Xeno Volcano and Elektra Sturmschnell are a Swiss dark ambient duo deadset on landing a record on World Serpent (the distribution center for Current 93, Sol Invictus, Coil, Moon Lay Hidden Beneath The Clouds, Chris & Cosey, and other post-industrial art projects). In all likelihood, they have a pretty good shot at it, with a cold, detached aesthetic that merges barren electronics with equally emotionless spoken word poetics. "Die Organik" does come across like the more electronic Current 93 pieces (especially "In A Foreign Land, In A Foreign Town") but with a dominatrix reciting her Nietzchian poetry in German rather than David Tibet and his pantheistic mythologies.
Into the dark and experimental? Take note! Here's an early work by the Swiss duo responsible for the Die Organik disc that we listed recently - brought to us by Xeno Volcano himself on his way back to Switzerland. Thirty two (!) solemn sonic glimpses of German spoken word amid a spartan landscape of electronic hiss, and soft melodies that drift and whir. Most are under three minutes long. Sturmschnell recites her short prose that shifts between sharp, icy orders to sedated ramblings. Tense, ominous and unsettling latenight listening.
Another high-concept item here, with a quite self-explanatory title. Yep indeedy, it's music made from the sampled sounds of copiers. Kinda not that much different from the dot matrix printer symphonies of The User reviewed here not long ago (though the copiers can't perform live via network and ascii "instructions" like the printers can). The fellow behind Xerophonics, one Dr. Stefan Helmrich PhD., made field recordings of copier machines in action, then sampled and re-assembled 'em via computer into these 13 tracks of manipulated, looping, layered machine rhythms. Clacking parts and melodic electronic blips too. Sometimes it's like a room full of shuddering copiers approximating current cutting-edge electronic dance music -- a copier rave if you will. You can imagine that they provide their own light show as their copying plates flash. There's plenty of weird noises and "notes" that are exceedingly hard to believe came from a copier, but they must have somehow. I mean, some of this gets really scary -- maybe it should have been the soundtrack to that new Terminator movie, "Rise of the Machines" I think it's called. Terminator office machinery!
Pretty cool. Deep thinkers might find more going on here, as part of the motivation for this project involves artistic commentary based on the additional meaning inherent in the sampling of sounds of COPIERS. Geddit, copiers. After all, it's on Negativland's Seeland label. Furthermore, Helmrich's "xerophonic" manipulations are based on aural analogs to the work of xerographic artists: mirroring, resizing, motion-distorting, multiple copy degeneration. Hmm. Regardless, definitely one for fans of the aforementioned The User!
Achtung Krautrock heads! Previously unreleased live recordings by this way-out-there, pioneering German band. Xhol Caravan, who started life playing R&B as Soul Caravan in the late sixties and then mutated into Xhol Caravan (and finally, just Xhol) as their
The latest offering from the Pre-Cert Entertainment label (Anworth Kirk, N. Racker, David Orphan, Slant Azymuth) comes from the man himself, Andy Votel, Finders Keepers / B-Music head honcho and one of the folks behind Pre-Cert Entertainment as well (along with the Demdike Stare guys). As Xian Orphic, Votel has crafted what might be our favorite release on the label so far, a record that plays like some lost seventies soundtrack, and while inevitably there are nods to Goblin and Carpenter and Howarth, we're hearing more Fred Myrow, especially on the first track, which is a dead ringer for Myrow's insanely awesome soundtrack for Phantasm, all thick squelchy synths, an impossibly catchy icy minor key melodic main theme, all wreathed in swirls of abstract ambience, there's a little bit of a cinematic kosmische going on, droney tranced out mesmer, lush and melodic, yet somehow ominous and strangely propulsive. It would be worth it for that track alone. But the record slips easily into something even more haunting, a washed out sprawl of layered and looped shimmer, laced with field recordings and strange FX, this track too reminiscent of some seventies soundtrack mood music.
The flipside changes gears a bit, with some tripped out tropical sounding soundscapery, over skittery rhythms, and peppered with dense sonic swirls, and shot through with more ominous melodies. The vibe is a little bit Morricone actually, albeit reimagined as something more synthy and sinister. The second track dips into some Zombi / Majeure territory, which is inevitable making these sorts of retro soundtrack sounds, but Votel transforms the sound into something even MORE old school, channeling a sort of seventies new age krautrock bliss, all before slipping into the final track, swirly and super abstract, all deep celestial thrum, chordal shimmer and gristled gauzy ambience.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
The beautifully damaged worlds of Xiu Xiu and Grouper are magically melded together on this limited edition ep. The trademark drugged out dreamy drones of Liz Harris aka Grouper perfectly compliment the mopey dark instrumentation of Xiu Xiu. Like their collaboration with Larsen last year, Xiu Xiu prove that besides their intense lyrics and over-the-top vocal delivery, they have a knack for creating a truly creepy and unsettling ambiance. Vocals and voices are just another element of the haunting mood these two effortlessly conjure up. Like the ghost sounds of a carnival that rode off into the sunset hundreds of years ago but whose imprint has never been totally erased. Together Xiu Xiu and Grouper weave sounds that occupy some perfect space between dreams and nightmares. Highly recommended! And we only got a handful direct from the bands, so you know what that means...
From the obi strip: "New Tzadik Oracles series is proud to begin with the unique visions of singer/songwriter Haena Kim. Featuring hypnotic, trippy vocals, nasty electric bass and two driving Korean percussionists, this is a band that opens up an exciting new world of sound. You've never heard anything like Xtatika--a magical blend of alternative rock with Korean traditional music.
Whoa, you won't be mistaking this cd for a super size t-shirt! No, this is a collaboration between Xiu Xiu and Larsen! An intriguing combination? That's putting it mildly. Think, the aural equivalent of a darkening storm cloud billowing forth with flashes of fork lightning, thunderous crashes and rumbles. An unstable atmosphere of eccentricity and melodrama. Although the overall mood is as heavy and disorienting as that of either groups' own releases, as the first track begins, you initially get the impression that there won't be as much of the emphasis on the overwrought vocals of Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart that we've come to expect from Xiu Xiu's own songs. The glitchily dynamic sixth song "Lipstick Fair" offers a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel, but then the next song, a strange cover of Adam Ant's "Prince Charming" pulls you back into the woe. No, he's not (and you're not) gonna get off so easy. Stewart seems to be singing from beneath a fortress of blankets afraid to see what's outside. The song swells to unveil another deeper male vocal, then it's almost as though the rest of the band members burst in, tearing the covers away from Stewart, exploding into a group chant/shriek atop cycles of clatterous percussion and plucked strings. Definitely one of the cd's high points. As in the song above, a few passages take on more traditional rock song formations, but they're soon scattered apart by seemingly random acts from crudely motor skilled limbs, only to settle into a more recognizably hypnotic, almost mystical and haunting tone. Here's hoping these two groups get together more often!
What we're about to say, we don't say lightly. Trust us. We may traffic in hyperbole. And our shelves may be stuffed with lots of 'best evers' and 'worst evers' and 'greatest evers', but this friends, is quite possibly the weirdest record we've ever carried. When we first threw it on, we were immediately struck with the realization, that what we were hearing, was either the most amazing thing we had ever heard, or absolutely the worst piece of shit EVER. Andee quickly decided on the former. And no matter how hard he tried, or how many repeated listens he was subjected to, Allan is sticking with the latter. But the more we play this in the store, the more the tribe of Xynfonica worshippers grows, Antaeus, Matt, Cameron, one can only handle a few listens before you're forever in its thrall. We're not sure how Allan does it, maybe there's some sort of chip in his brain, or maybe he's not really human at all, who knows. What we do know is we will wear him down, and just like you, faithful yet doomed reader of this list, he will eventually bow down to the damaged glory that is Xynfonica.
By now you're probably wondering what the fuck we're on about. Fair enough. So let's go back a bit. Not sure how we first heard about Xynfonica, but we got the disc in, it had an amazing cover, an old painting of some ancient battle, men on horseback, wielding swords, the record title: A Feast For Famished Ravens, song titles like: "From Your Father's Skull" and "The Viking Zodiac", a huge booklet jammed with more lyrics than could possibly fit in the three songs here, there are even footnotes!!! So we still hadn't listened to it, but we were pretty much sold already.
So we finally threw it on, and were greeted with some strange synthesizers, guitar synthesizers to be specific (we later discovered) and a growled demonic vocal, the synths, sort of atonal and detuned, like a demented Peter And The Wolf, the vocals, a strangled black metal rasp, so okay, we're thinking, a cool weird intro, so we waited for the band to kick in, and waited, and waited, and waited some more, scanned forward� So then we thought, okay, maybe the whole first track is the intro, so we skipped to the second track, which of course started with the raspy vocals and the seasick synths, but we gave it the benefit of the doubt and waited and waited, scanned forward, and then it dawned on us. HOLY SHIT. This was the band. There were no drums, no guitarist. It was just some trollish demon and his damaged synth, spewing endless tales of mysterious battles and lost civilizations. And suddenly, it had us. Xynfonica. Sure it's creepy and demented, and borderline retarded, and the synths sometime sound so wrong it makes us dizzy, so 'off' it makes our eyes water, the melodies are demented, alien, creepy ominous one second, bouncing cheerfully the next, but always those vocals, an everpresent demon storyteller, it's hard to explain exactly why we're so taken, but we are. Every time we play this, initial reactions range from confusion, to hysterical laughter, to anxiety to sheer unadulterated joy. Imagine if Jandek was the keyboard player in a black metal band and decided to make a solo record, or imagine Mr. Roger's neighborhood but Mr. Rogers is out sick, so the dude from Abruptum is filling in, or imagine the music files from some medieval video game getting corrupted, and then used as the intro music for some evil metal band. Well you know, what? There's no need to imagine. It's all right here. Xynfonica will give you all of that and more. With just a rudimentary grasp of the synthesizer, and a frog in his throat, all will be revealed, and we shall all revel in his stumbling, confusional musical brilliance.
Xynfonica. Xynfonica. Xynfonica. Xynfonica. Xynfonica...
A weird musical mix here from this brutal metalcore / post rock / uh, jazz fusion? band from Chicago. We were prepared for it, though, having previously liked and reviewed their debut album Way Of The Dead a couple years ago. In that review we said that only weirder metal band on the Century Media roster was Japanse black metal bizarros Sigh (both bands have moved on to new labels since then). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the saxophone player (yes, saxophone player) from Yakuza guested on the most recent Sigh album. And now Yakuza are back with a new full-length, just as heavy and arty as before. They remind us a bit of Iceburn (the vocals, the jazz influence) but heavier, more in the direction of Neurosis and Isis. Massive sonics throughout, with unexpected styles and instrumentation mixed in. The songs here blenderize tech grind mayhem, hardcore screaming, Alice In Chains style clean vocals, chamber music, and smooth jazz chops, and don't make as much a mess of it as you might expect... No, this works for us. If you're into the likes of Fantomas or Kayo Dot we'd imagine this might work for you too. Avant-cellist Fred Lonberg-holm shows up as a guest, as does one of the Mastodon dudes. That maybe tells you something right there.
To start with, we've always commended Japan's Doubtmusic label for the handsome packaging job that each one of their digipack cd releases invariably receives. This one, though, we'd probably be inclined to buy just 'cause of the especially cool cover art alone! Done by one Tomoo Gokita, the cover suggests an arched window in a brightly patterned wall, looking out on (a photo of) some majestic snow-capped alpine mountain (the Matterhorn, is it?). But in front of the "window", the corpse-painted visage of King Diamond pokes up unexpectedly, screaming at you... WITH, IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY, A MINIATURE HEAD IN HIS MOUTH. Quite confusionally cool, eh? But for what sort of music could this art be at all appropriate? Well, why not an electronics-augmented Japanese drums duo featuring someone who once played in the Boredoms/Vooredoms?! 'Cause that's what this is, with a vengeance.
Erstwhile Boredom Muneomi Senju (drums, percussion, electronics) teams up with Tasuhisa Yamamoto (drums, metals, percussion, gong, odaiko drums) for 7 tracks of mostly percussion-only soundscapery, from "primitive groove" to "wall of onkyo" in style, according to Doubtmusic's description, which also cites poly-rhythms and harmonic overtones as things you'll hear here, and we don't doubt it, these tracks are widely varied and always intriguing, certainly bizarre enough at times to merit the colorful, epic high weirdness of that awesome album cover art!
The likes of "Foggy In Aquarium" and "Coral Flirtation" feature calm, complex layers of percussive playing, free-jazzy but not really free, with lots of bells and chimes and liquid tricklings... tinklings and twinklings... lovely stuff! THEN, there's the erratic and effected thwap-and-snap of "Scattered Devils". Zany, zappy drum hits and other bits that sound sampled from some futuristic Carl Stalling cartoon score, cut-and-pasted with slaphappy abandon together with electronic textures, ultimately funking it up in fractured, spastic fashion that reminds us of another recent Doubtmusic release, Sim + Otomo's Monte Alto Estate. Perhaps 'cause this track was further remixed by guest producer Yuta Segawa, it's the most "computery" sounding cut on here, whereas the rest of this disc comes off as much more organic, without all that obvious digital tomfoolery (cool though we think it is). Organic, AND trancelike, such as with the ritualistic rainfall pitter patter percussion, swirling and circling, of "Correspon-dance", or the endless drum-roll and cymbal-shimmer of the 8 minute plus "Fricative Lights" - very Boredoms Super Rootsy, that one!
Now as we've always said, about the only "drum circle" we can stand is one that involves the Boredoms. But two drummers does not a drum circle make AND there's a Boredoms connection both sound- and personnel-wise here. So unless you HATE percussion, this is definitely an out-there experiment in rhythm(z) to check out. Speaking of drum circles, opener "Chronoscope Fatigue" and closer "Chronoscope Fatigue Variation" are the closest this duo come to that sort of thing here, and that's not that close, unless you're familiar with drum circles that make a practice of all falling down the stairs while they're jamming...
For all the things that are truly great about working in a record store, on of the only real bummers is that sometimes it's kinda hard to be surprised by new music, in most cases, we know when a record is coming long before it's out, and often we get to hear albums before they're released, so some of the musical excitement we grew up with is gone, and we sometimes really miss that thrill of making a special trip to the record store only to discover some record you didn't even know about. So when it does happen, we freak out big time. Similarly, being the music nerd obsessives we are (and most of you are too), we're constantly on the hunt for new sounds, and for new favorites, and the one thing we DO still experience, is stumbling upon a record, and being blown away by the crazy cover art, or the weird name, or both, only to find that the music inside more than lives up to that unspoken promise, which is precisely what happened with the oddly monickered Yamantaka // Sonic Titan (and yeah, that double back slash is part of the name), not a split between two bands, but a duo, who the label describe as being a "pan-Asian cultural collective" based in Canada, whose two person lineup is expanded to eight members for this record, and whose eclectic lineup includes a traditional Mohawk singer, and the sound, WOW, not just a pleasant surprise, but a total revelation. The label describe YT // ST as being "for fans of Boredoms, Flower Travellin' Band, Taj Mahal Travellers, Deep Purple, J-Pop and Chinese Opera", and whenever you read such an over the top impossibly rad comparison, you sort of feel obligated to call hyperbole/bullshit, but the weird thing, as impossible as it seems, we might have come up with something similar, although we would add something about math rock / post rock / noise rock, and would definitely include Blonde Redhead, the vocals are occasionally a dead ringer for Kazu Makino, albeit much more washed out and druggy, and there's definitely some of the hyper Magmoid prog of Hundred Sights Of Koenji / Koenjihyakkei going on, but not so hyper, a little more toned down and stretched out into woozy rhythmic mesmer. As with all great records, this stuff is actually really difficult to describe, although odds are by now, some of you are already flipping out over the above comparisons.
The record opens with a brief bit of ritualistic ambience, the sound of rainfall and distant thunder, reverbed vocal harmonies, like the chanting of some astral female monks, all swirly and druggy and ethereal, which leads directly into "Queens", which unfurls in a haze of strange looped voices and whirring Deep Purple like organs, the vocals come in, and the sound is transformed into a sort of psychedelic indie rock, the melodies though reminiscent o seventies British acid folk, the rainfall present throughout, haunting and liturgical, epic and mysterious, and then the drums kick in, super distorted, in-the-red, the guitars coalesce into some serious riffage, splintering off into psychedelic swirls, the sound blown out, but dreamily so, until the blown out indie rock haze devolves into some seriously heavy, churning mathy pound and crunch, the vox processed into dizzying loops, blurred into the organs and the swirling psychedelia. So good. Imagine a way heavier, mathier, tripped out psychedelic Blonde Redhead and you might be close. But it only gets better/weirder from there.
After a brief bit of ethereal haze, that sounds like a grittier spaced out lo-fi take on Kate Bush / Cocteau twins, those British folk melodies here rendered in thick corrosive streaks of warm woozy guitar buzz, underpinned by powerful drumming, the sound coalescing into a brooding ballad, heavy and dark and broodingly beautiful.
But then comes "Reverse Crystal // Murder Of A Spider", which feels like the record's centerpiece, beginning with a grinding, crumbling bit of blurred orchestral swell, wreathed in clouds of decayed FX and fractured muted rhythms, the song explodes in a twisted mathy progged out frenzy, like the Ruins meets Nomeansno, only to immediately blossom into a super distorted heavy post rock lope, and then the soaring crystalline vocals come in, and the song is transformed into a bass heavy math prog groove than manages to be impossibly catchy at the same time, with what sound like wordless vocals unfurling a gorgeous and irresistible melody over some serious organ drive prog that sounds almost carnivalesque at times. After a brief tangle of abstract noise and processed tape, the song shifts into its second movement, a muted, rhythmic, almost krautrocky groove, that sounds like This Heat by way of Tortoise, and as the song progresses, the drums distort, the sound gets darker and heavier, the vocals surface adding a swirling spectral layer to the churning rhythmic low end below, before gradually getting more and more abstract and then finally fading out. YT // ST manage in one song what most bands can barely pull off on a whole record.
"Hoshi Neko" starts off sounding almost like some alien Christmas carol, a music box melody over a hushed tinny rhythm, all blurred with FX, and then in come the big distorted drums, and the band locks into a dark sinister groove, that almost sounds like a heavy creepy Stereolab, the vocals here are dramatic, transforming the song into what sounds like some classic sixties girl group songs reimagined as some sort of rhythmic post rock churn. "A Star Over Pureland" is the other long song on the record, and in some ways is competing with "Reverse Crystal // Murder Of A Spider" for sonic centerpiece privileges, and definitely makes a good case, although it's less fully formed songwise, instead it's a killer mathprog workout, the drumming particular, intricate and intense, while the guitars grind and crunch and howl, occasionally splintering into full on psychedelic squalls, there's definitely some sort of White Heaven / Fushitsusha classic Japanese psych going on here, but filtered through groups like Aluk Todolo and the Psychic Paramount, the track constantly morphing, locking into a very Ruins-y groove about midway through replete with strange effected vocal barks, wild Yoko Ono like warbly wails, and some thick buzzing bass, only to return to that strangely hypnotic lurching and stuttering groove and riding it out until the end.
Finally, the record closes with the awesomely and evocatively titled "Crystal Fortress Over The Sea Of Trees", which opens ominously like some sort of John Carpenter cinematic creepfest, but instead launches into some serious mathy post rock, only to have that Carpenter-y synth return, to help the song transition into something more swirling and surreal, but it only briefly, as the drums crash right back down, and the song returns to that opening post-math-psych-prog groove, the sound noisy, with all manner of guitar shards and fragmented melodies and bits of keyboard and strange voices swirling all around it, the song building to a strangely choral sounding drum and vocal coda, before devolving into burst of bass buzz and drum pound before clipping out abruptly, leaving a long stretch of near silence, a barely there distant blur of tinny vocals and ghostlike shimmer.
Definite contender for record of the year, it's available on both cd and lp, the vinyl limited to 500 copies...
Boredoms fans!! Bandleader Eye Yamataka, when not conducting the Boredoms themselves through thunderous drum-circle tranceouts, has a sideline in doing remixes for other artists, incorporating the same mega dosage of percussive craziness, throbbing rhythm, and swerve-y turntablist glitch that you'd find spilling forth from the most way-out Boredoms tracks. If you picked up Lindstrom's Contemporary Fix remix ep that we listed a couple weeks back you've heard a good example of Eye's handiwork. This Japan-only import disc brings together a dozen other of his best recent remix projects, the raw material coming from bands both known and unknown (to us). All of 'em -- except for Gong -- being Japanese bands we're pretty sure. Along with Gong, some of the names we do know: OOIOO, Wrench, DJ Pica Pica Pica (who IS Eye, right?), and Ken Ishii's Flare. And the names we don't: Walrus, Zeebra, Atami, Black Drop The Bomb, NXS, Boat, and one more we can't figure out (it's written in Japanese). Given the headspinning EYE extreme remix treatment, these artists' disparate tracks sound like they belong together on one disc for sure, he's put his surreal stamp on each of 'em big time. It's a colorful, energetic melange of tribal drumming, barnyard noises, faux ethnic exotica, techno beats, tape manipulations, guitar riffs, and heaps of psychedelic electronic effects.
Yan Jun is quite the mover and shaker in the experimental sound arts community in Beijing; yet unlike the avant-garde of China's visual artists, the big names of Chinese sound art are hardly known outside of the metropolitan areas of China. FM3 would be the only act that most people have heard of; yet artists like Yan have been very active bringing a number of European, Australian, Japanese, and American artists to the mainland as an act of cultural exchange. At the same time, Yan has been producing his own exceptional works including this contemplative album of innerspace travel. The album transcends its humble productions of sinusoidal flutterings of pedal sourced feedback and squiggling aquatic field recordings treated with ring modulation, as Yan seeks a radically different approach to the cosmic listening embarked by the likes of Cluster and Tangerine Dream, whose baroque expansiveness has been subsumed by the vacuum of outerspace (remember the vacant sound design of Stanley Kubrick's 2001?), with just those two sources intertwining in an endless mobius strip of silvery drone and pointilist tactility. It sounds more like Steve Roden taking over an Asmus Tietchens album and allowing the electronically treated sounds and tones to organically evolve into a radiant blossom instead of the purposefully cold and sometimes stiff compositions that Tietchens often produces. A very intriguing record to say the least! Limited stock on this one.
Japanese experimentalist (who was involved with Fluxus way back when) shows how he can make a skipping cd into a thing of beauty, albeit a noisy one. A lot more jarring than Oval...
With his early recording "The Hidden Tongue," San Francisco noise composer Randy Yau conceptualizes an alternate perspective on how the physicality of sound is to be perceived. Instead of assigning a value to sound such as "man-made" or "natural," Yau proposes that sound only has two states: existence and absence. The implications of Yau's hypothesis are interesting, yet set up a conceptual groundwork that's difficult to articulate as a piece of sound art. Yau stages these two states as a loud, violent, staccato noise fragments on one hand, and nearly empty passages on the other. With jarring noise bricolage splayed across his album in an almost random factor, the very quiet passages become that which is nerve-wracking as nervous precedents for the blasted screams of incendiary distortion. "The Hidden Tongue" does emerge as an expressive piece of noise manifestation, even if its conceptual agenda is tough to find with the music.
"I guess I had a lot of terrible relationships," snickers noise artist Randy Yau as an apology for the electric violence that explodes from this anthology of early works. Ah, yes, but so much great art has come from the pain of shitty break-ups and romance gone horribly wrong. Spanning his college days at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Coagulation features some of most explosive, nauseating, and abject sounds to pass through the Aquarius doors. Considering that Merzbow, Whitehouse, and Bastard Noise are frequently stocked items here, such hyperbole should not be taken lightly. Where Yau differs from his power violence / extreme noise contemporaries is in focus upon the body. His recent investigations into low frequencies vibrations within any given architectural environment engage a similar poetry, however, in a much more benevolent way. Coagulation is anything but benevolent, purposefully jumping from harsh noise to silence and back to hyper-distortion within just a few moments. These sounds hit you like a ton of bricks, letting up just enough to let you catch your breath, and then the assault immediately begins again. Yau's start 'n' stop technique immediately sets him apart from the neverending torrents of sound from many of his contemporaries.
A word of warning, do not plan on eating a meal during or after listening to Coagulation, as one track in particular the homage to Schimpfluch's Dave Philips entitled "Intermission" finds Yau purposefully vomiting over and over again. I think I turned green; but then again, has Merzbow ever done that? No fuckin' way.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Before starting Ruins, Tatsuya Yoshida played in this unusual 80's avant-progrock band, along with K.K. Null of Zeni Geva, original Ruins bassist Hideki Kawamoto, and mainman (on bass, vocals, & keyboards) Kitamura Masashi. These two volumes collect the "greatest hits" from their many records--a bunch of weirdness, all dark, emotional, complex and heavy stuff, including an interpretation of a Paul Simon tune! Recommended to all fans of Ruins!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Before starting Ruins, Tatsuya Yoshida played in this unusual 80's avant-progrock band, along with K.K. Null of Zeni Geva, original Ruins bassist Hideki Kawamoto, and mainman (on bass, vocals, & keyboards) Kitamura Masashi. These two volumes collect the "greatest hits" from their many records--a bunch of weirdness, all dark, emotional, complex and heavy stuff, including an interpretation of a Paul Simon tune! Recommended to all fans of Ruins!
Brand new disc of solo works from these two one man bands, both of whom traffic in sounds much harsher and heavier in their 'day jobs'. Ventoux is Graham from aQ faves Souvenir's Young America and Forensics, and Years is Ryan from Darkest Hour and City Of Caterpillar, both of whom seem to share a similar sonic focus here, away from the heaviness of their proper bands, both delve deeply into some sonic netherworld where the churning blackened buzz of Locrian intersects with the psychedelic bliss out of Expo 70, and the barren dusky deserty twang of Barn Owl blurs into the cavernous creep of Lustmord.
Years is up first, and deftly unfurls a shimmery electronic buzz that drifts atop billowy clouds of rib cage rattling low end, the insectoid melodies the perfect foil for the suffocating black hole bass beneath, the two delicately intertwined, creating something at once dense and black, ethereal and amorphous. The high end peels away, leaving just that deep Niblockian thrum, before being buried beneath a cascade of almost symphonic sounding high end, a woozy washed out synth heavy swirl that fades out again, leaving just that massive almost physical sounding low end, before finishing off with a haunting minor key bit of cinematic synthscapery, that's both dark and dramatic, and definitely hints at the sound of Umberto and Zombi and all the rest, but still tethered to that intense black hole bass.
Ventoux is immediately a much darker proposition, launching immediately into a churning, Locrian like black ambience, thick and undulating, softly gristly, laced with shards of melody, and wreathed in ever shifting textures, and like Years, allowing all sort of warm whirl and dreamlike shimmer to creep into the proceedings, so that by the end of the opening tracks nearly ten minutes, the sound has lightened considerably, and has drifted into a sort of sun dappled Nadja style metalgaze drift, a lush blur of softly roiling riffage. The second track grows considerably darker, playing out like some ancient sonic ritual, the sounds massive and glacial, this track too, gradually begins to build, but here instead of blissing out, the noise is cranked up, and not just Merzbow style noise, no instead it's a weird grinding choral sort of swirl, a blackened choir, twisted and tangled into a gloriously chaotic psychedelic ur-drone, which leads directly into the final 'movement', perhaps the noisiest and heaviest of the bunch. A groaning, creaking, caustic landscape of crumbling low end, thick processed burts of strangely melodic noise and dubbed out industrial clang and clatter, all wreathed in a black sonic gauze, but also infused with a strange bit of buried melody, that keeps the sound weirdly warm, and strangely soothing, the sort of sinister blackdrone music that transforms punishing blacknoise into mesmerizing tranced out black ambience.
So, we raved about Small Cruel Party a few months back, being an unheralded genius of tactile minimalism hailing from the Pacific Northwest; and now we have the reissue of the Yeast Culture album IYS, in many ways, a document originating from the same time and place that's even more cryptic and more obsessive than Small Cruel Party all the while achieving similarly cracked abstraction of sound-art. Yeast Culture was the brainchild of an artist named Abo, who set up shadowy installations, performances, and even a record shop in an abandoned building in Seattle. The days of such romantic squatting are surely over in Seattle, but they provided the context of damp concrete, rusted rebar, and festering mold. Through collaboration and in piloting the ship himself, Abo steered Yeast Culture into a strange beast of DIY musique concrete, self-immolating electro-acoustic strategies and dangerous field recording situations, amidst all that rubble and decay. While there were only a handful of releases to coincide with the seemingly rich history of activity through that space, the 1989 album IYS is the Yeast Culture masterpiece. An enigmatic smear of crumbling events, metallic scribblings, aerosolizing hiss, poltergeist-like clunks of grey noise, and strange whirring machines caught in their last dying breath. What little information that can be found on the record is that the source material was entirely taken from a three day session on an island in the Puget Sound, after which Abo quite literally ripped those recordings to shreds and painstakingly reassembled the artifacts. Like Small Cruel Party and Organum, Yeast Culture's constructions are densely layered and aggregated, with the compositional strategies keeping to a blank linearity. The sounds themselves have the feeling of being an amplification of the wood beetles gnawing through oak trees or an invasion of mechanical insects adopting a scorched earth policy in miniature or perhaps some unwritten noise symphony for Jan Svankmajer's films, full of disembodied teeth chewing incessantly on cutlery and old furniture. As if that weren't enough to entice, there's the artwork - a densely silkscreened poster that wraps around an equally densely silkscreened inner sleeve with multiple belts of paper holding everything in place. As chaotic as the heavily overlaid silkscreens look, the packaging is quite elegant and perfectly reflects the sounds on the grey / splattered vinyl. While the artwork on the original was pretty stunning, it's even better here on the reissue. Yeah, it's pricey; but when you get your hands on this, you'll realize that the price is totally justified given the amount of work that went to each album. Of course, it's super limited and so fucking recommended! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Yeast Culture was a project that blossomed (or would 'festered' be more suitable here?) in Seattle during the mid-'80s, producing eerie soundfields of murky tape-collage, synth-noise, and junkyard ritualism, all of which firmly planted Yeast Culture within the cassette culture that brought forth G.R.O.S.S. tapes, Sound Of Pig, and of course the countless recordings of recycled music from RRR. Yeast Culture operated as something of a squatter collective, occupying abandoned buildings, setting up shows within those spaces, and eventually taking up residence in a warehouse space in (then) ungentrified part of downtown Seattle, with all sorts of installations, screenprinting, photography, and residue smeared paintings oozing out of Yeast Culture's creative output.
This recording marked the first release for the collective, originally released on cassette in 1987 (or thereabouts) and has been reissued in the same format as the original with collaged wallpaper mounted to board and xeroxed drawings sandwiched around the hand-painted tape and held together in a plastic bag. A bit cumbersome as an object, but certainly true to the tape culture mentality of the time. Drawn out sessions of clanks, bangs, and scrapes within those dank industrial spaces dominate the Yeast Culture ethos, but the group slices into murk with zoner synth sequencing (much more industrial minded than the Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, Caboladies set), masticated vocalizing further mangled through electronics, tactile object manipulation, field recordings, and tape compressed noise. All together, it was not all that far from the contemporary work of Cranioclast, Premature Ejaculations, P16.D4 (at their most primitive), and even some of the looser Nurse With Wound collages. A great document for sure, and in all likelihood, pretty damn limited!
We won't spend too much time on this one since we only got 20, and it's very likely there's probably WAY more than 20 of you who want one of these long out of print lil' gems.
This release is from a while back, it's a single 11 minute track, a collaboration between the Yellow Swans and Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core. We were lucky to get -any- of these, a bit of random postal confusion is what did it. A box of 20 got lost in the mail, the band made 20 more to replace them, but then the lost box resurfaced and we managed to lay claim to all 20 of the extras! And a good thing too. This is some of the most gorgeous stuff we've heard from either / both of these outfits. Warm atonal guitar strum, angular and purposeful, mournful and minor key, drifts above a bed of skittery glitch and rumbling drones. Eventually the guitars disappear beneath a wild wooly sheet of shrieking sonic turbulence, a whirl of moaning melodies behind a thick curtain of freaked out feedback and squealing skree. Nice and noisy!
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE THE LAST 20 COPIES THERE ARE! SO ACT FAST!
Be warned. This is another one of those tiny, tiny, tiny editions from Digitalis; and it's undoubtedly out of print from the source. Yek Koo is the solo project of Helga Fassonaki, the Los Angeles half of the trans-Pacific duo Metal Rouge, who blew us away with their last record on Root Strata. She follows a similar path as Metal Rouge on Psychic Atonement For Land Deaths, mining a deconstructed post-Krautrock vein all the way down to its droning core. It's all voice and lapsteel on this album; and not surprisingly, she shares more than a few similarities to the freeform atmospherics of Heather Leigh Murray (Taurpis Tula, ex-Charalambides) or even to the earlier Grouper albums. Much to her advantage, Fassonaki uses her voice with a restrained panache when it comes to these distant siren songs bathed in thick clouds of reverb and delay. The lapsteel itself melts into magical cascades of bliss out drones, roughly swirled ambience, and sustained chords. Everything comes together into three gorgeous longform pieces of seductively creepy feral drone work. Fans of Fursaxa, Grouper, and Charalambides should not miss this one! LIMITED TO 81 COPIES!!!
What initially sounds like a super distorted overblown recording of Hendrix playing his wild "Star Spangled Banner", or a super grinding fuzz drenched synth noise psych rock blow out, or some insane ultra processed Japanese psychedelic solo guitar freakout, is in fact, a 40 something man, covered in blood, holding a huge piece of contact mic'ed broken glass in his mouth. Huh?
Such is the musical world of Mr. Justice Yeldham. We weren't sure what to expect actually, conceptually we were definitely intrigued. A guy who records himself smashing his face against panes of glass, moaning and humming into the glass resulting in all sorts of bizarre alien sounds, and often ending up with the glass shattering and much blood being shed. He had us at glass and blood. The cd sleeve is even a patchwork of bloodied band-aids (euwww).
But when we finally got the disc, the sounds were just as amazing, maybe even more so than the process, which is definitely a rare occurrence. How many records have we gotten, where the story of the recording was way more fascinating that the resulting music? Way too many. The thing with this Yeldham disc, is it's actually quite listenable as well. Ostensibly a noise record, the sounds here are anything but run of the mill noise, they range from strange fuzzy drones, wailing streaks of coruscating feedback, crumbling synth like blasts (parts of this almost sound like samples from the Justice record!), grinding gnarled squalls of super distorted buzz and every strange fuzzy buzzy stop in between. And every once in a while you have to remind yourself that THIS IS A GUY WITH HIS FACE PRESSED UP AGAINST A PIECE OF GLASS! A piece of glass that just may shatter at any second. And the more feverish and frenzied the sounds become, the more strain is placed on the glass, and the more imminent shatter and bloodshed becomes. So weird, and so goddamn awesome.�
Comes in a cool velour lined cd sleeve, adorned with images of band-aids and blood, inside a full color booklet with tons of photos of Yeldham performing live, amazing and intense, some weird, some strangely beautiful, some super disturbing, most of them really bloody!!
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1st actual cd from these exciting Bay Area noisemakers.
Once again, our favorite SF sonic expats (now Portland based) return with another killer slab of drone-y goodness. This time bearing the mark of 'Descension' (for those new to the Yellow Swans, every record they are called something different, a different 'D' word preceding their name, unclear if it is related to sound or mood or what, but it's always different!) and sounding less noisy and more darkly introspective than ever. Which as far as we're concerned is a very good thing. But noiseniks, fear not, there is still some abrasive brutality lurking hear and there within. Read on...
The A side begins as a moaning and groaning minor key deep ambient drift, wreathed in crackle and static and bits of high end shimmer. Mournful melodies are muted and smeared into the backdrop of one of the prettiest dreamiest things the YS have ever done, but it doesn't last long as about halfway through they burst into a full on cascading crumbling wall of blown out buzz. There's still some moodiness underpinning the chaos, but by the end, there will most definitely be drops of blood on your headphones.
The second side foregoes the noise completely, as the 'Swans offer up a delicate and slow burning washed out dronescape, cavernous low end, gurgling buzzing tones layered into murky muddy harmonies, slowly shifting, industrial and machinelike, but still thick and warm and organic sounding. This might just be the chunk of buzzing lovely low end creep that finally hips the dirgedoomdronee set to the Yellow Swans...
LIMITED TO 489 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Pressed on crazy thick vinyl and housed in a gorgeous blue on black hand screened sleeve. ----* ----* New BLACK METAL Cassettes : ----*
Deterioration was originally released as a tour only cassette, which is interesting given that it seems more instantly accessible than many of their more widely available and well-known records. Of course, even though this Portland duo has since broken up, it's going to take a while to slowly sift through their catalog and really make sense of it all. The earlier days found these guys making overtly political noise tracks, devoid of really any discernible melody at all. Towards the end, the final releases (the 12" split with Ex-Cocaine, the 12" collaboration with Burning Star Core, the full length At All Ends, etc.) showed a somewhat different side. More obviously psychedelic, more melodic, and seemingly an increased attention being paid to composition. Not to say that the older tracks were completely improvised, because we can't definitively say without asking, but there is a greater cohesion and flow with releases like this one. It really is a shame the guys parted ways, because the last year or so of their records seemed like one collective Revolver. If you're a fan of YS and haven't picked up anything in a while, you'd be well-served to check this one out.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
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It's hard to believe these guys broke up close to two years ago, they keep a higher profile than most active bands, and they definitely release more records than lots of proper not-defunct outfits, but we're not complaining, amongst the many floorcore bands out there, these guys definitely shone brightly, whereas most were content to just plug in a rack of effects and make an ear splitting racket, these guys always did more with their noise(s), sometimes subtly, sometimes not so, even at their noisiest and most abrasive, they infused their crunch and skree with melody and texture, and were definitely capable of crafting some moments of sublime beauty, which is where this newest, and supposedly final Yellow Swans release positions itself. Gorgeously ambient, but Yellow Swans ambient, which means rife with strange layers, and sublimated rhythms, noise, but soft noise, the first track explodes in a cloud of grey noise, but it never gets too harsh, instead the duo soften the edges, add a lurching buried pulse, wrapping everything in a gauze of smeared melody, and woozy shimmer, it almost sounds like krautrock broadcast via shortwave and played back on a wax cylinder, but at extremely high volume, gritty, and hissy, but washed out and dreamlike, all wrapped around a skeletal rhythm, looped and mesmeric, it's only 4 minutes, but we definitely could have dug this track stretched out to fill up the whole record. The 13+ minute "Opt Out" begins all spaced out and dreamy, lots of shifting textures, undulating layers, hazy chordal streaks way off in the distance, eventually building to a white hot squall of psych noise, that is definitely harsh and heavy, but within the chaos of colliding sound particles, rhythms skitter subtly, melodies loop and intertwine, it's almost like pretty Merzbow, if that were even possible, which it seems it is...
The rest of the record dials back the noise, instead opting to drift and shimmer and creep, letting the sounds ooze and sprawl, sending notes into the ether, like sonic flower petals drifting on a swirling churning black stream, bits of guitar chime and ring out, the recording glitches out, sound cut out, throb, and pulse, swells of almost SUNNO)))-like buzz surface and then dissipate, streaks of near pop ambience hover over bells and chimes, and looped melodies, fractured chunks of warm whirring sound, crackle and hiss and rumble crafted into crystalline expanses of prismatic glow, long ominous drones unfurl into hushed black ambience, shot through with warm, languid psych guitar skree, with the tracks occasionally building to a howling lysergic speaker shredding climax, but just as often splintering into warped shards of melted muted melody, and allowed to drift lazily and slowly settle into the darkness below, or rise to the heavens above. So gorgeous. These guys are definitely missed.
The vinyl version (and ONLY the vinyl version) includes a bonus disc, featuring 70 minutes of extra music, including what sound like reworked and extended versions of some of the songs on the record proper...
Between the Yellow Swans and the Skaters, you could fill up a whole shelf at home with limited cd-r's. If you figured Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Birchville Cat Motel, Gray Daturas, Hototogisu, Axolotl and all the rest into the equation you might just need a whole room. So here's one more to try and squeeze in if you can. Recorded live in 2005 at Sound & Fury, a record store in Australia and limited to 150 copies (we got the LAST 24!), we have to say it'll be well worth the trouble to make room for this in the cd-r wing of your musical collection as it's another kick ass installment in what is now a MASSIVE, but surprisingly consistent body of work. This live set is all droney which you know we love (and we know YOU love). The first near twenty minute track is one long shimmer, a warm low end thrum supporting a pulsing dog whistle skree and in between all manner of creaking industrialism and drifting guitar warble, thick whirring vacuum cleaner fuzz and moaning distant feedback. Track two takes the sounds of track one and roughs them up, adding more volume, more power and ultimately more noise, a big thick layer of feedback and rumble and rrrooooaaarrr. The final fifteen minute track continues in a similarly droney direction with another layered soundscape of ultralowend power and ultrahighend sinewave squeal. This time the low end is thicker and more distorted, like a guitar pressed up against the speaker, while the high end is just a distant sheet of white hot shimmer, while in the foreground, guitars oscillate and pulse, not full on noise, but not melodic necessarily either. There are most certainly melodies (or fragments of melodies present, but they are suffocated by the Swans' bulldozing sonic swells. Another winner. Hototogisu heads and fans of other such sonic mayhem will love it!
Packaged in a simple brown cardstock sleeve with a black 'Y' wax seal. Hand numbered and limited to 150 copies, includes an actual photo insert. Each one is different.
We have 24 copies and then these are gone for good!
Another archival release from the now defunct and greatly missed floorcore noise duo Yellow Swans. We have not been able to keep this in stock, we sold out twice before we had a chance to review it, and now we have 5 copies, maybe the last 5 copies, as this was limited to 500 copies and is already sold out and out of print at the label. So act fast and be lucky if you want one of these.
This Mort Aux Vaches session from 2007 finds the 'Swans at their heaviest and noisiest. On first listen, it's a wild psychedelic squall, heaving walls of crumbling distortion and blown out buzz, Skullflower, Total, that sort of thing, but closer listening reveals all sorts of prettiness beneath, lilting melodies, haunting refrains, keening feedback, unlikely harmonies, in fact, the more you listen, the more the 'noise' seems to peel back, letting the strange melodic beauty underneath shine through. Which was sort of the magic of the Yellow Swans, creating massive roiling swirls of chaotic beauty, sculpting otherwise harsh and hellish sonics into impossibly beautiful soundscapes, weaving buzz and rumble and drone and whir and howl and grind and crunch into dense shimmering clouds of otherworldly sound.
INCREDIBLE PACKAGING, maybe the most over the top Mort Aux Vaches yet, the usual fold over sleeve held shut by a little metal fastener, but affixed to the front a three dimensional sort-of-sculpture, depicting a little girl and a yellow swan, an image from some old storybook but rendered in three dimensions like it was pried off the front of some old building. Super cool.
And again, we only have FIVE copies. Be prepared to be disappointed... Sorry.
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It's been a seriously productive year for the Yellow Swans. Multiple cd-r releases, some 7"s, a Australian tour with pals the Grey Daturas, as well as loads of splits and collaaborations with folks like Axolotl and the Skaters as well as teaming up with the Daturas for a couple releases as well. Phew! But thankfully, there seems to be no end in sight. With all those releases, it's a bit surprising to realize the Yellow Swans only have one proper non cd-r release, and that one flew so far under tha radar we wouldn't have known about it at all had one not drifted through here used a while back. So here we have a brand new, shiny silver, actual cd, non-cd-r, blast of Yellow Swans nooooooooooize! Joined on a few of the tracks by fellow noisy folks Inca Ore, Gerritt and Christina Carter (of Charalambides), Psychic Secession is another gorgeous chunk of sweet sweet noise, equal parts glistening shimmer, crushing and jagged skree, skittery diembodied rhythms, haunting ghostly vocals, blistering sheets of distorted electronics, squealing feedback, chiming reverb drenched percussion, glistening delicate ambience, even some ultra processed psychedelic rock, all woven into a dense chaotic and surprisingly gorgeous whole!
This will be coming out in the states on Load Records, but not until way later in the year, so for now we got this Australian import version which comes in a super spiffy oversized cardboard sleeve and is a completely different (supposedly 'noisier') mix than the forthcoming Load version!
Recorded at the same time as the recently listed (and now out of print) collaboration between the YS, Axolotl and Gerritt, this disc treads much of the same sonic space, glistening high end feedback, distant crumbling drones, smears of sparkling glitchery, burbling underwater cd skipping, grinding industrial whir. Not jagged or harsh at all, not what you would expect from these noiseniks. Quite dreamy and soothing, all the harsh bits have the edges smoothed into a slow flowing dronee bliss-scape. Comes with a photocopied copy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Vietnam speech and comes in a gorgeous hand painted sleeve. As with all Jyrk cd-r's it seems, SUPER LIMITED, already out of print, and we have the last 30. So again, act fast if you want one of these. Once they are gone they are gone for good.
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Another one of those 'it had to happen' matchups. New Zealand's inimitable Campbell Kneale aka Birchville Cat Motel and the formerly Bay Area now PDX based noiserock dynamic duo The Yellow Swans. As we're huge fans of both of these outfits, it would take a pretty serious fumble to disappoint, and we're happy to report that this is anything but.
Two massively thick snarls of corrosive fuzz and buzz. This is some serious noise for sure. But as a testament to the skill at work here, this noise is imbued with all sorts of melody and color, for every harsh streak of blown out amp melting feedback, there is a delicate burbling melody, for every wall of skull crushing synth damage, there is a a smooth drifting smear of glistening shimmer. It's ugly on the outside, sure, but like your mom always told you, beauty is only skin deep, and just below the blistering scaly monster skin of these two bursts of furious amp damage, is all manner of loveliness, subtle tonal shifts, gloriously rich overtones constantly swirling and blurring together, it's a little like some Sunroof! wrapped in bit of Merzbow, or a dense swirl of Growing all wrapped up tight within a crunchy Masonna shell.
Sure sounds good to us...
Another prime match-up between two long time AQ favorites, who almost sound better together than they do apart. Portland's dynamic duo the Yellow Swans and one man violin terror Burning Star Core, together for this super limited lp, two shows recorded over the past couple years, both extended noise-drone fests.
The A side starts out surprisingly tranquil, sounding more like Sunroof! or the Double Leopards, here the trio are augmented by an extra member, another AQ fave, Mike Shiflet. A sea of bleary eyed faux sitar buzz beneath slippery Eastern sounding violin, sawing away in dense clouds of delay and reverb. A super hypnotic sonic sprawl that eventually explodes into a wall of psychedelic skree, blown out distorted guitars, malfunctioning electronics, jagged bursts of static, a furious freaked out noise jam.
The flipside came out a while back as a cd-r on the Yellow Swans' Jyrk label, but we only ever had 20 of those, so odds are most folks never got to hear it. Which was a shame as it is definitely some of the nicest stuff we've heard from either of these outfits. So here's one more chance to get an earful. Warm atonal guitar strum, angular and purposeful, mournful and minor key, drifts above a bed of skittery glitch and rumbling drones. Eventually the guitars disappear beneath a wild wooly sheet of shrieking sonic turbulence, a whirl of moaning melodies behind a thick curtain of freaked out feedback and squealing skree. Nice and noisy!
Pressed on thick 140 gram marbled red/purple vinyl, housed in a super swank sleeve, each one stickered and hand numbered. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
This has been a big year for Bay Area noise combos, with loads of releases, write ups, tours and much higher profiles in general for bands like the Skaters and the Yellow Swans. Oakland free noise duo, the Yellow Swans, also run their own label Jyrk, responsible for lots of AQ favorites recently, including the Yellow Swans / Grey Daturas 2 cd-r collaboration we listed not too long ago. This time around, Dove Yellow Swans (they often switch between different D-words reflecting the sound or mood of each particular record) have taken a handful of older releases and chopped 'em up, and re-assembled and re-worked them into an entirely new beast, forty seven minutes of sputtering, splattery, free noise, drone drenched, druggy and damaged, malfunctioning electronic chaos. However, unlike most noise outfits, the Yellow Swans know a thing or two about dynamics, and are quite adept at taking all sorts of horrible noises and weaving them into an entirely listenable, and often quite gorgeous whole. Drum machines spit out all sorts of random beats and sounds, stumbling and clattering and careening around your head like shotgun pellets, beneath a thick wash of shrieking feedback, sick sounding synths, super processed vocals, and distorted and dizzying guitars. A little bit Wolf Eyes, a little bit Sunroof!, a little bit Merzbow, but all twisted and tangled into it's own deliriously damaged Yellow Swan-ed shape.
Packaged in a cool oversized cardboard gatefold, with a bit of black felt to protect the disc. Cover art by Devendra Banhart. And as always, extremely limited!
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Another ultra limited blast of ambient free noise form Bay Area duo the Yellow Swans. This time around they are DRIFT Yellow Swans (their name includes a different 'd' word every time) and the drift couldn't be more appropriate as this lp finds the 'Swans at their most, well, drifty. Three lengthy tracks of shimmering slithering ambience. Electronic grit is smeared over gentle finger picked electric guitars, melodies become more and more abstract, shimmers grow into drones, which grow into sheets of rumble and skree before fading back into swirling slow-shifting tranquility, peppered with clinking chiming industrial clatter. The final 20 minute track builds into an almost Skullflowery wall of distorted guitar, warm and suffocating, before quickly dissipating into gauzy clouds of melodic whir and barely-there drone and rumble. As always, quite lovely.
Released on Root Strata (the label of Tarentel's Jefre Cantu) in a limited run of 350 of which we got a big ol' batch, never to get more!! Each lp hand screened and decorated with real gold leaf.
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Another killer fuzzy foggy blast of noisy beauty from these Portland based ex Bay area noisemakers, captured on the practically obsolete and thus still uber hip cassette tape format. We only got 20, so only the truly quick on the trigger (and by trigger we of course mean 'buy' button) will be claiming these as their own, so get that clicker finger all limbered up.
This latest missive, hear titled DAMNED Yellow Swans (in keeping with the always different D-word) find the band in almost ambient territory. Not that they were ever that far from ambientland anyway, but here the 'Swans unfurl massive slow shifting clouds of sonic steel wool. Grey and black and itchy and scratchy, prickly but with all the thorns dulled, so instead of pricking and drawing blood, these whirls of swirling sound just sort of wrap themselves around your ears and poke and prod, shimmy and shake, wrapping you in layer after layer of thick, dense reverberating foggy fuzz. Hand made sleeves and hand painted tapes. So limited, if you blink your eyes they'll be gone.
It wouldn't be an AQ list without a new Yellow Swans release, and the 'Swans have been gracious enough once again to make sure that a Yellow Swans-less AQ list will never happen. Safe for two more weeks!
The way in which this is not just another Yellow Swans filled list is twofold, one: this is an actual cd, not a cd-r, and two: this is in fact a collection of super limited long out of print releases. Plus, this disc is fucking awesome!
It's Doubled Yellow Swans this time around (different 'D' word for every release) and Global Clone collects nearly an hour, five long tracks, from these long gone rarities: Declawed Yellow Swans cassette on Tone Filth, the YS half of the split cassette with the Skaters on Jyrk, the YS contribution to the Deathbombarc Tape Club, a split with Sex With Girls, and the Damaged Yellow Swans cassette on 23 Productions.
All five tracks are dramatically different, but this collection definitely flows like a proper album, and contains some of the loveliest YS material yet. Long lonely keening tones drift over a fuzzy backdrop that sounds like rain falling on leaves, thick tones reverberate and shimmer and beat out an almost rhythm while bells and chimes are chopped into a gorgeous high end trill. Huge washes of warm synthy fuzz swirl and billow creating gloriously blurry and indistinct melodies that drift and drone. Blistering bursts of freaked out space rock FX spun into dense little glowing orbs of burnished rumble and sparkle. Hissing soundscapes of white noise and electronic shriek spread out beneath an alien, sort of Celtic sounding melody, a warbling upper register trill, gradually swallowed whole by crumbling swaths of superdistorted sound. Gorgeous grinding waves of thick slow motion riffing and mumbled distorted vocals all tangled up in some lilting musical slow dance, droney and dirgey and buzzed out and dreamy.
As with most Yellow Swans action (but maybe even more than usual), SUPER RECOMMENDED!
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This is part two of the Dove Yellow Swans' (remember, different 'D' word every time) two part (maybe more?) series, Live During War Crimes. On the first volume, they took older releases, out of print tapes, cd-r's and other long gone goodies, chopped 'em up, recontextualized them, and created a whole new chunk of brilliantly bilious bluster. For part two, the band recorded a live set back in the beginning of this year, and it's a doozy.
This is less splattery abstract noise, and more huge bulldozing walls of blown out fuzz, almost like SUNNO))) jamming with Sunroof! Tons of low end, massive slow shifting tectonic plates of sound, grinding and creaking, but mostly rumbling, a long drawn out muted roar. Thick and black, utterly dense tarpit drones, like some hellish sound system, playing every single Wolf Eyes record at once, all run through some old rickety distortion pedal, and broadcast from a million woofers buried under two feet of silt. Or like listening to a Merzbow record on the wrong speed, with the bass ALL the way up and the treble ALL the way down,
A mighty, murky, slithering, slow motion corrosive crawl...
packaged in a cool oversized full color sleeve with a little felt lined pocket inside to hold the cd. Cover art by Devendra Banhart!
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Latest from this former Bay Area (now Portland based) duo, and maybe their prettiest yet. Tour only and cassette only, we got these direct from the band who stopped by before their SF show, which means not only are these probably super limited, but we can't be sure if we'll be able to get more and if so, when.
Dark and dreamy, long loping swirls of distorted guitar draped over soft billow backdrops of murky swirl, disembodied vocals and mournful melodies stretched into crumbling sonic frameworks, set adrift in a sea of thick grinding low end distortion and glistening harmonics. Fuzzy and blurry and washed out, think Jeck, Basinski, Tim Hecker... But where as those guys are happy to just drift endlessly through soft focus landscapes, the 'Swans pile on layer after layer, more and more distortion, turning a lovely lope into crumbling chaos, blown out psychedelic dronescapes, noisy and blistering, but still lovely and subtly melodic.
Pro printed cassettes, striking black and white sleeves, and again crazy limited...
It must be a blast to stay with the Yellow Swans on tour. Most bands who put up other bands are pretty good hosts, but only to the extent that a punk rock pad can be. Floor space to crash on. Maybe some pasta or pizza. A TV with every episode of the Simpsons on tape. A shower or a bed if you're really lucky. But it seems like that in addition to all that, when you stay with the Yellow Swans, after a nice dinner and some TV, you make a record. We're not complaining (well, okay, maybe we are, that never really happened to us when we were on tour) since most of these collaborations have been completely amazing.
We never really considered ourselves 'noise' fans. Sure we love the occasional Merzbow or Masonna, but 'noise' isn't really something you throw on at home while you're cooking dinner, or relaxing reading a book. But somehow, this new breed of noisemakers, have devised a way to make 'noise' interesting again. It's no less caustic and abrasive (well, maybe a little) but it's just more interesting, more varied, more textured, it's less about 'making noise' than it is playing music that just happens to bee noisy. The Yellow Swans are one of the main practitioners of this new noise, and we've pretty much been digging everything we've heard. This here collaboration features the unknown to us Moth Drakula, who team up with their pals the Yellow Swans and proceed to make a seriously corrosive and brutal racket. More than any of the Yellow Swans stuff we've heard, this is most definitely a NOISE record. Recorded live in L.A. last year, these three tracks are white hot, as in white noise, a swirling cacophony of grinding electronics, processed feedback, and maybe there's some real instruments in there, but if so they're beaten into nearly unrecognizable shapes. A squirming squealing shrieking metallic monster, a burst of blinding harsh brutality. Harsh and harrowing, jagged and grating, fierce and fucked up, and very, very, very, very noisy!
Packaged in a super cool folded printed cardstock sleeve sort of like one of those Independent Project Press packages.
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Modern noise rock match up, one side noisy, the other side not so. The A side features AQ faves, PDX based SF expats Yellow Swans, who dish up a thick wall of corrosive guitar and damaged electronics. A serious squall, dense swells of grinding buzz, and thick streaks of almost full on white noise, keening feedback, ultra aggro super distorted synth squiggles, stuttering rhythms buried WAY down in the mix, this is the 'Swans at their fiercest and most furious. And we like it!
The B side features Devillock, aka Tone Filth records head honcho Chris Meyers, who counters with, not noise, but some dreamy blissy drones. A live recording, reprocessed and reshaped into something downright pretty. What begins as a crumbling wall of high end skree, quickly stretches out into a near static upper register shimmer, a blissy slow motion drift underpinned by barely audible slow shifting drones and distant whirs.
Packaged in a striking super simple black on grey silkscreened sleeve.
A super limited tour only ep head to head matchup between Australia's Grey Daturas (whose most recent record Dead In The Woods was an aQ record of the week a while back) and Bay Area free noise duo the Yellow Swans, who just returned from a month on the road with their pals in the Daturas. This ep was only on sale at their shows in Australia and New Zealand, but we managed to get the last of their left over copies.
The first track is the Yellow Swans along with their pal White Rainbow, and together they stir up a static expanse of white noise and amp buzz and pink fuzz, a swirling ambient shhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrr with various melodies and bits of guitar feedback and little snippets of noise and shards of sound drifting above and below and within the muted skree. Darn near tranquil in the Yellow Swans' universe, but by any one else's standards this is still a blast of white noise.
The Daturas take track two and they offer up a dual guitar dronefest, that sounds quite a bit like that weird tuning fork interdimensional transport thingie in the movie Phantasm. The sound of that thing was so appealing even when we were kids, maybe that's why we grew up to enjoy thick slabs of distorted guitar droning endlessly. But that's only the first half of the track, the second 8 minutes or so is a throbbing pummeling downtuned dirge with guitars squealing and churning and chugging and shrieking like two wild beats in a battle to the death over a fiercely pounding beat. An amazing slab of dreamy droney minimal stoner psych rock, for sure. Packaged in a cool oversize cardboard sleeve.
SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 30 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.
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The long defunct yet still impossibly prolific duo Yellow Swans continue to exist in some sonic afterworld, like a noise rock Tupac, with a seemingly endless cache of recordings, surfacing from beyond the grave, or in YS's case, from beyond the brief life span of their group. We're not complaining, as we've mentioned in past reviews, of all the floorcore combos, the Yellow Swans were one of our favorites, and having thrown in the towel, now years ago, doesn't seem to have effected the quality of their out put, cuz their side of this split lp is a doozy. Starting of as a haunting blackened drone, al echoey effects and manipulated tapes (or turntables), hushed delicate drifts and woozy layered shimmer, that is gradually consumed by some Merzbowian distorted black noise crunch, the sound transformed into a feedback drenched industrial howl, all buried vox and grinding buzz, sounding more like Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, a seriously caustic and crushing slab of blackened electronics and dronoise blur.
Oakeater take up the second side with their ritualistic black drone ambience, the opening track a churning SUNNO)))-like rumble, softly roiling and oozing, like some sort of black sonic puddle, which gives way to something much more dreamy, a delicate pastoral bit of hushed thrum and spaced out cinematic drift, there's a constant lurking sinister vibe throughout that seems to infuse the otherwise sun dappled shimmer with something rotten and black. The side finishes off with another chunk of ominous dark drift, thick undulating streaks of black blur, wrapped around melting melodies, the whole thing like a field recording of a pallet of drone records melting in the sun, the mic stuck directly in the viscous liquid sound.
Like all Black Horizons releases, super swank packaging, striking metallic silver ink on black matte jacket, pressed on thick black vinyl, and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
