Hrmm. What d'you think you're gonna get if you put these three Chicagoan (or ex-Chicagoan in the case of Flying Luttenbachers drummer Weasel Walter, who has relocated to San Francisco) noisenik/improv types together and call it Eruption? Yes that's right, hecka noisy claptrap! Weasel's drums spasticate all over the 40 short tracks on this hour-long album, while Drumm's electric guitar, synth, tapes, pedals, and other electronic appliances get equally excited. Sawing away alongside those two maniacs, the cello of Lonberg-Holm adds a contrasting touch of 'classical' class, when you can hear it amid the blasts of near-white noise distortion and frenzied drum pummel. Basically the avant-garde version of grindcore (with song titles in the typical grindcore wise-ass/gross-out vein). Eruption is one of those over-the-top improv exercises sure to annoy most folks, except for the select few who live for this stuff. Definitely NOT easy listening. But those with a high threshold of noise enjoyment will indeed enjoy this threshing...I did!
We'd been hearing a lot about this guy, a UK soundscaper named Louis Johnstone, who records as Wanda Group, and while we dig this quite a bit, none of the descriptions we read though really prepared us for what it actually sounded like, two sidelong sprawls of darkly psychedelic avant noise collage, the sounds all over the map, from dense blasts of white noise buzz, to mysterious field recordings, to minimal flurries of skittery percussion, distant foghorn drones, conversations, the cries of seagulls, gristly crackling rumbles, like contact mic'd fire, shimmering dronescapes, muted murky drifts laced with random bits of ambient noise, scrapes and bumps, footsteps and whatnot, gorgeous stretches of near silent shimmer, hushed lowercase thrum, fields of blurred vocals, which sound like grunting and groaning processed into disembodied swirls of sound, looped Jeckian warble, symphonic fragments, all layered and mashed up into woozy washed out streaks, thick industrial grey ambience, all manner of random noise, field recordings and room sound, tangled up into heaving swells of densely reverberating thrum. And that's just the first track/side. The flipside is essentially a sonic continuation, lots more grey, gristly sounds, more murky field recordings, buried voices, hiss and static and hum, crackle and glitch, some Ryoji Ikeda style clinical sine wave / minimal tone scapery, haunting dronescapes laced with fierce grinding buzz, bursts of staticky shortwave transmissions, dense swirls of fragmented power electronic pummel, deep cavernous rumbles, crumbling staticky swells, malfunctioning machinery symphonies, blurred into grim industrial smears, all settling into an uneasy blackened drift.
Noisy, austere, haunting, brutal, abstract, ambient, a twisted epic expanse of experimental sound that should definitely appeal to fans of twisted modern minimalism, avant drone, soft noise and lowercase exploration.
Includes a download code too!
In 2000, Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar made a conscious decision that their stalwart project Beequeen would cease to be a drone-based project and concentrate their output as atumnal sountrackish song; but the lure of the drone has proven to be far too great for the Dutch experimentalists to simply leave it behind. Hence, they began Wander to satisfy this lust for the drone. Perhaps it took a bit of separation from the production of holy minimalism, but whatever the cause, Wander has fabricated a series of drones, ambience, and atmospheric vibrations that easily surpass that which Beequeen produced many moons ago. Using a whole bunch of analogue synthesizers and an old chord organ, de Waard and Kinkelaar conjure a shimmering tranquilizer references the academic drones of Eliane Radigue and Charlemagne Palestine but also has plenty of impressionist movements that would make fans of Mirror, Troum, and Jonathan Coleclough happy. Limted to 600 copies.
Battlecruiser is a new label from AQ pal Campbell Kneale who runs the impeccable NZ label Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Battlecruiser is basically an outlet for a bunch of New Zealand noise guys to fufill their secret desire to be metal gods! Who can argue with that? Cool band names, distorted guitars, demonic vocals and all that good stuff! Metalheads might have to stretch their definition of 'metal' to really get into this stuff, but the rest of us, metal and unmetal alike will find lots of beautiful crushing far out noisy weirdness on these evil 'lil 3" cd-r's! Wardagger starts things off with backwards guitar ambience which gives way to pounding eighties style industrial punk/metal. Brittle guitars over simple machine like drums, throbbing and relentless. Like a more metal Swans or Cop Shoot Cop. Some extra sludgy bits and backward guitar fuckery adds to the weirdness.
A Sandwich Short is the second album from the pairing of British eccentrics Andrew Liles (who on occasion has graced the stage as a member of Nurse With Wound) and Tony Wakeford (the grim troubadour behind Sol Invictus and Death In June). Where their first album shuddered with a Victorian ghostliness, A Sandwich Short is downright odd. The opening number centers on a desolate noirish piano score that's not dissimilar to Coil's infamously rejected soundtrack to Hellraiser, but with sustained yet scratchy violin drones replacing Coil's Fairlight synthesizers. Soon afterwards, jauntily plucked guitars and a tentative gamelan assembled from kitchen utensils forms the background to the stolen narrative of several drunks in a bar whose camaraderie quickly dissolves into near violence. As charmingly surreal as these moments are, it's Wakeford and his tightly wound recapitulation of British folk through an occult lens that keeps A Sandwich Short from pulling itself a part. The centerpiece of the album is in fact a reprise of an old Wakeford number, "Lucifer Before Sunrise" which had first appeared on his collaborative record with Steven Stapleton The Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish. His gravelly voice alternates with the cold recitations of Alice and Helen Potter amidst Wakeford's Spartan, depressive guitar melody and Liles' electronic splutter and whir. Given how many (including us) had remarked that the first Wardrobe album resembled that Wakeford / Stapleton album, it makes perfect sense that Wakeford would return to the song and twist it into something equally as disturbing albeit wholly different with the help of Mr. Liles.
For all of the militaristic death-folk that we've championed in the past, we've actually never listed any Sol Invictus records. Well with the dissolution of World Serpant Distribution a couple years ago, the bulk of the Sol Invictus and Tony Wakeford catalogue has disappeared from our grasp. Way darker than Current 93 and expressing a Nietzchian / Odinic theatricality that occassionally is laughably over the top, Sol Invictus (as well as the bulk of Tony Wakeford's solo material) always maintains a furrowed-brow seriousness that extends into the portentious waters of death, European history, and the problems with modern society. Regardless of what you may think of Wakeford's occasionally provocative politics, Wakeford excels in his craft of songwriting, especially through his elliptical acoustic guitar finger picking which darkens melodies adapted from British folk.
The Wardrobe is a collaborative project that Wakeford has begun with Andrew Liles, who has grown in notoriety thanks to his work alongside Colin Potter and Steven Stapleton during the occasional Salt Marie Celeste performances from 2005. Entirely instrumental, Cups In The Cupboard is a creepy Victorian soundtrack, filled with sideways glancing half-melodies fragmented into eerie repetitions and oscillating forms. Sampled elements of whimsical bassoons and baroque strings become peculiar to the point of hinting at a lurking horror, best expressed through Wakeford's insistant and ominous guitar chords. Thanks to Liles' deft ability to transform commonplace sounds into uncanny, curious, and strange sounds, it's easy to make the comparison between The Wardrobe and another great Wakeford collaboration The Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish which found Tony working with Steven Stapleton.
Limited to 500 copies.
Well, "Columbodia, Missouri's" own Warhammer posse showed up not too long ago here at aQ enroute to all corners of the country and they stopped in long enough to rock the asses of the San Francisco scene in a wickedly intimate "bus show" (AQ pal and former A Minor Forest-er has a huge mobile venue, IN A BUS, with a stage, a solar powered generator and an engine that runs on vegetable oil!) and to hand us off a a big pile of their new self-released second cd entitled An Ethereal Oracle.
By the looks and sounds of it, the title holds true to the old adage "what you see is what you get". That is if you can figure out what an ethereal oracle is -musically- speaking.
While the mind-melting debut Uber Om was more of a big loud thud upside your melon, An Ethereal Oracle is more like some forbidden fruit. That something or someone, you've been warned about, you know it's dangerous, potentially deadly, but you just can't resist. It's the temptation of the darkside, the dangerous, you know you're in for it, you know you're done for, you just can't ever be sure when. Or how!
The record starts off with a long scary radio broadcast track, you know, like one of those Emergency Broadcast System things warning you about "the big storm approaching", and just when you start feeling REALLY nervous, you start to get dizzy, everything becomes blurry, your head is spinning, your ears are ringing, you feel flush, you start to sweat, goosebumps, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end, you try to resist, fight it off, but it's too much, you are completely under its spell.
You let the jagged guitar lines, birds chirping in the distance, strange what-the-fuck acoustic folk fuckery, drugged out laid-back droned-out blissful warmness and full on red-line space jam experimental shredding pummelry drag you into the darkness. Before you know it, you're bruised and bloody, naked and tied up with broken guitar strings, ears ringing and bleeding, you have strange WH48K images burned into your flesh, laying atop a pile of bloodstained broken drumsticks, surrounded by a Stonehenge like circle of towering totem like amps, in front of which stand the mysterious members of Warhammer, smiling wickedly as they prepare to do it all over again.
And that's only the first half of the cd!
Limited to 500 intricately illustrated/hand printed/hand assembled copies, and we only have about 30 left of the ones we got.
So act fast...
Denver's hip hop punk rock retards the Warlock Pinchers, who flourished in the late '80s/early '90s, are either the stupidest band ever, or the most genius, probably the former, although we think it's some impossible/improbable mix of the two. You may have heard their classic anthem "Morrissey Rides A Cockhorse", a heady, hooky dose of borderline homophobic Smiths bashing, but like all of their jams, it's all in good (stupid) fun.
Their proper albums are chuck full of big dumb beats, crunchy metal riffs, big dumb rapping, and irresistable choruses, they're one of those bands who practically everyone we know LOVES, which makes way less sense once you hear them.
Bomb The Franklin Mint is tough to recommend to anyone but diehard fans, as it's a collection of early recordings, demos and practice sessions. That's not to say that this doesn't rule, it does, but it rules in a way that maybe only WP fans can really understand. Imagine very early Beastie Boys, but way more simplistic, the beats totally primitive, the guitar playing rudimentary, and the lyrics, alternatingly ridiculous, over the top, offensive and/or funny as fuck. And on these early jams, all that stuff is even more magnified, the sound even more raw and lo-fi and capital D dumb, but so fun and funny and infectious and fuck it, AWESOME.
We'd probably recommend tracking down Deadly Kun Fu Action / Pinch A Loaf and Circusized Peanuts first, the proper records do in fact rule, big time, fucked up and funny and funky, but listening to this, even the demos and practice sessions sound pretty bad ass, but then we LOOOOOVE the Warlock Pinchers, so we're not exactly objective. So fans, buy this, you definitely want it, especially for the old stuff, the first tape, most of which we'd never heard, for the rest of you, give it a try, check out the sound samples, prepare yourself for some awesomely inane over the top lo-fi goofiness, and you never know, you just might end up as weirdly obsessed as we are... [Only one sound sample, per the band's request]
Warmdesk is the work of Chicago electron technician Bill Selman, who has produced this 30 minute EP for the Irish Fallt label of Force Inc / Mille Plateaux influenced techno minimalism loaded with conveyor belt shifts of ring modulated tones, splattering dub delay patterns, and fragile Sahko shards of electronics.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Brand new ultra limited full length from Warmth, who really couldn't have chosen a more appropriate monicker, as the sounds here are indeed warm, dark, swirly, humid, shimmery, a drifting blackened dronescape of elongated tones, blurred melody, and smoldering low end. Not really dense or heavy or blown out, instead, the sounds are hushed, muted, dense and deep, barely there, a whirring whispery smear of sound, industrial but only slightly, machinelike, but simultaneously organic, a haunting otherworld of looped rumbles and layered clouds and swirls of melodic fragments, and constantly shifting textures, a warm, lush, soft noise, rife with what sound like field recordings, but could also be mechanical detritus, creaks, groans, clicks, even those sounds dialed way back, just another bit of hazy grit added to the already washed out sprawl of dreamlike ambient dronedrift.
Privacy From God is a strange hybrid of sounds that in other hands would be cranked up, doused in distortion and spewed from massive speakers, but Warmth take those same sounds and pull them apart into microscopic clusters of dreamy ambient minutae, soothing, surreal, softly undulating, hushed and looped expanses of near static, frozen in time, dreamdrone minimalism. So nice.
Packaged in a clear plastic oversized clam shell case, with silver offset printing on black vellum paper. Hi-bias chrome tapes with silver labels. And... LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Warmth seem to exist only in the realm of split 7"s. We're sure they probably have a handful of cd-r's or cassette tape releases (actually at least one cd too), but this is the third split we've gotten from these guys, and this will probably be the third time we talk about how we want o hear more than one song!
The Warmth track here is indeed warm, beginning as a slow smoldering, barely there shimmer, but over the course of the side, the sound intensifies, getting more abrasive, more caustic and crunchy, eventually building to a sort of Wolf Eyes rumble, which is soon streaked with jagged shards of feedback, and swooping upper register tones, all smeared across the roiling buzzing crunch of the background drone. We can only imagine what might have happened if this were an lp instead of a 7" and the track was allowed to sprawl and spread and mutate for another 15 or 20 minutes.
The flipside comes from a band with the tongue twisting monicker Medroxy Progesterone Acetate, which a quick internet search revealed as a drug to decrease the production of Testosterone and to reduce the sex drive in males, aka "Chemical Castration" sometimes given to convicted rapists and sex offenders. Hmmm...
So what would something like MPA sound like? Maybe like this, a murky, fuzzy, muddy sprawl of rumbles and whirs, haunting melodic swells, squalls of glitch and buzz, teapot whistle melodies, disembodied voices, woozy, stuttering loops, tape hiss and sea sick warble, all beneath a gauzy lo-fi haze. Quite nice actually, if not a bit creepy.
Both tracks, and both bands are quite recommended, this 7"s is definitely a good taster, and yeah, we still want to hear more Warmth, and now we, ummm, want more Medroxy Progesterone Acetate...
Beautiful die cut silkscreened sleeve, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! most likely already out of print, we have a handful...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES
A brand new, super limited head to head meeting between these two sonically similar underground noisemakers, trafficking in the dronier dreamier side of modern abstract 'noise'...
Warmth are up first, and deliver a murky chunk of melodic drone, like some classic pop song, that had been transferred from tape to tape about a thousand times, before being dubbed onto a 20 year old cassette left in the glove compartment of your car for the last decade, then played back at the wrong speed, a gloriously lugubrious glacial crawl, the muted melody pulsing beneath a constantly shifting sonic sea of low end thrum, distant field recordings and washed out hiss and buzz.
Robe counter with a sonically similar chunk of sound, haunting and playful at the same time, muddy melodies, and what sounds like horns, it actually sounds like some Carl Stalling cartoon music played at 16rpm, warbly and off kilter, murky and blurry, a drawled moonlit soundscape of twisted smeared ambience, muffled percussion, and mysteriously fragmented melodies.
Packaged in a super elaborate multi paneled sleeve, printed with metallic silver ink on black, sealed with a black wax seal and including a purple and black on black insert.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Another blast of Yellow Swans, this time splitting a 7" with the appropriately monickered outfit Warmth. Yellow Swans here are on the noisy side, but even at their noisiest, there is much going on below the surface that keeps their sound from devolving into mere 'noise'. A crumbling and gritty distorted lowend soundscape, noisy and blown out, but murky and muddy with thick synthy swells and surprisingly sweet melodies buried under the roiling clouds of damaged guitars and fried electronics. Harsh and heavy, but also quite subtly dreamy.
Warmth take the opposite path, offering up almost nothing at first, just the sound of tape hiss, and bits of found sound, like a field recording, before eventually bits of rumble and whir and static and crackle begin to surface, as do distant high end creaks and haunting swells of barely there drone, the whole thing very murky and mysterious. Near the end, some very strange Star Trek like FX are introduced, sort of alien and angular, giving the Warmth track a bit of a sci-fi vibe. Cool stuff.
Packaged in an eye popping cover with virtually no information. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Already sold out and out of print, so once these are gone, they are gone for good.
Maybe best known for counting actress Shannon Sossamon as a member, Warpaint managed to downplay any sort of celebrity hype and create a brooding doomic chunk of gloomy murky indie rock loveliness. Equal parts shimmery shoegaze, mumbly slowcore, and soft focus noiserock, the band slip easily from hushed whispery jangle to full on psychedelic freakout to classic fuzzy sixties pop. These six songs are super varied, but do manage to sound perfect together. "Stars" is all Mazzy Star meets Blonde Redhead, glimmering, moody and minor key, the vocal harmonies so lush and angelic, the music perfectly warm and lugubrious. "Elephants" features weirdly processed vocals, over heavy drumming, chiming guitars, lots of reverb and delay, and gets all Sonic Youthy part way through.
"Billie Holiday" might be the best track on the record, so warm and druggy and dreamy, with sixties girl group vox, muted guitars, droning synth/strings, and a killer main hook. Although "Krimson" might be a contender too, with it's looped sounding main melody, throbbing bass, and super emotive vocals, the sound is very early nineties indie rock, but manages to sound all modern at the same time, and so so good. A super fantastic ep for sure. Surprised Warpaint aren't way more popular than they are. Could be because this was originally self released in a super limited run, and is only now getting reissued, so odds are, a record this cool won't stay a secret for long....
A simple album of stark sonic gestures from local composer Henry Warwick. Just one or two perfectly realized elements are unfolding at a time, usually a variant on shimmering waterfalls of analogue synth pulsings, often warm and delicate, sometimes threateningly dark, sometimes minor key and wistful. Quiet and lovely. Comes packaged in a signed edition of 500 with copper leaf
Some abstract, cinematic, late-night (or early morning) drone-whoosh here from this academic/electronic/experimental composer. He's now based in Toronto, but we know him from his years in SF, as he's an aQ customer of long standing. Recorded between 2003-2012, the seven tracks here encompass warm waves of blissed out ambience, glitch-distressed hauntology, and cold glacial drone. 'Tis nicely varied from track to track, and within each one as well, there are enough dynamics and textural shifts to hold one's interest, if you're actively listening - though a more relaxed listening practice could easily result in simple mesmerization.
Apparently, this disc is the first release in a trilogy, documenting Warwick's latest program of "audio research". The title of this one, Something Borrowed, is in reference to his compositional process here - the basic sound materials are all "borrowed" (samples from cds, synth presets, etc.) and then manipulated with the use of computer software. Not that you'll recognize the sources or anything.
Fans of stuff like :zoviet*france: and Tim Hecker should perhaps investigate.
Proprietor of London's 323 Sound shop and protagonist in the New London Silence movement that bridges the ethos of minimalism within the scope of Birtish improv and academic composition, Mark Wastell is a figure whose name has been popping up more and more in recent months. Vibra #2 is a limited edition CD-R release of his solo work upon a tam-tam. In fact, the gong he used for this recording was previously owned by the late Roger Sutherland, to whom this album is dedicated. In softly tapping this gong, Wastell offers an exceptional drone construction of soft resonant timbres, clouds of natural metallic reverberation, and harmonic shimmers that give the impression of electronic treatments, even when Wastell used no such devices. The slow pacing of Wastell's performance adds to the languid almost submariner haze of the recording, providing something of a mix between Thomas Koner and Stockhausen's tam-tam composition Mikrophonie. Beautiful stuff! It's limited to 200 copies, of which we only have a handful. You know what that means!
Featuring members of now defunct SF outfit New Thrill Parade, and loosely affiliated with the now seemingly hyped to death 'witch house' movement (due mostly to their cd-r on witch house flagship label Disaro), Water Borders have evolved into one of the strangest and most fascinating bands in the bay area. On their last record they sounded a bit like Coil, but on this 4 song ep, they sound, well, like pretty much nobody else.
The title track is a thick miasma of glimmering high end, lush synth swells, looped percussion, haunting 'witchy' ambience, and deep crooned vocals, and a sound that grows more caustic and corrosive as it goes, the vocals following suit, getting more manic and maniacal, the sound suffocatingly intense and explosively freaked out. "Rome" features Glasser guesting, a creepy post industrial dronescape laced with fuzzy synths and crumbling melodies, Glasser's ethereal vocals locked in a doom-ed duet with those creepy bellowed WB vox, a gorgeously twisted electro-doom-cabaret ballad, melodic but also mesmerizingly damaged. That same track gets remixed and blossoms into something simultaneously more washed out and psychedelic, and more driving and propulsive, whirring loops, repetitive melodies, a low slung dubstep beat, some thick fuzzed out bass, some weirdo processed vox, all very spacey and groovy, sounding like a jam that some enterprising DJ might use to confuse the fuck out of a dancefloor.
And finally, the title track gets remixed by Petals, which just so happens to be former aQer Cameron, and whose mostly unheard recordings rule, it's only a matter of time before some big label catches on and so does the rest of the world, but for now, revel in this grim, freaked out, darkly psychedelic reworking, all low end thrum and pulse, some feral grunts and growls, everything gauzy and blurred and even more haunting that the original, a black ambient electro gloom creep, that builds to a thick industrial pound the whole thing held together by a fragmented melodic loop, that will stick in your head like crazy.
SO recommended. We definitely need to hear more Water Borders, and heck, more Petals while we're at it...
Yet another chunk of electro goth, witch pop, gloom-soul weirdness from this SF duo, who, while originally linked to the witch house scene, seem dead set on blazing their own confusional sonic path, and it does just keep getting better and better.
Drippings is a songsuite of what to these ears sounds like minimal miserable electronic death ballads, or like a more lo-fi, creepy and drug addled How To Dress Well. The same sort of soulful vibe, but WB's 'soul music' is something altogether more grim and evil, mottled and murky, the music here stripped down and skeletal, the vocals verring from DJ Screw style sizurped drawl, to an almost Nick Cave sounding deep and dramatic croon. All laid over a strange framework of super spare electronic dub, crumbling bits of distorted melody, bits of metallic buzz and deep rumble, the occasional swirl of synthy shimmer, gauzy stretches of sci-fi kosmische ambience, wheezing drones, sometimes coalescing into a clattery detuned warped cabaret, other times spacing out into glimmering expanses of crystalline haze, and still other times, stumbling into strange Middle Eastern sounding grooves, that sound almost like Muslimgauze crossed with the Butthole Surfers, but still laced with those creepy ominous bellowed vox. Seriously twisted, dementedly genius, fantastically totally fucked up and thus WAY recommended.
SUPER LIMITED! We might not be able to get more when we run out, so act fast.
John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber has long been hailed as one of the minor masterpieces of post-industrial sound art, yet it's one of those albums that has escaped my (Jim's) ears up until now, as it's been reissued both on CD through Cold Spring and on picture disc by Die Stadt. Back in 1990, this German born sound artist had traveled to Calcutta where he stumbled upon a gas chamber that had been closed down just a few years earlier. Watermann explains in the liner notes that the Indian government had numerous policies, both official and clandestine, aimed at population control; and the gas chamber was one method that had been employed for the expedient dispatch of those condemned to death. The Calcutta Gas Chamber was one that actually closed down for economic reasons (and not for human rights issues, I might add), and I'm not all that sure if the Indian government still uses such practices at this day and age. Needless to say, the experience of walking through this death factory had a huge impact upon Watermann. There had been some debate as to the validity of Watermann's claim that he had managed to get field recordings of the gas chamber itself (as he claims in the liner notes) or if he replicated what he heard from recordings he made from a power station in Australia. As Watermann died several years ago, the true nature of the recordings will remain something of a mystery. That said, Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber deserves its place as esoteric gem of the darkly avant-garde. His compositional style is a industrial take on musique concrete, as he roughly chops his field recordings of mechanical clatter, aerated hisses, and disembodied voices into a claustrophobic arena of turgid repetitions and blackened drones that reflect the automation of death haunting that space. Occasionally a thick drone of flanging ambience creeps forth from his mechanized collage; but even as these sounds reflect something like the nightmarish guitars of Maeror Tri, there is very little jubilation to found within these recordings. A powerful album that shudders at the potential for man to exact atrocities upon fellow man and the world at large.
One of two new strange sonic artifacts this week from the seemingly bottomless vaults of The Tapeworm, a UK tape label trafficking in the strange, the mysterious and the bizarre, this right here, an interesting bit of sound art based on the concepts of race and gender and sex and politics, and how those inform the works of artists, and what's at stake for artists as they try to push the boundaries and strictures of art, especially in terms of the above powerful themes. These references are however not so obvious on a purely musical level, Watkins weaves a slowly undulating dronescape, of deep sonic swells and muted electronic buzz, utilizing analog synths, guitars, drums and percussion, cassette, Casio, bass, and of course SuperCollider(!). Those deep swelling drones, grow more and more corrosive, the buzz intense and crumbling, building to a SUNNO))-like squall, but shot through with streaks of glitch and crunch, all draped over swirling clouds of hiss, and haunting undulating melodies before slipping back into a more tranquil stretch of deep resonant dronemusic. The piece is somehow based on a cassette tape Watkins found of a lecture by scholar and musician Bernice Reagon, a member of vocal group Sweet Honey On The Rock, which Watkins sometimes incorporated into live performances, though we don't hear it here. Definitely recommended for all the drone lovers out there, had this been a super limited cd-r, in mysterious black packaging, with some name like Blackened Blood Sphere, all you grim heavies would be all over this, so maybe that's actually what the dripping oozing crucifix cover is all about, and the title, cuz these are indeed some seriously grim black sonic spirituals. And are thus, as with pretty much all Tapeworm stuff, totally recommended.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. With cool dripping crucifix cover art by Savage pencil.
A beautiful object d'art from the Bay Area cottage industry Land And Sea, Mixed Raced is a rare document of the harmonically charged compositions of Zachary James Watkins. He studied at Mills College under the tutelage of Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Alvin Curran, et al; and is now a professor at UC Santa Cruz in electronic music. Mixed Raced is one facet of Watkins' work for rarefied tonal perfection that is emblematic of many of the graduates who matriculate from Mills, though some of his other solo work does move into an angular dissonance of saw-tooth noise with all the right No Wave allusions. Here, we have two compositions with multiple movements involving guitars and strings respectively. "Positively Right On" is Watkins take on the Branca / Chatham guitar harmonics. Watkins's composition only calls for two guitarists, setting up a duality of the harmonic interplay of growling drones and rasping fundamentals; but the results expose the diminishing returns on the guitar symphonies from both of those aforementioned heavyweights of downtown minimalism. These pieces glide, drift, hum, and blur with the best that either of those had done over the years, though the 20 minute program in three movements (obviously a requisite for a vinyl release) is a bit limiting, where a much longer duration would have been thoroughly entrancing. Nonetheless, "Positively Right On" is quite a triumph for Watkins. "Movement III" for violin and doublebass is a more conventional piece of academic minimalism with rising and decline notes sustained upon those two instruments, played out over seven variations on that theme. Think Lucier, Curran, Ashley, and any number of the American minimalists who came to prominence in the '70s.
Features hand letterpressed artwork in an edition of just 100 copies.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Curious that this disc is not on Touch, but the lack of the Jon Wozencroft design stamp does not detract from another impeccable recording from the world's premier field recordist - Chris Watson. A founding member of both Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, Watson turned his attention in sound to the natural world in the late '80s, having worked on countless documentaries for the BBC. We've long been taken by his ability to present and contextualize the humble field recording as a magnificent piece of art, much in the way that great photographers - say, Richard Misrach - can present all of the details of a landscape with no discernable tricked out production and make it sublime. Cima Verde is a document of the alpine landscape in Northern Italy, primarily focusing upon the diversity of bird life, although the rushed blur of the first track seems to be a collision of atmospheric events reminiscent of his work with BJ Nilsen. The blurting caws of ravens introduces us to avian life, made more ominous than mischievous by a thrumbing of wires agitated by the wind. Watson then spends a considerable amount of time with the grouse - first the gentle cooing of a black grouse and then the dramatic mating dances of the wood grouse (aka the capercaillie). This latter recording with its erratic flapping and odd growls is one that seems oddly familiar to us - perhaps we are just getting this confused with one of those Sitelle field recordings disc; but it sounds great nonetheless. Watson does include some water recordings - a very nice underwater recording of a stream and some cold cold rain; but the final recordings on Cima Verde return to the birds in two dawn choruses, one of which begins with the mellifluous song of a nightingale eventually overtaken by the rest of the riparian creatures, waking from their slumber in ecstatic chirping. Of course, it's amazingly recorded with details popping directly through Watson's microphones into our speakers. Very highly recommended!
Preeminent field recordist Christ Watson returns with a bit of a twist on El Tren Fantasma. Pretty much all of his work up to this point (outside of his contributions to Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio way back when) has been audio verite. Even such albums as Weather Report, which edit field recordings from the African savanna (for example) into a condensed journey, are pristine, realist documents codified through the exquisite, lush details in Watson's enviromental sounds such as that of a lion panting after a successful hunt. El Tren Fantasma is much more engineered, imagined, and processed than anything else in his solo career; and this fictionalized Watson is no less compelling, no less dramatic, and no less awesome.
El Tren Fantasma - The Ghost Train - traces a now-defunct passanger rail line which ran from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Veracruz on the Atlantic Coast. Watson had the opportunity to make this journey while working as a sound recordist for the BBC for their Great Railway Journeys. His compositions work with extracts from that excursion travelling across Mexico along with archival recordings whose origins are not specified. As he's stopping throughout the Chihuahuan Desert, Watson does capture the stunning chorales of chirping frogs, buzzing insects, and the blaring call of a California Quail (whose syllabic chortle is often mnemonically transcribed as "chi-CA-go" as if it were seeking a more temperate climate); but it the train's power and mass that provides so much of the impact for Watson's album. By the fourth track "El Divisidaro," Watson captures a series of loops of the train - with the bellowing horn pitched back and forth into a sustained symphonic tone and the clatter of the train's engine becoming an ersatz rhythm track, which in turn gets tricked out with some Martin Hannett styled, phasing delay work. It's easy to get lost in the majesty of this track, much like the expressive electronica that Wolfgang Voigt produced on Konigsforst as Gas. What a brilliantly simple transformation executed to perfection! "Mexico D.F." reprises this strategy with rhythmic churns building out of the grinding brakes and the roiling tumult of steam blasting through the train's pipes, becoming an almost militant thump on a lone drum. The train's horn drifts suitably in a cloud of reverberation at the end of the album, dissolving into the ghostlike apparition Watson intended it to be. As brillliant as this work is, we should also point out that Watson is not alone in composing such fictionalized scores purely through environmental sound. We would be remiss if we failed to point out the work of Australian composer Tarab, whose deft psychogeographical albums share the scope and execution with Watson's El Tren Fantasma. So great!
El Tren Fantasma was Chris Watson's amazing, imagined excursion across Mexico released in 2011, tracing a now-defunct passenger rail line which ran from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Veracruz on the Atlantic Coast. Watson had the opportunity to make this journey while working as a sound recordist for the BBC for their Great Railway Journeys, and the resulting album was constructed using those field recordings. Unlike so much of Watson's previous field recording albums, El Tren Fantasma sported a quite a bit of processing and production work, transforming the rhythmic chug of the train into an electronica backbeat. The two mixes on this single further those propulsive aspects, especially on the album's highlight "El Divisidaro," where Watson captures a series of loops of the train - with the bellowing horn pitched back and forth into a sustained symphonic tone and the clatter of the train's engine becoming an ersatz rhythm track, which in turn gets tricked out with some Martin Hannett styled, phasing delay work. It's easy to get lost in the majesty of this track, much like the expressive electronica that Wolfgang Voigt produced on Konigsforst as Gas, expanded through glassine tones and deeper rhythms. "Veracruz" is certainly a bricolage, but pulls back on the rhythmic interlocking considerably, with chunks of locomotive noise surging against the backdrop of the harmonic train horns. Fantastic!
Brand new two track 7" from sound recordist extraordinaire Chris Watson. Having done time in both the Hafler Trio and Cabaret Voltaire, Watson deals now almost exclusively in unadulterated field recordings, mostly of nature and wildlife. Past full lengths have been huge hits around here, and this single is just as compelling. Demonstrating that, it takes much more than a tape recorder and a microphone to capture magical field recordings. It takes an amazing ear, and a bit of technical savvy, one listen to these two tracks, recorded underwater around the Galapagos Islands, make that abundantly clear.
Two tracks, each recorded at a different depth, both dense and deep, rife with all manner of unexpected sonic subtleties. The first at 3 meters, is gorgeous and clear, it sounds nearly the same underwater as above, the sounds of the boat, and the water lapping against it, sea gulls, what sound like stones knocking against one another, all of these sounds wrapped in that haunting undersea shimmer, and captured perfectly, crystal clear and so vibrant.
The flipside finds us dipping down to 10 meters and the sound changes dramatically, deeper and more resonant, all the sounds more warbly and indistinct, burbling and languid, muted and softly glimmering, all naturally smeared into a warm soft focus soundscape of underwater drones, and muted sonic events. So lovely. And both sides end with gorgeously hypnotic locked grooves, which were so nice, we ended up letting both play for a long time before realizing they were looping...
Thick vinyl and a super striking Jon Wozencroft sleeve.
Wind and rain, birds and waves. Ok, that sounds a little bit like a clock radio you can get from the Sharper Image catalog. But if you're into field recordings of nature sounds, you know there's more to this than just white noise to help you sleep. On a full-length "audio documentary" such as this, your ears can aid your imagination, allowing you to "experience" far places and phenomena in a way much more immersive than a Discovery Channel program. And here, you're in the hands of two of the best field recordists around -- the UK's Chris Watson and Sweden's BJ "Benny" Nilsen (also known for his work as Hazard and his exquisite duets with Stilluppsteypa entitled Vikinga Brennivin and Drykkjuvisur Ohljodanna) should be familiar to fans of field recordings, both of whom being responsible for some of our favorite releases on the Touch and Ash Int'l labels, including several prior collaborations on Hazard's albums. We're always thrilled to get a new release from either of them, documenting where/what/when/how they've been listening to (in) the world. The aptly-titled Storm finds the duo capturing heavy weather over the North Sea, from opposite shores. There's three long tracks, the first and last solo recordings done by Watson and Nilsen, respectively, the middle track a synthesis of recordings made by both gentlemen. In Watson's words, here's more of an explanation of the genesis of this disc: "During December 2000 several significant storm fronts developed across the North Sea and Scandinavia. Benny remarked to me that he had recorded some of these on the Baltic coast and proposed a collaborative CD project based around our mutual interests in the rhythms and music created when the elements combine over land and out to sea. We spent the next few years gathering recordings on our respective coastlines and islands during the very active weather windows during the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. This was focused around our following one particular cyclonic system, which veers over Snipe Point on Lindisfarne to the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, and finally descends upon Oland and Gotland where Benny listened in with a favorite pair of Sennheiser omnidirectional microphones."
We're not really clear on how the edits were done, other than artfully! Through the tumult of thunder and crashing surf, and the calm of gurgling water and cawing gulls, they've seamlessly stitched together 50 minutes of wondrous audio, allowing you to stay warm and dry in the comfort of your own home and enjoy the sounds of these storm-wracked coasts.
It's not entirely clear why these two pieces were bundled together, other than they're awesome, and they're both by Chris Watson, he formerly of electronic legends Cabaret Voltaire, now composer and field recordist, the first half of this here two-fer, is in fact, a processed field recording, but not processed in the way we're used to, where found sounds are mutated into new sounds, no, what Watson has done is recorded 12 hours (sunset to sunrise) of South Africa's Kalahari Desert, the hidden nighttime symphony that is the world of the nocturnal animals and insects, but that whole 12 hour recording, compressed into a mere 28 minutes. The cool thing is, it doesn't actually sound strange or processed, it's not a barrage of overlapping sounds, instead, Watson has deftly created a half hour glimpse of the desert at night, the trill of crickets, the high pitched whine of other insects, the whipping wind, chirping birds, some of the sounds identifiable, but many of them downright alien sounding, the whole thing in some ways playing out like some abstract experimental 20th century electronic tape music, only as always done better by nature. A gorgeous, haunting listen.
The second piece by Watson for a festival called PESTival focusing on "insects in the arts and the art of being an insect" (we definitely need to check that out!), and composed and arranged by Marcus Davidson using recordings by Watson, exploring vocal harmonies between humans and bees, a choral piece woven into the sound of buzzing bees, the result is pretty stunning.
A warm summery afternoon, replete with wildly chirping birds, is underpinned by the deep thrum of buzzing bees, over which the choir sings long tones, creating lush harmonies, and mysterious overtones. At first, it's more vocals, the bess way down in the mix, but as the track progresses, the buzz of the bees grows more prominent, the human voices more hauntingly liturgical, building to an intense operatic crescendo culminating in a squall of blurred smeared sound, sounding neither animal or human, before fading back into the insect chorale, the human voices drifting dreamily over the lovely low end hum of buzzing bees, that buzz, growing murkier and muddier until for the last few minutes it's just a warm washed out thrum. So lovely.
Out of all the proto-new age records that have become available again this one is quite unique and utterly weird. Often stated as the very first psychedelic album, it is more a document of of the intermediary space when beatnik bohemian sensibilities were beginning to transform into hippie communal expression.
British born philosopher Alan Watts, who popularized Eastern philosophy for Western audiences from his base in the San Francisco Bay Area of the late fifties and early sixties, emphasized the link between the practices of Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy, and proposed that if the sane man couldn't let himself lose control every once in awhile, he wasn't truly sane. So what we have here are freeform recordings from 1962 of wordless group chants, drum circles and primal scream therapy tempered instrumentally by circular repetitions of out of tune piano, percussion and flutes. Babbling call and response, vocal trills and whistles over caveman rhythms with occasional spoken philosophical passages by Watts himself, it has early influential links to later communal psych records like Parson Sound, Amon Duul and Taj Mahal Travellers. Though its outright and blatant freakiness may be an acquired taste for some, those who have a penchant for the sort of recordings featured on the famous Nurse With Wound list, especially Alan Sondheim's group Ritual ALL-770, this may be right up your alley!
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Any band that thanks funeral doom horde Rigor Sardonicous is alright by us. Especially if RS are one of the only four entities thanked. One being the label, the other being one of the other bands featured amidst this recent spate of Faunasabbatha releases, Sorc'Henn.
So what comes of an unhealthy love/obsession with Rigor Sardonicous, how about a creepy, ultra sick, noise drenched slow motion doom crawl? Downtuned, and lurching, stumbling and heavyheavyheavy. After a brief intro, all mournful windblown twang, a spidery latticework of spare, sorrowful melodies, plucked out over a whirling expanse of emptiness, comes the filthy, crusty, noisy multiple o'd doom. But sonically, Waverly Hills don't so much resemble funereal doom, as they do, modern noise rock, or Japanese ultra psych. The guitars are caustic coruscating streaks of blurred buzz, unleashed in heaving waves, while much of the band's time is spent crawling doomlike through a field of sonic broken glass, the guitars spend most of their time erupting in squalls of near white noise that sound like Keiji Haino fronting the Dead C. Thick clouds of whirling buzz, deconstructed riffage, super abstract percussion, the vocals a subsonic rumble, a blurred low end gurgle (except when it's a haunting ghostlike falsetto!) underpinning the soaring and drifting slabs of buzz overhead. Imagine doom metal being pulled apart, the notes and chords and riffs being rent asunder, the resulting squall still dark and doomy, by way more tripped out and damaged.
So yeah, you doooooooomlords will definitely dig this, especially if you lean toward stuff like Moss and Khanate and Bunkur and of course Rigor Sardonicous, but it might be even more appealing if your cup of tea is abstract psychedelic noise a la Sunroof!, Total, Dead C, White Heaven, etc...
LIMITED TO 74 COPIES, hand numbered on a tattered, torn piece of cloth, with the Faunasabbatha logo stamped on there as well, in a paper sleeve held shut wit a piece of metal wire.
An Australian import, but although band leader David Watson is from that corner of the globe, the other players on here are generally to be found Downtown, New York City...Andrea Parkins, Kato Hideki, Ikue Mori, and others. Japanese turntable genius Otomo Yoshihide also appears. What makes this stand out from any other bunch of NYC all-star avant-jazz improv jams? Well, Mr. Watson's main instrument is the bagpipes! The result: totally great, unusual bagpipe, um, squeezing, in a "free-rock" context. Recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A.C. Way has been a fixture in the Bay Area noise community for close to a decade now, performing constantly and within a number of ensembles (Maleficia, French Radio, Riqis, Carrion, NF Orchest, etc.), but his recorded solo output has been woefully under-represented. He's one to start furiously on projects only to shelve them either out of frustration with the process or if another opportunity might come along. However, the strength of Odo is such that Way should delve back into that repository of mangled tapes and extract more material like this. His means of production often involves a beat-to-shit turntable, a similarly beat-to-shit sampler, vocal growlings, and a noise-freak collection of pedals, resulting in a black noise miasma orbiting around MB, Lasse Marhaug, and Locrian. Odo is a comparatively brighter affair of harmonically interwoven tones and field recordings, but Way's menacing noise lurks throughout. The first of three pieces layers a set of harmonium-sounding drones whose linear stasis is upended by an arching churn of growling, low-end feedback, snapping into the second track of watery field recordings and subterranean drippings sutured to a chorus of mid-range sinetones. The final track engages an uneasy set of feedback tones made even more unsettled by a distant blackened cloud of rumbling distortion slowly joined by a metallic clamor and spectral blasts of wintery black noise. Think the more psychedelic noise of Ramleh, the transitional recordings by Emaciator from noise-to-drone, and most everything that comes out on Utech. Just 20 minutes long, but the price is certainly right!
A disembodied scream becomes noise becomes drone becomes the sound of swarming bees. Such is the course laid out by the oft-performing / occasionally-recording East Bay noise technician A.C. Way on this mighty fine 3" cd-r. This man has performed in numerous projects over the years, bringing his battered turntable, abused sampler, and array of distortion pedals to such projects as Maleficia, French Radio (with MX-80's Bruce Anderson, no less), Carrion, Riqis, and probably a few others that have slipped our mind. All of those aforementioned elements work their way into the crosshatched structure of this 20 minute composition. Whatever Way is sourcing for the initial blast of noise is downright terrifying. As much as we'd like to give credence to the thought it's a reverberant scream captured inside the half-mile Baker-Barry Tunnel found in the Marin Headlands, it's probably a fortuitous abrasion manipulated from Way's turntable. As encrusted distortion and corroded noises begin to dismantle these unsettling sounds, a glowing tone also emerges as something of a shimmering, gilded beacon, that's as beautiful as the noises that preceded it are not. When the sound of the bees flutters through that ephemeral drone, Way hints at another wash of sonic horror but resolves those sounds as a vibrating massage of ecological white noise. Really nice work, and limited to 50 copies.
Early electronic compositions from Karlruhe native and Stockhausen pupil Reinhold Weber. 2 long pieces inflected with oscilating bloops and bleeps, sirens and a delayed German narration.
We love music. But even so, it's not like we love everything. Here at the store, we've all got different tastes and enjoy different things to varying degrees. Regular readers will notice there are only a few unanimous picks, but pretty much everyone here loves Windy & Carl!
This release veers into way different territory than might be expected, but will still please plenty of W&C's more adventurous fans. Before hearing the record, rumors were circulating about how harsh it supposedly was, and how it sounded nothing like what we'd expect. Well, after checking it out, that's true, and then again it's not. Many of the same sonic qualities are present: warm drones, whispy guitars, etc. But it's in the melodies where this really diverges from the norm. Whereas W&C typically go for major-key, pretty drones, this work has a truly sinister quality to it. To really engage with the music, you need to at least become acquainted with the general concept.
On the surface, I Hate People sounds very unlike what we'd expect from the kindhearted dog-lover, musician, and Michigan record store owner we've come to know and love. So let's talk more about this specific release. Well, the cover sports her 1987 passport photo, which shows a very Siouxsie and the Banshees-esque, punk-meets-goth Windy. On the inside there is a short musing on Sirens, which can be summed up by one particular line: "at one point or another, we've all wanted an island." I Hate People is a record that openly paints human relationships as being a Self versus Other paradigm, and then juxtaposes that with the relationship between sailors and sirens. Windy hates people because people are the only thing that can truly hurt us. Okay, you get it. We don't want to get all pedantic. So what does it sound like? Sonically, the release definitely reflects a musical exploration of those ideas. At times more or less frustrated, but throughout it evokes a certain feeling of anxiousness and alienation, but never apathy. This record maybe be best suited for Windy & Carl fans who can stomach the idea of truly disturbing drones, or possibly even fans of leftfield, ambient black metal. Yeah. So if none of that scares you, dare to delve in! This is a great release, and we hope to see more solo work from both Windy AND Carl! Recommended!
Some of these tracks have been floating around on blogs for ages, it was only a matter of time before someone would gather them all up and release a killer compilation, shouldn't be too surprised it ended up being Omni! This Australian synth pioneer is probably best known for the bubbly synth pop classic "Love By Numbers", with its near literal lyrics, the verses simply AW reciting numbers from 1 to 100 (and then some, but it fades out around there), in a thick weirdly Teutonic accent, his count interrupted here and there by a dreamy girl pop chorus of "It Must Be Love", before it's right back to the counting, all over some terrific minimal wave electro pop. Originally released with the awesomely titled B-side "Boring Instrumental", which is a glorious little chunk of stripped down lilting electronic pop, not boring in the least. And then it gets really weird. Check out "Sex II", which lays down a groovy squelchy minor key electro groove, over which AW, and his female counterpart, recite what sounds like a strange not especially sexy, grocery list, from avocado, to rare beef finely sliced, aspirin, a kumquat, three floral toilet rolls, a pork sausage, a cantaloupe, a jar of Vaseline, chicken giblets, crumpets, mayonnaise (this one delivered in a near orgasmic croon, as is chopped liver, rump steak and Listerine!), the whole thing laced with little electronic squiggles, the boy / girl vocals delivering their various items extremely passionately/seriously, more so as the list continues, the track occasionally also augmented by breathless panting, all over a sort of chorus of thick soaring majestic synth swirl and some crunchy fuzz guitar. Might be the most replayed track here. But that's only the beginning, there's a twisted cover of the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" which is nearly unrecognizable, made all woozy and fuzzy and soft focus, there's the VERY Elvis-y electro-rockabilly of "Boom Boom Baby", which also predicts the sound of eighties big haired synth weirdos Sigue Sigue Sputnik, there's the woozily psychedelic "The Galvanized Garden Of Inner Peace", that also has a little rockabilly swagger to it, there's another version of "Sex II", instrumental this time, the music even more playfully exaggerated and the sounds super dubbed out, there's the dark bloopy, distorted guitar driven, electro slither of "Do-Do" replete with some weird deep vocals intoning "GET OFF THE FLOOR!!", everything reverbed and drenched in echo, there's "The Ballad Of A Metronome", which is classic eighties pop, but with some truly strange sung/spoken vocals, there's also the warped piano ballad "Radiation Injection", which is more goofy and playfully silly than the title might suggest, but with some snarly almost Suicide like vox tethered to the bleepy bloopy music. Pretty much every track here is a twisted gem, covering all of AW's outfits, from his solo single, to his stints fronting the Metronomes, Thealonian Music and Modern Jazz. He would later go on to record with Nina Hagen, he's actually STILL a live member of Einsturzende Neubauten, the liner notes, as with all Omni releases, are extensive, and detail AW's musical life, and of course there are lots of rare photos and reproductions of original record sleeves. But give a listen to the sound samples, we're guessing you'll be immediately hooked!
We've been trying to track these down for ages, a mysterious set of dubstep 12"s, some of the coolest, darkest, grimiest dubstep we've heard, all housed in plain white sleeves, no info except for a stamp of either a larva, a pupa or an adult Weevil, that symbol designating which of the three Weevil Series 12"s it is. We decided it was probably better to sell these as a set, as they were difficult to track down, and had to be shipped overseas, and odds are if you want one, you're probably gonna want the set.
Originally a customer sent us a link to some samples online and all it took was about 30 seconds and we were hooked. Dark and creepy, ominous and menacing, the sound rough and textured and raw and not at all slick or glossy, the beats, slipping from dubstep stutter to almost jungle skitter, the background a swirl of spaced out effects, deep bass swells, mysterious voices, and when the beat drops, it drops hard, the bass buzzing, thick and corrosive.
The first volume, Larva, is seriously grimy, muted buried rhythms and roiling black clouds, the beat gradually growing more intense, the drop huge, the beat nearly knocking us over, the dubstep definitely a little jungly. The second track offers up some super effected distorted dancehall style toasting over an echo drenched beat, and warped bass warble, and the drop here too is fierce, the bass a fat fuzzed out wobble, the beat jagged and stuttery, a super raga style dubbed out groove that kills. The final track gets a bit more darksteppy, the tempo cranked up, definitely more jungle than dubstep, the beat wreathed in clouds of squelch and synthy squiggle, and peppered with bits of African Head Charge like ambience. So good.
And the second volume, Pupa, is just as good, starting out with a clipped lurching groove, and some vocals that are chopped up and transformed into a weird sort of bassy hiccup, almost like a croaking frog, the beat stripped down and minimal, all skitter, wreathed in clouds of swirling psychedelic hiss and whir, and haunting black ambience, a strangely off kilter hip hop-ish chunk of dark dark dubstep. The second track mixes it up again, setting the beat against a backdrop of woozy synth swirl, wrapped around a skipping chunk of warbly bass buzz, wrapped in swirls of glitch and static, the sound more laid back and droney, hypnotic and washed out, which leads into the final track, a big block rockin beat, laid over fuzzed out bass, and all sorts of dubby effects and extra percussion, again, with some swirly synths laid down in the background.
Finally, the set finishes off with part three, Adult, which shifts gears again, the first track a murky bit of super minimal droned out mesmer, the beat, muted and buried beneath a field of static, and blurred low end fuzz, laced with random bits of clatter, like some super abstract Chain Reaction Heroin House take on lo-fi dubstep, crusty, and sinister, and abstract and haunting and AWESOME.
The second track continues in the same direction, similarly minimal and stripped down, not nearly as murky, but with a seriously clinical, motorik clipped beat, surrounded by Geiger counter like chitter, all over little flurries of high hat, and subtle bits of dubbed out FX, super hypnotic and WAY too short.
Finally, the closing track picks up the pace, that creepy processed raga like toasting returns, over metallic clouds of billowy bass, the beats laid back and stripped way down, the thick buzzing bass pulse driving the groove, everything surrounded by what sounds like field recordings of a forest or jungle, a darkly psychedelic bit of dubbed out bass heavy murk. So good. We haven't stopped listening to these since we first got them in. Dubstep jam of the year? Last year? This year? Any year? Hell yeah!!
Each 12" is limited to 300 copies, hand numbered, and hand stamped, all in plain white sleeves. And remember we're selling all three 12"s together as a single set.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of the most gleefully eccentric albums around right now is a re-issue from 1970! Fans of the bizarre genius of Bruce Haack and Raymond Scott gather 'round! Heck, you're undoubtedly already more than familiar with Mr. Fred Weinberg, but for those of us who missed it the first time around... Here's 18 tinkly twinky twisted compositions (including 7 bonus tracks) that would probably be deadringers for television theme songs and commercial jingles if they were being performed on a more - ahem! - traditional array of instruments, but such is not the case! The Weinberg Method involves the electronic manipulation and mutation of "natural" sounds (y'know, from the world around you: car horns honking, sirens squealing, toilets flushing, hearts beating, etc). These sounds are then inserted where those of the string, horn or percussion instruments would have been. Incredibly strange music indeed! We should also note that the liner notes suggest "this album be played at 33, 45 and 78 rpm." Kinda hard to do on a cd, but probably well worth the effort!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Equipped with naught but a sampler, Weinstein creates disjointed, alienated soundtracks that sound like Tipsy without the groove. His pieces swing between a nostalgia for the music of the past, and premonition of the music of the future.
We listed the latest record by Texas folk pop ensemble the Weird Weeds a few lists back, and everybody dug it like crazy, so we got in touch with the band and got a handful of their first record, Hold Me. Which is just as good!
A dizzying blend of random ethereal popness and shimmery dreamlike folkiness with a healthy heaping of arty angularity. Slightly confusional and a little schizophrenic, but the Weird Weeds' off kilter playfulness is exactly what makes this combo so totally appealing. Fun and freaked out, but always soft and dreamy, even at their most convoluted.
One side of the band's sound is all fluttery flutes and swoonsome strings, little bits of strum and twang wrapped into perfect little nuggets of sunshine-y West Coast pop. A little country, a little hippy, all super sun dappled with plaintive vocals and simple minor key strumming.
The other side of their sound is a much more obtuse assemblage of stumbling drums, twinkling guitar harmonics, lots of tangled squiggly almost metallic guitar solos over wildly strummed acoustic guitars, a constant angular Deerhoof art-rockiness that perfectly plays to the interaction between super high sad boy vocals and dreamy angelic female vocals. While these guys are definitely far out, and these songs are not at all straight forward, the weirdness never overshadows their pop sense, which makes Hold Me a total delight for pop kidz and artrock nerds alike.
Another ultra limited cd-r from Root Strata, only 100 copies, most of which are already gone, so we'll be brief, but grab one of these before they're gone, it's quite lovely.
A mere 20 minutes long, a series of hushed barely there ultra delicate guitarscapes, all drift and shimmer, breathless and minimal, a glacial swirl of muted tones, and subtle overtones, no attack, just decay, notes left to hang as they slowly fade out, only to have another hazy note laid over the top. Dreamy and ethereal and ephemeral, strap on some headphones to truly get lost in these blurred stretches of soft focus guitar, you'll most likely end up setting your player on repeat, laying back, and letting these sounds carry you away.
So gorgeous. As is the packaging, brown chipboard, sleeves with a hole cut out, each one displaying a water colored insert, every one unique, all done by hand, and LIMITED TO 100 COPIES...
We last heard from Wereju was on a sprawling�two track,�double cd released early last year. The ambient drone side project of Irish ultra doom heavies Wreck Of The Hesperus, Wereju deviated from the mothership bigtime, their take on the slow and low a whole 'nother beast entirely, and then even not all that beastly. It wasn't massive or heavy or sludgey, instead it was dreamy and mysterious, the low end more soothing than corrosive. There were definitely some intense moments, but for the most part, the sound of Wereju was a gorgeous blackened late night shimmer.�
So here we have the follow up, released on Basses Frequences, one of our favorite new labels, who recently brought us that cool Tamagawa triple 3"cd-r with the origami lantern, and several other releases elsewhere on this list. Wereju, sonically, are a perfect fit on BF, this disc another two tracker, the first, a gauzy glimmering slow motion soundscape, the sound of a camera slowly panning across a barren landscape, cloaked in fog, wreathed in smoke, the trees barely visible, just dark shapes wrapped in whites and greys, rendered in gorgeous loooong tones, not all low end either, in fact, this is firmly in the upper register, distant keening high end streaks, smoothed into strange slithery melodies, bell like tones ring out, the decay stretching out forever, softly pulsing as the sound waves drift heavenward, beneath it all, a soft rumble whirs lazily, like an ancient engine powering this slow moving celestial body of sound. Shimmering, glittering, ethereal, the sound of sunlight on water, of sunbeams filtering through the clouds, infusing the otherwise barren soundscape with a soft burnished glow.
The second track, is a bit more ominous, a bit more minimal. Distorted guitars moan way off in the distance, a deep undulating low end, spreads out like a black cloud in front of the sun. Bits of feedback and reverbed melodies drift by, but where as the first track was day, this is most definitely night. Dark, ominous, shadowed, cloudy, lots of rumbling low end, but not quite disguising the soaring shimmering remnants of the opener, that seem to be lurking just below the surface, a softly churning, constant battle for sonic supremacy, light versus dark, high versus low, but a soft war, the two sounds not so much clashing, as bleeding into each other, black and whites become greys, the sound gorgeously languid and soft focus, a long, luxurious slow burning fade to black. Gorgeous.�
Incredible packaging too. The cd is seated in a black tray within a hinged metal tin, with a paste on front cover, full color sticker, and a sticker inside too with the liner notes.�
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!!
A while back we listed a killer chunk of ultra sludge from Irish doom-mongers Wreck Of The Hesperus, whose particular brand of doom fell more in line with Eyehategod than Esoteric. A sort of blown out slithery not quite groovy drugged out sludgey bile spewing stoner doom. Phew. We dug it very much though. But who would have thought that under all that blown out distortion and downtuned swagger, lurked a shimmery droney drifting soft side. Certainly not us, but here we are, sinking deep into the dolorous embrace of Wereju, the dark ambient drone side project of one of those Hesperians. Not so much black ambient as dreamy droney drift, although that may just be splitting hairs. Hard to say what the sound source is, we're guessing guitar, but the end result is pretty and shimmery, dark and billowy, slow soft swells of rumbling whir, steel string reverberations smoothed into muted abstract melodies. At it's most fierce, you can hear some Sunn 0))), as the tones distort and overload the poor speakers on our computer, but more often than not Wereju occupies a sonic space somewhere between the hushed minimalism of Niblock and Coleclough and the slightly more active and blown out doomdone ministrations of the more aggressive proponents of dark ambience. Two discs, loooooong songs, every one a slow shifting hypnotic slab of mysterious darkness and ur-drone divinity.
Way Recommended.
Notorious Swiss drummer (of Alboth! and 16/17 fame) Wertmuller and guitar experimentalist Wittwer release improv tracks that are equal parts airy and dense, raucous and careful. Lovely yet super heavy. Caspar Brotzmann fans (like us) will enjoy. Recommended.
