Two song teaser for an upcoming full length and it's a doozy. And it's two sides of Wolf Eyes we don't get to see all that much of, and hearing it here, we're sort of jonesing for more of both. On the one side (both literally and figuratively) we have Wolf Eyes as some sort of plodding doom metal behemoth. A keening buzz becomes a raga like drone and then devolves into a thick caustic dirge, with growled blackened vocals, pummeling throb percussion and what sounds like a swarm of detuned guitars, all lurching evily beneath a dense cloud of shimmery skree.
On the flipside (again, both figuratively and literally) we've got the softer more sensitive Wolf Eyes, well, okay maybe not so much softer and more sensitive as less harsh and noisy, more creepy and dark. Gurgling low end, sine waves and grinding electronic grit spread out over a wide expanse of creepy crawly ambience, a drifting droning underworld rife with weird horn like squalls and all manner of little sonic irregularities. Pretty dang cool. We're definitely psyched to hear what they do for the next full length.
It was only a matter of time really. The bad boys of noise rock, and the grandaddy bad boy of modern avant jazz... Okay, maybe it wasn't only a matter of time, who would have ever really dreamed up a Wolf Eyes / Anthony Braxton jam session? Braxton maybe. He has a penchant for odd pairings. Remember his saxophone / stand up comedian disc? Well Black Vomit might not be -quite- as whatthefuck as that one, but it is pretty strange. And surprisingly, it's also pretty dang listenable. Especially for a disc called Black Vomit, with tracks called "The Mangler" and "Rationed Rot". "The Mangler" starts off all dreamy abstract soundscape, with the Wolf Eyes boys creating haunting landscapes of scrape and skitter, deconstructed streaks of electronic buzz and thick smears of low end grind, while Braxton sort of soars above it all, his horn emitting thick swirls of resonant rumble, dissonant bleating, and mournful minor key groans. It almost sounds like that guy on the corner playing sax and busking for change being sucked into hell, the ground just opening up as he plunges into a cacophonous wasteland. The last 5 or 6 minutes do finally take the plunge into all out noise, but even then, it's weirdly textural and while not -easy- on the ears, still strangely accessible, even with the swirls of malfunctioning electronic crunch and weird demonic vocals.
Track two is introduced by the Wolf Eyes guys asking Braxton which he'd rather hear, "Leper War" or "Black Vomit"? His response, a hearty "BLACK VOMIT!" gets the crowd cheering and Wolf Eyes immediately launch into a musical world of hurt. The sound blisses out after a few minutes into a weirdly percussive soundscape, of low end throb and high end skitter, but before too long Braxton has joined the melee and they ratchet up the noise quotient and it's a swirling, grinding, churning free noise, wild jazz lead pipe to the side of the head. Wow. How fucking cool is Anthony Braxton? Recorded live in 2005 (the between song banter is pretty funny, especially the "Good night..." bit at the end), rumor had it that Victo didn't even want to release this, but damn if it's not one of the coolest records they've ever put out!
I can see the kids ' mouths watering. If this were a show, Wolf Eyes and Black Dice, the tight pants, too-small thrift store t-shirts, white belts and bowl haircuts would be lined up around the block. And for good reason. Black Dice and Wolf Eyes are two of only a tiny handful of bands making some seriously challenging, damaged, and beautiful noise. This collaboration is maybe a bit more tranquil that you'd expect, but its listenability shouldn't deter you. The sound is a lot like Black Dice's recent Beaches And Canyons album, all rhythmic hypnos and soundscape shimmer, but with Wolf Eyes supplying a gritty electronic, rubble strewn back drop for the proceedings. Side one is droning skree over tinkling bells, swelling until it becomes a blast of full on malfunctioning Merzbow machine mayhem. Side two gets downright dreamy, a groovy sidelong Krautrock epic, so smooth and serene you'd never guess it was either of these bands. A seriously great record.
Killer picture disc reissue of a long out of print double cassette, on which each member of Wolf Eyes does a whole side solo, and then the band does a whole side together. Hard to tell whose side is whose, which sort of makes sense really, all four sides sound distinctly Wolf Eyes-ish, and all are pretty dang great, it hardly matters.
Four massive expanses of growling gloomy synthscapes, murky doom, damaged deconstructed space rock, wild cacophonies of high end skree and upper register scrape and squeal, long stretches of near orchestral noise, tranquil and ghostly ambience, moaning crumbling tape damage, humming streaks of monotone buzz and crackle, barely there swirls of surface noise and low end rumble, bits of metallic clang, creaking moaning strings, muted percussive rhythms buried in thick swaths of black ambience, a litany of mysterious ambience and post industrial experimentation. Noisy and murky and creepy and exactly what you might expect from a Wolf Eyes free for all.
Plain black gatefold sleeves, gorgeous picture discs pressed on super thick vinyl. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! We got a handful and WILL NOT be able to get more....
They may be thousands of miles apart, but it would take more than something like distance to keep these two forces of musical darkness from meeting and unleashing this Black Plague. AQ faves, Australian noise rockers the Grey Daturas, were visited recently by the US ambassadors of noise, Wolf Eyes. Never one to squander an opportunity to get together and kick up a ruckus, the Daturas dragged the Eyes into the studio, and both bands spent a few hours cooking up their own unique vision of sonic decay. Wolf Eyes came up with the 5 part "Post Civilization Muzak", 24 minutes of grrrrrrrrrrrinding post industrial brutality. Huge sheets of coruscating electronics, super distorted guitar, and wild streaks of white hot feedback, all tangled up into a blazing blood red supernova of sound.
The Grey Daturas counter with some musical density of their own. A bit more lo-fi, three long tracks, one a tangled freejazz grind psychnoise splatter, a blurred cloud of stuttery staggering freakout, another a slow plodding glacial sludge, with thick washes of abstract doom and simple tribal drumming and finally a full on far out post rock post punk instrumental epic, heavy and droney and massive. Pretty killer stuff.
Packaged in a glossy digipak and released on the Daturas' Heathen Skulls label. Includes a bonus Wolf Eyes track NOT included on the upcoming domestic lp version!!
This is a split release if there ever was one. Two bands and SIX labels!! Indie labels Up Jumps The Devil, Vegalia, SNSE, Muet, Ignivomous and Nihilist all pitched in to bring us this tag team match of NOISE NOISE NOISE!!! First up, psuedo-industrial noiseniks, Factrix worshippers and AQ faves Wolf Eyes offer up a churning throbbing rhythm built from moaning low end organs, a sort of chopped-up hiccupping drone, that quickly splinters into FULL ON NOISE, pink noise and white noise battle feedback and rhythmic pulses of industrial crunch and midwestern style Japanoise. Panicsville, who we aren't so familiar with, present a very Wolf Eyes like din, that starts off innocently enough with bleeps and bloops and clicks and whirs, but soon erupts into a crushing tidal wave of rumbling, warbling drones, malfunctioning-video-game crunch, screeching feedback and distorted howls and screeches. Recorded live too, as far as we can tell. A seriously solid split of blistering brutality. Those of you who need this know who you are! Cool, gory cover art and swirly grey vinyl! ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
Super limited collaboration between well known industrial noise drone pioneers Wolf Eyes and lesser known noisenik Sickness. And thankfully, like a lot of the noise music we've been digging lately, this is much less noisy, and much more textural, a grim blackened ambience, albeit peppered with a fair bit of noisiness.
The A side begins with a shimmery mechanical loopscape, wreathed in high end tones and keening feedback, which gives way to a heaving sea of hiss and shriek before slipping into deep speaker rattling buzz, a massive abstract low end rhythms seemingly fashioned from moaning foghorns and the clang of shipping containers. There's more static and whir and muffled murky industrial clatter before a buried, but caustic harsh noise outro.
The second side is a muted minimal dronescape, all buried melodies and looped fragments, bits of distortion and rhythmic skitter, soon joined by a throbbing electronic pulse beneath a roiling swirl of ominous crunch and metallic buzz. The track transforms into a field of jagged white noise, chopped up and stuttery, skittering and hiccupping, creating all manner of inadvertent noise almost-grooves, before being swallowed up by a swell of deep rumble and a coda of crumbling strangled guitar freakout.
SUPER LIMITED. We got about half the copies we ordered so odds are these will be gone quick� ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
The apocalypse has come to mean 'the end of the world' but its original Greek definition is that of 'revelation,' albeit a really fucking heavy revelation of how the world is going to end. The differences between the pop-cultural definition and the biblical definition are somewhat semantic, but it's apt to mention in regards to Chelsea Wolfe's second record which situates the title in the context of the Greek alphabet. It's pretty clear that the revelations that Chelsea Wolfe spills across her brilliant doom-folk album don't aspire to the allegories and mystical visions pronounced by David Tibet, rather she seems to be clamoring about the conditions leading up to the end of the world. With demonic possession, toxic wastelands, and haunted sexuality being so prevalent in her ghastly world view, it's no wonder she's bellowing that the end is near.
Wolfe's first record - The Grime And The Glow - was a home-recorded affair, whose tape murk added to the choking-on-smog atmosphere of the dour songs. The sparse arrangements aggressively strummed on acoustic guitar shot all of the attention back on Wolfe's beguiling voice which takes cues from PJ Harvey, but way darker and witchier. The songs did liken themselves to the early apocalyptic folk aesthetics of Sol Invictus and Current 93; and that's still the case for Apokalypsis, although she has fleshed out her sound with a full band, capable of delivering minimalist Goth ballads, swamp-rock menace, and harrowing bursts of distortion to match the mood of her songs. Wolfe twists the fairytail beginning of "Tracks (Tall Bodies)" into gritty depressive dirges, reflective of the goth sound of her native LA some two decades ago (e.g. Abecedarians, Kommunity FK, etc.). She also reprises two songs from The Grime And The Glow, including the infernal barnburner "Demons" and the antebellum blues number "Moses" which retains its minor-key mope and slavehouse misery. The stalking-in-the snow pace of "Pale On Pale" lurches at a pace even slower than that of True Widow, with Wolfe's mournful voice lifting above the churning, blackened guitars. There's a grit and a severity to Chelsea Wolfe that makes her a very compelling figure in contemporary music, almost like a musical reincarnation of The Process Church in neo-goth form. Very highly recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
All Rudimentary Peni covers!!!
Cloud of angular riffing, blurred into a dense swirl of muted crunch, woozy warbly, with the pitch constantly shifting, over which Wolfe's voice drifts ghostly and ethereal.... before the sound settles into a dolorous creep, all drifty twang, and distant echo drenced vox, a sort of gothic Morricone-esque doomfolk, very reminiscent of Woven Hand, that same sort of apoacalyptic swamp folk vibe, but here, that sounds is stretched into something more ephemeral and wispy, which leads directly into a swaggery stretch of spectral blues, echo drenched and wreathed in a thick fog of reverb and echo, her voice buired in the mix much of the time, all blurred gothic swoon, but on tracks like "Black On Gold / Sickening For Something" her voice is fron and center, witchy and bewitching, powerful and passionate, channeling a little PJ Harvey via Zola Jesus, but with a definite pounding punk vibe. But then the sound will space out again into the skeletal creep of "Dissolution / Rehearsal For Mortality", all spidery minor key guitars, minimal percussion, Wolfe's voice winding itself around the slowly unwinding doom/dreamscape,
culminating finally in the tripped out title track finale, a free form Dead C style doom, all bursts of chaotic noise, and stumbling anti-rhythms, draped over a dirgey riff, and Wolfe's soaring intense vox, before all the sounds coalesce into a churning dirge, the vocals growing more and more intense, nearly overwhelming the music, a tense, intense, darkly dramatic finish.
Reissued once again! Here's what we said the first time around:
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great, highly recommended!
Yeah, she covered a Burzum song before releasing this album, but there's a hell of lot more to Chelsea Wolfe than copping a few moves from Mr. Vikernes. This Los Angeles minstrel has quipped she writes "spiritual realm funeral songs," and that's a pretty apt description given the acoustic guitar dourness, doom-laden atmospheres, grimy production values, and witchy goth-folk vocals that come together as the perfect hybridization of Zola Jesus and PJ Harvey. Her arrangements are pretty stripped down with little more than acoustic and / or electric guitar occasionally fleshed out with a rhythm section. She puts an outsider folk spin on her songwriting, as if she were penning acoustic black metal songs channeled through the freak-folk mysticism of Topanga Canyon. This also has a lot of similarities to the apocalyptic folk stylings of Death In June / Sol Invictus / Current 93 circa 1992 although Chelsea Wolfe is far less precious with the song and is not afraid to let some blood spill as she violently scrapes her knuckles on the guitar strings. In so many ways, what she does is so much better than what Douglas P and Tony Wakeford could conjure through their cryptic folk songs. The haunting "Cousins Of The Antichrist" is one track that effortlessly exceeds the songwriting achievements of those aforementioned British esoteric musicians, with the urgency of the violent strum on her acoustic guitar stuck in minor chords buttressing the soaring vocals.
Similarly, "Deep Talks" works its blown out 4-track recording of her grab-every-string-on-the-guitar-and-pull method of playing along with her wordless vocal delivery that's as impressionistic as Grouper, but with Grouper's narcolepsy replaced by night terrors. "Moses" (a track which interestingly follows "Cousins Of The Antichrist") plays on stomping Southern spirituals but turned ashen and turgid in pace and demeanor. And the album's closing number "Widow" is a bleak, half-whispered song mired in morose atmospheres and just the right amount of narcotic smoke and exhumed-from-a-swamp 4 track production values, sounding a lot like the criminally underappreciated Corpses As Bedmates (whose sole album was reissued under an entirely different band name - Venus Handcuffs, probably worsening things for the band, but we digress). The short of it is that Chelsea Wolfe's The Grime And The Glow is fucking great and marks another killer release in the growing catalogue of witchy releases by Pendu Sound, following an lp from Sasha Grey's Atelecine and a single from witch house maven Mater Suspiria Vision. Highly Recommended!
An acoustic record might seem strange coming from Chelsea Wolfe, whose two records The Grime And The Glow and Apokalypsis, seemed to rely heavily on the production and surrounding sounds, the murky home brewed outside alchemy of the Grime, and the churning blackened full band energy of Apokalypsis, but as much as those records were about sound, they were more about the songs, and Wolfe may have wrapped her songs in all manner of bleak sonic gloom and dusky dolor, but it did little to disguise the power and emotion of her songwriting.
Unknown Rooms is Wolfe reconnecting to the country and folk music that inspired her, Townes Van Zandt, Hank Williams, and is not strictly 'acoustic' in the sense of just voice and electric guitar, no the sound here is much more fleshed out, the guitar and vocals are obviously the focal point, but the sound is gorgeously lush, songs laced with muted simple percussion, minimal drumming, shimmering strings, multitracked vocal harmonies, the production too, spare and cavernous one second, muted and washed out the next, some tracks here sounding clear and bright, like they were recorded in a proper studio, others, like the darkly delicate "Hyper Oz", sound like they were recorded at home, in the grey light of morning, hushed bedroom dreamfolk, and others, like "Boyfriend", sound like neither, hovering in some netherworld where it's perfectly natural for aching downer folk to be flecked with strange analog synth blurts. And of course Wolfe's vocals are divine throughout, rich and throaty, and swaddled in subtle smears of echo, often slipping into a witchy falsetto, the effect electric. Some folks at aQ hear Wolfe on Unknown Rooms as sounding a bit like Marissa Nadler, but Wolfe seems to be exploring a world much darker.
The record starts with "Flatlands", which is stirring and moody, starting out spare and stripped down, underpinned by haunting string shimmer, before blossoming into a lush sprawl of classic pop, the switch into the soaring sweetly melodic second half, and the final minute of swirling strings are stunning, and definitely set the stage for the rest of the record. "The Way We Used To" finds Wolfe sounding a bit like Zola Jesus, but the sound recast as a spare apocalyptic folk, the sound anchored to a gorgeous looped harmony vocal refrain, Wolfe slipping into that divine falsetto for the chorus. Those falsetto vocals bleed over into "Spinning Centers", hushed and dreamlike, with lush chordal swells, pizzicato strings, the vocals hushed and delicate and crystalline. And so it goes, song after song, which somehow play like lost classics, dusted off and reimagined, Wolfe's eerie folk as much indebted to the classics as to whatever darkness must haunt her musical soul.
From the accompanying obi strip: "For half a century legendary scholar Christian Wolff has created a very personal musical response to John Cage's challenging experiments and three of his most distinctive compositions receive inspiring performances here
Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930) has long been one of our favorite artists. An incredible touchstone of what has been called Art Brut or more commonly Outsider Art, Wolfli created an epic body of work while suffering from psychosis (and resulting hallucinations) and confined in isolation at the Waldau Clinic in Bern, Switzerland for the latter half of his life. Working with loaned pencils and newsprint and other materials that he would have to scrounge from his surroundings, Wolfli developed an amazing kaleidoscopic cosmology of vast complexity featuring colorful angelic orders, dynamic structural compositions and weaving motifs of idiosyncratic musical passages. Some of these exist as free drawings, but most (1600 of them!) were illustrations for a semi-autobiographical epic that eventually expanded into 45 volumes of over 25,000 pages. The musical notes, starting out as decorative motifs at first begin to take on more significance as he developed his epic book, especially in the last two volumes where he outlines his musical theories, favoring marches, waltzes and mazurkas for their rhythmic quality, as a means (to put it very simply) of some form of spiritual self-transformation. It has remained unclear if Wolfli had musical training or if he transcribed the scores from found sources, but he often would write out the scores and play them on a paper trumpet he made.
Which brings us to the purpose of this book and cd. There already exists a history of analyses of Wolfli's musical scores to see if they actually can be performed. Recordings have been made including one by Graeme Revell with the help of Nurse With Wound in the late Eighties, but many of these were largely interpretive and subjective, adding ambient impressions largely based on the visual aspects of the artworks as well.
For this particular analysis, Belgian composer and violinist, Baudouin de Jaer, who didn't have previous exposure to Wolfli's work, sticks to a more empirical approach to the scores. Limiting himself to solo violin with mute, de Jaer attempts to decipher what he sees as cryptograms (Wolfli made the scores with six lines staves instead of the traditional 5 lines and didn't connect the notes horizontally, suggesting alternate meanings), and forms his own detailed hypotheses in the book about how Wolfli put the musical forms together (mostly believed to be copied from a book of marches for 4 handed piano). Musically, the 32 pieces are very short and spare (about a minute or less with the longest clocking in at about 3 minutes). But de Jaer does a lot with little, often using the side of the violin for percussive rumbles or rubbing the strings for bird-like chirps, the music has an off-kilter fanfare feel to it that follows logically from Wolfli's divine cosmological visions. The book is about 25 pages with full color illustrations and text in French and English and with the cd, offers a fresh new insight into this complex artist's work that will be of interest to old and new fans alike!
The newest slab of blackened wyrd doom-folk from the misty moors of... Texas? Poland? Mordor? Well, wherever main-mangler Smolken makes his home these days. Smolken, also the man responsible for the equally dark and fucked up Jandekian "black metal" of Dead Raven Choir, always has had a skewed take on his favorite subgenres of music, in the case of Wolfmangler entering the realm of doom metal riding a swaybacked country-folk steed, but eschewing the cinematically Western wide-open spaces that Earth has been roaming of late, to plow deeper into the muck and mire of the direst of wagonwheel-sucking mudflats... There's 14 doleful and dirgey tracks here, Smolken sawing away on some classical-sounding stringed instrument like an uber-depressed, one-man chamber music outfit. Besides those suicidal strings, this is sparse and skeletal, there's not much more here... some background ambience, clanking percussion, and creepy whispers... all of which work for us in a Dead Raven Choir like fashion. But then Smolken airs some almost-spoken, sorta-theatrical clean vocals (on tracks 12 and 13 fersinstance) and we're not quite as into it. For DRC fans surely, but maybe not doom metallers this time out (unlike Wolfmangler's earlier split with Moss).
Back in print and back in stock at a slightly cheaper price. But still just as warped and wonderful and weird as before...
The return of Wolfmangler, aka Smolken, who also just so happens to be the man behind Dead Raven Choir. Hot on the heels of a split with UK ultra doomlords Moss, Wolfmangler continue to explore the dark world of doom in their own truly peculiar manner. With bass, electric bass, drum, flute, trombone and bassoon (each band member is also credited with things like umber bulk, water nymph, floating eye, tengu, trapper and of course leprechaun) the Wolfmangler ensemble create a truly unique doom, woven together from wheezing woodwinds, throbbing low end, simple occasional drum beats and weird grumbled growly vocals. The result is not so much a massive doom sound as a creepy ancient court music, plodding and funereal. You can almost imagine some black clad procession trudging along the winding cobblestone streets within some walled fortress. Kerry though it sounded like punk rock slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down.
Texturally it's unlike anything we've ever heard. The closest reference might be Skepticism, the way it sounded like their music is being heard through the floor or from a building next door. Wolfmangler's sound has a similar timbre, a bit like some high school marching band dipped in tar and forced to march through a desert of black sand, or maybe like holding a stylus in one hand, and a scratched up 45 of Fleetwood Mac's tusk in the other, and trying to manually play the record by dragging the needle along each groove. Warbly and dizzyingly warped, Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves is some sort of hellish circus music, the soundtrack to a Fellini film, showed one frame at a time, a New Orleans Funeral Jazz band 78 played at 16 rpm on an old dusty victrola. So gorgeously slow, so pretty and creepy and dreamily doomy.
Yet another mysterious missive from the dark forests of Poland (via Texas of course) courtesy of doom folk trio Wolfmangler, featuring the one and only Smolken, aka Dead Raven Choir.
While Wolfmangler have been know to lay down some serious doom (c'mon, they shared a split with Moss!!) albeit in their own uniquely skewed fashion, these two tracks are not so much doom as they are doomy, the band embracing their foresty folk side, but shot through with a healthy dose of mourn and misery.
The sound here is some sort of funereal campfire folk, simple plodding percussion, moaning violin, fluttering flute, very tribal, and primitive, almost old timey, like some strange pirate sea shanty. Growled ghostly vocals crawl menacingly over what at times sounds like a very gnarled and twisted version of Peter And The Wolf.
The second side is a bit slower and creepier, even darker and more lugubrious, the flute, instead of flitting and fluttering is stretched into long drawn out melancholy melodies, the vocals a ragged whisper, the strings now weaving a surprisingly lush minor key backdrop.
A nice little slab of creepy crawly doom folk for sure.
Packaged in super swank silkscreened sleeves. he cover image, a wolf and what appears to be a river of blood, and a drowning body. Nice!
Smolken has always been a confounding personality, the man behind both Wolfmangler and Dead Raven Choir, releasing records on proper metal labels, but also on weirdo avant free folk microlabel Jewelled Antler, mixing black metal, folk music, country, bluegrass, whatever the hell he feels like really, the results sometimes brilliant, often baffling, but always weird and wonderful in their own way.
They Call Us Naughty Wolves marks the return of Smolken as Wolfmangler after more than two years of relative inactivity, and to be honest, we were approaching this with a bit of trepidation. It was after all a record called They Call Us Naughty Wolves, and according to the label was blackened burlesque chamber music, a sort of channeling of pop from yesteryear, not to mention that some of the cds come with a pair of Wolfmangler undies (really! more on that in a second). But really, conceptually and sonically, this is no stranger than past Smolken projects, so we threw it on, and were pleasantly surprised, if one can find this sort of music simply 'pleasant'.
The sound is creepy, and dark, and creaky, and mysteriously ominous, strings moan and groan, a slow lugubrious chamber music, transformed into something much blacker and creepier, the melancholic gloom and string laden dirgery accompanied by a blackened croak, vokills that gurgle and growl, although they are sometimes accompanied by an angelic female counterpoint. The guitar or bass is more a fuzzy blur, a droney rumble, that underpins the strings, cellos or violins driving the tracks, creating the muted melodies, and it's that weird guttural vocal and string combination, that can't help but remind us of those groups like Xynfonica, Shevelreq, Gluttony, Thursar, the twisted metal vox with gnarled guitar synths emulating exotic instruments. So right off the bat, if that stuff is to your twisted taste, then this will definitely hit the spot. But Smolken's vision isn't so damaged or demented, it's definitely rooted in sounds more traditional, a sort of blackened doom chamber folk, which will appeal to fans of dark slow low moody weirdness. Although some of it is definitely WAY weird. The band occasionally slipping into some strangely jaunty jig like Renn Faire folk music, but for the most part, it's just some seriously brooding, surprisingly beautiful, freaked out and fucked up outsider darkness, like Tom Waits' Black Rider blurred and muddied and blackened into some woozy warped soundtrack to a filmic fable of wolves and woods.
Two lucky aQ customers who order this, will also get a companion pair of red (riding hood), women's panties, with a screenprinted image of a wolf dressed up like grandma on the butt, They Call Us Naughty Wolves after all, it'll be totally random, so cross your fingers...
This is the first release on Brazillian label Essence music, run by AQ pal Uirajara Resende, and is the second release from Portuguese dark ambient technicians Wolfskin. Campos De Matanca, literally translated as "Fields Of Slaughter" is actually a reworked/expanded version of a super limited and long out of print cd-r. Kudos to Uirajara for unearthing this utterly mesmerising and terrifying slab of dark dronology!
This is the kind of gorgeous and brutally abject dark ambient drone that only a chosen few can actually pull off. And you can add Wolfskin to that list. Voices and bells, rumbles and whirs all stretched into a thick blanket of inky blackness, a sonic black hole that sucks you in and buries you beneath tons of static thrum. Ominous and crushing, and truly frightening. Lustmord and Coleclough, Noisegate and Brighter Death Now, Band Of Pain and Troum. You get the picture. Wolfskin also occasionally haul out the drums and indulge in a little Der Blutharsch style miltarism, with static, battlefield percussion, Laibach-ish vocals, all over a crumbling industrial backdrop. This militarism surfaces occasionally throughout the record, but is always quickly subsumed and overtaken by the monstrous, magma-like flows of sound. This record thematically represents "forgotten Keltik fertilization rituals, honour and victories of ancient civilisations and a profound respect for the nature and its untamable forces" utilising an unlikely arsenal of sonic weaponry: carillion, bells, accordion, tin whistle, talara, ceramic box and a curious array of field recordings even including "the slaughter of pigs in winter." Woah. Pretty heavy stuff. But this whole record is heavy. And dense. And dark. And grim. And bone-chillingly, soul-crushingly, heart-breakingly brilliant.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
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!
Maybe the weirdest of the batch, the first track on Wolfskull's Black Hole Rose sounds a bit like Jandek metal. Guitars warbly and out of tune slathered in the most noxious distrotion possible, pained emotional vocals all sort of drunkenly wobbling along. Track two is an extended gong/cymbal workout, very hypnotic and sparse. And the final track is a dreamy bacwards guitar thing. Definitely a cool record, but probably the least 'metal' of the batch.
It's been nearly a year since we've heard from this mysterious black sonic beast from New Zealand, a shadowy entity that may or may not be a dirgedronedoom shadow cast by the very dark side of one PseudoArcana head honcho Antony Milton.
Black Uhura is four looooooooong tracks of gorgeous viscous murk. The opening track is a dreamy drift, if you dream of being dragged through thick tarpits in the very depths of the underworld. Riffs held over a flame and melted down into shimmering black puddles of sound, rippling gently, beneath, vocals mumble and warble, buried under a crushing slab of slow sinister sprawl, like some unholy collision between SUNNO))) and the Dead C, but with the bass cranked and the treble turned all the way down.
The second track is way more caustic, a blown out riffage rendered in violent squalls and smeared sheets of crumbling buzz and low end rumble. Prickly and chaotic and dirgey, almost more Merzbow noise, than any sort of dirgey drone, but closer listening reveals some buried riffage, some moaning walls of feedback, some corrosive metallic song structure, but sounding as if it were left outside to rust and decay and slowly crash to the ground.
The third track returns to the relative tranquility of the first, with the song elements even more noticeable, a barely there voice, a sing songy melody, some sort of desiccated melody, all washed out and indistinct, beneath the slow flowing river of molten hum and lo fi shimmer. Then the final track crashes back down, but not before slowly building up from a tolling church bell, a stuttering disembodied riff, thickening guitar growl, coruscating peals of feedback and machine like grinding buzz, all slowly sinking into a roiling black abyss, eventually morphing into a super hypnotic processed low end slither, and a surprising drum machine'd smoky coda...
Packaged in a super swank oversized dvd sized booklet, offset printed. The cover black on thick brown cardstock, the inside 8 pages of hellish black and white sketches, liner notes, the cd affixed to the back cover, and a 200mg sticker. Limited of course...
The last we heard from Wolfskull was a super limited cd-r on Campbell Kneale's avant metal label Battlecruiser, a stumbling slab of Jandekian doom metal drone. Since then, there's been a split with Polish (by way of Texas) black folk ensemble Wolfmangler, and not much else... until now.
Tannasg is the latest installment from this New Zealand based outfit (we're thinking there's a distinct possibility that Wolfskull is in fact either PseudoArcana's Anthony Milton, or BCM's Campbell Kneale...) and begins like a page out of SUNN)))'s doomdrone playbook. A very Black Boned slow motion downtuned riff-fuck, glacial and thick, huge moaning notes and chords crumbling into black rumbles...
Track two though harkens back to the Battlecruiser release, with shuffling abstract percussion, wide open reverby room sound, simple acoustic guitar strum, a sort of super super mellow Dead C jangle jam, that never really goes anywhere, just sort of drifts and eventually fades out.
But that's the only calm in this storm, the rest of the tracks are variations on a crushing minimal sludge theme. From muted throbbing pulses, to hissy lo-fi Skullfower guitarscapes over practice space drums, to the 16 minute sludge pummel of "Shred Your Axe", with pounding drums, shrieking feedback, all over a fuzzy rumbling riff so distorted it almost sounds like a streak of blacknoise, to the final 4 minute finale, a blown out guitar drone, muter feedback, twisted into stuttering rhythms and throbbing pulses. Some seriously heavy shit for sure. Essential listening for the doomdronedeathdirge obsessive among you...
LIMITED TO 79 COPIES!!!
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Man, I wish I didn't know how this was done... because it takes all of the mystery out of the sounds and also that it appears to be the same trick that Steven Stapleton employed on the Nurse With Wound album "Thunder Perfect Mind."
Uber-conceptualist Achim Wollscheid broadcast a collage on Radio X in Frankfurt, Germany, using their three Denon DN C680 cd players. These can be operated at the same time and are equipped with scan/search data-wheels that allows one to start or stop a cd at any given point. When moved while playing a cd, the wheels send the disc into a locked groove, which can be shifted by constantly turning the wheel (about 60 shifts will scan one second of playing time). Essentially the cd players had been used to generate rapid fire pulsing clicks, which Wollscheid intuitively collaged to form a glistening digital elegance in "Shifts." Cool.
Previously unpublished early works by this 20th-century avant-garde composer (who, later in life, was a professor to Morton Feldman). Radical, dadaist, agitprop songs for piano and voice.
We made Wolvserpent's Blood Seed lp our Record Of The Week on list #358 back in November of last year, Wolvserpent being the group previously known as Pussygutt, a male/female duo from Idaho capable of crafting grimly powerful blackened folk flecked dronescapes that defy easy categorization. And as we mentioned then, the name Pussygutt probably put off plenty of people, thus the shift to Wolvserpent, and while that name definitely better captures the group's ominous tone and black metal leanings, it still leaves much about the music, and its makers, quite mysterious.
Yet for as much as we dug Pussygutt, and love their new Wolvserpent incarnation, we somehow managed to miss completely, the Wolvserpent lp that preceded Blood Seed, a record called Gathering Strengths. Thankfully, the mighty Crucial Blast have stepped in, and combined both Blood Seed AND Gathering Strengths into a handsome double disc compendium, the first disc of which, is the first time on cd for the aforementioned Blood Seed, two epic sprawls, the first a haunting bit of dirgey folk, laid over lush shimmery drones, a gorgeous funeral lament, that only hints at the abject brutality these two are capable of, instead, simply invoking a darkly melancholic mood, eventually guitars drift in, plucking out simple sad melodies, while the strings continue to swirl and soar, gorgeously tense and intense, cinematic and soundtracky. It's not until nearly the nine minute mark that the drums come in, as do the electric guitars, laying down a sort of skeletal doom framework, a different kind of downtuned slowbuild creep, pounding drums, muted riffage, the strings and Sunroof!-like drones growing in intensity, a super intense bit of droney tribal drift, but with an odd start stop arrangement, peppering the lush droning plod with little bits of more traditionally metallic riffage. Eventually some shrieked vocals swoop in, and the song stretches out into a strangley psychedelic epic, a bastardized mix of Godspeed like post rock, avant ur-drone drift, funeral doom, and glacial black metal buzz, all muted and blurred as if mixed by Tim Hecker.
The second 'movement' takes up right where the first left off, long layered high end tones, a lush undulating upper register dronescape, haunting and hypnotically shimmery, before finally lurching into some seriously metallic crunch, a lumbering doomy dirge, buzzing riffs, caveman drums, all wrapped in swirling swaths of reverbed vocals and superdistorted streaks of ambient melody, erupting into occasional blasts of uptempo chuggery, but always slipping back into that stuttery creep, and constantly wreathed in a lush otherworldly sonic haze.
Which brings us to Gathering Strengths, originally released on lp by Olde English Spelling Bee back in 2009, like Blood Seed, a single track split into two epic parts, the first, subtitled "Silence Within", begin with the chirping of crickets, which is soon joined by some haunting distant low end thrum, a dreamlike swell, which is soon joined by a more intense layer of buzzing tones, overlapping woodwinds, rife with mysterious overtones, a creepy harmony, the buzz and shimmer drifting in and out, the minimal drift gradually coalescing into an intense bit of dronemusic, like a blackened Phil Niblock, while off in the distance, barely there percussion surfaces, fragmented slo-mo rhythms, while more and more layers are piled on top, super intense and trancelike, until the woodwinds drift off, leaving a feedback laced stretch of blackdronedrift, softly clattery and corrosive, A wolf Eyes-ian industrial sprawl, that transforms into some hauntingly lovely gypsy like folk, driven by a mournful fiddle melody, the sound swells and smolders, all lilting melodies, and cinematic atmosphere, the vibe like a doom folk Astor Piazolla, that is until a MASSIVE avalanche of washed out downtuned doomcrush rolls in, that gorgeous fiddle now all tangled up in a heaving SUNNO)))-like churn, which manages to be both brutal and blackened, dreamy and so totally lovely. Impossibly pretty heaviness, this whole double disc worth it for that 5 or 6 minute stretch alone.
But there's still the second part, that one subtitled "Spirit Walker", this one starts off in seriously gorgeous drone-folk mode, the band laying down a lush, mesmerizing, hauntingly tense layered drone backdrop, over which the violin keens and cries, accompanied by simple shamanistic drumming, the result a darkly mesmerizing glimpse into some lost forest glade, where some shadowy priest like visages are gathered around dancing black flames, conjuring up spirits from another realm, but like the first track, this one too gradually grows heavier, with the addition of a slow thick dirge-y doomy riff, not super distorted or grumbly, but more softly buzzy, the chords ringing out and fading until they seem to bleed into the sounds around them, only to have the next chord take over, what we said about the last few minutes of the first track, well, we could say it about this whole track, worth the price of admission all on its own, a hazy tranced out chunk of heavy, heady, forest folk drone drift bliss.
Both records are incredible, and work amazingly well together, and like Pussygutt before, Wolvserpent continue to hone their unclassifiable sound, a melding together of dark hushed folk, minimal drone music, and blackened dooooooom. Their name change probably won't really make 'em much more commercially appealing, but who needs that, when you're ruling the darkened otherworld of psychedelic avant heaviness???
Dark, ritualistic, blackened ambience, and experimental psychedelic black metal from members of Dead Reptile Shrine, Ride For Revenge, Will Over Matter, Blutleuchte and Cloama, all of whom we've raved about separately on the aQ list before, and who have all come together to create this hour long songsuite, that fuses twisted electronics, shimmering kosmische drift, minimal percussive post industrial murk, and tranced out hypno-psych mesmer. Separated into four movements, and given titles like "Satan Universe Moloch", "Bug Humanity", "She male Vegetarian" and "Neptunean Crystal Rain", at first blush, the sound seems to fall closest to the weirdo minimal electronics of Will Over Matter, the opener laying down a gristly sprawl of glitched out electronic buzz, but bolstered by some dreamy, almost krautrock sounding guitar, a twisted kosmische / avant electronic hybrid, those guitars soon dropping out, leaving a wild tangle of damaged FX and mutated synths, a darkly chaotic blacknoise, that eventually resolves into some dark, almost John Carpenter sounding cinematic dronemusic. Those hazy soundtracky atmospherics bleed into the second track, this time accompanied by some twisted vocalizations, wreathed in static and distortion, and drifting beneath thick undulating sheets of synth, everything peppered with bursts of glitch and crackle, moody and ominous, haunting but weirdly tranquil. Soon industrial rhythms surface and enter the fray, they remain muted and in the background, while once again, the electronics take over, this time drifting atop mutated vocals, pitch shifted and heavily effected, not to mention fluctuating fields of woozy melodies and strange, damaged samples.
It's not until track three ("She Male Vegetarian") that there's any actual black metal, and even then, there's a buzzing blackened main riff, but instead of exploding into a furious blast, that riff lumbers ominously through fields of chaotic murky drumming, the result much more trancelike and weirdly hypnotic, and quickly that riff splinters into a weird stretch of chiming distorted harmonics, and tangled sonic skree, before slipping back into the black churn, now joined by more guitars, the sound more lush and expansive, but still woozy and stumbling, you can definitely hear the Dead Reptile Shrine here, but before you know it, the sound shifts, transformed into a lovely bit of soft synth ambience, before once again, exploding into a field of blackened power electronics, smeared into something droned out and murkily mesmerizing, finishing off with what sounds like a bit of sampled Finnish folk. Finally, the close is announced by the sound of thunder, which is quickly subsumed by some bleak, blurry, tinny black metal riffage, smeared into staticky swaths of blacknoise, laced with moaning, anguished vokills, the sound growing gradually less and less noisy and buzzy, another barrage of alien electronics soon taking over, the record finishing off with a weird bit of black ambient electronic ritualism, that grows more hushed and haunting, before fading out completely.
Twisted and lovely, bleak and black, mysterious and bizarre, minimal and murky, fans of any / all of the members' other projects will no doubt dig. But best be quick, this is LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!! These are the ONLY copies we will ever be able to get, and once they're gone, they are gone for good!!!
Emotional Rescue returns with another obscure Woo reissue originally only released as a cassette in 1990. For some avid Woo fans, this one has been heralded as an all out favorite, and indeed it is a incredibly strong addition to their already reissued catalog which we can't seem to get enough of. Marked notably by a more ethereal atmosphere made with digital synthesizers along with the acoustic guitar and oboe that has trademarked their sound previously. The arrangements still acoustically rhythmic but with less of a restless rush, and there is a greater presence of vocals, but not overtly so. In fact the first vocal track "Make Me Tea" is one of our favorite tracks with a lilting female backup vocal and gentle lullaby delivery. Their Durutti Column meets Cluster meets Penguin Cafe Orchestra vibe remains in tact, but with greater nuance on the details. That may be because of its new remastering, but this is really aurally quite deep and beautifully delicate, becoming at times more about the spaces between sounds than the sounds themselves.
Their is a vinyl version of which we have a couple of copies (just ask!) but will wait until we can get more before we highlight here. One thing to note however is that only 18 of the original 22 cassette tracks are on the vinyl version, and annoyingly "Make Me Tea" was left off the vinyl version and released as a separate 7" that we haven't been able to get. All the tracks are included on the cd however. Regardless, this is an amazing release, and a great place to start with this remarkable duo as any!
We made the 2012 Drag City reissue of Woo's 1989 album It's Cozy Inside, Record of the Week, but upon hearing this recent reissue of the group's 1982 debut, Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong, we knew with even MORE certainty that we had to make it a Record of the Week as well. We have been playing this constantly in the store for weeks, and with each listen becoming more enamored with its blithe mosaic of introspective soundscapes and quiet pop-jazz sensibilities. Reissued by Emotional Rescue a few months ago, we wanted to list this sooner, but the vinyl version had already sold out (it's being repressed, we're told), but we have the cd version while supplies last, so we recommend you act fast.
By the time It's Cozy Inside was released, the eccentric brothers Mark and Clive Ives' highly individualized method of making music using acoustic guitar, bass and clavinet processed through synthesizers to create strange hybrids of jazz and pastoral electronica was largely dialed in. But on their debut, with its compelling title and cover depicting a young child surrounded by the authority figures of religion, politics and academia all pointing in opposing directions and acting as a personal manifesto for forging ahead on one's own unique path, the sound is at once more open ended, searching and strange than the later record. Intermixing buoyant melodic passages with serpentine experimental sonic arrangements and rhythms, Woo sounds like a band made up of way more than just the two brothers. The opener, "Swingtime" is the perfect start. An intricate and bright melody punctuated by drum machine, labyrinthine bass and acoustic guitar, sounding like the crystalline guitar lines of Durutti Column, before suddenly dropping into the hot gurgling percussive ambiance of "Pokhara" with its Middle Eastern guitar sounds, made from sped up dubbed out rhythms. Each track melds into the next like an alien and otherworldly soundtrack, or more aptly, like aliens hearing the early jazz melodies of Django Reinhardt for the first time and trying to emulate that sound using modern technology. The sound is gentle, but never quite relaxing. Nothing stays at rest, but at the same time, nothing is rushed either. Moody and pensive, the layered acoustic guitar work is incredible, as it anchors the tenuous atmospheric backing of electronics and muddled loping rhythms. "Razorblades" channels the Brian Enoish side of David Bowie's Low into a dense and worried jazz deconstruction. The one vocal track, "The Attic" is a dreamy pop masterpiece seemingly transported from Factory Record's Benolux imprint or Les Disques du Crepuscule, two Belgian based labels that focused on the dreamier side of European new wave avant-garde pop in the eighties. Anyone who's a fan of those labels, and bands like Antena, early Thomas Dolby, John Foxx, Bill Nelson and later Tuxedo Moon as well as solo releases by Steve Brown, Benjamn Lew and Peter Principle, will find a kindred spirit in Woo's epic gentleness. We were playing this one day when ex-Yellow Swan Pete Swanson paid us a visit and he asked us what was playing. He had been told by many friends that he should definitely look into Woo, but listening to the track playing, he couldn't really understand why. But Woo is not a band you can just check out a track and get it right off. It's disarmingly soft in a way that may come off as wimpy at first, but it eventually gets under your skin in ways that are subtle and mysterious and then you can't stop listening.
A beautifully elastic and hard to pin down musical force. Limited!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Originally this two song 7" came bundled for free with the vinyl copies we had of the first pressing of Wooden Shjips' latest full length, West. But that lp+7" combo was crazy limited, and of course disappeared in a flash, but NOW, Thrill Jockey has made that 7" finally available on its own, and as you might imagine, it's still crazy limited, so if you missed out the first time around, grab one now while you can. The A side is a non-album track called "Photograph" which features some seriously heavy guitar crunch, and sounds like it could easily have been included on the record proper, while the flipside features a Peaking Lights remix of "Looking Out" from the album (re-titled "Lights Out"), which spaces out the original a bit, makes it a bit dubby, and cranks the druggy Spacemen 3 vibe way up, and in the process manages to make it even more dreamy and psychedelic. In a full color sleeve, the same packaging as the first press...
It's hard to believe that it's been five whole years since Wooden Shjips effortlessly materialized into the psychedelic musical landscape. Between then and now they have become semi-hugely successful, almost right under our noses, and taken on the identity of sage-like masters of their psychedelic craft. Indeed, at the beginning, the Shjips appeared to be on the cusp of something new, not quite a "revival", but perhaps a much needed re-imagining of hazed psychedelic rock that sounded just as good in revved-up motorik excursions as it did in slow, confusional wanderings. Perhaps the one thing that bound it all together so perfectly was the band's patience and their ability to really bring out hypnotic grooves, starting with a perfect riff and just taking it all the way into the ever after. Each band member has a specific role within the group, and they know exactly what needs to be done for the song. Sure, a lot of bands will talk that game, but not many people are able to so expertly strip this music to its minimal core as the Shjips, and the formula has changed little over the years - a simple drum pound with no fills, a rumbling low end anchor of bass, wandering organ grooves, and a fuzzed out guitar that inevitably leaves the world behind to venture into clouds of acid-fried soloing. Sitting perfectly within the swirling instrumentation are the low crooned vocals that bring to mind everyone from Alan Vega to a sedate Lizard King to, hell, Elvis? The remarkable thing is how Wooden Shjips have managed to bring about so many comparisons while sounding only like Wooden Shjips.
Album #3 comes to us from the highly esteemed Thrill Jockey label, maybe the most ideal home imaginable for this band in 2011. Unlike the band's previous outings recorded in their practice space, West marks the first time Wooden Shjips have gone into an actual recording studio. How does it sound, you ask? Well, REALLY FUCKING GOOD to put it mildly. We loved the lower-fi murkiness of those other records but the clarity of the recording here brings out an expansiveness that wasn't previously there while also working itself into the record's themes of relocation and expansion to the American West. Ya know, like, San Francisco man. Freedom. Exploration. Rebirth. That kind of deal.
The record opens portentously with "Black Smoke Rise" and sets the tone for what is to come. It rides out with a cool midtempo biker riff while describing the crazy allure of the unknown. "Crossing" moves forward in a warm fuzz blanket with a tambourine clink keeping things nice and steady. Unlike what you might expect from the title, "Lazy Bones" is a hyped up jaunt with ominous little organ melodies adding to the confusion, before the slow burning "Home" brings things down a notch with an organ that has a bit of a Southern swamp vibe. "Flight" kicks in with a nice... uh, "boogie-rock" inspired riff that works really well against the devil may care rhythm and a super catchy organ line. This is probably the closest the band will ever get to making a song to strut down the street to, and it's a motherfucker. "Looking Out" is another uptempo romp with percolating organ chords and the tremeloed guitar shifting hazily in the speakers. Strange, sitar-like guitar notes that could have been beamed in from Sandy Bull, wherever he is, come and go and present a lovely array of musical notes that expertly do as they please. The closing number "Rising" brings things full circle by reversing "Black Smoke Rise" and stretching out the ambience with the rhythm provided by that awesome backwards swooping sound we all love.
Making this Record Of The Week is a no brainer. We've loved watching Wooden Shjips' journey unfold over the years, and they have yet to disappoint. They are a quintessential San Francisco band, and wherever they go, we're along for the ride.
While supplies last (which might not be long), the vinyl lp version of this comes with an exclusive limited edition bonus 7" single. Non-album track "Photograph" b/w a Peaking Lights remix of "Looking Out" from the album (re-titled "Lights Out"). In sleeve with full-color artwork. Definitely a collector's item, only available from a very few lucky stores (like us) and super limited. Sorry cd folks, no bonus with that format...
First in the series of live documents from a 2005 tour, made shortly after recording Gypsy Freedom. This one titled, "Born Free" is 40 minutes of psychedelic musings and mystic ramblings creating a mildly whirling cacophony of half-uttered voices, bells and shambling rhythms. Sustaining this feel without too much shift in dynamics, this set is more ghostly than freaky, but still a good introduction to their unique sound and how it is manifested in a live setting.
Previously only available as a limited vinyl pressing of 300 from De Stijl Records, now reissued on CD by those kind folks at Troubleman Unlimited.
If we were gonna be lazy-asses and just toss off some current reference points, we might say that Wooden Wand album sounds a lot like what you might imagine the avant-folk bastard offspring of Devendra Banhart and Jandek would conjure up, but with absentminded spoken-sung male vocals and somber, resonant female vocals that occasionally draw comparisons to Jarboe (particularly on the song "Caribou Christ In The Great Void"). However, there's so much more to be said about the splendidly off-center sounds of Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice. Fans of Vibracathedral Orchestra, No Neck Blues Band, not to mention the assorted twigs and branches of both Animal Collective and Jewelled Antler Collective should definitely check this out (if they haven't already!). Smatterings of flute toots, stringy plink plunks, rattlings, rustlings and other random sounds rummaged from various knic-knacs, shrubbery, loosely strung strings and earthen wares. Apparently there's many many more Wooden Wand releases on the horizon. So if you dig this, you've got plenty more to look forward to! Liner notes by some dude called Thurston Moore.
Just in case you haven't quite got your fix for lackadaisical, lo-fi pop, here's a folky dose of strummy daydreaming from East Coasters Woods. Songs of Shame, their fourth full-length, basks in the same sunny day euphoria that radiates from other Woods records, complete with falsetto vocals, clumsy percussion and reverb on -everything-. Dense layers of woozy vocals and weird Casio sounds busy the songs as small details and hidden instruments reveal themselves in a sea of psychedelic clatter. Super warped and drugged out, Songs of Shame sulks in pools of hazy acoustic guitars, ultra catchy 'ooohs and aahs', and soaringly damaged fuzzzzzzz guitar, all loosely compiled into some analog relic found on the shore of Coney Island in the blaring summer heat. Housed in a sharp lookin sleeve with a grainy mountainous landscape on the front and what looks like a drawing by a kindergardener on acid on the back, very nice and very typical of the Woodsist fellows. Not sure how limited this puppy is, but take our advice and don't miss out.
Maybe not a match made in heaven, but definitely a match made in some twisted sonic otherverse where we want to spend the rest of forever, this brand new split finds East Coast psych folk combo Woods teaming up with ex- Man Is The Bastard weirdo psych noise SoCal shaman Henry Barnes aka Amps For Christ for a record of heady psychedelic drift and cosmic lo-fi sonic experimentation, that sounds just about as good as we figured it would. The track listing is a little bit confusing. Opener "Sleep" while credited to Woods, definitely sounds like a collaboration, the music itself is lilting sun dappled folk, all chiming and sweetly melodic, but underneath, a crazy distorted droned out guitar like buzz undulates and pulses, adding a strange sort of raga like vibe, and for folks new to Amps For Christ, definitely sounds like one of Barnes' gorgeous and gorgeously ramshackle homemade noise generators, which often look like some old kitchen cabinet you might find by the side of the road, all warped plywood, and strange nails, often screwdrivers and wild tangles of wires, and more often than not, everything decorated with strange drawings of winged guitars and bits of twisted bible verse. However, once we get to a track we know is a collaboration, we realize maybe that first track was just Woods paying homage to the twisted genius of AfC, "From Oatmeal To Buttermilk" a wild glitched out buzzing droney electronic raga, that squelches and chitters, a field of hazy electronic interference over mysterious electronic bagpipe like melodies. Soon after, we return to the tranquil dream folk of Woods, who seem to have infused all their songs with some mysterious psychedelic buzz, buried way down in the mix, a raga-like buzz underpinning the folky flutter, the campfire twang, and the abstract Appalachia, all before we get to the final three song suite, which finds Barnes and his Amps For Christ unfurling some surprisingly dreamy folk of his own (if the track listing is to be believed), acoustic guitars, simple hand drums, shakers and percussion, distant buzz and warm atmospheric shimmer, falsetto vox, and while we were expecting some crazy electronic freakout from the oddly named final jam, the nearly ten minute "Roto Koto In C Major", instead we're treated to a darkly hypnotic, brooding expanse of bas driven psychedelia, laced with bits of twang, flurries of acoustic guitar, more percussion, all very spare and spaced out, hauntingly mesmerizing, and dreamily trippy and druggy and woozily soft focus.
Fans of both bands will definitely dig, and this may just be the most easy to digest Amps For Christ record yet, certainly the perfect place to start for the uninitiated, and we can hope the perfect gateway record to all the weird electronic darkness that lurks beyond.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
There's some sort of competition going on in the cassette tape underground. There's nothing new about elaborate packaging, the weirder and wilder and more extravagant the better, but things are getting, well... dangerous.
Recently we reviewed a tape by UK doomlords Moss, each one packaged in a huge metal sculpture, most adorned with nails and chains and gears and all manner of sharp metal bits (don't ask, those are LONG GONE). Somehow though, the packaging fit the music perfectly.
Now we have the latest from the strangely monickered Work/Death, the brilliantly titled Teenage Heavy Metal Revisionism, and the packaging, well, it manages to outdo the Moss in one important way, it's MUCH SHARPER. We mean it, the first time we picked one of these up, we sort of started and dropped it, unprepared were we for the strange sensation of nails on the soft skin of our hands. It's a regular old tape, in a plain old tape case, but each side has a little mini-bed of nails, really sharp nails, tied up tight with twine. Very imposing and threatening looking. And again, somehow, the sharp and twine-y outer shell suits the music within.
A dark, rumbling, scraping and creaking cavernous journey through some post industrial low end wasteland. Sort of ambient, but also brutal, and aggressive, harsh and harrowing. Metallic percussion peppers a snarling swirling black soundscape, streaked with shards of feedback and crumbling black melodies. Thick blown out fuzz churns and roils, as if Wolf Eyes and Black Boned Angel were boiled down and placed in a huge black iron pot to simmer. Or like some sort of caveman Einsturzende... a million black suns slowly dying and spreading out, coating everything in thick, viscous blackness...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We got about 15, and be warned, it's VERY SHARP, so if you do damage to yourself, we are not responsible, and if you order this with other stuff, it will have to be properly padded and secured to keep it from damaging any of the other items in your order, and in some cases that might bump up you shipping a tiny bit, but it's so worth it!
A stark half-toned reproduction of two idealized proletariat workers graces the cover of Work / Death's debut full length album. This along with the stencil text of the album's title gives the impression of this being somewhere not too far from the anarcho-punk of Crass or the sadistic noise of Con-Dom or Grey Wolves. In fact, Work / Death's fizzing synth-drones are far from these grim signifiers. At one time, this Rhode Island one-man band might have abused his audience with sheer hellish miasma. But even though he still uses the self deprecating slogan "garbage in, garbage out" to describe his working process, Tender Comrades is nothing at all of a noise record, creating mesmerizing assemblages of layered static, soft blurry orchestrations of electronics, and sustained drones which come together much closer to the likes of Tim Hecker or Lawrence English than anything previously mentioned.
The album opens with a wispy swirl of aerosolized hiss situated above a Charlemagne Palestine style church organ drone, slipping into an Oneohtrix Point Never melody on the synth presets for horns by the end of this uncannily gorgeous piece. The second track may be more in keeping with Work / Death's earlier compacted noise, with motorized clickings and dampened alarm bells perched upon a carcinogenic hum of MB style sonic rumbling and electro-acoustic brutalism. But the gauzy approach returns on the third through a quiet set of guitar strummings behind another engulfing mass of thickened grey/white noises, with all of the sharp edges burnished off, like a shoegazed approach to noise construction, matching the mood of the plaintive guitar strums. By the album's finale, Work / Death offers something of a post-noise homage to Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon or Jonathan Coleclough's Period, with small clusters of piano hanging on a smoldering backdrop of rasping Brendan Murray-like minimalism. Very nicely done and a quite a nice surprise.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Using a MiniDisc player feeding back upon itself as the sole source, Dion Workman (formerly of the Sonic Youthish avant-rock ensemble Thela with Dean Roberts and Rosy Parlene) and Australian sound artist Rohan Thomas have constructed an incredibly austere piece of digital minimalism that sounds very much like the Bernhard Gunter album "Details Agrandis." An album that tries very hard
Honey Owens is one busy woman. Besides her vocal based drone outfit Valet (whose gorgeous new 7" we reviewed last list), she is also a sometime member of Jackie O Motherfucker, Nudge, Dark Yoga and others, as well as running the kick ass Yarn Lazer cd-r label. Somehow she also manages to record in the duo World, with Adam Forkner, who plays in Yume Bitsu, White Rainbow and with Owens in Dark Yoga. This is the last World release ever apparently, which is sort of too bad since this is the first one we've managed to get a hold of.
Can You Feel It Coming In The Air Tonight? is a collection of sorts, gather up two tracks�originally meant to come out as part of a box set of Portland bands that was eventually scrapped, a 30 minute collaborations with another Portland band called Tres Gone, as well as a handful of unreleased track and remixes. But it hardly matters that this is a collection, as all the tracks here are ghostly and haunting, and all flow together perfectly as if they were written and recorded to be this single suite of music.�
Every track is mysterious and murky, lots of dark shimmer, and fuzzy druggy twang, when there are vocals, they�are smokey and ghostly, or cooed and creepily sexy, the percussion is minimal and as muted and mumbly as the rest of the sounds. Our favorite songs are the ones where the band sound sort of country, incorporating bits of abstract twang into their glacial drift. Like�a way more stoned, spaced out and cough syrupy Red Red Meat all�languid and languorous, stoned and sleepy sounding, or imagine�taking a Souled American record, and spinning it manually on the turntable with your finger as slooooooow as possible,�a gorgeous, dreamlike warble.
Elsewhere the rhythms become more active, and the songs begin to resemble a more soft focus No Neck or Sunburned Hand, all spare and sparse, reverb drenched and, drunken melodies stumble through wide open fields of choral voices, distant drones, everything swirling dizzily, while�in the background crumbling melodies drift in crunchy distorted soundscapes of buzzing and crackling drones, all smeared into traffic-light-through-rainy-windshield blurs. So gorgeous.�
The record finishes off with that 30 minute collaboration with Tres Gone, and combined, the two bands are way more propulsive, adding some more distinct angular distorted guitar and wild skittery free jazz drumming, all tangled and abstract, over a roiling bed of distant industrial whir, and rumbling low end shimmer, the result being some sort super druggy, stumbling outsider free folk acid jazz jam. Cool.
Packaged in an oversized photocopied and hand painted sleeve, with a full color photo. LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!!!
This is the latest release from local black metal tape label Brotherhood Of Light, who have been moving well away from black metal on recent releases, never more so than here, the first we've heard from Worldscape:18, one of a handful of new BoL tapes (the rest are listed in the In Stock Not Yet Reviewed section if you want to take a flyer on any of those) that find the BoL crew exploring all manner of experimental soundscapery, power electronics, harsh (and not so harsh) noise and even techno, ALL of which find their way onto Hunter, a dizzying, constantly shifting sprawl of crumbling drones, blurred damaged loops, corrosive textures, and even some beats!
Hunter starts out in a grey sonic fog, sound a bit like Nurse With Wound doing power electronics
all blown out, decayed sonic detritus, the sort of cool warped sound that makes it hard to figure out if it's meant to be like that, or if it's the batteries dying in your Walkman, either way, it sounds amazing, a churning fractured dronescape, buried melodies and swirling looped samples underneath, sounding a lot like a noisier, more caustic Caretaker, all washed out and woozy.
The sound shifts into dense cascades of melting symphonic swirls, and wild squalls of demonic whispers and fractured psychedelia, again all jumbled and tangled into a swirling chaotic mesmer, harsh in places for sure, but smeared into something less brittle and brutal, and transformed into the sort of soft noise that's totally hypnotic and mesmerizingly tranced out.
We were settling in for a long sprawl of droned out zoner drift, when BAM, the sound splinters, and then explodes into a sort of killer distorto house music, blown out and super aggressive, like a jacked up Silent Servant, laced with all sorts of strange sci-fi bloops and bleeps, spacey melodies, wreathed in sheets of thick blacknoise thrum, pounding malevolently, total blackened dancefloor destruction for sure. That beat soon disappears in a cloud of staticky white noise, before devolving into a cool, slithery downtempo groove, all slowed down vocals, roiling looped rhythms, again all wreathed in gristly buzz, and drifting atop a bed of rumbling thrum. Haunting minor key melodies surface, again transforming the sound into something hauntingly beautiful, the beats still throbbing down in the murk, sounding a bit like a demonic lo-fi Boards Of Canada, sort of. All before another barrage of noise swallows the proceedings whole, and spews out an entirely different set of gnarled beats, monstrous vokill bellows, and swirling kosmische synth melodies, buried beneath layer upon layer of black noise buzz. And so it goes. A twisted sort of electronic noise record, fused to old school hardcore techno, woven into a beat driven chunk of psychedelic post industrial power electronics, and filtered through a damaged floorcore harsh noise combo, and the result might just be one of our favorite BoL releases yet!
We realize that lots of folks might have only recently discovered aQuarius, and may have missed out on lots of past favorites we consider essential listening. Many of those same people may not relaize that our very own Andee runs the tUMULt label, on which some of our all time favorite records have been released. Since the world has finally caught on, caught up and plain old caught a serious case of Finnish fever (Circle, Avarus, Anaksimandros, Islaja, Kemiallisett Ystevat, etc.) we figured it was high time to re-list this slab of beautiful brutality, from mighty and mysterious outfit, Worms:
Will Finland never cease to surprise us? How can one tiny country continue to produce so much progressive, transgressive, creative and fucking perfect experimental rock? Circle, Keuhkot, Avarus, Anaksimandros, Mieskuoro Huutajaat, Pharoah Overlord, Ektroverde, Skepticism, Kemialisett Ystavat, and now Worms!
The Worms may be new to us (and actually to most people in Finland, surprisingly) but they have been a fixture of the Finnish underground for over a decade. And even after a decade, their entire recorded output consisted of three 7" singles and a few compilation tracks. So Andee's tUMULt label managed to track down the band, and discovered that they actually recorded a full length a few years back, but the label that was supposed to release it dropped the ball.
So here it is finally and man is it something. Five tracks of beautiful brutality. A dark and wintry, more motorik My Bloody Valentine, mixed with a little Circle and a little Filth-era Swans. Or some Frankensteinian dirge rock band, equal parts Godflesh, My Bloody Valentine, the Shadow Ring, and the Swans.
The disc starts off with a massive 30 minute medley, a droning hypnotic dirge, like Terry Riley composing for Godflesh or the Melvins and not a little reminiscent of Dutch riff gods Gore. Endless and hypnotic, crushing and brutal. The next three tracks display Worms more melodic side, letting a little pop shine through, with lilting vocals and darkly melancholic melodies and frontman Veli Pesonen's deep Michael Gira like drawl intoning simple mantra-like lyrics, over jangly strummed riffs, more melodic maybe, but still drone-y and hypnotic and dreamy. Think late era Swans, or maybe the Terminals, or the Clean, that sort of dreary, jangly New Zealand rock. The twenty minute 'Border' closes proceedings with a glorious din of shimmering but harrowing guitars, buried melodies and relentlessly propulsive rhythms. This was a long time coming, but once you hear it you'll agree it was well worth the wait. Definitely for fans of all the above mentioned bands as well as connoisseurs of drone/dirge/doom. Crushingly beautiful. And of course essential.
It doesn't really get any more METAL than this. Wormsblood. Killer name. Wicked illegible logo, the band name written out in the black roots of some hellish plant. Over a black and white photocopied canyonscape. Epic and windswept, snow covered and GRIM. The man behind Wormsblood is Wyrdskull, and to the black cause he contributes "common ritual tools, heavy-handed electro-overblood, vibrations of the unsilent dark tomes and the crossing of song and siege." Guests include Crimson Maaritkitaka who delivers "cryptwyrm bloodlet and akashic magnet", Vragknacht The Two-Handed, who offers up "battle-ready bloodsong", then the song titles: "Thundercall", "The First Dim Shinings (Of Those About To Awaken", "Ritual Of Bone And Horn", "Tolling Beyond Our Lunar Trance", plus they do a Manilla Road cover, "Street Jammer" and they even offer up a hearty "Hails to the fucking Mad Street Hammers".
But for all the pure troo metal action, the sound is anything but, which is most likely due to the fact that Wormsblood is very likely made up of folks from the free noise / freak folk scene, who in Wormsblood finally get the opportunity to indulge in their darker musical side, to touch that blackened part of their music soul, to unleash all those pent up demonic forces, and the result is a dizzying confusional blast of chaotic, lo-fi, muddled and muddy, freaked out and blown out, damaged what-the-fuck blackened METAL.
The closest comparison we could come up with is probably a black metal Faxed Head, which is pretty much all we'd need to hear. The vibe is definitely similar, the riffs a garbled buzzing mess, thick swaths of weird keyboard, the drums splattery and stumbling and blasting, the tape hiss, and random instrument buzz as much a part of the sound as the bands damaged black roar, then there are the vocals, hysterical shrieks, rumbling grunting moans, haunted howling, the tracks often crumbling into utter disarray, or coalescing into epic doomy pound, everything drenched in malfunctioning electronics and fried FX.
An absolutely dementedly genius fucked up black metal noiserock melt down. Packaged in a super strange fold over plastic sleeve, with multiple printed inserts, and most likely crazy limited...
Seems like only moments ago, my favorite record of last year came out. Maybe that's just because I still listen to it almost every day!! It's that good. If you read the AQ list you know I'm talking about the totally amazing Woven Hand record, a solo project of David Eugene Edwards from Sixteen Horsepower. Let's quickly recap for those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Sixteen Horsepower make weird backwoods gypsy folk, augmenting normal instrumentation with fiddles, accordions and mandolins. Dark and swampy tales, campfire stumps and lugubrious dirge folk crawls. Sound good? Well that's 'cause it is!! A huge AQ favorite. We weren't sure what to expect from Edwards solo record. We certainly weren't expecting it to surpass 16HP in every way, but it did!! Darker and creepier, tales of apocalyptic doom and Biblical salvation rendered in dreary, droney folk, lit by the fire of a bayou campfire. SO SO SO GOOD!!! One of the few records that really moved me. Seriously, like to tears. It's so gorgeous and passionate and sinister and perfect. Yes, PERFECT. So here we are a year later and a new record from the Woven Hand. Blush Music is music composed for a modern dance performance by the Belgian dance troupe Ultima Vez. It's about half re-worked songs from the first record and half new material. At first I was a little disappointed that it was different versions of old songs, until I heard the new versions. GOD!! This record perfectly complements the songs on the first record. One of the highlights from the first record was the cover of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine", a perfectly gut wrenching, tear jerking slow motion valentine to lost love. On Blush Music, "Ain't No Sunshine" reappears as the 12+ minute "Animalitos", with the original stretched out into an entirely new shape, complete with dark, mornful ambient passages, wheezing organs, bombastic percussion, rumbling drones, bird calls, and forest sounds, with the vocals and melody occasionally surfacing only to be immediately overwhelmed by the turbulent soundscape. A couple songs from the first record get this treatment and the results are sublime. The new tracks, while not as immediately catchy as a lot of the tracks on the first record, still capture the same dread and dark hope. A good way to imagine this record in relation to the first, is imagine the first record as the -soundtrack- to an epic biblical southern love story equal parts Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Southern Comfort and All The Pretty Horses. Now imagine that Blush Music is the -score-, all the incidental music, the theme reworked and stretched out to hover emotionally beneath dialogue, or to guide the viewers emotions. I think this record works better if you already own the first one (thankfully the first one was just released domestically), but that isn't to say Blush Music is not a perfect slice of dark and droney, fire and brimstone, forlorn and forgotten, gorgeously damaged, gypsy psych-folk. 'Cause it is!
Another gloriously sun baked, drug drenched slab of psychedelic free folk splendor, this time from the mysterious Wovoka. Occupying a sonic space smack dab between Matt Valentine and his Tower Recordings, and the more abstract forest folk of Avarus and Davenport, but with bits of Jewelled Antler clatter and No Neck / Sunburned Hand abstract drone rock mixed in, it sounds like this could end up being a mess. And it sort of is, but it's a fantastic, stumbling, perfectly ramshackle, hippy jam sort of mess. Simple tribal drumming, chanted vocals, spidery psychrock guitars, long stretches of blissful Appalachia and buzzing drone-like raga. A totally tripped out late afternoon drift through a skeletal world of folky twang and abstract rhythmic shuffle, super laid back and totally hypnotic.
ULTRA LIMITED. ONLY 100 COPIES! We got 20 and we won't be able to get more as it's already out of print.
Pressed on cool faux-vinyl cd-r's (with grooves and everything, housed in a simple cardboard sleeve with paste on artwork, and color acid tab insert.
