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After a handful of releases on Bernhard Gunter's label Trente Oiseaux, M. Behrens turns to the exceptional Japanese label Digital Narcis. Here his precessed environmental recordings take on a particularly artificial quality through a use of digital distortion and timestretching, altering the exaggerated microscopic striations and air-duct drones to otherworldly sounds, beyond the original sources of frogs, insects, and owls. 'This new Behrens is the best work I've heard from him to date!' - Vital Weekly / Staalplaat
For his "Elapsed Time" album, the German ultra-minimalist Marc Behrens uncovered a handful of his old cassettes of field recordings and compositions for analogue synthesizer, which he then ran through his current studio set up of digital signal
Behrens' has done well to keep his original intent of manifesting a paranoid listening environment with the original recordings, but some of the recordings do show their age from time to time (especially the sporadically used but sorely out of place Arp synth). Certainly recommended to those fans of current ultra-minimalism who have a healthy appetite for the cut-up experiments from the Industrial Culture.
The title "Integracao" translates from Portuguese as "Integration," which is the title of a series of microsound performances by Michael Behrens, in various locations around Europe during the past couple of years. In each successive performance, he would add
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As on the preceding album "Elapsed Time" for Intransitive Recordings, German composer M. Behrens has been digging through his archival recordings and digitally reworking them. Lately, Behrens has been veering away from the delicate minimalism of his
Marc Behrens is a sound artist who hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention around these parts, despite having released plenty of compelling albums of conceptually driven compositions abstracting various environmental recordings. It's not surprising that he's worked with Francisco Lopez and Achim Wollscheid in the past, but to see that he collaborated with Atom TM certainly raises an eyebrow or two around these parts. But here, Behrens is operating in the clinical vein of the phonographer. 20 Zonen was originally commissioned for a radio piece and features field recordings entirely collected from a particular neighborhood in the German city Darmstadt. The 40 minute composition mixes the sounds of heavy industry, high-tech precision devices, rustic soundscapes of bird twitter at various ponds, and a brass band here and there. Behrens is more than happy to cut-up and reconfigure the sounds; but even in doing so, he typically keeps the sounds easily recognizable. This is most true when he chops up various sounds from an equestrian club, so the snorts of horses become a recursive theme as does a solemn clomp of a slow horse trot. Some of the more compelling sounds of 20 Zonen come from the specialized devices used at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, whose whirring machines emit eerie, strange gaspings and radioactively crackling drones that would be the envy any number of radical sound destroyers. Behrens' contextualization of these sounds is where the art lies in 20 Zonen, and there is a mathematical precision to his craft that makes this such an interesting listen!
Sourced from recordings made aboard Lisbon ferries and at the quays of Cais do Sodre (one of the neighborhoods in the Portuguese capital), Marc Behrens and Paolo Raposo have constructed an allegorical set of compositions on Hades that intentionally mirror the mythological journey in crossing the River Styx. According to the ancient Greek beliefs, Styx was a border between the Underworld and Earth; and a ferry was the only means of transportation across the river. When put into a modern context of sound art and field-recording based collage, quotidian sounds sucha as the rumble of a diesel motor as it spews crusty exhaust and the creaking of the hull against the pier takes on a much more profound significance. Behrens and Raposo have done quite a good job in highlighting particular sounds, frequencies, and vibrations from the aquatic journey in traveling through Lisbon by way of boat, as a way of transforming that experience into a sombre event of mournful bellows and anguished sighs. Yet on occasion, Hades becomes agitated with rasping clatters of mechanical noise, alluding that the end of life is certainly not an easy journey. For an album about such a portentous subject as death, Behrens and Raposo do well to concentrate upon their sounds through the lens of a minimalist conceptual framework and allow the mythological and allegorical images to flow around their well-grafted sound.
We first came across the work of Thomas Bel through a compilation track he provided to the beloved ambient label Time Released Sound. This French musician has quietly hand-fabricated his own releases, an aesthetic that both TRS and Invisible Birds also share. To Dye Every Night is something of a personal soundtrack for an emotional landscape of melancholy and introspection. The materials are spare but wholly elegant - field recordings of a rain storm, guitar, and voice. That rain storm is recorded in such a way to capture the smacking textures of water and mud. So sharp are some of these aqueous plonks and drips that Bel gives the impression that these recordings were made at near freezing temperatures. Bel's elliptical guitar picking cycles through a desolate melody whose mood completely fits those rainy, miserablist field recordings, and the slow, funereal piece is more in keeping with the latter day Earth recordings although the melodies certainly align themselves with the Slint / Mogwai / Codeine sensibility. Very slowly, Bel's voice rises out of the rain and mud, presenting itself as a singular, tonal chord (obviously looped, unless he's mastered circular breathing to an extent that's beyond even Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young!). It's a beautifully lilting piece of maudlin, super stripped down mope-rock meets ambient soundscaping. Limited to just 100 copies and hand assembled by the fine folks at Invisible Birds.
So many good releases on the Swedish label Hapna, it's hard to keep up! But we didn't want to overlook this one, 'cause Italian experimentalist Andrea Belfi is one half of the duo known as Crista Pfangen, whose Watch Me Getting Back The End, an album of (in our words) "fragmented yet melodic, experimental avant-indie pop", appeared earlier this year on Die Schachtel, and got a big thumbs up from us.
As a solo artist, Belfi delves here into a weird (but successful) conceptual minimalist electro-acoustic experiment based around something about making music from ordinary household sounds. Hmm... it's an interesting house Belfi must live in! It's a dwelling of gentle drones, glitchy mystery, and shimmering, skitteringly propulsive percussion (sounding at times not unlike that recent excellent Tarentel double cd). And the neighbors doing strange things upstairs, moving furniture and stuff. Field recordings, electronics, vague voices, and regular ol' instruments mesh into a lovely bit of work here. Definitely worth investigating especially if you're into the Italian scene populated by Belfi's pals like 3/4hadbeeneliminated, Stefano Pilia, Giuseppe Ielasi, etc.
Believer is the new musical project of Danny Paul Grody and Trevor Montgomery (both from Tarentel and The Drift as well as various other side projects and solo outfits including Lazarus, and Moholy-Nagy). For their debut release put out by Land And Sea, who brought us the Coconut 7" from a couple of lists ago, the duo recorded three expansive synth-based compositions that are beautifully minimal and impressionistic. Using loops, sweeping bell tones and guitar washes, the three tracks encompass a kind of melodic formlessness, beginning with a pattern and then slowly letting it dissolve into something much airier, all the while still maintaining a sense of gravity and musical purpose. A fine debut that makes us look forward to whatever comes next. Super limited to 50 copies in handsewn paper covers (that you have to rip or cut open to get to the disc!). Highly Recommended!
This long time aQ favorite, finally back in stock!
Another solo outing from a member of the mighty Lungfish, and another disc of looped repetitive transcendental mesmer. First Daniel Higgs, then Asa Osborne's Zomes, and now Nathan Bell, how these guys ever put together an actual ROCK band we'll never know, we'll blame it on the drummer for now, at least until he comes out with some insane raga drone solo record, then we just give up.
It makes sense though as Lungfish songs weren't like normal songs, they were like minimal loops writ large, expanded into hypnotic epics, the band locked into an incredible groove, while Higgs does his thing over the top. But it becomes more and more apparent, that all the various members of Lungfish had a thing for minimalism, for drones, ragas, for repetition, and thus we have Nathan Bell's @2640. Recorded in a massive crumbling old cathedral, plugged into a blown out amplifier, these four tracks, while played on the banjo, don't sound country, or bluegrass, or even remotely twangy, in fact they don't really sound like they were played on a banjo. The notes have a sharp attack and a quick decay, but the massive space helps them stay afloat a bit longer than normal, Bell's arrangements and compositions offering nods to Reich and Riley, the pieces nearly static, a simple melody wound up within the endless repetition. So simple and gorgeous and absolutely mesmerizing. If you dug the Higgs solo records and the Zomes, you pretty much need this too.
Limited cd-r, in a hand screened fold over cardstock sleeve with a printed insert. And of course, as always LIMITED!
They had us at DOOM BAND, NO STRINGS. Just drums, sax, and TUBA. That's IT. FUCKING tuba and sax, seriously, no guitar, no bass, just two horns and a drum kit, and these guys kick up a sound that dwarfs plenty of bands with axes to spare. Bellows is the perfect name for these guys, cuz the lungs on these guys must be like bellows, the horns moan and howl, the sax especially, the lead instrument, is wrapped in effects, and essential lays down some wailing, FX drenched, leads, that squeal and howl, the bands lock into killer lurching groove, the tuba, letting loose with an elephant roar low end, the sax just as often laying down a weird sheet of hiss or washed out drone, sometimes so effected it sounds like some fucked up synthesizer. And the drums, heavy and chaotic and mathy, the band locked into lurching lumbering dirges, post rocky workouts, and full on noise rock freakouts. It's a little like a marching band gone over to the darkside, some sinister assembly held in the deepest recesses of hell. The vocals are also bellowed, distorted and growled, venomous and malevolent, giving the sound a distinctly nineties East Coast noise rock Cop Shoot Cop sort of vibe. There's always a groove, but it's typically a woozy doomic one, the drums driving the sound big time, but those horns are just insane, some of the sounds they get out of 'em, on "Haunts" it's all drums and tuba, while the sax unfurls a creepy minor key melody, over and over, so hypnotic, before the track breaks down, and the low end is transformed into what sounds like a choir of throat singers, while the sax bleats and trills, and the drums just bludgeon.
There are moments, where the sound borders on jazzy, it's sort of unavoidable, but we're talking face melting Brotzmann style jazz, and that jazziness is inevitably all filtered through some crusty, creepy, blown out super distorted space doom filter, that makes these guys sound absolutely like no one else, and just as often as it gets jazzy, it gets something else, "Story Of A Giant" is all spaced out and almost waltzy, and there's no way you could tell the instrumentation, the sax unfurling shimmery psychedelic clouds of tangled melody, the tuba a thick bass throb, all wrapped in a druggy haze, and on the record closer, "Half-Life", the sax is super processed and becomes some fractured angular noisemaking machine, leading the group into an extended drone-out, all long tones, chanted vocals, swirling effects, total psych drone trip out, before finally slipping into a woozy jazzy outro, and finally a crushing chugging closing burst of ultra distorted crunch.
Fuck yeah. Came close to making this a fourth Record Of The Week!
There are certain sounds we can just never get enough of. Belong have always trafficked in one of those sounds, a blurred, bleary washed out droney, druggy drift, everything hazy and gauzy and pixelated, crumbling melodies, slow shifting textures, like old pop songs broadcast through broken transistor radios, or alien transmissions distorted by millions of miles of space and millions of years, every song some sort of dizzyingly smeared blown out, hushed and haunting dronescape, all thrum and shimmer, rumble and whir. It's a sound practiced by others for sure, but there is most definitely a pantheon, a royalty of sorts, and alongside Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck and few others, so too do sit Belong.
It's been maybe 5 years since their last proper full length, the gloriously abstract and distorted loveliness that was October Language, and since then, they've released a single 4 song ep, a record of covers, but of course utterly transformed, the very poppiness of the originals buried underneath layer upon layer of murk and grim and buzz and crunch, and again all stretched and blurred and smeared into these fantastical miniature epics, these avant pop flecked drones, warm and whirling and completely mesmerizing.
Looking back now, listening to Common Era, Belong's brand new full length, it's easy to say, that those covers were already hinting at a sonic shift, a move toward something more traditionally pop, a gradual approach to something more structured, more overtly pop, but the 'pop' of those songs is WAY removed from the pop found here, for Common Era has taken all that fantastic shoegaziness and shimmery ambience, and wrapped it around real and proper pop songs. Simple propulsive percussion, minimal guitar jangle, swaths of swirling keyboards, hushed breathy vox, everything reverbed and echoey and washed out, a sort of eighties style new wave minimal pop, but of course in the hands of Belong, it becomes something more ethereal, ghostly, ephemeral, druggy and dreamy.
Imagine My Bloody Valentine crossed with Tim Hecker crossed with Felt, maybe stir in some of Ariel Pink's idiosyncratic faux FM radio pop, and that's these perfect abstract, minimal chunks of lilting jangle, often buried in billowing clouds of warm swirling FX and softly distorted shimmer, but just as often, with much of the noisiness peeled back, leaving just some pure pop, and even then, it's muted and muddied, like it's being broadcast from some rift in time, a sort of blurred transmission from the past, pretty fantastic. Some of the tracks get downright spacey too, a sort of kraut flecked hypnorock, the takes the minimal repetitive psych of groups like Moon Duo or Wooden Shjips, and slathers on tons more echo and reverb, wreaths everything in blurred synth swirls, and fuzzy low end pulses, and lets the songs just sort of ooze and drift and hover, gradually becoming less and less pop, and more loose and abstract and woozy and washed out and dreamy. But ALL the tracks on Common Era never fully give up the pop. For all the droniness, and the minimal FX drenched soundscapery, this is essentially a gorgeous, albeit, strange and mysterious, pop record.
The funny thing is, since these guys are on Kranky, and their last few records were more minimal and droney and avant, this record will essentially be considered art, a sort of high brow minimalist pop music, or some sort of dronepop, and so, of course, all the folks who love everything Kranky, will no doubt dig this like crazy, as they should. But had this been a super limited cd-r, or been released on Not Not Fun or maybe Olde English Spelling Bee, this would be hailed as THEE lysergic lo-fi minimal bedroom pop jam of the year. WHICH IT IS. Too. In fact, Belong have managed to somehow make a record that's both a strange druggy lo-fi pop record, and a super abstract avant bit of poppy droney prettiness. And we LOVE it.
Belong, belong (couldn't resist) in a world of washed out sound, faded memories and blistering layers of sound. Imagine the warm crackles of Endless Summer era Fennesz, a touch of Godspeed You Black Emperor aimed at monumental peaks and valleys, a Flying Saucer Attack eyes half closed eyes half open delivery with a My Bloody Valentine shimmering layer of sound thrown in for good measure. A duo from New Orleans, Belong do a really nice job of taking from their influences but also having their own unique take on the whole gauzy smeary ambient free noise sound. Their take being a thick heady blast of sound that doesn't at all lose any of its gauzy dreaminess. October Language is that great kind of record that can take on different lives when played soft vs. loud. It allows you to enjoy it quiet, as a textural layer that you can dream beneath or drift away on top of. Or you can blast Belong and they'll take you out of your dreams, and your head and into another state completely. So nice!
There have been a whole bunch of killer installments in Table Of The Elements' recent guitar based series of one sided 12"s: Oren Ambarchi, Lee Ranaldo, Jon Mueller, but this is the one everyone seems to have been waiting for.
Especially considering what went on with the last belong 12". We sold out in a flash, got more and then sold out again, we couldn't keep that in stock. Well, we're happy to report that this latest is just as good if not better. Whereas the other 12" was all covers, the single looooong track here is an original and it's a doozy. A warm, washed out, dreamy, delicate, gauzy blurred woozy drift of pixilated sound. Jeck, Tim Hecker, Fennesz, all those guys have nothing on Belong. If anything, Belong take those sorts of sound and transform them into something more organic, more amorphous. "Same Places" sounds almost like actual people playing actual guitars, instead of something assembled on a computer. Layered and dense, the melodies obscured by thick swells of fuzzy whir, the fact that this is the "slow version" does explain how gorgeously glacial it sounds, and how many of the tones do sound like someone with their finger on the vinyl slowing the record player down to a crawl, but all that does is let the lowend sprawl, the melodies become even more abstract, pulled apart, and slowed down to the point where their constituent parts almost separate and drift away, almost. Instead, it's an underwater whirl, everything shimmery and indistinct, the sound as you sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, but instead of getting darker, the sounds begin to glow from within, bathing you in their unearthly light. So totally gorgeous.
Pressed on thick clear vinyl. One sided, the other side with a super bad ass etching by Savage Pencil, housed in a thick vinyl sleeve, and of course, as always LIMITED!
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Beneath The Lake is the new ambient drone project of Nicolas Lampert, who was one third of AQ faves Noisegate, a bay area crusty, death-drone-ambient project with two records out on Andee's tUMULt label. Beneath The Lake finds Nicolas and new partner Dave Canterbury exploring similar sonic space as Noisegate did on their last full length 'Suspended Animation', but with more emphasis on the nature of sound and a much more dense and heavily layered approach. Utilising cello, guitar, pedals, processors and environmental recordings of sea lions, water, whales, wasps, wolves, owls and wind, Beneath The Lake manage to create rumbling pulsing drones that feel somehow alive, with organic thrum and cavernous shimmers, sounds slipping in and out of the sonic landscape, sparse and desolate one moment, lush and overpowering the next. Haunting and chillingly beautiful. One of our new favorite drone records.
This is record number two from Beneath The Lake, whose first record from 2002, Inside The Passage, was a huge hit around these parts. BTL is made up of Nicolas Lampert, who was one half of Oakland ambient terrorists Noisegate, who released two records on Andee's tUMULt label, and Dave Canterbury who is a fixture of the noise underground performing as Wage Class Slave. Beneath The Lake is a project based on creating soundscapes combining minimal ambient music and found sounds, with an emphasis on composing the music to compliment the sounds instead of just using the sounds as a backdrop. Where their first record focused more on nature, Silent Uprising shifts the focus a bit more toward the increasing influence of the urban landscape as cities continue to encroach on nature and change the balance forever. The record begins with the clatter of trains rushing past, the receding sound of the train is soon joined by a simple strident guitar riff, accompanied by a mournful wooden recorder. The two drift and shift and slowly build in intensity. Very reminiscent of Neurosis at their most mellow, surprisingly enough. The riff shifts and twists, shadowed by the recorders melodies eventually being joined by the sound of another train and eventually being drowned out by the roar of the wheels on the tracks. The second track is a simple, gorgeously melancholy guitar melody, slowly and deliberately picked, over a bed of crackly static that could be either the sound of rain falling or the crackle of a fire, or both. The sound on Silent Uprising is much more musical than on Inside The Passage with the drone being relegated to just one of many instruments / approaches as opposed to the very dark and slow shifting all encompassing drone of the earlier record. Here, it's -that- guitar, all dark and shimmering and reverberant, and the brooding slow building melodies that creep across the sonic landscape. It sometimes almost sounds like the slow core of Low being performed in a steel mill or a rail yard, the band struggling to be heard over the sound of rain and wind and trains and passing cars. Strangely powerful and poignant. Packaged in a gorgeous oversized sleeve with breathtaking images of winter foliage and urban landscaapes, printed in all muted browns and tans. So lovely.
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Glacial drones, beautifully sung songs by/about a notorious killer, thousands of buzzing bees and a death metal cameo...all are elements of this gorgeous and bizarre soundtrack to one of the weirdest and biggest budget art/film projects ever, Matthew Barney's million-dollar "Cremaster 2".
We were lucky enough to get a hold of some copies of the rare soundtrack composed by Johnathan Bepler. For the most part, Bepler layers multiple atonal church organ chords with varying effects that tweak the underlying sound. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir makes an appearance as does some digitally bent country twang. But the mindblowing highlight (both here on the cd and in the film) is the massive blastbeat provided by ex-Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo as Morbid Angel's bass player and vocalist Steve Tucker sings into a phone while cloaked in bees, who also contribute much buzzing to the wall of sound.
Barney's "Cremaster" series is arguably the most important work to emerge from the artworld in the past decade. To discuss in depth Barney's convoluted symbolism and bizarre Lynch / Cronenberg / Greenaway imagery would take up far too much space even for this increasingly verbose new arrivals list, but we'll attempt a brief introduction for the uninitiated: Barney's sound / film / installation pieces are poetic and difficult allegories, centered on the growth of human sexuality and its psychological implications. "Cremaster 2" is actually the fourth in a five part series (the order went 1, 3, 5, and then 2), and is, quite crassly put, a really good dick joke. More critically put, Barney abstracts the life & times of the serial killer Gary Gilmore to portray an archetype for a pre-linguistic male figure who lacks the super-ego control over the id's proclivity for sex & violence.
Music has always played an important part in the Barney work, and Jonathan Bepler's score for "Cremaster 2" certainly does its best to support Barney's complex visual elements. If you haven't seen the film, this soundtrack will make you want to.
It's a shame "Cremaster 3" isn't slated to come to San Francisco anytime soon, although the final installment of Matthew Barney's massive film project of onanistic cryptography, baroque sexual fetishes, psycho-analytic allegories, and divergent narratives will return to New York in spring of 2003. So, there's not much to report about the film itself (since I've not seen it), although it has something to do with the history of Freemasons, the Guggenheim Museum, macho-minimalist Richard Serra hurling vaseline, a punk battle of the bands between Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front, video games, and multiple references to Chrysler (both the car and the building). Yet, we -can- announce the arrival of the "Cremaster 3" soundtrack composed by Jonathan Bepler (who scored the two preceding films "Cremaster 5" and "Cremaster 2.") Yes, the numerical sequencing of this series is supposed to be out of order, merely one of many convolutions of logic. As in "Cremaster 2," Bepler masterfully constructs his soundtrack out of pre-existing musical genres and recognizable codifications of sound. Gaelic bagpipes blurt a dissonant stream of polyphonic notes, theremins sadly pull a solitary croon from the ether, violins glide through sustained tones, lurid artnoir grooves further corrode Barry Adamson's dark application of be-bop, and the drones, oh the drones. Much like the Alan Splet score for David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and even some of the later Ligeti chorale pieces, Bepler dissolves all of these references into pools of droning sound which allow him to fluidly work in and out of the huge pastiche. As before, Bepler's work is totally amazing.
Any record bearing the legend: "All the music on this cd has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire" pretty much has to be good. Well okay, maybe HAS TO is exaggerating, but at the very least that sort of description is enough to get us very intrigued.
And in this case, it is good, but at the same time nothing at all like we were expecting.
We had imagined some sort of washed out Philip Jeck style drones, or pixelated Tim Hecker-ish soundscapes, or even the sort of crackling slow decay of William Basinski's tape pieces, but instead, Grant Beran has taken old records and some junky beat up equipment and used them to create surprisingly rhythmic tracks, utilizing various cracks and pops, and skips to fashion almost-grooves, like a lo-fi DJ Shadow sort of. The opener is all fuzzy and buzzy, but with a super driving beat, a skipping record looped into a hypnotic groove, a little bit techno, a little bit hip hop, a little creepy Goblin soundtrack, and a lot fuzzed out turntable buzz. It's not hard to imagine some clever DJ adding huge beats to this and you'd have the most fucked up lo-fi dancefloor jam ever. But we don't want to exaggerate the 'dance' aspect, it's more like the soundtrack to some lost John Carpenter movie, dubbed from VHS to VHS to home stereo to microcassette recorder until it ended up sounding like this, groove and fuzzy and murky and awesome!
The second track is much more moody and atmospheric, the rhythms an afterthought, that seem to surface randomly, while the meat of the track is deep sonorous tones, throbbing and distorted, woven into some low end melody. The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between hushed whispery ambient drone, and weirdly distorted lo-fi grooves, standout's include the buzzy electro jam of "The Man In The High Castle", the cinematic krautrocky murk of "Double Star", the almost Chain Reaction dub of "Star Collector" and the droney buzz and grind of "Gleanings".
Falling somewhere between experimental turntable soundscapery and a moody cinematic DJ record, Beran has skillfully woven sonic straw into fuzzy, stuttery, groovy gold, taking turntables and dreamdrone ambience into rhythmic places until now, as far as we know completely unexplored! WAY recommended.
Yet another record from this Australian soundscaper / dronologist (the fourth in the last year or so), and another fantastic collection of lush minimalism and field recording flecked mesmer. It had occurred to us before, but this new one in particular has us wondering how come so few folks seem to have heard of this guy, and why doesn't he have records on Editions Mego or Touch or any number of other labels who routinely put out stuff that's not nearly as good as this.
The 12 plus opener is the track that's had us smitten recently, with its haunting almost horror movie soundtrack melodic refrain, drifting over a surprisingly active backdrop of hiss and static, of barely there ghostly voices, and constantly shifting textures, a mysterious microscopic soundworld that most definitely rewards close listening, headphones required for the full effect, and that recurring theme, it's a perfect chunk of haunting cinematic electronic ambient minimalism, that once gain positions Berber Ox as something folks into Tim Hecker, Thomas Koner, Philip Jeck, Circle, Monos, Ora and the like, should be freaking out over.
The rest of the record is not nearly so lush and melodic, instead dipping into more caustic noise, blurred sheets of Merzbowian static smoothed into thick swaths of gristly ambience, or dark, ultra minimal landscapes of swirling murk, more buried voices, blurred broadcasts, a long stretch of haunting ambient drift, that sounds like a dubbed out stripped down version of the opener, slightly more sinister, and finally, the closer, which sounds like it was assembled from the sounds of bells, but those tolling chiming tones smeared into indistinct tonal blurs, overlapping, and pulsing subtly, like some sort of slow sonic tide, which is soon joined by a dense drone, and some distant percussive thumps, the whole thing seeming to melt into a warm, washed out thrum, droney, and druggy and dolorously dreamlike.
Gorgeous stuff as always, but act fast, cuz these are LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
We had never heard of the artist known by the strange monicker Berber Ox, but we got two different releases from this Australian soundscaper recently, whose music the man himself described as "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", which most definitely sounded right up our alley, a dizzyingly dark assemblage of sounds, found AND created, woven deftly into droney psychedelic ambience that definitely has us kicking ourselves for not hearing this stuff until now.
As Mr. Berber Ox spent much of the last few years in Japan, where most of the sounds on these two releases were in fact recorded, the proceeds from the sale of both will be donated to the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Fund, which is another reason to grab both before they're gone...
Like the Trounce cd-r, this tape finds Berber Ox taking raw field recordings and folding them into generated sounds, electronic and organic, rendering them unrecognizable for the most part, and blurring all of those into hazy atmospheric sprawls, on the surface a warm whir, a bleary shimmer, but within those seemingly slo-mo glacial streaks of layered sound lurk hushed melodies, mysterious overtones and subtle rhythmic shifts, with the field recordings occasionally revealing themselves, adding a whole 'nother vibe to the sound, humanizing the dark drift with voices or snippets of conversation, or further obscuring their provenance in the form of muted clatter, buzz, or soft industrial crunch, but even so, everything in the world of Berber Ox is further blurred into some sort of hazy otherworldliness, a muddied, murky, muted swirl of softly chaotic thrum and whir, shimmer and drift, hum and buzz, the sort of sound that is so easy to get lost in, a sonic gateway forged from dreamlike minimalism and hushed, sculpted softnoise, so darkly divine. And like the cd-r, recommended for drone explorers partial to Chalk, Coleclough, Ora, Mirror, Monos, Brendan Murray, Peter Wright and the rest...
Packaged in cool eye popping full color J-cards in bright blue tape cases, and LIMITED TO JUST 111 COPIES!! We got a very limited number of those direct from the man himself, and we might not be able to get more once these sell out.
We won't go into too much detail with this one, cuz like everything else we've ever had from this Aussie dronescaper, this is extremely limited (just 50 copies total, of which we got 10), which is a shame, cuz as we've mentioned in past reviews, the music of Berber Ox is pretty goddamn fantastic, and is definitely the sort of thing that deserves to be heard by more than just fifty people. Needless to say, act fast if you want one of these, cuz like the two tapes, and two cd-r's we've had before, Private Everywhere is another stunner, melding field recordings with strange psychedelic ambience, abstract percussion, buried rhythms, shifting textures and tangled melodies, heaving swells of chordal thrum underpin fields of high end pulses, and mysterious echo drenched rhythms, skeletal and spare, all drifting above hushed expanses of truncated voices, of crumbling chords, of swirling electronics. In places, the sound blossoms into fierce fields of blackened buzz, the sort of dronelord dirge that could give SUNNO))) a run for their money, while in others, the sound swings all the way to the other end of the spectrum, unfurling slow blossoming field of bell like chimes and gamelan like melodies, blurred into meditative sprawls of dreamdronedrift.
Long tracks that build slowly, weaving their way through daily life, the sounds of cars, bicycles, footsteps, loudspeaker announcements, all hover in the ether, while modern minimalist dronescapes pulse ominously, emitting arcs of subtle overtones, constantly shifting and mutating, slipping easily from ominous, sinister rumble, to crystalline cosmic shimmer and back again, finally culminating in the strangely out of place closer, that adds to the Berber Ox sound, a skittery Kompakt like techno beat, sounding like it could end up as a 12" on UK label Trensmat, which is not a bad thing at all...
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, housed in a cardboard sleeve, with full color, paste-on artwork affixed to the front and back.
Latest release from this Australian soundscaper / dronologist, another collection of self described "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", and really, no matter how many ways of describing the oddly monikered Berber Ox, we have yet to come up with a more succinctly accurate description. But while that is a pretty accurate thumbnail descriptor, it doesn't really do justice to Berber Ox's dark and surreal dronescapes. Four lengthy tracks, the shortest, 7:41, the longest a whopping 28:07, the sourced field recordings are for the most part blurred into impressionistic smears, layered tones, lush drifts of muted electrical crunch fused to shimmery soft focus chordal whir, a deft balance of grit and gristle, thrum and drift, the opener begins with some strange grinding bits of low end, almost rhythmic, which are quickly stretched out and subsumed by a whirring flow of tangled tones and blurred ambience. There does seem to be some fragments of the original field recordings, bits of click and skitter, but those elements merely add texture to the tracks glacial forward momentum. The much longer second track, is another bit of breathless shimmer, all soft swells and softened edges, it's not until well into the track, where the vibe begins to feel mildly industrial, with the background whir and hiss gradually overtaking the more melodic hum in the foreground. Darkly dreamy and utterly meditative.
The flipside begins with another short one, the awesomely titled "Bear And Vortex", which unfurls an ultra minimal rumble, that sounds almost like the wind whooshing past a microphone (and could very well be just that), and doesn't really move much beyond that, a hushed murky murmur of a track, with other haunting incidental sounds creeping into the picture, the result much like the sound of exploring some old abandoned underground bunker, a low level thrum, distant reverb drenched barely there ghostlike echoes, all softly blurred into an ultra minimal expanse of hushed grey ambience.
Finally, the record finishes off with the nearly half hour long "Kong", which again continues Berber Ox's dark and delicate exploration of some otherworldly / subterranean sound work, another dark expanse of layered softnoise shimmer, and buried melodic fragments, the field recording are most noticeable here, the occasional clang, tolling bells, what could be animal sounds, everything wreathed in a foggy sonic haze, until about three quarters of the way through, when the fog seems to dissipate, leaving something much more overtly musical, melodies become more fully formed, the background noises, almost rhythmic, the tolling bells, woven into something lustrous and lovely.
Fans of all things dark and dreamy and droney will dig this, Berber Ox definitely deserves a spot on your shelf alongside Tim Hecker, Thomas Koner, Philip Jeck, Machinefabriek and the like, assuming of course you have a very strange way of alphabetizing your records...
Printed bright yellow cassettes, housed in super colorful J-cards, limited to just 111 copies.
We had never heard of the artist known by the strange monicker Berber Ox, but we got two different releases from this Australian soundscaper recently, whose music the man himself described as "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", which most definitely sounded right up our alley, a dizzyingly dark assemblage of sounds, found AND created, woven deftly into droney psychedelic ambience that definitely has us kicking ourselves for not hearing this stuff until now.
As Mr. Berber Ox spent much of the last few years in Japan, where most of the sounds on these two releases were in fact recorded, the proceeds from the sale of both will be donated to the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Fund, which is another reason to grab both before they're gone...
Trounce is a super limited cd-r, released with minimal packaging on the esteemed Install label, home to Peter Wright, Gareth Hardwick, Horaflora and others. And Berber Ox sounds right at home, opening Trounce with with a thick humid cloud of sound, all rumbling whirring blacks and greys, shot through with all manner of field recordings, the thick thrum eventually recedes, leaving just a low level shimmer, laced with strange burblings, distant bird calls, that gradually builds and builds into what sounds like white noise surf, fading out in a blur of what sounds like canned mall music, leading directly into the hazy sonic gauze of the lengthy follow up, a nearly static drift of muted minimal hum, but within seems to lurk all manner of low end melody, subtle sonic shifts, all in their own way affecting the texture and timbre of the thick sound surrounding them.
And so it goes, the sounds tending toward the very minimal, long tones, draped over long tones, allowed to softly pulse, and gently undulate, creating ghostly overtones, and softly submerged almost-rhythms, these streaks and blurs infused with the chitter of insects, mysterious voices, snippets of traditional Japanese folk music, muted percussion, culminating in a final 20 minute sprawl of gently roiling gloom, beginning with a soft cacophony of tolling bells, one can imagine it's those bells that are blurred into Berber Ox's gorgeously murky gloom, a gloom that is transformed into what sounds like some sort of washed out doomgaze guitar buzz for the last few minutes, hypnotically heavy, yet still somehow hushed and dreamy.
Gorgeous stuff for sure. Recommended for anyone who digs lush, minimal drift and layered low end shimmer: Chalk, Coleclough, Ora, Mirror, Monos, Brendan Murray, Peter Wright et al...
VERY LIMITED, we got these directly from the man himself, and there's a good chance these will be the last copies we can get.
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Yet another slab of crunching, crushing electronica from our friends at Fflint, brought to us (of course) by the so far infallible Berkowitz, Lake and Dahmer.
This time it's all about the drone, and no one here at AQ can argue with that. While some of the stuttering skitter and jagged glitch remain, they are surrounded by and occasionally overtaken by washes of speaker melting hum and foundation rattling rumble. Fucking amazing.
Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it...
Besides having the greatest band name ever, BL&D whip up a malfunctioning maelstrom of stuttering, fuzzed out synth and hiccupping bursts of skull pounding glitchery.
Sputtering clicks and oscillating low end rumbles are draped over chest rattling modulated pulses, creating some of the fiercest, coolest experimental electronica we've heard in a while. Like music for that video game the devil forces you to play in hell, for eternity. Awesome.
Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it...
Record number two from the brilliantly named BL+D. This is a little more droney and hypnotic than the first Berkowitz record, but equally as fucked.
Spazzy organ solos degrade into super distorted, hypnotic pulsing, slowly evolving like a Charlemagne Palestine piece, albeit with a full battery of broken down machinery, malfunctioning effects, and distorted alien transmissions. Noisey but still musical, BL+D are like a thinking man's VV/M.
It's been almost three years now since our little musical community has been terorrized by everyones favorite serial dronesters Berkowitz Lake and Dahmer. And once again, the guys at Fflint Central, our favorite UK electronic / experimental / noise / drone label, have come up with an absolute killer (um...pun intended actually). BLD just so happens to be the duo of Barry and Tim, the men behind the Fflint curtain, and so it makes sense that BLD are probably the most musically powerful and fully realized Fflint entity. Tar Weasels is as good as anything BLD has done, the difference this time around, being that there seems to be much more of a focus on melody and texture, melodic swells, dreamy drones, gone are much of the abrasive noise and squelchy rhythms of past releases, with Weasels being a far more tranquil affair. There are rhythms, but they tend to be minimal little seismic events, or squeaking alien weirdness, present, but only in the background, while in the foreground, the world is a slow motion snapshot of an alien landscape, all shifting swirls and slow building swells, ambient, but an active ambience, static sheets of drone demarcated by little sonic imperfections, somehow wrangled into a marked musical path, guiding us through a dense and darkened world of crumbling drones, and billowing waves of rumble and rattle, a murky otherworldly vacuum, where each sound is frozen in time, and then hurled into a black hole, but instead of being swallowed up and lost, each sound is stretched into infinity, every sound pulled apart and stacked into a single, slowly slithering, gorgeously thick shimmer, occasionally cracking, sonic shards dropping onto the surface below, creating more barely-there, off kilter rhythms for BLD to bury under their warm thick blankets of bowed drones and reverberating fuzz. What else can we say at this point? If you're already a member in good standing in the church of Fflint, then you already know you need this latest Fflinty sacrament, and it you have yet to be converted, well, you can only resist for so long...
Berkowitz, Lake & Dahmer have easily become our new favorite electronica renegades (having easily overtaken V/Vm, what with being more musical and less annoying (just barely) and not so concerned with inane 'concepts'). The 'Missionary District' cd is their newest offering and is only available though Aquarius. But be warned, it's not a normal cd, it's a rectangular credit card sized mp3 cd-r(om) with the new record, and a ton of other Fflint propaganda and goodies on it, and is only playable on your computer!!! That said, this is their best yet, weird and grating and beautiful and baffling. Since I don't have the technical know how to make these mp3s into real audio samples, i'll just describe each song for you in a sentence:
1. an indian soundtrack being overtaken by a bleeping hyper distorted techno marching band.
2. grinding scraping pulsing drone, like a small village being over run by snakes made out of bowed cymbals and broken samplers.
3. hissing ambience created by a choir of traecheotomy patients w/intercepted short wave transmissions interrupted by gunfire, only the bullets are Masonna cassettes.
4. skittery but smooth. like someone drugged Boards of Canada and then pushed them down the stairs, while outside BL+D tried desperately to start the getaway car.
5. shortwave, high pitch skree like a Skullflower / Sun City Girls pool party.
6. like laying prone in a pool of Rephlex 12"s while hundreds of 'electronica artists' piss on you from above.
7. ultra harsh noise over a strange man humming into a broken telephone, while Glen Branca and his orchestra try desperately to compete in the background.
8. unwrapping cellophane candies in a hyperbolic chamber, while little girls in tap shoes run laps around the room.
9. pipe fight and synthesiser fight double tag team. broadcast through a toy megaphone set on 'monster'.
So definitely, if you've bought anything or everything on Fflint, then this is obviously essential, and if you haven't yet, what the hell's wrong with you?! This is as good a place to start as any. Fucking great!
The mighty Fflint Central again prove that they have cornered the market on subversive (and intelligent) electronic fuckery in the UK. Why listen to the retarded antics of V/VM or the pedestrian downtempo dreck of Boards Of Canada when you can get the best elements of both AND THEN SOME from almost any band in the Fflint stable?! The return of the 'killer' electronica threesome (actually a twosome, like the 3 piece Thompson Twins) and their imbalanced, dangerous and baffling electronica. Balancing noise and melody, BL+D craft noisy epics, with gurgling, sputtering synths, purloined Middle Eastern melodies. distant rumbles, screeching high end crunch, chopped and shuffled 20th century classical, ultra-abstract musiqe concrete, bursts of face melting noise, running water framing delicate far-away melodies, totally nonsensical, epileptic drum programming, and more strange and beautiful sounds than any two guys should be able to produce. Gorgeous, challenging, intense and completely original. If there was any justice in this world, Berkowitz, Lake + Dahmer would be the jewel in someone's electronic crown (Warp, Skam, Lo, etc...) They'll just have to settle for Andee's tUMULt label, who will be releasing their first non cd-r release towards the end of the year. In the meantime, don't miss out. You know you want to be able to say 'Oh yeah, I was into BL+D way back in February!' SO RECOMMENDED.
Hot shit musique concrete found here! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalogue of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible light. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through! Limited to 300 copies as well.
We apologize to tape music buffs near and far, but we shamefully snoozed on reviewing this awesome book about this music movement's seminal Bay Area based hub back in June of this year when it was first published. We thought that now would be a good time (what with the holiday gift-giving season just around the corner as well as the chillier stay-inside-with-a-good-book autumn and winter months) to give it a good ol' shout out! Better late than never, right?
Those already well acquainted will need no further explanation, but for those unfamiliar, in a nutshell, the San Francisco Tape Music Center was a vital cultural and educational meeting ground of adventurous pioneers in audio arts and science. The sonic explorations of composers Morton Subotnick (who performed an in-store presentation here a few years back), Steve Reich, Ramon Sender, Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley among others produced some of the most stunning and influential avant-garde sounds of the period in an utterly unassuming locale right here in SF. This creatively tangled web of tape-loop and tape-delay, analog synthesizers and various other electronic tentacles came into fruition back in the early '60s. These days, having been schooled by the wonderful reissued works of numerous seemingly like-minded audio renegade technicians of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, John Baker to name a few), we still can't help but conjure images of the electronic music artists of that decade donning lab coats with pocket protectors and bespectacled consternated gazes, but this 344-page book reveals just as much the kaleidoscopic opening of minds induced by sound (and in some cases substances). In fact, for those of you who were captivated by the revelatory glimpse of the LA counterculture in the '60s courtesy of the recent Source Family book (The Source: The Untold Story Of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa And The Source Family), this serves to some degree as a Bay Area counterpart (albeit perhaps somewhat less Hollywood tabloid scandalous). It's the first ever first-person retrospective of the SFTMC. Many a fond memory and occasionally a hair-raising tale were unearthed for this tome. Our current favorites include one involving wild escapades to keep the center afloat on a less than shoestring budget as well as a desperate search across a floor/sea of tape edit detritus to find an errant single note snippet using a dismantled reel-to-reel playback head!
An inspiring, fascinating and often entertaining document of interviews with and essays by all the key figures and more. This 322-page softcover tome is also packed with color and black & white photos, diagrams, drawings, and a comprehensive chronology. But wait, there's still more! A dvd is tucked away in the back which features video documentation from the 2004 Wow & Flutter: The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1961-Now festival / reunion of sorts that took place in Troy, NY.
Highly recommended!
Originally released in 1973 in France by Futura Records via their SON series (which also included the wonderful "Tacet" by Jean Guerin. Futura also released otherworldly tripped-outness from the likes of Red Noise and Mahogany Brain). Recorded between '71
It's a mystery how we managed to miss the previous recordings from the British ultra-minimalist Keith Berry, because if there's any justice in the world, he should be mentioned alongside such blue-chip drone artists as William Basinski, Thomas Koner, Bernhard Gunter, and Akira Rabelais. Yeah, his work is that good! He's got the sublimely romantic melodicism of Basinski, the glacial pacing of Koner, the hushed restraint of Gunter, and, um well, he's got a copy of Rabelais' legendary Argeiphontes Lyre software in his repertoire. But Berry is no mere aggregate of previously mined aesthetics, there's plenty to his work that speaks of his own beliefs and agendas which all draw heavily from Zen philosophies. While Berry's previous work The Golden Boat (Trente Oiseaux, 2003) and The Ear That Was Sold To The Fish (Crouton, 2005) were both exceptional releases (with the Crouton album easily being the best smelling record of 2005!), each of Berry's albums makes small adjustments that add up to an improvement and refinement of his sound; thus A Strange Feather stands out a remarkable achievement. Like all of the previously cited composers, Berry's fundamental structure is the drone supreme into which he bends field recordings, subtle instrumental arrangements, and small tactile events. Like falling snow, his dreamy work drifts with a poetic chill and tranquil hypnosis through which peripheral elements tease the listener with subtle details. It's so damn beautiful; and oh yes, the double cd version is very limited to 100 copies of which we only have a handful!
It's been way too long since Keith Berry has put anything out. The last time we had one of his records in stock, it was the impeccable 2005 album The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, which was housed in an oversized box filled with fragrant flower petals. On that album, Berry's somber ambient constructions looked forward to the hauntological wash of Leyland Kirby, but also ran parallel to Thomas Koner's isolationism and the miniscule musicality of the later works of Bernhard Gunter. There had been rumors of an album to appear on The Helen Scarsdale Agency; for reasons unknown, the album never surfaced. Outside of a compilation track here and there, this British artist has kept a very low profile until this breathtaking album, released as a part of Elevator Bath's ongoing series of picture discs. Berry presents five extended pieces of soft-focus ambience, whose elegant suspension of sound gently bends along a majestic orbit with huge expanses of sounds undulating with ghostly melodies transmitting from way back behind Berry's dense fog. Where Kirby imbues his work with a maudlin strain, Berry's casts an eye into heart of the sublime. Something beautiful is afoot here, and at same time, the feeling is darkened and just unsettled enough. Let's hope that it's not another 5 years between albums, as Berry is too good a composer to be forgotten about! Limited to 233 copies.
In case such a declaration matters in the grand scheme of things, The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish is my (Jim's) Record of The Year for 2005.
That said, there is a unique facet to Keith Berry's impressionistic masterpiece that I cannot fully enjoy. You see, I have a very limited sense of smell. I've always blamed it on my pyrotechnic stunts during my college days when I would light my paintings on fire; and as grandiosely stupid as this made me look, the sensorial failings of my nose is more the result of genetics than anything I could have done to it. So when I opened the box for the first time to Keith Berry's The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, I got a small tingle as something perfumed and pleasant drifted from the contents of the box, which contained not only a CD and booklet but also a delicate pile of dyed flower petals. Those of you who are not sensorially damaged might be able to place the scent; but I simply cannot. Regardless, Berry (with the help of the fine folks at Crouton Records) engineered an amazing feat: an album with a fragrance.
For very obvious reasons, the smell-o-rama trick is not what attracts me to the record; it's the seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations that truly captured my imagination. Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter; but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas.
Given the packaging constraints, The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish is strictly limited to 300 copies.
The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish was released back in 2005 by Jon Mueller's now defunct label Crouton, and it came packaged in slightly oversized cardboard box filled with dried flowers drenched in a silken perfume. While devoid of this smell-o-rama trickery, the much-needed reissue of Keith Berry's masterpiece of hallowed drone does come with an unreleased body of work as a bonus disc, which is just as good of The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish.
Here's what we had to say about the album way back when, and these words still ring true today: Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter, but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas. These seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations truly captured our imagination.
Not to be confused with a track on his Twenty Hertz album whereby he instructs the listener to veer left, Turn Right A Thousand Feet From Here is a far more nocturnal album than The Ear with its enveloping shadows, snowblinded mirages, and slow-motion tumbling of obfuscated noises into half-melodic passages. One would be forgiven for thinking these recordings to be a lost Thomas Koner record around the time of Kaamos or Daikan. Both discs are completely mesmerizing and come with our highest recommendation.
We had never heard of Ron Berry before, but Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin has unearthed two psychedelic space synth gems from this unsung synth pioneer. Building his own synths, sequencers and drum machines, Berry created two albums of dreamy kosmische synthscapery, beholden to folks like Klaus Schulze and JD Emmanuel, but also predicting much of the new synth music coming out today.
A Voice In The Wilderness was record number two from Berry, originally released in 1983, and is a sprawling two part, 44 minute cosmic synth epic, which starts off like some mysterious planetarium show, the soundtrack to the birth of the universe, all swirling shimmers, and deep rumbling pulsations, a slow build from ark to light, the sound eventually transforming into a prismatic tranquility, very cinematic, lush and layered and darkly dramatic, the first side/track moving through multiple movements, brooding and hushed one minute, propulsive and almost krautrocky the next, the rhythms when they surface skeletal and skittery, with a definite Kraftwerk / Tangerine Dream vibe, but most of the first side spent in spaced out drift mode.
The second half/side starts of similarly, moody minimal drift, sun dappled and dreamlike, slowly fading to near silence, a stretch of barely there thrum and distant pulses, what sound like faux field recordings, eventually erupting into a Geiger counter like electronic freak out, swirling and percussive, only to slip right back into that whispery drift, this time laced with subtle percussion, only to slowly build to a dreamy, melancholy drift of soaring softly swirling synths, moody minor key melodies, spare skittery rhythms, a laid back, electro-kraut synth pop that gradually fades into a soft psychedelic shimmer. Gorgeous stuff, and absolutely essential for fans of early minimal synth music for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
We had never heard of Ron Berry before, but Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin has unearthed two psychedelic space synth gems from this unsung synth pioneer. Building his own synths, sequencers and drum machines, Berry created two albums of dreamy kosmische synthscapery, beholden to folks like Klaus Schulze and JD Emmanuel, but also predicting much of the new synth music coming out today.
1982's Where Dark Forces Meet weaves a lush, ominous sprawl of deep cosmic drones, and percolating synth melodies, with playful pulsing poppiness, check out the opener "Sea Of Tranquility", which broods and drifts ominously for the first few minutes before the drum machines surface, and the song is transformed into a weird sort of electro-synth groove, but which soon blossoms into something much more dreamy and blissfully psychedelic, which is basically Berry's MO here, unfurling gorgeous hazy shimmers, and soft focus sonic ripples, tranquil sprawls of softly pulsating synths, occasionally peppered with motorik rhythms. The best moments for us are where the rhythms are abandoned, leaving just gauzy celestial drifts, like the glimmering sonic starfield of the title track, or the moody, minor key drift of "View From A Bedsit Window", which almost sounds like some lost video game music. Gorgeous stuff, and absolutely essential for fans of early minimal synth music for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Belgium's Sub Rosa is one of those labels that's always worth checking out. Often, we have never before heard of the artists they put out, and may never hear of them again, but the discs they release quite often become favorites 'round here: Saule, Israel Quellet, Time Control, The Wild Classical Music Ensemble, Mace... Of course Sub Rosa issues stuff by plenty of better known names as well, like Philip Jeck, but the point is, when its someone we don't know on Sub Rosa, we have learned we'd still better pay attention, it might be amazing!
Which is all by way of saying that we had no idea who Pierre Berthet was or what to expect from him, except it was on Sub Rosa, and maybe the disc's title held a clue: Extended Loudspeakers. That sounds potentially cool, right? And it is, if you're into subtle, active droneworks! This is a recording of a sound installation from a Belgian art gallery, and while it would probably be really neat to witness Berthet's whole sonic apparatus in person, it's quite good as a compact disc recording too! We might as well quote the handwritten note printed inside the digipack, as Berthlet can probably do a better job of explaining his elaborate "extended loudspeakers" set up than we can: "An 'extended loudspeaker' is a loudspeaker with as less membrane as possible connected with long steel wires to a net of metal cans resonators. Inputs are sine waves, feedbacks and radio. At the end of the piece, steel wires are also vibrated with a small low tension electric motor equipped with a flexible fan." He also explains that "the piece starts with drops falling on small tin cans." And, additionally, there's helpful, and rather cute, simple stickfigure illustrations diagramming the thing visually. So now you know how these sounds were sourced, sort of, but listening to it, your imagination will doubtless delve further into the fantastical, because the overall effect of Berthet's creation is one of mysteriousness. There's passages of bell-like ringing, layered rainfall rhythms that beat with and against each other, accompanied by wavering, high-end drones, quite trance inducing. Elsewhere in the piece (which lasts for about an hour, arbitrarily indexed into seven tracks on the cd for listening convenience) the chiming, dripping sounds fade into something more spacious and abstract and arrhythmic, whilst the drone-tones of feedback grow more present and prominent, but still pleasant... it's beautiful stuff, calm, soothing, mesmeric. (But maybe only for drone-heads, I was playing this at low volume in the car, driving someplace with my dad, and he thought either something was wrong with the stereo or his hearing aid, but then again he'd say that about almost any music we like here.)
At times Berthet's cans, wires, membranes, fans, and drip devices conjure up the prayerful practice of meditative monks, or the massed rhythms of a Far Eastern percussion ensemble, or the delicate hum of Japanese onkyo experimentalists. Meanwhile his methods recall the resonating wires of composer Arnold Dreyblatt, and the unique "mechano" of another Pierre, Bastien (with both of whom Berthet has worked, it turns out).
So, glad we paid attention this time, 'cause actually this ain't Berthet's first disc for Sub Rosa we now realize, and he has another on Sonoris too, so we'll have to check those out as well, since this one really is one of the loveliest and most intriguing, ever-changing sound installation / drone recordings we've heard in a while.
Harry Bertoia's sound sculptures developed from years of work as both a commissioned furniture maker for Knoll and as an environmental sculptor who built large scale balancing kinetic pieces, usually out of bronze. But in the 1970s, Bertoia and his son Val began experimenting with resonant properties of metal itself with huge sculptures of vertical metal shafts that were
Unfortunately, this reissue concludes with a folk-rock song from a member of the extended Bertoia family... it's really really awful. Why is it there? Val Bertoia should know better. Consider it a non-bonus bonus track and ignore, while enjoying the rest of this lovely disc.
Latest disc of blissed out soft focus dronemusic from this longtime aQ fave. After past collaborations with Lull (which is available again and featured elsewhere on this week's list) as well as Aidan Baker, Lunar Monograph is the first disc we've head from BC on his own, and it's definitely a divine bit of ethereal and ephemeral drift.
Field recordings are deftly woven into soft swirling shimmering tones, guitars are spidery and delicate, spinning crystalline webs of hushed melody, the opening track is a gorgeous bleary eared whisper, which segues smoothly into the second track, a sprawling 22 minute stretch of delicate piano, wreathed in swirling clouds of muted glitch and streaks of static and hiss, like listening to a solo piano performance, on a hilltop in the dead of night during a rainstorm.
The record does get intense briefly, on the surprisingly rocking psych dirge blowout of "Marsh Of Epidemics", with its keening chiming guitars, fuzzy blown out buzz and pounding drumbeat, the whole thing propulsive and intense, but also washed out and otherworldly sounding, but the record quickly shifts back into something much more tranquil and contemplative, another 20+ minute slow motion soundscape, this one much less distinct in terms of instrumentation, instead a swirling, looped, processed bit of layered dronemusic, lots of high tones laid upon what sounds like angelic voices way off in the distance, and a softly undulating low end, very choral and cinematic sounding, like a much more mellow Sunroof!, laced with hints of Arvo Part.
The record finally finishes with some gorgeous prismatic pop ambience, whirring and indistinct, a slight industrial undercurrent, but for the most part, pealing tones, and barely there melodies, drifting weightlessly through a field of minimal effects, and slow shifting whirs, as well as some mysterious field recordings, that make the end of the record feel like you've just come out of a trance, and found yourself back in the real world, which is not all that far off the mark. So nice.
Hell yeah! We were just doing a bit of cleaning, and found a little stash of these, an AQ record of the week from WAY back in June of 2000!!! We only found 10 copies, and we're pretty sure this is out of print now, so as soon as these are gone, that's it!
This record is sooooo amazing. So dark, and beautiful, creepy and mysterious. So much so that we just had to make it record of the week! Initially, our interest in Beyond Dawn was due mostly to the bizarre fact that they were a trombone-fronted black metal band!! But, in the space of one record (Revelry, the record preceding this one), their sound shifted completely, to something less metal, more experimental, a morose sort of "avant-pop" with a heavy heavy heavy Swans vibe. As well as a bit of Katatonia too. And thankfully, the trombone remained. The mostly acoustic follow-up "In Reverie" also could quite easily be a late period Swans record or an Angels Of Light disc. But for our money, it's even better than most of the later Swans records. The voice is a deep ringing baritone, a dead ringer for Michael Gira's, but the music is way more bizarre. Somehow managing to be both lush and spare, Beyond Dawn create rickety tales of loss and sorrow with plaintive trombone, simple minor key strumming, bizarre percussion, clouds of subtle glistening electronics and warm emotional swells, all wrapped in a creepy atmospheric intensity. Immediately following this disc, they then went on to explore a more electronica-influenced sound on their next record, the completely different but equally amazing Electric Sulking Machine, reviewed elsewhere on the site. Not sure what happened to these guys, they sort of just disappeared, which is an incredible shame as they are just such an amazing band, a perpetual AQ favorite for sure, and this is such a totally breathtaking disc. For everyone who somehow missed out on this 6 years ago, at least ten of you get a second chance. Don't blow it again! So recommended!
Not long after we reviewed the recent collaboration between dark ambient drone legends, Nordvargr and Drakh (who started out as partners in the legendary black industrial drone outfit MZ412), we received an email from Drakh, thanking us for the review, and letting us know about his main project Beyond Sensory Experience. What a weird coincidence. Some of us around here were already huge fans of BSE, but had no idea who was behind it. Although sonically it makes perfect sense. Beyond Sensory Experience is an exploration into bleak sonic darkness, vast expanses of suffocating drones and desiccated melodies, haunting disembodied voices and ghostly glimpses into the dark soul. Korrelations is a remix record of sorts. Four original tracks, seven re-interpretations. One from ex-partner Nordvargr, the rest from like minded isolationists Alexxx, Doshaka, P3, Zdan and Alko. While occasionally the new versions introduce Muslimgauze-like tribal percussion, traditional drum kit and electric guitars, the bulk of the record is dark and dreary and rumblingly minimal. Muted pulses underscore streaks of black and grey, distant throbs beat out funereal rhythms beneath huge swaths of thick fuzzy drone, all flecked with bizarre sonic bits of lost dialogue, cracked and creaking flutters, and a completely claustrophobic and creepy ambience.
As we've mentioned before, we have all been huge fans of the black metal ambient outfit MZ412, as well as the work that followed from Nordvargr and Drakh, the two masterminds behind MZ412, Folkstorm, Toroidh, BSE and the recent Nordvargr / Drakh collaboration. Well suddenly, for some reason, it's gotten a whole lot easier to get a hold of all their records so we're finally able to share yet another of our musical obsessions with the AQ faithful. This is release number five from Beyond Sensory Experience, aka Drakh. The first three BSE records (all released in 2003) were ritualistic dark ambient experiments, examining through sound, the affect of and the correlation between numbers, music and life. Pretty heady stuff, but somehow the dense drones and ambient explorations found on those records seemed like they could in fact explain and expose, if one was just willing to let go and let the music carry them away. This newest record is much more active, and alive sounding, perhaps because now the focus is on life and sexuality. Ultimately this is still a drone record, or a dark ambient record if you prefer, but the shading is more distinct, and the sonic pallet much more broad, from the dirgey plucked guitar of "Pursuit Of Pleasure", almost like a minimal, distortion-free Earth, to the soaring strings and cinematic grandiosity of "Affection / Devotion", to the staticky submarine rumble and subtle sepia shadings of "Hold Your Breath And Close Your Eyes". Sure to satisfy drone obsessives and dark ambient freaks, but close listening reveals so much more than those broad descriptors would lead you to expect. Layer after layer to gradually unwrap, sounds that sneak up on you where you swear there weren't sounds before, and so many details that lay hidden, only to surface after repeated exposure...
