Ilpo Vaisanen hasn't had nearly as prolific a solo career as Mika Vainio - his companion in Pan Sonic who has a plethora of solo projects under his own name and as Ø, Philus, Tekonivel, and Kentolevi. "Asuma" is actually his first full album, finding a good home on Mego. After his electro-rhythm crunch which he contributed to Raster / Noton's "20 to 2000" series and a hard to find 12" of similar post-techno damage, we were surprised that his debut solo project had more more in common with Vainio's dreamy electro-acoustic collages.
"Asuma" acoustically feels as if it is intentionally paralleling the optical phenomenon of a mirage -- with wavering textures that never provide much definition to objects near the horizon in an environment of oppressive heat. Vaisanen keeps the subtle rhythmic elements (perhaps generated by voltage fluctuations rather than drum machines) submissive to the hot-wired buzzing drones from ill-tempered cable groundings. Really sublime and quite unassuming.
Another fantastic release from the brilliantly named Yarn Lazer label. This one from Honey Owens who also does time in Jackie O Motherfucker. We mentioned it elsewhere on this list, but there definitely seems to be a preponderance of vocal based music surfacing lately, Grouper, Bastard Wing, Pump Kinn, Lichens, and Valet also uses the voice as a major component of her sound. Twisting and stretching it into broad sonic strokes and dreamy drones. But it's not just vocals, Owens also weaves darkly delicate little sound worlds, of muted tribal percussion, dark cavernous rumbles, lots of buzz and creak, alien transmissions, clattery minimal percussion, crumbling guitar grit, murky swirls of reverb and delay, the perfect sonic backdrop for all manner of processed and unprocessed vocals, ranging from sultry chanteuse like croon, to chopped and delayed Boredomsy "boop boop"s to breathy ambiance. Really beautiful and understated.
Packaged in simple and striking silk-screened cardboard sleeves.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. WE ONLY HAVE ABOUT 30 AND ONCE THEY ARE GONE THAT'S IT!!
Brand new vinyl only 12" ep from long time aQ fave Honey Owens and her (often) one woman project Valet. We've been raving about Valet for ages, since the first few cd-r's on Owens' Yarn Lazer cd-r label. Her sound has definitely grown more refined, gotten a bit more polished even, but still manages to sound intimate and fuzzy, warm and languid, dreamy and druggy.
False Face Society is another fantastic collection of diamond eyed free folk drift, with Valet now expanded to a quartet, and a lot less reverb than on past outings, so less murk and mumble, in exchange for something a bit more crystalline. The vocals are still delivered in a darkly druggy haze, but the music now glistens and glimmers, shines and sparkles, the combination at once ethereal and ephemeral, lush and layered. And all very dreamlike.
Imagine some dark meandering free folk, slowed waaaaaaay down, dipped in acid and then played back frame by frame, a stop motion sprawl of flutter and whir, of woozy warble and unmoored psychedelia. The guitars are spidery and spare, effects are looped within soft clouds of slow shifting textures and spaced out melodies and Honey O's angelic soporific croon.
The single song-ed A side amps up a bit part way through, the drums get tribal, and the various abstract strands of sound and melody coalesce into some seriously hypnotic high end shimmer, transformed into a weirdly propulsive bit of Sunroof! like ur-drone, the guitars gradually growing more buzzy and distorted.
Two shorter songs n the B side, the first all spaced out synth blurts and distant drifting psych guitars, moaning strings, slivers of feedback and barely there wordless vox, while the second finds Honey O. tackling "Rainbow" all by her lonesome, and yeah, we're talking about THAT "Rainbow", as in Boris and Michio Kurihara's "Rainbow". Here it becomes something super minimal and tripped out, tons and tons of space, reverbed emptiness, shot through with delicate traces of melody, hushed voices, wah wah guitar unfurls lazily, muted understated percussion lurks beneath soft swirls of minimal buzz, and of course Honey O.'s sultry FX-wreathed vocals, the guitars getting more and more psychedelic, over a backdrop that seems content to just hover and shimmer and drift. Druggy, languorous and so so lovely.
Packaged in super heavy, full color sleeves, pressed on thick black vinyl, with a photocopied insert, and a download card, so you can get these tracks for your iPod (although, when we tried, we couldn't figure out where or how to download the tracks on the Mexican Summer website).
We've been pretty enamored of this whole new ambient processed vocal dreamdrone movement, our favorites probably being Grouper and Valet, both capable of turning simple vocal melody and some old FX into gorgeous drifty epics. We were warned / promised that this new Valet single was nothing like the rest of her recorded out put, supposedly it was the prettiest and most straight ahead thing she's recorded, and damn if that ain't the truth, not to say this isn't still trippy and druggy and space-y, it most definitely is, it just happens to be more folky and, well, song-like.
It's almost straight ahead, simple guitars drift and wave, shimmer and sparkle, amidst a soft background of distant drones and soft whirs, but the vocals are way up in the mix, smokey and sultry, very torch song, still bathed in reverb, but more for mood than obfuscation. A languid late night ballad, a throaty croon singing melancholic tales over that spidery minor key slowcore backdrop, definitely reminds us of Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500.
The flipside is more of the Valet we're used to, which balances the folkier flip quite nicely, a bit of spaced out shimmer, looped melodies, and blurred vocals set adrift in soft gently flowing streams of abstract ambience, and murky moodiness. So lovely.
SUPER LIMITED! Pressed on clear gold vinyl.
These days, Portland seems to be at the epicenter of a new wave of seriously creative DIY underground 'noise' rock. From the last Yellow Swans record to the wonderfully incestuous Marriage Records crew, there have been a seriously ridiculous number of great releases in the last couple years. The thing is, though, that while you could argue that there is a "Portland sound," every project is totally distinct, so you can't really go lumping them all into some generic category. Well, Honey Owens' newest release under the Valet moniker is absolutely no exception. It's absolutely amazing. If you've been following her work, and you were lucky enough to grab one of the Fire/Beachside 7"s, you have probably noticed a trend toward more structured and more accessible songs. The pop-ophile in us who loves hooks and pretty melodies was pretty excited, while the nerdy drone-monger side was seriously scared. "What if she goes too far? Too poppy?"
Alas, Naked Acid is simultaneously a seamless blend of previous works, and -- yes -- a step toward tracks that are more easily digestible. It's like Fripp & Eno had a hippie baby with Karen Dalton and Tangerine Dream. But through it all, one thing that keeps us more than happy is Honey's voice. It's gorgeous, but not at all fragile. Not even so much confident. Instead, it seems beautifully unconcerned with those sorts of paradigms. The overall feeling is one of blissful engagement with melody and texture. Analog synth-sounding drones, gentle strumming, then suddenly everything is heightened by vocals and searing psych guitars. Just like a good movie, the final impression of any artistic experience is at least partially governed by the ending. On Naked Acid, the second to last song is "Fire" from the eponymous 7", which quietly dies down before bringing us to the final piece, a techno song. While on paper it may sound off-putting, it somehow works. If you can picture everything else about this record somehow being woven around some sort of late '90s Detroit techno, created in the wake of Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, then you've got a good idea. Maybe the reason it works so well is simply because it hints at unpredictable ambitions of Ms. Honey Owens, and we've got to say, the future is looking pretty good. Absolutely, wholeheartedly recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
So, what exactly is a "brutal orchestra"? That's what this Japanese band describes themselves as, and their brand of loud, dynamic, droning chamber prog with violins and piano vying with wordless vocals (and bass, and drums, and turntables, and electronics, and etc.) in an constantly swelling, cinematic onslaught is certainly orchestral, and kinda brutal (volume, noise, density) but also beautiful. So, OK, brutal orchestra it is. And making 'em even a bit more brutal than they might otherwise be, they've got special guest Merzbow bringing some additional noise n' distortion to the proceedings. Among other guests is, on vocals, Jarboe of the Swans (shades of her collab with Justin Broadrick a while back, as there's a Jesu-ishness to this, somewhat). Also apparently drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins fame appears here, and a few Boredoms related folks contribute too. So, some high powered personnel present, and put to use!
There's two loooong tracks on this album, one with Jarboe, the other with Merzbow, "Sea" (24:43) and "Land" (24:36), titled after things both of which unhappily have proven cruel and threatening to the beleaguered populace of Japan in recent days. Their elemental power is portended here, in the build-build-build ups of these ominous, abstract, slowly unfolding compositions, making this release fit in well with the doomdirge side of Important's avant roster, for sure.
May or may not be representative of Vampillia's usual sound, we've seen some YouTube videos that portray them as much more of a surreal, circus-y affair, a facepainted freakshow vibe of artrock absurdity. There's hints of that here, but the entirety of this has more of a coherent, atmospheric impact, almost like a Miasmah label release multiplied in intensity and amplification.
Yet another electronic improvisation featuring Christian Fennesz, which are becoming as banal and commonplace as "electronica compilations featuring Kid 606". "Dawn" was recorded in Berlin in November, 2000 with Fennesz performing with Peter Van Bergen on
Those Vinyl On Demand boxsets are a very tempting proposition. Some are no brainers - SPK, The Hafler Trio, and John Duncan all offered up utter classics of unreleased or impossible to find recordings spanning multiple pieces of wax and housed inside handsome packaging. But others are a bit too obscure to fork over well over a hundred bucks for an unknown quantity. Van Kaye & Ignit were one of those terminally obscure minimal wave projects whose collected works had been anthologized through a massive 5lp boxset on Vinyl On Demand. It came and went as too much of an expense for us to invest in. Thankfully Dark Entries has extracted a good chunk of that material in the form of this 2lp set, plus the tracks from the duos first seven inch not found on that VoD set. Van Kaye & Ignit (nee Ed Van Kasteren and Ignatine Bekken) began their fruitful collaborations in the late '70s with the former hailing from more of a punk background and the latter from the realm of performance art, with both sharing an infatuation with DIY electronics. A Slight Delay was a cassette release the band self-published on their own Ding Dong Records, which later would go on to release works by the Legendary Pink Dots, Bene Gesserit, and that amazing Andre De Saint-Obin album. The idiosyncratic melding of experimental modelling, pop-song naivete, and inventive use of electronics found in all of those other bands is something that Van Kaye & Ignit share. Given a spacious Martin Hannett production, the turbine electronic stabs and spry drum programming of "Beach" could have been a Hacienda hit for Factory Records, but as it stands, it's just one of many deft synth-wave / mutant-disco / synth-punk tunes on A Slight Delay. While that track's an instrumental along with about half of those found on this 2lp set, Van Kaye and Ignit do share the vocal duties when called for, with Ignit being the stronger of the two with her Nina Hagen theatricality and Van Kayen adopting the untrained approach of Genesis P-Orridge. Along with the Belgian comrades of Bene Gesserit, Pseudo Code, and the rest of the Insane Music network, Van Kaye & Ignit have a sympathetic sound to those antipodean malcontents Severed Heads. Another great find from Dark Entries; and we gotta wonder if there's going to be a cottage industry of somebody going through the Vinyl On Demand catalogue to reissue those reissues in more economical chunks.
The launch of yet another cd-r label, this one, cleverly titled Seedy R!, is a sub label of the already kick ass PseudoArcana label run by Antony Milton. This disc is supposedly the result of a van trip up the Eastern coast of Australia, in one tiny van, packed to the rafters with Milton as well as the dronepsychrock band 6Majik9, and of course musical instruments, fast food containers, dirty clothes, sleeping bags, lots of pot, and most importantly, a tape recorder!
The result is an abstract lo-fi tribal jam, a stripped down Wicker Man on wheels, a Sunburned No Neck road trip, the air thick with smoke, as well as dense swirls of keening snakecharmer like melody, detuned guitar scrabble, tin can percussion, fuzzy kazooscapes, long dreamy drones, but instead of any sort of effects, the entire recording session is swathed in that immediately recognizable 'driving-down-the-road-with-the-windows-wide-open' sound, a natural delaychorusreverbdistortion, that adds a fuzzy hiss and a whipping whir to these skeletal psych jams. Pretty dang cool.
Packaged in a brown paper sleeve, with a hand stamped 'R' on one side, and a map of said van journey on the other.
Another killer tape from one of our favorite cassette labels (along with two others on this week's list), The Tapeworm, this one right up our alley for sure, a collection of minimal electronic music, a sort of mutant dark abstract techno, all created from an arsenal of "crippled tape machines", used to transform recordings of tape hiss, broken radios, a defective TV set from the fifties, some sine wave generators, and no doubt lots of other other cool junk, into a pulsing, pulsating array of skeletal sonic skitter. An army of 24 damaged reel to reel tape players all creating a hauntingly spare sprawl of weirdly psychedelic house music, the sort of lo-fi, industrial tinged ultra minimal techno that will definitely hit the spot for fans of Silent Servant, Sandwell District, Shed, Terrence Dixon as well as Porter Ricks and other Chain Reaction outfits. Moody, murky, primitive and raw, but still darkly groovy, tranced out and hypnotic.
We have become increasingly enamored with the recordings of Dutch renaissance and baroque lute player Jozef Van Wissem, whether it be through his solo output or through his many collaborations with guitarists Gary Lucas, Tetuzi Akiyama and most recently James Blackshaw (Brethren Of The Free Spirit). You wouldn't think that there would be such wide-ranging approaches to such an antique instrument, yet with each release, we're let into a new realm of sonic possibility. Sometimes it's classical deconstructions; using palindromes, mirroring, backwards compositions and cut-up techniques. Sometimes it's more Takoma-style fingerpicking and bottleneck playing. Or more avant, flinging sparse and reductive fragments of loosely connected tones into large voids of silence. Or augmented by subtle electronics and field recordings of airports and other public spaces. On his latest release A Priori, arguably his prettiest and most engaging to date, Van Wissem pushes forward the beauty of the melodic form but frames it in a stark restraint. Using a glacial pendulum-like progression and D minor tuning (the most melancholic of all tunings), Wissem establishes an up-down-up riff taking a pause between each turn before repeating, letting the tones ring out over the empty spaces. Occasionally he lets subtle nuances like an octave change or a bottleneck run appear, yet he takes great pains to avoid filling the space unnecessarily. With each song on A Priori, he explores this limitation to its outermost boundaries that connects each piece to the whole, forcing our headspace to slow down to this intensely meditative pace in order to experience its lovely tonal revelations. If Earth 2 was transcribed for renaissance lute, it might sound something like this. Liner notes by David Tibet of Current 93. Highly recommended!
A few of us were very lucky to catch Jozef Van Wissem's recent AQ instore where he played his new 13 Course Swan Neck Baroque Lute, a super long and intricately exquisite variation of the lute we've never seen before, that he wielded mightily, rocking out heavy metal guitar style, and also played whilst walking around the store like a medieval troubadour (check our blog for pictures!). While unfortunately it wasn't our best attended instore, Van Wissem played like it was, and we were graciously rewarded with an intimate and beautifully hypnotizing performance. NEXT time, don't miss him!
And that is what you will find with his latest (vinyl-only) release on Important, Ex Patris. On vinyl only (for now at least), Ex Patris (The Fathers) gives us four new tracks of gorgeous plucked string majesty. Building upon his repertoire of mirrored palindromic compositions, he focuses this release on layered and repeating melodies rather than sparse reductions of past releases. At times, we wonder if he might be using overdubs, something we haven't noticed before in his recordings or if it is just that his new lute offers more depth and range than the ones he used in the past. Hard to tell, but oh so easy to become seduced by its magnificent spell!
The cover of this latest Jozef Van Wissem release is one of our favorite photographs of him, showing the mighty lute player wearing a studded leather wrist cuff, head low with hair hanging down, wielding his instrument like a heavy metal guitar. And while he doesn't necessarily "shred" the same way a metal axeman would, there's definitely a connecting thread between Van Wissem's hermetically spiritual lute extrapolations and the doom-laden esotericism of today's drone metal practitioners.
Thematically based on the first chapter of Genesis, the seven pieces here are at first played forward then reversed in an attempt to create the feeling that the pieces have no beginning or end. Van Wissem often uses mirror imaging and palindromic takes on classical lute music to create these compositions, but more and more, he's using plenty of space and restraint placing a greater emphasis on the concentrated listening experience, instead of musically filling the space. Thus the pieces are becoming ever more glacial and dramatic, highlighting the dark beauty of creation but never denying the slow decay of death in all its infinite and ever spiraling momentum. Transcendent!
Renaissance music? Field recordings? Palindromes? A photo of sex toys on the back of the cd booklet? Creative Dutch composer and lute player Jozef van Wissem both mystifies and delights us with this original and unusual album of avant-garde lute music. He has a background in the Renaissance lute, which he applies here by taking historical lute pieces and rewriting them as mirror-image palindromes, that sound the same played either forwards or backwards (hence the mirror of the title). Further distancing the material from his early sources, van Wissem adds electronics and computer-processed (again, mirror-image flipped) field recordings of ambient airport sounds (in homage to Brian Eno, perhaps). One track also features a guest playing "palindrome percussion". The sex toys, we're still not sure about though. This combination of classical lute plucking and the ambient airfield recordings reveals a wealth of placid beauty... it's minimal and melancholic music that recalls the trance-inducing work of avant-acoustic guitarists like late period John Fahey and just-intonation guitarist Rod Poole. We're also reminded of the likes of Giuseppe Ielasi and Tetuzi Akiyama (the latter with whom van Wissem has recorded an improv duet, reviewed here a few months ago). So very pretty -and- intriguing, both sparse and detailed, van Wissem's conceptual compositions thwart traditional idioms without abandoning the tranquil beauty for which the Renaissance lute is known... Recommended. If you're gonna own just one avant-garde lute and electronics album, this is it!!
We always knew that famed indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch had good taste in music, judging by the soundtracks to his movies, but we were only vaguely aware of his extracurricular musical activities. In fact it was with some surprise that we recently encountered him on record, as a guest guitarist in a cameo appearance on the latest 12" by avant-punks Fucked Up! Meanwhile, AQ fave experimental Renaissance lutist, Jozef Van Wissem (who, yes, is also the ONLY experimental lutist we know, though if there were others he'd probably still be our favorite, after his rocked out performance at a memorable aQ instore awhile back) has collaborated in the past with a variety of interesting personages - Gary Lucas, Smegma, James Blackshaw. And now, Jim Jarmusch! Who actually played on a track on Van Wissem's previous album, The Joy That Never Ends, one we stocked and listed on our website but somehow never managed to get around to reviewing, which we should have 'cause really everything we've heard by Van Wissem has been excellent and that one is no exception... Anyway, we'll try to make up for that lapse by reviewing this new one, his full-on duo disc with Jarmusch. And it's a beaut.
Slowly and steadily, Van Wissem plucks prettily at the strings of his instrument, while Jarmusch's electric guitar hovers gently in the background, an ambient wash. As the disc goes on, though, Jarmusch becomes more assertive, accompanying Van Wissem like a ghostly, twanging echo, until eventually the cyclical note patterns chiming from Van Wissem's lute are almost fully enveloped by Jarmusch's doleful dense guitar distortion, approaching Ulaan Khol or Urthona levels of softly droning bliss. His past association with Neil Young (Dead Man) definitely makes sense...
The disc as a whole, at all points in the Van Wissem/Jarmusch duet, is meandering, melancholic, mesmeric... The final track, "He Is Hanging By His Shiny Arms, His Heart An Open Wound With Love", is perhaps the loveliest, and happiest, all-acoustic, brought to a close with a brief spoken supplication from Jarmusch, reciting words by St. John of the Cross.
So, another Van Wissem winner - and we'd definitely be happy to hear more electric guitar emanations from Jarmusch, how 'bout a solo album?
By the way... is it possible that Jarmusch and Van Wissem got together because both men are members of a secret society called The Sons Of Lee Marvin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_Lee_Marvin)? Jarmusch is known to be a founding member, and Van Wissem looks like he might qualify...
The Vance Orchestra had piqued our interest from a very curious addition to the Drone Records series of singles, much like Nurse With Wound taking a bunch of arrhythmic loops and constructing a whirring oblique drone. "No More Boleros" certainly follows suit with these cyclical repititions of manipulated field recordings and dadaist posturing.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Here's a pretty fantastic discovery we just made (although the disc was released a few years ago). It's a seventy-minute long single track entitled "Neheh", the result of four members of French prog-weirdos Magma jamming together one night in '73. We thought this would sound like a scaled down Magma, or some sort of jazz improv session. But, instead, this neither. It's absolutely unlike the jackboot precision of Magma circa '73's "Mechanik Destructiw Kommandoh" (which was in fact recorded, like, the next day!). Although this does share the esoteric spiritual aspects of Magma, there's none of Magma's grandiose rock/jazz/Wagner fusion here. Rather, it's a late-night excursion into kosmiche avant-hippy freakout realms, starting with unearthly vocal chant/drone and moving into percussion spasms, clarinet eruptions, and organ improv. So, instead of mother-band Magma, this should be compared to Amon Duul, the Sun City Girls, the No Neck Blues Band, Yahowah 13, and (closer to home) Thuja. Beautiful and wild, totally inspired. It's strange that this went unreleased until the '90s-- maybe Vander and Co. didn't want to dilute the Magma concept with something so loose and organic and, uh, 'of the times'. Still, it's one of our absolute favorite Magma-related documents, and should even appeal to those scared off by Magma's prog/fusion chops. Recommended!! (By the way, along with this, we've restocked a bunch of Magma classics, and we definitely have 'em at the best price you'll probably find anywhere.)
Christian Vander = Magma. He's the mastermind behind the monumental music of spiritual prog/rock/jazz group Magma, one of the late twentieth century's (and now early 21st century's) obscure musical visionairies. Not, perhaps, in the godlike catagory with his hero John Coltrane, but a genius nonetheless. This double cd set is brand new on Magma's Seventh Records, but consists mostly of tracks recorded between 1972 and 1975, with a two minute piano/voice coda newly recorded this year. It's Vander solo, purely solo (live in concert), on his main instrument: the drums! Two discs's worth of epic, incredible drum soloing, yes! That might sound tedious and self-indulgent, but, if you're in the right frame of mind/soul, it's not. It's really a religious experience, as Vander turns his drum kit into a virtural orchestra for his personal spiritual celebration via percussion. Some vocals make an appearance, such as the bizarre high pitched yelps and low guttural proclamations at the start of the twenty-two minute "Korusz III" but mostly, it's drums, lots of drums...and some mysterious indeterminate noises...if there every was anybody who could coax 'feedback' out of an acoustic drum kit, I suppose Vander could... I haven't quite deciphered the French liner notes, but apparently the Korusz concept has something to do with the elements, with the cymbals symbolizing (cymbalizing?) fire, etc. There's also lots of great black & white pictures here of a seemingly-possessed Vander (who always looks a bit cave-man) behind his kit, wild hair flailing, beating the drums with abandon. In sum, true Magma fans (no, not fans--there must be a more appropriate word: followers? devotees? acolytes?) need this. Maybe not anybody else could handle it. You remember "Metallica Drummer"? Well, this is for the "Magma Drummer" in you... Amazing, exhausting, AND energizing.
The long unavailable solo soundtrack debut of Greek composer Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (aka Vangelis) finally gets an official reissue. The soundtrack to this obscure 1970 French film directed by Henry Chapier (so obscure that the only info IMDB has on it is this eight minute opening sequence found here: http://www.ina.fr/video/VDD08000001/sex-power-video.html), has only seen previous release as a bootleg cd-r and it has been rumored that Vangelis himself has suppressed many attempts to reissue it. Sex-Power, starring a young Jane Birkin, is similar to Zabriskie Point in that it seems to be a desert quest for meaning by young beautiful intellectuals giving up on society for more earthly concerns like walking in the desert naked, and apparently having lots of sex... But regardless of the arty tone of the film, in our book, you can't go wrong with the music of early seventies Vangelis. Early Vangelis recordings are often marked by exotic instrumentation (tribal percussion, water gongs, flutes, and ethnic string instruments) as well as piano, early synthesizer and ethereal female vocal choruses. Like Morricone's majestic early soundtrack work, Sex-Power has a strange free-folk mystery of lilting passages and beguiling pensive mystical soundscapes. It was recorded the same year Vangelis's prog band Aphrodite's Child released their final album, the legendary 666.
Recommended for fans of the soundtrack work of Jean-Claude Vannier, Lubos Fiser, and Alain Goraguer, and of course very limited!
Another missive from the Wooden Wand Universe, a dizzying world so filled with hokum and smoke, character changes and rotating pseudonyms that it's really hard to keep things straight. We may be only half-right on the details, so bear with us. Vanishing Voice, (the choral and instrumental Body of the Wooden Wand Mind) taking advantage of Wooden Wand's momentary dalliance with spiritual advisor Satya Sai and the Sky High Band in California, has retreated into the dark woods of Norway (or perhaps Vermont?) to imbibe in some dirty pagan Ur-folk jams. Kicking up a whirring dust devil vortex of clatter and murk, the title track is a side-long excursion and sounds fresh off the Gypsy Freedom sessions except minus the free jazz horns and howling vocals. The three ghostly tracks on side B, offer up some haunted banjo picking, subdued chanting, wolf howls and something we can only describe as "baby skree", which sounds like the mewling of a lost baby animal whose cries are unraveling like thread through the branches. Remember that scene in the Blair Witch Project, where the lost campers wander into that grove of trees with all those creepy hanging stick sculptures and strangely wet piles of rocks?
Well, this record sounds like it was recorded there. Truly Fucking Spooky!
On their debut outing for Important, Vanishing Voice (sans Wooden Wand) give us another heaping spoonful of freaked out forest psyche madness. Composed of two tracks (with a mysteriously extra song title but no song), the first is the epic 40 minute title track (or it could be called "Peace Symbols", -we're very confused on the song listing), which takes on a long whirling vortex of clattering percussion (provided by Magik Marker's Pete Nolan) and damaged electronic passages before propelling momentously forward with a Krautrock-like acid jam. The second song (we think it's called "The Last Evil") begins with a twisted sing-a-long that reminds us of "On Top of Old Smokey" but perhaps sung by the mutant children from the recent remake of The Hills Have Eyes, before developing into further mutated lo-fi weirdness.
Some reissues of long-lost gems arrive here with little fanfare and turn out to be great nonetheless. This one though, came our way emblazed with blurbs proclaiming its immense awesomeness quoting the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Tim Gane, Jarvis Cocker and David Holmes. And guess what? Those guys do indeed know what they're talking about! This IS pretty fantastic. Here we have an action-packed instrumental concept album whose title translates into English as The Child Killer Of The Flies, which musically narrates a simple but creepy story by Serge Gainsbourg (written *after* he heard the album, not before, and included the liner notes, explaining each track title) about the horrific revenge of flies on a child who had tortured them. This musical story-telling is by way of schizoid arrangements of tracks that range in sound from groovy pop to jazz to avant-garde tape music to fuzz guitar rock! Sounds good, eh? Good n' weird for sure.
L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches is a "Fellini-esque psychedelic symphony" originally released (but poorly distributed and relegated to general obscurity) in 1972, credited to a unknown group called Isolitudes. The man behind Insolitudes, though, was one Jean-Claude Vannier, a musician and producer from the happening '60s French pop ("Ye Ye music") scene who had scored film soundtracks and collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg, most famously providing the arrangements for Gainsbourg's highly-rated L'Histoire De Melody Nelson album (the reissue of which we wish we had in stock also, but haven't been able to get a hold of lately). This record is thereby cited as the follow-up to that one-of-a-kind conceptual classic. Itself it's pretty much one-of-a-kind too. Funky and groovy, as well as deliriously, disorientingly hallucinogenic, this will hit you with lush string arrangements one moment, sound effects of sheer terror the next... it's psych, it's prog, it's funk, it's musique concrete. There's even a chorus of car horns put to good use here! It's the freakiest 'sploitation soundtrack that never was. This reissue includes two bonus tracks from a rare 7" single entitled Point D'Interrogation, and also boasts extensive and informative (and quite laudatory) liner notes by DJ Andy Votel. Very recommended!
The name might not seem immediately familiar to you, but avid readers of the aQ list might remember Vantzou from her membership in aQ faves The Dead Texan, a Stars Of The Lid offshoot fronted by the Adam Wiltzie half of SOTL, and whose self titled (and now sadly out of print) full length on Kranky from a few years back, was a huge favorite around here. Vantzou provided the stunning visuals on the accompanying dvd, and also provided vocals, but here demonstrates quite a Stars Of The Lid like flair for dramatic cinematic soundscapery. The tracks here dark and dreamily brooding, all lush strings draped over distant mysterious drones, subtle smears of echo and reverb add just the right amount of mystery, layered swirls of sound billow around hazy washed out melodies, slow glacial swells of sound which give way to more traditional chamber music, only to quickly slip back into warm whirls of hauntingly majestic drift, notes and tones left to float and gently decay, sinking gradually through layers of reverberent shimmer, blurred and gently smeared into something that sounds more more akin to Indignant Senility or The Caretaker, and at times, like on record closer "Joggers", indeed like an even darker and more abstract Stars Of The Lid.
The making of this record is almost as fascinating as the record itself. Vantzou, a member of the Dead Texan (along with one of the Stars Of The Lid guys), delivers her second solo record, which was conceived of and composed over a four year period, while she was an SAT exam mathematics tutor. She wrote the whole record using synthesizers and mutated samples, and only then went about notating the music for a proper ensemble, strings, woodwinds, brass, piano, etc. And the results are stunning. The opening track sounds like it could be a Stars Of The Lid track, big swirling clouds of sounds, flecked with starlit piano, lush and lovely and layered, far too short at just two minutes, could easily have listened to a record length version of just this song, but Vantzou and her ensemble have much more to offer, whether it's the haunting, contemplative cinematic drift of track two "Going Backwards To Recover That Which Was Left Behind", a moody balladic dream-dirge, that wreaths pointillist piano in swaths of swoonsome strings and dramatic horns, or the ominously orchestral "Brain Fog" which sounds like Bernard Hermann composing a 20th century classical version of a John Carpenter score, at least until it settles back into something again more Stars Of The Lids-ish. The whole record is darkly dramatic, and VERY soundtracky, alternately achingly lovely, hushed and harrowing, droned out and drowsy, softly psychedelic, with a few tracks introducing a very Arvo Part like choral element, while others sprawl languorously, all dusky and firelit, and a few, get downright epic and bombastic. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff.
A list or two back we reviewed the debut record on Kranky from Christina Vantzou, a gorgeously drifty and dreamy collection of washed out soundscapery, that had us all smitten, which made perfect sense once you realized she was also a member of Stars Of The Lid offshoot The Dead Texan, contributing both vocals AND visuals. That Dead Texan record was hugely popular around here, and Vantzou's record explored similar territory, but definitely with it's own subtle twist. Laying lush strings over ethereal chamber music, weaving delicate tinkling piano into lush majestic chordal swells, the vibe new agey and tranquil for sure, but also soundtracky, and dreamily dramatic, and so here, on this newly released companion, Vantzou presents that record again, this time accompanied by her visuals, which are and striking and sweetly surreal as the sounds themselves. From gorgeous shots of forests and rolling hills, overlaid with some sort of black sigil that seems to be burning into the film, to strange almost old school video game looking 8 bit interference, and from flickering old films colorized and druggily warped, to gorgeous abstract swirls an stripes of soft focus color, bleary and smeared and utterly dreamlike, often melding two or more of those techniques into even more striking hybrids. And thankfully, unlike most groups who think that any cool old films or abstract visuals will make their unexciting band a bit more exciting to watch, Vantzou's films seem impossibly linked to the sounds, as if that record we reviewed was actually a score, and now we're finally seeing/hearing everything as she originally intended. And the sound themselves, reimagined WITH visuals, conveys the sense that these are some mysterious set of old nature films, or archival footage from another world, definitely another time, dusty old filmstrips dug out of an old trunk, the images warm and familiar, but just slightly warped, as if they were glimpses into another world.
And while the visuals are quite varied for sure, to systematically describe each one would definitely ruin some of the joy of discovery that comes with viewing this for the first time, needless to say, they are all interconnected, woven into one grand sweeping, ever-shifting visual feast, replete with old filmstrip style chapter (song) titles, which only make it feel even more like some recently rediscovered, long lost archival footage, from another time, and perhaps another world.
Included is a bonus disc, which finds the whole record remixed / reimagined / reinterpreted by a handful of folks, many of whom should be familiar to long time readers of the aQ list: Koen Holtkamp, Loscil, White Rainbow, Ernest Gibson (from aQ faves Net Shaker), Rober Lippock, Ben Vida, Dustin O'Halloran, Isan, and Montgomery Knott. The new versions range from the washed out ethereal shimmer of Koen Holtkamp, to the hazy pulsing atmospherics of Loscil, and from the murky, post industrial blur of Ernest Gibson, to the rhythmic kosmische synthwave of White Rainbow, and obviously a handful of other sonic stops in between. And as if that weren't already enough, also included on the bonus disc is a brand new song from the Dead Texan, which could very well have come from Vantzou's record as well, a lush, soft focus landscape of thick, softly undulating strings, swirling chordal layers, some delicate piano, and what could be disembodied vox, all laced with strange, heavily reverbed samples, as well as clouds of softly swirling hiss and muted static, all blurred into a gorgeous bit of melancholic cinematic ambience, which most definitely has us hankering for the new Dead Texan record as well...
Yet another Bardo Pond offshoot/side project, this time it's Bardo brothers John & Michael Gibbons, who manage to strike out for musical worlds beyond the reach of past Bardo missions, while retaining a tenuous sonic link to the Bardo Pond universe they helped create. Vapour Theories seem to be exploring their own world of drifting lilting spaced out Neo-Appalachia, simple strummed steel string guitars form the basis of the seven minute opener, and the twenty plus minute closer, while the two tracks in between are more of the abstract drone drift variety. The first track takes the buzzing steel strings and positions them above a distant psychedelic swirl of abstract psych guitar and droning saxophone, while the epic final track lets the guitars meander lazily, a gorgeously laid back soundscape of twang and strum, old time melodies wrapped in steel string buzz, lovely late afternoon dreaminess, minor key, but not really mournful, more sort of reflective and contemplative. And so lovely. The two tracks between, lean much more toward the brothers' Bardo Pond soundworld, the first, a buzzing high end drone, warm and fuzzy and super slow shifting, over a dense tangle of tablas, the second a truly blissful drift through a landscape of lazily unfurling reverb guitar, their notes suspended for ages before drifting off, melodies lazy and slowly intertwining, harmonics chiming and ringing out, a sonic pond full of delicately intersecting ripples.
For fans of Bardo Pond, the new wave of Appalachian guitar (Rose, Blackshaw, etc.) and all things dreamy and psychedelic.
Varghkoghargasmal. When we first discovered this German one man band, it was via a cassette, with a black and white photocopied cover, a washed out image of some wintry forest landscape, accompanied by the legend 'wooden metal'. Needless to say we were totally intrigued, only to discover, that there wasn't anything really that metal about it, or wooden even. Not sure if 'wooden' referred to the trees, or to acoustic guitars, but none of that mattered once we head the music inside. A twisted confusional mix of slowed down Dick Dale style surf riffage, stumbling drums, haunting melodies, warbly organs, all wrapped around a simple motorik almost krautrock groove. We had no idea what to call it, or really even what to think, other than being totally smitten, transfixed and ensorcelled. Definitely ensorcelled.
So here we have the brand new album from Avenger, the man solely responsible for Varghkoghargasmal, and if anything, it's even more haunting and mysterious, more creepy and strange, and somehow way more beautiful.
It's a difficult sound to explain, the guitars are clean, but are often still playing in a black metal style, frantic riffing or rapid picking, but just as often the guitars are spidery and minor key, unfurling lugubrious tendrils of creepy twang, or reverbed shimmer. The vocals are minimal, a hushed whisper here and there, a Viking style chant during one song, but it's mostly left to the music, which is incredibly evocative, it's like some sort of acoustic black metal, mixed with slowed down surf rock, dark languorous krautrock, and a distinct Morricone vibe as well. And then there are the drums, which by design or by happenstance, are a definite sonic focal point, as they are WAY up in the mix, and they are all over the place, the fills are chaotic, the rhythms stumble and stutter, but in their imperfections lie a truly unique sort of emotion and feeling not found in most music. The drums anchor everything, locking into foresty krautrock grooves, sputtering into dense little tumbling squalls, the prefect framework for Avenger's rickety moonlit jams.
Most of the songs creep and crawl, sometimes behind a curtain of rainfall, the sound of the forest spirits, flickering firelight, fireflies lighting up the canopy overhead, pianos pick out mournful melodies, the drums, lurching along, a perfectly imperfect accompaniment, organs wheeze, synths whir, steel strings twang, the whole thing so impossibly transcendent, effortlessly evoking ancient atmospheres and deep emotions. When the band lock into a more rocking groove, and the rhythm builds into something propulsive, the guitars stretch out into long streaks of buzzing melodies, the organ plays along like some old time music box, and the sound transforms before your ears and transports you to some truly mysterious otherworld.
There are some black metal references for sure, mostly the ambient bits of Burzum, and some of the riffing recalls suicidal black metal, albeit played with no distortion and more melancholy really than miserable, some of the more frenzied parts even sound like Iron Maiden played on acoustic guitars, and sometimes the guitars manage to sound like banjos, but still the creepiest and prettiest moments occur when the sound winds down into something much more minimal and muted, letting the keyboards weave fluttery melodies, over whirring drones and spare guitar melodies, only occasionally flecked with little flurries of haphazard drumming.
One of the few records that we can unequivocally describe as being utterly unlike anything else you will ever hear! Hauntingly beautiful, beautifully bizarre, and WAY WAY recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While we wait patiently for the long overdue reissue of the amazing 'wooden metal' masterpiece Call Of The Raven from German black metal weirdos Varghkoghargasmal, we have this split tape to tide us over, a single track from Varghkoghargasmal, and one from the even more damaged and demented H418ov21.C, who we surmise might just be the same band.
The Varghkoghargasmal is another stumbling chaotic chunk of clean guitar surf licks, bizarre, off kilter drumming, all very spare and skeletal and shuffly, lo-fi, and only black metal in spirit, as the sound is more akin to some early nineties post rock outfit, but so much more confusional and fractured. The melodies are epic and majestic, the arrangements are progressive and complex, the execution is all over the map, the drums and guitars locked tight for a stretch, only for the drums to go careening off course, while the guitar slips from muted crunch, to shimmery jangle, to weird warped off key twang and chime. Like a black metal Shaggs, or an even more loose Hypothermia, Varghkoghargasmal have easily created one of the most unique sounds in modern music. All hail WOODEN METAL.
So what's the story with H418ov21.C, other than they're named after a record by Beherit? And a Beherit record that most metal fans hated, seeing as it was all ritualistic ambient and electronic music. But that makes sense that H418ov21.C would look to those Finns for inspiration, as this is also some kind of sonic ritual. Thick throbbing downtuned bass, rumbling, grinding, droning, all beneath a cacophony of old drum machines, heavily effected, spaced out and splattery, not really playing beats so much as creating rhythmic melodies, the effect is pretty stunning, a weird almost krautrocky bit of superdistorted lowslung crunch, the closest comparison we can think of is French sonic alchemists Aluk Todolo, and odds are if you dig their throbbing stripped down rhythms, you'll dig this too. Weird and wonderful, heavy and distorted and weirdly melodic. Definitely need to hear more from these guys (this guy?). And speaking of hearing more, there's also a split 7" elsewhere on this list, featuring another chunk of fractured blackened kraut crawl...
LIMITED TO 70 COPIES (or thereabout), packaged in a super deluxe, multi panel, elaborately folded sleeve.
More "True Black Nekronoise Metal" from our man Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk! Vargr is HNB's one-man black metal outfit in the grand tradition (from Burzum through Xasthur), bringing grim guitar buzz to the fore, although it often sounds as if his raspy vocals ("nokturnally recorded in Swedish Swedish forests"!) are accompanied by vacuum cleaners or industrial grinders instead. Grim and buzzing NEKRONOISE it is regardless. No surprise since Vargr's HNB aka Lord Nordvargr was known to us originally as an experimental drone artist, a member of such dark ambient industrial outfits as Folkstorm and MZ.412 and a collaborator with the likes of Merzbow. He made his first foray into "true" black metal realms with the Vargr disc Wehrmacht Satanas reviewed here just a couple weeks ago, and this new one, released by the ever-reliable 20 Buck Spin label, is in much the same vein of extremely-noisy-even-for-the-genre black metal, a noise album in black metal guise. Or should we say, in wolf's clothing? That's what Vargr means, Wolf. The logo was done by Jazkamer's "Count" Marhaug, and there are guest guitars on track (excuse me, "hymn") eight from HNB's old collaborator, Drakh.
It's hard to say if all the Christ-hating conceits of this album are sincere, or included simply as signifiers of the black metal concept being celebrated and/or subverted... but since when was that really an issue? It certainly seems serious. Howling distortion is a language spoken in both the genres of metal and noise, and with all the the eerie isolationist ambient elements -- disembodied voices, electronic drones, echoing bootsteps -- this certainly sounds like it could come from the most dark and demented depths of the black metal's caverns of chaos, wherein dwell the likes of Abruptum, Striborg, and Wold.
Pedestrian Deposit and Emaciator are two projects that the Los Angeles noise artist Jon Borges steered toward the electro-acoustic, the drone, and even the beautiful. This was especially true for the last two Pedestrian Deposit albums Kithless and East Fork North Fork, which found Borges' emphathic electronics dialed into the chilling violin from Borges' partner Shannon Kennedy. But with Vasculae's Cultural Primitivism, Borges is all violence, all punishment, all noise. Fifty minutes of glass-gargling distortion, headrinsing overload, and downright sonic obliteration that harkens to the pre-digital era of Merzbow and the feral noise of Matthew Bower's Total. While Borges posits this album as "full circle" to his beginnings, he doesn't slump back into wall-of-noise ethos of his teen years, as he's clearly learned a thing or two about the dynamics of noise and is very much attuned to the textures that bristle and crackle through his torrents of sound. It's great to hear Borges return to the noise, somewhat like hearing those blistering noise records that Kevin Drumm cranked out after his isolationist albums Imperial Distortion and Imperial Horizon. That said, certainly not for the faint of heart, or sensitive of ear!
Akin to William Bennett's Cut Hands or perhaps to the acoustic-leaning facets of Muslimgauze or to the slightly more obscure British project O Yuki Conjugate, Vasilisk were a well-regarded Japanese outfit of ritual-industrial musicians who released a handful of albums in the late '80s. Now, they've undergone a necessary reissue campaign thanks to the Austrian imprint Steinklang. Acqua (1989) was the third and final album from the band's first incarnation. And while they's since reformed, with a couple of albums that's we've not yet heard including one with the nihilist industrial project Dissecting Table, Vasilisk have long been lumped into the continuum of industrial culture (mostly since two members of Vasilisk started out in the brutalist punk-noise trio White Hospital with Jun Konagaya later christening himself Grim), but the music of Vasilisk falls more on the hypnogogic, dreamy side of tribal esoterica. Synths, organs, flutes, and guitars float through Acqua's processional tracks. This is especially true for the lengthy title cut which has much more of the kosmische atmospherics of a Popul Vuh or even a Motion Sickness Of Time Travel, before an ominous clamor from hand-drums turns the vibe in a completely different but wholly cinematic direction. The shorter tracks follow Vasilisk's mantra-based hypnosis through acoustic rhythms, moody flute drone, and suspended ambience; but the longest piece marks one of the earliest appearances from long-standing aQ-favorite Tatsuya Yoshida, aka the ringleader of the Ruins. This is a live session recorded with Yoshida behind a drum-kit and pushing the velocity at a considerably greater speed than what Vasilisk had typically performed. Around Yoshida's Charles Hayward / Jaki Leibezeit timekeeping, the rest of Vasilisk punctuates with tumbled percussion, time-warp electric drones and more of those ghostly flutes. Limited to just 300 copies...
Probably the most fully realized of the Vasilisk records, Mkwaju was originally released via Eskimo Records in 1988 with a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a Diane Arbus print as the cover. This portrait of patients in a mental hospital, masked in their Halloween garb from what they could gather from the dustbins and forgotten closets is a potent metaphor for the autodidactic / outsider temple music that Vasilisk began creating in the mid-'80s. Unfortunately, the cd reissue campaign neglected to reproduce the original liner notes for Mkwaju, which stated: "Vasilisk's musick, as an expression of human consciousness and will, is an attempt to break through the cycle of determinacy and establish an independent existence for man... Ritual, based on the principle of gradual intensification, with ecstatic, cathartic climax, promotes the solidarity of life. Man acts as the responsible center of the rite." These rituals for Vasilisk are hypnotic in nature, with fundamental architectural drones, throat singing harmonics, and blurred miasmas of synths, tape loops, & guitars woven throughout Vasilisk's signature tribal percussive patterns. The somber, arcane atmospherics of Mkwaju align Vasilisk most closely with the ritual industrial practitioners that spawned from the early '80s metal bashing of Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Dept., and Dissecting Table, with all of that aggression tempered in favor of a ritualized solemnity cloaked in buzzing mesmer and transcendent aspirations. Like all three releases in the Vasilisk reissue campaign, this disc is limited to 300 copies.
An eccentric proposition, Vasilisk's Whirling Dervishes (1987) was the group's first album after Tomo Kuwahara and Jun Konagaya dissolved their politically charged noise/punk unit White Hospital. Konagaya kept screaming against the sky with his aptly named industrial project Grim; and Kuyahara turned inward with the ritual-industrial outfit Vasilisk. Through the connections back to White Hospital, Vasilisk had often been associated with the Japanese noise community even as their aesthetic steered clear of the aktionist bloodletting, dada nihilism, and junkyard brutalism found in every other Japanese noise outfit. Swaddled in lush reverberation and acoustic drones, Vasilisk's hypnotic, tribal percussion and occasional psych-folk jams offer a direct link to the holy minimalism of the Taj Mahal Travellers, Angus Maclise, and John Cale through the magickal liturgies of the British industrial practitioners (e.g. PTV's Themes, 23 Skidoo, Masstishaddhu, etc.) and looking forward to the pine-cone drones of the more shambolic artists from the Y2K freak-folkers (e.g. Avarus, Sunroof!, Toho Sara, etc.). The album's title track is a 22 minute excursion built up from a fundamental drone with interlocking hand-drummed rhythms punctuated by lysergically bellowed Kecak-like vocalizations, low-key Kosmische guitar work, and circular breathing chants. The shorter program pieces which flesh out the album operate mostly along those lines with the power-tool blur and militant staccato of "Bricks" and the cagey, whispered rendition of Suzanne Vega's "Cracking" (sounding more like Current 93, mind you) as the furthest axis points for Vasilisk's sensibility for miasma drone and opiated psychedelia. This reissue on Steinklang is completed with Vasilisk's contribution to RRRecord's Noise And Junk Omnibus overview of late '80s / early '90s Japanese noise - a track called "The Ritual Mask." Only 300 copies pressed...
This super limited, extremely pricey triple lp gathers up the three most recent cassette only releases from primitive gothic industrial outfit Vatican Shadow, aka Dominick Fernow, he of Prurient, Cold Cave, Christian Cosmos, Hospital Productions among other similar dark sonic pursuits. Like other recent Vatican Shadow releases we've reviewed (Ornamented Walls, Kneel Before Religious Icons), these three cassettes: Jordanian Descent, Ghosts Of Chechnya and Atta's Apartment Slated For Demolition, all travel similar sonic terrain, a claustrophobic, war-on-terror obsessed sprawl of minimal, skeletal electronica, that falls somewhere between the Eastern tinged rhythmscapes of Muslimgauze, and the more bleak beat driven projects in the God / Godflesh axis (Techno Animal, Curse Of The Golden Vampire) as well as those amazing electronic comps from way back when (Isolationism, Electric Ladyland), but imagine all of that framed through a more gothic eighties sensibility.
The first half of the Jordanian Descent tape is a sidelong tranced out, dubby, loping stretch of minimal skitter, underpinned by an ominous droned out thrum, the surrounding sonic shifts, the beat locked tight for the duration. The second half also fills up a whole side, and cranks the sound up a bit, and adds a healthy dose of murk as well, looped percussion, churning away beneath moaning low end, and some super distorted beat heavy crunch. eventually ditching much of the low end and buzz for something more lurching and stuttery.
The second lp, which contains the Ghosts Of Chechnya tape, is much more eighties, right out of the gate, glimmering synths drift atop a loping electro beat, eventually some buzz and drone enter the mix, adding a sinister slant that remains throughout the rest of the record. The overall sound though is way more gothic gloom pop, albeit more spare and skeletal, but add some deep dramatic vox and this could be on Captured Tracks. Instead, Fernow, adds a bunch of other sonic weirdness to the tracks, a dizzying mix of murky minimalism and occasional noisy industrial crunch.
Finally, record number three, Atta's Apartment Slated For Demolition, sort of splits the difference, beginning dark, minimal, skittery, haunting and ominous, the vibe a bit more techno, but a mutant strain of techno that's away more creepy and cinematic than dance-y. But then moving into something more gothic and eighties, culminating in a woozy sprawl of dark electro pop that sounds almost like some instrumental Chris Isaak B side reinterpreted by Holy Other.
LIMITED TO 911 COPIES!! Housed in a swank gatefold sleeve.
Originally released as an ultra limited cassette in 2001, Vatican Shadow is the alter ego of Dominick Fernow, the man who runs the Hospital Productions label, performs and records as Prurient and who is a sometime member of Cold Cave, but who in Vatican Shadow, traffics in a warped lo-fi new wave, the sort of thing you'd expect to hear in the back room of some weird goth club in the eighties, or on a dubbed tape you found in the backseat of your goth friend's car. The sounds is a swirl of shitty Burzumic synths, and looped programmed soft beats, all in a haze of low fidelity tape hiss and atmospheric murk, it's washed out and dreamy, druggy and woozily hypnotic, opener "Chopper Crash Marines' Names Released" (the first of many titles that point to a distinctive and very specific theme), is the sort of warped crumbling primitive new wave loopage that we could listen to forever, and the song really does lock into a loop and just churns away, wrapping the above sounds around a low slung Joy Division-y bass line, and then trancing out completely. A fantastic chunk of hypno-wave mesmer, that pretty much sets the template for the rest of the record. Each track a warbly looped melody driven by a crunchy, crumbly drum loop, while all around those sounds, Fernow wraps various streaks of hum and thrum, hiss and whir, brief bits of melody here and there soft melodic swells once in a while, but it's always subtle, the songs more about that hypnotic looped drone-wave at their core. But within that strictly defined sound, Fernow does manage to transform his looped hypno-wave into various permutations, whether it's crunchy and caustic and industrial, or Depeche Mode like new wave pop, or ominous droned out crunch, or lumbering spectral witch house drag, or tripped out almost Muslimgauze shuffles, of blown out super distorted new wave shoegaze pop, each track and every permutation retains Vatican Shadow's raison d'etre, which seems to be creating these insulated hypnotic retro rhythmic wave-scapes, and in doing so, inspiring a drugged out musical trance. Totally mesmerizing.
Ornamented Walls is the latest blast of primitive gothic electro industrial from Dominick Fernow, Hospital Records head honcho, and the man behind Prurient, Christian Cosmos, as well as sometime member of Cold Cave. And while this is the third or fourth VS record we've reviewed, this one differs in a big way, namely its creation. The A side is a vinyl reissue of a super limited tape (17 copies, sold at the first VS live show), which demonstrated Fernow's cassette deck technique, as in using tape decks and a mixer the way a DJ does a turntable and mixer, a primitive collage of blown out beats, of distorted melodies, of caustic noise, and all manner of raw buzzing texture, somehow deftly woven into a churning electro industrial crunch that kills. The three tracks on side A are live rehearsals for the above mentioned gig, and are raw, and powerful, intense and surprisingly nuanced, flitting from chaotic caustic crush, to stripped down droned out beatscape, to churning industrial pound, the sounds hissy and crackly, lots of tape noise, and murky whirring soft noise shimmer, not to mention mysterious voices, bits of other songs, primitive samples, stuttering beats and throbbing in-the-red basslines.
The flipside features a handful of tracks whipped up post show, using the same multi tape deck set up, and offers up still more of the same, thick insectoid buzz, dirgey distorted beats, creepy droned out melodies, swirling gristly textures, dark sinister atmospheres, and some gorgeously crumbling blurred bliss out noise, sounding a bit like Muslimgauze by way of Tim Hecker. In fact the B side tends toward the minimal and abstract, a more mellow balance to the A side's bombast, but it's great stuff, skeletal and spare, haunting and sinister, much more moody and atmospheric, gorgeous stuff, which definitely had us hoping there was more of this tucked way in the vaults somewhere.
Yet another killer collection of murky, Middle East obsessed gothic industrial slo-mo techno from Dom Fernow, who in addition to recording as Vatican Shadow, also does time in new wave combo Cold Cave, runs the Hospital label, and also has about a million other projects, including Prurient, Christian Cosmos, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement and loads more.
As Vatican Shadow, Fernow weaves a murky, moody landscape of slow, skittering beats, zombie like lumbering grooves, primitive lo-fi synth melodies, whirring drones, everything washed out and grey, each track nearly a static loop, a core rhythm, and an abstract melodic component, locked into a tranced out mesmer, while all around, strange sounds drift in and fade out, soft washes of atmospheric shimmer, reverbed synth squelch, lots of echo and reverb, giving much of the sound a dubby vibe. Muslimgauze is definitely an apt comparison in places, as are outfits like Techno Animal, although Fernow's approach is much more reductionist, his soundworld more about the minutiae of the sounds, the mood, the texture, the vibe, a track like "Muscle Hijacker Tribal Affiliation", is super simple on the surface, a looped synth, a clattery bit of percussion, a crawling techno pulse, and what sounds like some processed heavy breathing, but somehow Fernow deftly transforms those constituent parts into something much more harrowing and haunting, making the over the top song titles sound like plausible descriptions of what exactly Fernow is trying to evoke with these minimal masterpieces. Some tracks do crank up the tempo, but even then, the skittery rhythmic jitter is often wrapped in heaving swells of crumbling blacknoise, or distant swaths of ominous chordal rumble, so instead of propulsion, those jacked rhythms, simply add more texture, the gristled skitter bleeding into the black sonic shadows surrounding them, and when the beat does fragment and explode as it often does, not only does it inspire a sort of music malevolence, and emotional dread, it also again harkens back to Fernow's gothic roots, sounding like the sounds could be emanating from some dank gothic bunker in the East Village, circa early eighties, from a mysterious dark room way in the back of the club. The same is true when electric guitars enter the mix, the weird metallic riffery often sounds a bit like a way more minimal Ministry, stripped down to its very essence, and once locked into the inevitable looped out trance, gradually transforms into something much more mysterious and mesmeric.
Latest release from Vatican Shadow, aka Dom Fernow, aka Prurient, as well as being the man behind the Hospital record label and store (R.I.P) and a member of cold wavers Cold Cave. VS his Fernow's retro electro goth project, and this 12" is the first release on Bed Of Nails (Fernow's new post-Hospital label), and is presented in the style of an old school eighties 12" single, the A side features two versions of the title track, the first total old school electro goth groove, equal parts early industrial, dark wave, and goth dance pop, the second version gets significantly darker, more droney and driving, stripped down a bit but wreathed in a haze of crumbling noise and brittle buzz.
The B side begins all swirly synth and ominous chordal swells, before the beat finally surfaces, another gothic electro groove that wouldn't have been at all out of place on some cobweb draped dancefloor at the monthly goth night at your local nightclub, sandwiched between Sisters Of Mercy and Fields Of The Nephillim, while the final track ditches the beat completely and offers up a trippy gloomy sprawl of gothic synthscapery. Cool stuff for sure, especially if you were a high school goth, or still have a soft spot for that sort of thing!
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!
When You Are Crawling is an ep addendum to the recent Remember Your Black Day full length from Vatican Shadow, aka Hospital Productions and Prurient mastermind Dom Fernow. Vatican Shadow's Middle Eastern gothic industrial techno gets a slight reworking here, with two tracks from Remember revisited, first the title track, which gets smoothed out a bit, its churning rhythm laced with looped breathing, and backed by minor key melodies, spare and skeletal, even more so here, the beats building throughout, until the final few minutes is transformed into something much more aggro and electro, all the while, the background sounds remain hushed and abstract. The other reworked track is "Not The Son Of A Desert Storm But the Child Of Chechnya", which is all girded industrial churn, and deep chanted monk like vocals, the sounds grimy and gristly, and once again, the beats seeming to transform over the length of the track, getting dirtier and murkier, the surrounding sounds this time following suit, a mesmerizingly propulsive industrial electro groove.
"Atta's Apartment Slated For Demolition (Bouthayna Engineering)" appropriates its title from an older Vatican Shadow release, and unfurls a heady bit of minimalist skitter, draped over soft focus chordal swells, and shimmering distant drones, much more laid back than the other two tracks, and the longest at nearly 15 minutes, the sound shifts constantly, getting murkier and housier part way through, before once again splintering into something much more caustic and corrosive near the track's end, and again, it's just the beats being mutated, as the background sounds remain washed out and melancholic. Finally, "Al Qaeda" is another dark groove, Muslimgauze by way of Techno Animal maybe, a moody, murky sprawl, that in this case, grows MORE murky, shedding most of the surrounding sounds leaving just a stuttery beat, surrounded by sonic echoes and abstract shadows.
Wierd Records have brought us some amazing records over the last few years, from Led Er Est, Martial Canterel, Xeno & Oaklander, Staccato Du Mal and others, but this one might just be the coolest, and the weirdest (wierdest?) of the bunch. From the above mentioned bands, it's obvious that Wierd traffics in darkwave / coldwave / newwave music primarily, and this debut from Canadian outfit Vaura, definitely does fit in there, somewhere, sort of...
But unlike those bands, Vaura is HEAVY, the sound dense and epic, and times intense and downright crushing, while at others, droned out and dour. At their gloomiest, we're reminded of French retrowavers Soror Dolorosa, the sound a sort of death rock, beholden to groups like Joy Division and the Cure, but there's no denying the metal element, hinting at the likes of both Liturgy and Katatonia, which makes more sense when you know Vaura's pedigree. A group you might not expect to include members of Dysrhythmia, Kayo Dot, Secret Chiefs 3, and maybe most surprising of all Gorguts, who are responsible for what might be one of aQ's favorite death metal records of all time, Obscura. So the real question is maybe what is a death metal guy doing in a band like this, and how the heck did these weirdos and metalheads end up with a dark, gloomy, heavy record on Wierd? And really the answer is who cares. We're just happy to have this strange slab of moody heaviness, and it's quickly become the only thing we want to listen to.
The sound is a bit confusional, but only when you're trying to describe it, cuz on paper, it seems like a mess, like a weird whatthefuck that would never work, but in action, it's awesome. Hooky and heavy, brooding and moody and metallic, thick guitars, chiming and shimmering one second, churning and chugging the next, sinewy basslines, the vocals deep and dramatic, subtly processed, the songs proggy and intricate, some incredible drumming, the songs super melodic, even poppy in places, but occasionally peppered with bursts of gloom infused black metal, complete with blast beats, and deep ominous vox, atonal chords, often splintering into a grinding almost death metal, but more muddy and gothic and less distinctly metal, everything wreathed in cool textured psychedelic guitars, dense squalls of dark sonic energy, layered chordal thrum and swirls of FX and streaks of feedback. And while the sound seems to always return to a sort of dark, and heavy, gloom rock, it's what the group do to and with that sound that makes this so transcendent.
And while the record definitely works as an album, the individual songs and sound are super varied, from the washed out black metal flecked gloominess of "Obsidian Damascene Sun", with its furious double kick drumming, and swirling psychedelic guitar filigree, to the churning bombastic almost doom-ed heaviness of "Uncreated Light (Transfiguration)", to the strangely ritualistic sounding "The Column's Vein", all rumbling low end, and chanted monklike vox, to the acoustic gloom-folk of the title track, a gorgeously moving softly psychedelic steel string ballad, the record culminating in our favorite track, "The Zahir" which begins as a barely there rumbling drone, underpinning steel string guitar strum, some softly crooned vox and chiming harmonics, which disappear in a squall of massive distorted riffage and swirling feedback, the whole song transformed into a whirling propulsive sprawl of melodic drone-psych, a brooding slow build that becomes a heavy gloom pop, driving and intense, in comes some metal vokills and some tangled super catchy guitar melodies, all over tribal drumming, and thick buzzing guitars, the sound gradually falling apart, and transforming into a woozy detuned dirge, only to explode into a crushingly heavy, gloriously blown out Godspeed style epic outro, wild streaks of psych guitar, pounding chaotic drumming, clouds of swirling effects, definitely the sort of thing that should have been stretched out for another 20 minutes or so, but instead, collapses in a field of glitch and static, buzz and crumble. So fucking awesome. A practically perfect slab of heavy gloominess / gloomy heaviness. And a new aQ favorite for sure.
