Utech-designed fold-up sleeve, with cool art appropriate to the dark spacey sounds on the disc.
This fellow we know recently wrote an entertaining book called Get High Now, no not about drugs, but about other sorts of highs, non-drug related natural techniques to enjoy "sensory trips" and the like. Quite a few of them are sound-based (the book even references Ryoji Ikeda at one point) but in a major oversight, a recommendation to "listen to VagusNerve" was left out! 'Cause it's definitely a trip when you really settle into a session with VagusNerve on the stereo or better yet headphones - likewise of course with a lot of other drone musics too, why do you think we like the stuff so much? Loud enough, it'll either stimulate, or at least simulate, a high.
So, c'mon, get high now with Chinese guitar/laptop duo VagusNerve. Someone calling herself VAVABOND is the laptopper, and Li Jianhong (of D!O!D!O!D!) is the guitar player. We're already considerable fans of Li's solo psych/noise guitar excursions (his disc on aRCHIVE for instance, and a fantastic new one on PSF, Classic Of the Mountains And Seas) so we were excited when we found out he's half of VagusNerve. We were also interested to learn what exactly the lo pan of the title is. As the liner notes explain, it's a traditional Chinese mytho-technological device, a sort of Feng Shui compass. A rotating disc in a wooden base, with several concentric rings of Chinese characters to which the needle in the middle can point, indicating various arcane things.
VagusNerve are not actually using a lo pan to make this music, rather it's inspired by a dream Li had about a giant lo pan in a forest that could be used to summon UFOs! That's pretty much the title of the first track, in fact. And swarming cosmic UFOs looking for mystical feng shui advice definitely could be making some of the sounds heard here. It's nervous, very active drone musick, buzzing and zapping and crackling and chiming, featuring 3 long tracks (8:21, 21:05, 28:27). There's much moody sci-fi windiness, and what sounds like flocks of otherworldly birds crying to one another, amidst thick grinding whooshing sizzling drones, spinning and swirling. Feedback a la underwater whale calls, resonant "long wire" like vibrations, insectoid buzzings, and mechanical rhythms all feature in the the mix. It's a sonic delirium, wherein Urthona is jamming opaquely with KK Null, if that hypothetical comparison is of any help to you.
Definitely another cool Utech release, a label we've been raving about lately for many good reasons (Horseback, Gog, Aluk Todolo, Blood Fountain...). Regarding Li Jianhong, hopefully we'll be reviewing that new PSF disc of his very soon. And, by the way, he also made several appearances on that An Anthology Of Chinese Experimental Music box set we listed last time.
More and more quiet goes the solo album for Mika Vainio, the Finnish electronic wizard who has brought us such feats of techo-minimalist intensity as the Kesto 4cd boxset set in Pan Sonic and the Metri album recorded as an O with slash through it. But under his own name, Vainio's recordings shrink from existence in the wake of gasping, nocturnal bouts of silence. That said, comparisons to the very-special-nothing-music of Bernhard Gunter (whatever happened to that guy?) or Richard Chartier don't really apply to Vainio's work. There's much more in common here with the 2009 release Vectors from Robert Hampson (also released through Touch), as a revamped interpretation of INA-GRM concrete / electronic compositions from the '60s and '70s. Vainio's palette of sound rotates between chorales of electrical static, snarls of sawtooth buzzings, and cold sinewave generation with a few field recordings thrown in for good measure; and Vainio composes these elements by way of the razor-cut more often than not. Thus, Aineen Musta Puhelin is a fragmentary collage, at times marked by sharpened, Tesla-coil bursts of engorged electricity only to snap to a blackened frame of silence or at least prolonged inactivity.
The cool thing about records like this, and this kind of music in general on vinyl, is that it's difficult to tell if a record is scratched, or if there's fuzz on the needle, as those are the sounds that have been harnessed to create the rhythms. Crackle and pop, hiss and skip, the more beat up the record, the more complex and abstract the rhythm. But for the sake of this review, we'll assume the copy of the new Touch single by Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio we listened to was indeed pristine�
The A side opens with a super minimal loop, seemingly crafted from the run off groove of an old record. A stripped down skeletal groove made from a bit of hiss and crackle, laid over a gorgeous blurred murky loop, that slowly builds and builds as the rhythms remains static, simple, hypnotic, the whole thing very abstract and quite lovely.
The flipside also begins with a super minimal rhythm, again, assembled from bits of vinyl detritus, this one too looped over a slow building drone, but this side is a bit more intense, the background sounds slightly more corrosive, while managing to remain subtly musical. At some moments, because of the staticky rhythm, it does almost sound like some dreamy drone 7" that got all scuffed up, especially when the music drops out and the needle settles into the locked runoff groove, where it stays, playing out the rhythm that began the track over and over and over.
Latest in Touch's recent 7" series, like all Touch releases, beautifully packaged, with a simple spare design and adorned with gorgeous photos by label head honcho Jon Wozencroft.
The bruised Mika Vainio that was photographed on the smoldering 2011 solo album Life (... It Eats You Up) has mellowed out from the caterwauling guitar destruction and amphetamine-driven electronic noise to produce a reductionist album of electro-acoustics in Fe3O4. With the major exception in the aforementioned Life (... It Eats You Up), Vainio's solo work under his given name aligns neatly with the decentered abstraction that Touch has always been known for (e.g. John Duncan, BJ Nilsen, Thomas Koner, The Hafler Trio, etc.), with the blistered post-techno rhythms of Pan Sonic being deflated into a solitary muffled thump or a Geiger counter click punctuating his nocturnal experiments with power-drone stasis, power-grid hums, and slumped silence. Vainio draws inspiration here from the vast allegorical properties of iron. The directionality of a pre-GPS compass, the ability to store data through ferric oxide on magnetic tape, and the corrosion of steel all speak through Vainio's spacious compositions with often sublime, subtle results. "Magnetia" opens with the slashing acoustic rasp from a bowed cymbal akin to the classic Organum sound that collapses under the weight of a linear rumbling frequency. Ghostly utterances of searing noise slide out subdued space-time ambience on "Magnetotactic" and "Magnetism" as almost heavily dubbed versions of his previous album. The album's finale - "Elvis's TV Room" - eschews the magnetic metaphors even as it follows suit with the other tracks of eerie calm, blustery noise, and minimalist gestures.
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It would be nice to think that after a long day of hammering shards of technotic minimalism from the handbuilt electronics of Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio sleeps next to these machines, operating them in his dreams, their toggles triggered in cybernetic response to the colorful pools of abtract imagery in his subconscious, while at the same time capturing the soothing comfort of a room being slept in at 4 in the morning. While such technology may be entirely out of reach (even for the talented circuit builders of Pan Sonic), Vainio's "Kajo" is a beautiful placid album of serial electrical events that could have been the result of such a sleep-composition. Very nice.
Kilo finds our man Mika Vainio returning to the rhythm and noise once again, and very few people have ever done that combination as successfully as this Finnish electronic artist. Vainio's career, as you probably know, began in the early '90s through the project Panasonic (which later had to be rechristened as Pan Sonic for obvious reasons), with slippery grids of pure-tone bleeps and clinical atmospheres haunted a swaggering techno that aligned in equal parts with Plastikman, Suicide, and Throbbing Gristle. The monumental 4cd set Kesto by Pan Sonic from 2004 marked one of the most exhaustive statements of experimental electronica EVER produced; and the resulting world tour led to the collapse of the Pan Sonic. Vainio remained steadfast in his solo productions since the demise of Pan Sonic, alternating his major albums between the rhythmic workouts and sleepless landscapes of drone-splattered electro-acoustics. Even on an off day, Vainio's rhythmic explorations are at the top of the heap... And on Kilo, Mika Vainio is in top form. His post-techno, breakbeat rhythms have always enjoyed a bad-ass swagger, and those grooves persist on Kilo through an industrial barrage of jackhammered sequencing, Martin Rev-esque pulsations, and cyclotron velocities spun from his analogue noiseboxes. Another very impressive album from Mr. Vainio!
Sure, this is the solo album on which Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio picks up the guitar, but the sounds that he wrangles from that instrument are not all that dissimilar from those he crafted on the final Pan Sonic album Gravitoni, and especially on the first half of their 4cd opus Kesto. There's long been a swagger to the low-slung electronic rhythm and noise that brought Pan Sonic closer to an electro-punk rockabilly sound by simulating a snarling guitar with accelerating riffs of synthesized distortion that had more in common with the growl of a motorcycle than the squelch of an 808. So, when Vainio switches out his tone generators for a guitar, he's still got all the tools to distort, corrode, and disintegrate the sounds of six strings with considerable aplomb. The drum machines, the spatialized approach to editing, the white hot shards of electricity, the swarming noise, and Vainio's ability to control all of his cacophonic sounds are all present on Life (...It Eats You Up). "Mining" is an exemplary track displaying Vainio's ability to work a brutalist noise-guitar riff into his jittery industrial groove, sounding something like a downtuned Big Black or loosened-up Godflesh. Many will comment on Vainio's cover of The Stooges "Open Up And Bleed" which strikes a glam rock strut with drum track and smolderingly dissonant guitar riffs. It must be said that Vainio's cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" on Oleva was a better choice; but this one is pretty damn good too. The rock-n-roll mimesis of these tracks disintegrates over the remainder of the album, where splinters of guitar noise pop through walls of electrified drone, ominous hums, and demolished doom-laden ambience which aren't too far from the realms of KTL or Black Boned Angel. Pretty fucking great.
Mika of Panasonic's solo album, almost an hour of squeaks, subsonic rumbles, ear piercing whistles and barely audible drones. Either your favorite record of the year or you couldn't care less...
This single from the Finnish electronica giant Mika Vainio (one half of the Pan Sonic duo) was meant to be available as a special release on Record Store Day, but it arrived about a week late. These things, of course, do happen. But we've got 'em now, and while RSD 2012 is past, these are still crazy limited, and most likely will be gone in a flash!
Mostly when Vainio records under his given name, his electronics are thoroughly abstracted and dislocated from the rhythmic strategies he produces in Pan Sonic. Those recordings tend to be strange, dream-time excursions of Tesla coil charges and mad-scientist fizzle, but here on this single, Vainio returns to the 'rhythm', which has long been his strong suit. The A side is grinding, shuffle-techno number whose heavy rhythmic swagger and cycloramic distortion locks in step with the Pan Sonic albums Kesto and Gravitoni. The B side is a tad mellower with a groovy noirish rhythm, but equally as dark. One time pressing of 750 copies!
Revitty? Might that have something to do with Martin Rev? It's hard to say if the word means anything other than simple being a title for this solo project from Mika Vainio, one of the two shockheaded Finns behind Pan Sonic. As the electron wrangler for Suicide, Martin Rev has clearly been a major influence on Vainio's work, especially in how to extend electronic sounds through dynamic usage of pattern, repetition, and variation. Both Pan Sonic and Suicide have always been known for the rhythmic pounding of their scalding electric minimalism; yet in most of Vainio's solo work, the rhythmic structures are merely hinted at through nuanced implications or entirely done away with in the spirit of grand abstractions. What's left for Vainio's sound sculpting is raw energy often recklessly unleashed in radioactive bursts with only ghostly hints at a pulsing electricity within. So maybe we're grasping at straws to add some context to this work, but it's still a mighty fine piece of Finnish electronic abstraction, chock full of bleakness and aggression.
Best known as half of the minimalist techno duo Pan Sonic with Ilpo Vaisainen, Mika Vainio has crafted a variety of electro-acoustic techniques that bare little resemblance to his contemporaries in glitched electronica. Marked as much by his use of space as by the quality of his abstraction of sound, Vainio's recordings under his given name even stand apart from his solo projects such as �, Tekonivel, and Philus. As Vainio, he has shed all of the intertwining rhythmic assualts found elsewhere, but continues to pursue a crystalline frigidity in his investigations of sound. "Sokeiden Maassa Yksisilmainen On Kuningas" (which translated from the Finnish as "In the Land of the Blind One-Eyed Is King") opens with a harsh blast of digitized noise that settles down into a ominous soundscape punctuated by a flanging bass pulse and distant isolationist drones. Smatterings of prolonged silence take up a considerable amount of time within Vainio's album, and provide parallels to the French attitudes of musique concrete (i.e. Lionel Marchetti, Luc Ferrari, etc.) But it's drones that give Vainio's work such dynamism and expressivity, at times standing in as sustained chords from a grimy organ and others as creepy swells of "Forbidden Planet" style electronics.
Time Examined is a monograph that documents Mika Vainio's scores for installation, film, theater, and performance, sounding very much like the work that Vainio has been releasing through Touch in recent years. As most folks probably already know, Vainio is half of the minimalist techno project Pan Sonic, but his solo work has become increasingly devoid of rhythm, with suspended tones, industrially-minded field recordings, prolonged electrical gasps, explorations into signal decay, and metallic echoes cast upon a black canvas of expansive nothingness. These installations within employ numerous visual cues - vintage clocks, old lightbulbs, transistor radios, vacuum tubes, Soviet-era electrical components, industrial films from the 1940s, and other ephemeral equipment from science laboratories from a past era. There had always been something elegantly retrograde about Vainio's electronic tinkerings with sound, and his installation work certainly reinforces this reading into his work. The accompanying 92 page book features tons of images from these installations, films, performances, and dance pieces with accompanying texts from CM von Hausswolff and Daniela Cascella. The first of the two cds features scores from over the past 15 years; and the second disc features the tone-plus-bleep split 1997 release Mikro Makro that Vainio produced alongside Carsten Nicolai (then recording just as Noto). A very nicely designed document!
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Following the bleak shiftings of sound on his albums "Okno" and "Ydin", Vainio (who also works in Pan Sonic and has a list of pseudonyms including �, Kentolevi, Tekonivel, and Philus) sets up the electrostatic buzz of his Complex Sound Generator against the body cavity throb of huge slo-mo beats. An excellent (if only 20 minutes long, lacking in artwork, and very hard-to-find) document from this AQ-beloved electronica artist.
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'Ydin' is a limited edition release of 750 copies of dark haunting electronic minimalism. Raster has proclaimed this to be best solo project from Vainio (of Pan Sonic, 0, Philus, Kentolevi, Tekonivel). Certainly it's in the running. As one of Vainio's non-beat oriented psychoacoustic compositions, Ydin is an exploration of electricity buzzing with delicate pulses, slashing noises, and eerie reverberations. Excellent!
The second in the "Invisible Archecture" series of live collaborations from Audiosphere is Christian Fennesz and Mika Vainio from Pan Sonic. Housed like the Jeck / Tetreault / Yoshihide album in the annoying "super jewel box," this features a 34 minute
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Mika Vainio of Pan(a)sonic and Sahko fame, Pita of Mego, and minimalist Charlemange Palestine each composed and performed a piece for machines (duh) that include the electric siren and 'bell tree'. The one collaboration between Pita and Mika Vainio is certainly worth the price of admission alone... 12 minutes of sublime murky beep and click composed entirely out of the processed sounds of typewriters!!!
Panasonic team up with Alan Vega of Sucide fame for a full-length!
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Vaisanen is one half of Pan Sonic with Mika Vainio, and presents his contribution to what may be the coolest series for 1999. Noton / Raster has commissioned 12 electro-minimalists to reconstitute 20 minutes for the next millenium. Vaisanen is clearly the brutalist of Pan Sonic (where as Vainio is the sublimist) presenting harsh tones coupled with electronica 4/4 pulses.
