Back in October, 2005, Die Stadt invited these four artists to perform at the Lagerhaus in Bremen; and consequently released this curious double seven inch / double CD in conjunction with that concert. The seven inches contains exclusive tracks by each of the artists, and the CD consists of remixes by those same artists, reworking the original material from the seven inches. For his seven-inch piece, Z'ev piece delves into the archives of his performance from the now legendary Atonal Festival dating back to 1983, for an intense mix of his percussive clamour. On the CD, Z'ev gets to mix Duncan's impeccable shortwave / drone composition, and Duncan returns the favor by transforming Z'ev's percussive work into a skittering, time-stretched blur of noise. Aidan Baker (whose name may be to familar to some from the Nadja album on Alien8 we made Record of the Week so recently, as that's his band) provides a deep driftscape more in keeping with Troum or Jonathan Coleclough; his remix of Fear Falls Burning (which is the nom de plume for Vidna Obmana) continues along a similarly dark path. Like the Vidna Obmana work, Fear Falls Burning mirrors the classic ambient works of Brian Eno, both in the original piece on the seven inch and in the remix of Baker's work. This version is strictly limited to 300 copies.
The return of the orcs!!! Chapter two in the musical tale of Uglach and his band of orcs. Here's a little of what we said about chapter one (which we also have in stock):
"Much like a radio play, the whole drama is played out via dialogue, ambient sounds and incidental music....a musical story, utilising dark ambience, cinematic soundscapes, the sounds of life in the forest (sticks crackling, wind blowing, water splashing, swords clashing) and a litany of grunts and growls, which is the dialogue spoken entirely in orcish."
Chapter two is heavier on the music (not heavier mind you, but containing more music), with less emphasis on battles and dialogue, sounding much more medieval and almost renaissance faire-ish at times (although fear not, there is still plenty of orcish being grunted, as well as the occasional unsheathing of swords). Flutes, hand drums, jaw harp, and didgeridoos are woven into fantastical soundscapes, evoking forests, caves and times of yore. In fact, according to the liner notes, much of the record actually -was- recorded in forests and caves (as well as lakes, rivers and a castle). Those of you who need another Lord Of The Rings fix before film number two might find what you're looking for with Za Frumi. If you don't have the first one, you might want to start there, but if you're anything like us, you'll have to get both!!
It's been a long wait, but now, after 5 years, we return to the ongoing saga of Uglach and his band of Orcs. You heard us, Orcs! We know some of you have been waiting like a kid at Christmas for the next installment. But those of you who are new to the wonderful world of Za Frumi, are in for a treat. An entire world, a wild cast of characters, most of them Orcs, the entire drama played out like a radio play, complete with the sounds of battle, music, and most importantly dialogue. Yep, dialogue. Except for brief passages in Dark Elf, all delivered in actual Orcish (aka Black speech).
Where as chapter 2 was heavier on the music with much less focus on the story and thus less dialogue, chapter three is all about the story, tons of action, loads of dialogue, all printed in the cd booklet too so you can follow along. And it's not necessary to have heard the first two chapters to get into chapter 3, as Uglach recalls the events of the first two chapters at the beginning of the disc (although the speech is in Orcish).
The music is cool too, heavy on the brooding dark ambient, with rumbling drones, and haunting melodies, simple martial drumming, epic sweeping strings, occasionally the music slips into a more sort of Renaissance Faire sort of folk, but as the majority of the story is a tale of death and destruction, war and revenge, the music is suitably dark.
And even if you have no interest in the fate of the Orcs, or the life of Uglach and his friends, or the story at all, purely as a sound document, Shrak Ishi Za Migul is a captivating listen, equal parts, radio drama, soundtrack, field recording and high concept art piece. So good.
It had been so long since we had visited Uglach's world, we had almost forgotten how bracing it was, what a dangerous and vicarious thrill it was to ride alongside the Orcs in battle, to grieve the dead, to drink and sup, and to luxuriate in the epic and majestic sounds of the mighty Za Frumi!!
Let me preface this review by mentioning that Allan has never read The Lord Of The Rings (even with his extensive D&D experience...hmmm).
Za Frumi is a group of Swedish musicians, disenchanted with the black metal scene, and the music scene in general, who were compelled to look elsewhere for the magic and mystery they felt was lacking in modern music. The result is 'Za Shum Ushatar Uglakh', a musical tale of a clan of orcs and their battle against a mighty vampire lord! That's right, orcs.
The story goes like this (from the liner notes):
"Join the epic voyage of the orc leader Uglakh and his compatriots. Their adventure begins in the deep lustrous forest filled with the sounds of the wild and the roar of a great fire. Around it sit the Uruki Uglach, awaiting the mysterious primal dance of their shaman. The morning after, the uruks, compelled by their mystic shamans advice to Uglach, attack an old castle. After the raid, the subservient Golug Fachtal and his more adventurous kinsmen Yagui forage the forest, and set out to build a watch tower. After a frustrated argument about a toadstool, the wet Yagul and the other orcs begin building a tower, while the dagalush Knish and his kapuli friend go further afield, and find a deep sea beach, where the melodious elves are making sweet music. Later, we join the clans march during a night filled with wonder. They press constantly on, sometimes marching, sometimes sneaking. After a short stroll in the forest, Uglakh and his clansmen happen upon the dark, brooding castle of the dreaded vampire Ismael. The journey through his dark castle has two parts, with mysterious subterranean chanting and majestic orchestral sounds. They face many perils there, and end in the final battle with Ismael in his greatest chamber."
Much like a radio play, the whole drama is played out via dialogue (more on that later), ambient sounds and incidental music.
So simply as a musical story, utilising dark ambience, cinematic soundscapes, the sounds of life in the forest (sticks crackling, wind blowing, water splashing, swords clashing) and a litany of grunts and growls, which is the dialogue spoken entirely in orcish (for real! -- a handy translation is included in the booklet for those not fluent in the tongue). It's really interesting and quite entertaining.
But the music, taken on its own, is quite an epic dronescape (albiet littered with very un-drone like segments). 'Za Shum...' is a strange mix of dark rumbles and throbbing pulses, simple clattery rhythms and tribal workouts, grunting and growling and roaring (that could be electronic rumbles or misplaced death metal vocalists if you didn't already know it was orcs) and the occasional folky flute interlude. Imagine the No Neck Blues Band jamming with Jonathan Coleclough or Andrew Chalk, with Chris Barnes (Cannibal Corpse) or Glenn Benton (Deicide)
grunting the dialogue with the Thai Elephant Orchestra as their rhythm section. It's that weird. It's that cool.
Drummer Tatsuya Yoshida from Japanese prog-crazies the Ruins teams up with Polish pianist Piotr Zabrodzki for these sixteen tracks of advanced "jazz" insanity, recently recorded in Warsaw. We'd never heard of Zabrodzki before, but he more than holds his own with the notoriously hyperkinetic Yoshida, playing distorted bass as well as piano (at the same time? sounds like it -- must be overdubbed, though you never know with a Yoshida project, as he's able to play, like, a half dozen instruments and sing all at the same time, so maybe his friends can too!). The duo's presumably improvised music wildly ranges along an extremely spastically noisy to almost classically jazzy continuum. They attain appropriately Ruins-y levels of Magmoid prog-ness (the throbbing bass pulsations! the octopoidal percussion frenzies!) punctuated with some gargling vocals from Yoshida. The ivories are tickled unto death by Zabrodzki, who plays with "Great Balls Of Fire" ferocity, fractured into the avantgarde abstraction of a Cecil Taylor. It's all very chaotic and complex, manic yet melodic. And meaningful? Maybe, we're puzzled by the African imagery found in the cd packaging, how does that fit with the quasi-scientific sounding song titles ("Permanent Beta Power", "Tri-Command Connector", "Oxymoron 9", "Micronode Examination", "Quick-Core", etc.), or the Poland/Japan connection also celebrated in the cd graphics with the flags of both countries? Who knows, but anyway Ruins/Yoshida fans should dig this, it's another in a long line of interesting, intense duets in which the drummer has taken part. Satoko Fuji is probably jealous.
Here's a particularly nasty slab of vinyl from Marcia Bassett, formerly of Hototogisu and Double Leopards, and still the pilot behind Zaimph. There have been varying shades of grey to black for Zaimph with some of her work shifting toward the delirious tonal ragas of early Vibracathedral Orchestra, and with other pieces having all of the subtly of a slab of meat hitting a concrete floor. Even set against some of the bleaker works of her past, Death Blooming Pleasure is an ominous crawl through broken glass, rat shit, and sewage scum. Yeah, it's really dark. Had the first track "Great Are The Riches Hidden In Tribulation" been coupled with blastbeats, it could easily double as a cult black metal track, as Bassett sets forth a buzzsaw drone drone stitched crudely from churning hiss, electrical errata, and very lo-fi slabs of barely melodic noise. Throughout this track, she snarls and growls with the cruel, blood-curdling intentions of Dead Raven Choir's Smolken. The second piece cranks up the volume and dynamics through the clusters of noise, pulling away from the black metal references but neverless maintains a devastating ill-spirit. The flipside "As Well In Death" sets that buzzsaw drone to zombie trance with Marcia singing a bizarrely atonal chorale that's half Jandek and half Fursaxa, but fully creepy. Here, Zaimph recalls a classic number from the Nurse With Wound songbook "Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree" while summoning those blackened noise projects Gnaw Their Tongues and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. One of those hyper limited edition LPs from No Fun. Just 300 in print, but not for long!
Yet another missive from Zaimph, the one woman noise/drone outfit helmed by Marcia Bassett, she of Hototogisu, Double Leopards, GHQ and loads more. As Zaimph, Bassett can be pretty unpredictable, dabbling in blissed out Sunroof! style ragas, cripplingly brutal white hot noise, or super subdued minimal ambience, although she does tend toward the noisy heavy side of things.
Emblem is no different, definitely noisy, and heavy, not to mention textural, expansive, gritty, buzzy and psychedelic. Two long tracks, the first, clocking in at about 10 minutes, is based on a growling guttural grinding low end foundation, what sounds like a guitar tuned so low it sort of rumbles and whirs, creating a gristly fuzzy drone, over which, all sorts of disembodied melodies and fractured harmonies soar and swoop, wreathed in effects, and heavily distorted, the sky above is filled with streaks of crumbling feedback, whirring clouds of hiss and scrape and amp buzz, but always grounded by that churning undulating low end short circuited drone beneath.
The second track, a nearly half hour epic, is not so corrosive, beginning with some languid raga-like buzz, a warm whir drifting in a wide open expanse of barely there shimmer, very dreamy and mesmerizing, other instruments join in, but only swirl gently around each other, a loosely woven midnight sky full of reverberating strings and moaning melodies. It's not until about 20 minutes in, that things get any wilder, and even then, it's just a matter of several of those buzzing melodies becoming ensconced in warbly effects and super charged a bit, upping the intensity, but remaining hypnotic and trancelike, eventually building to a glorious harmonic coda, the tones floating and drifting majestically over a softly swirling sea of sweet sweet buzz and drone.
Beautifully packaged, in an oversized black cardstock sleeve, with metallic silver ink. And be warned, we've actually had these for a while, so as they're not new, they might be tough to restock when we run out.
One of two new releases from the strangely named Zaimph, which just so happens to be the monicker Marcia Bassett, of Hototogisu, GHQ and Double Leopards fame, uses for her solo noise and guitar explorations.
As we mention in the other review, the sound of Zaimph, and Bassett's projects in general can range from soft and lovely to not soft at all and not so lovely, dabbling in noise, psych, drone and raga, often melding all of those into one single organic whole.
For this disc, a 30 minute live set recorded in 2006, after some strange smooth jazz over the house PA and what seems to be a recording of Bassett setting up, things get rolling with a cloud of dark metallic shimmer, that spreads and oozes and envelops the crowd in a soft swirl of whirling effects and blurred drones, eventually, the sound shifts gears and the guitar (at least we think it's a guitar) becomes more caustic, more metallic, the sound more buzzy and sharp, almost like a buzz saw playing out some subtly melodic drone, the sound billowing into thick swells of grind and skree, before slipping back into a deep minimal hum, and beginning the slow build to the eventual cathartic explosion of guitarnoise and fractured FX freakout that finishes the set.
Heavy and noisy, will definitely hit the spot for folks who dig the meaner side of Hototogisu and Matthew Bower's old Total project. Super limited cd-r, that we've had for a while, so there's a good chance these might be the last copies we can get.
We were ready for another blast of blissed out free noise from Zaimph, the one woman outfit of one Marcia Bassett who spends most of her noisemaking days crouched over a mess of guitars and broken FX pedals in Hototogisu with Matthew Bower or in the Double Leopard. But instead we were treated to a strangely tranquil drone record, no sudden bursts of acidic feedback, no sheets of corrosive guitar crumble, instead, this is two long sides of deep dark low end soundscapes, both ominous and lovely.
Moaning far away guitars shimmer and whir, abstract melodies drift in and out of the murky rumble. A dreamy muddy sonic swirl. Thick layers of looped riffs smeared into warm blurs, crumble and slowly decay, while the overtones throb and pulse, creating minimal almost rhythms, while melodic fragments hover and whirl, drifting just below the surface.
Side 2 is a side long black fog, billows of soft shimmering low end, slowly spread out wrapping their warm tendrils around everything within reach, filling your ears with soft black fuzz, creepy and haunting and dark, but sort of luminous and dreamlike, and almost pretty!
Super thick full color paste on sleeves, full color card stock inserts and super nice thick vinyl! ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
Another batch of ambient free noise guitar explorations from Ms. Marcia Bassett, who when not playing in the Double Leopards, GHQ and of course Hototogisu, somehow manages to find time to also record as Zaimph. Sexual Infinity starts off super dreamy, a brief drift through some spacious, cavernous underworld, thick strands of echoey guitars, tons of reverb, a surprisingly tranquil subterranean drift. But it doesn't stay tranquil for long. Well, that's not entirely true, it's just a different sort of tranquil from there on out. The rumbling shimmering low end is traded in for some grinding, pulsing, shrieking, crumbling feedback. At first it does sound harsh, but closer listening reveals feedback as melody, with the tones and timbre and overtones, shifting and twisting, sometimes a clear streak of shiny brightness, other times a harsh scrabbly charged crackle. But before we can get used to the wild Haino-style amp experiments, Bassett shifts gears back again into a murky, looped shimmer, fuzzy and staticky, a whirring whirling swirl of guitar fuzz, smeared into a prickly buzz, a strangely peaceful, but still thick and roiling ambience. The record sort of shifts back and forth, between shadow and light, low end rumble and buzz, and upper register screech and skree, but each definitely compliments the other, and demonstrating Bassett's deft hand and sculpting unruly sound, even at its most harsh, is still strangely beautiful. The final track is the perfect blend of both elements, a strangely metallic, Earth / SUNNO))) style dirge, thick fuzzy waves of grinding crunchy guitar growl wrapped in thick swirls of buzz and hiss and fuzz. Cool.
Another blast of homespun free noise from Marcia Bassett of the Double Leopards, Hototogisu, GHQ and many more. Released on Hototogisu's Heavy Blossom label, this super limited cd-r, is another dark trawl through a noise strewn alley, processed synths, looped feedback, and ultra distorted vocals are stretched into wide dirty streaks of pulsing distorted sound, a throbbing rhythm surfaces from within the vocal murk, while strange scrapes and grunts become some sort of percussive framework, huge sheets of dog whistle skree leaned up against distant foghorn drone and moaning freenoise whir, grinding instrument grit and electronic malfunction drift into ghose like vestiges of song and melody. As always pretty darn great. Packaged in a handmade foldover paper sleeve with insert. And as always VERY VERY LIMITED!! (only 100 copies and we got but a handful!)
Here's an album that we had heard about a while back, but had never been able to track down until now. Anna Zaradny is a Polish sound artist, specializing in harmonically challenging drones that slide out of electrical pulses and glass-shattering digital errata. She seems to have had something of a similar background as Gunter Muller or Jason Kahn (well, without Kahn's hardcore exploits in the US during the '80s), as she began her career in the realm of improv and has worked into a powerful and complex aesthetic for pierced minimalism, bristling with psychoacoustic intensity. Mauve Cycles features two lengthy pieces, the first being a zonked crucible of lazer-shot tones and frequencies which slowly melds into a mosaic of skittering rhythmic pulsations, pure tone dissonance, and seasickening sequences. We're not alone in finding parallels between this track and some of the more abstracted rhythmic constructs from Mika Vainio. As Zaradny smooths those rhythms into sustained vibration, this track begins to allude more to the classic electronic minimalists, with that strategy being furthered on the alluring second piece of pure dronescaping. Zaradny spatializes fizzes and crunched pixelations into complex constructions for oscillator tones slipping to toxic phase shifts from time to time. The overall feel of her work falls somewhere between recent John Duncan, feedback-era Eliane Radigue, the narcoleptic sounds of Mika Vainio, and a polite Florian Hecker. Intense!
This fictional collective is in fact one Carter Thornton, a New York based composer / sound artist, and 'Floor Child' collects five years of his recordings and live performances, sewn together into one throbbing, creaking, tinkling droning whole, spread out over two discs, and featuring appearances by a couple of No Neck Blues Banders and a handful of NNCK-related folks. This is a massive, expansive free form soundscape hobbled together out of everything AND the kitchen sink, humming drones, keening feedback, spacy honking free jazz horns, distant clatter and hum, snippets of short wave radio and TV dialogue, an assortment of strings, strummed, plucked and bowed, far away drums, found sounds, birds and running water, jazzy clatter, bouncy rhythms, tinkling piano, groaning swells, shimmery melodies and all sorts of other sounds. A surprisingly smooth and dreamy listen considering the disparate sounds and sources. Nice. Released on NNCK's Sound@one label.
About a year ago we were completely floored by the cd release of a cassette recording made in Jerusalem circa 1980 of the intense and trance inducing zorna playing of Zadik Zecharia. His Kurdish Melodies On Zorna had the kind of fire and intensity that appealed not only to Middle Eastern music aficionados, but also noise freaks, drone lovers and experimental music-heads of all stripes. So when we heard that the Israeli label Something On The Road had compiled a remix cd of Zacharia's masterful record we were both intrigued and a little skeptical. We'll be the first to admit that most remix records tend to miss the mark, adding generic beats and kind of killing the original spirit of a work that we love. And the first couple tracks on this collection while ok weren't totally doing it for us but then...oh my god!!! after a few tracks things started to heat up FAST! While most records, especially compilations and remix albums, tend to be top heavy, this is in many ways quite the opposite. Things start off with a nice smoky Planet Mu almost dubstep kind of vibe and then as the record goes on the beats start to diminish in favor of drone and noise and buzz. We love how Something On The Road have such a good sense of continuity, mood and pacing, something most remix records completely ignore. We weren't familiar with most of the Israeli bands and DJ's involved in this record but now we will for sure try to seek out more music by the likes of Nemoi, Gal Tushia and David Ovadia. The one artist we were familiar with was Poochlatz an amazingly bleak and primitive noise project out of Israel who always whip up beautiful and chaotic doom & gloom! We love the tidal wave that erupts as this remix record unfolds. Like the best moments of Muslimgauze, this is Middle Eastern experimental electronica that resonates so strongly and does it's source material proud!
The resurgence of the cassette as a viable media may provide an additional context for the work of Jason Zeh, as his gritty drone-noise constructions are entirely based on the contact points between magnetic tape and the tape heads that read / translate that magnetic information into sound. His approach to sound often deals with the dislocation of this contact point, which is akin to the way that Christian Marclay, Gum, or Phillip Jeck approach the turntable. Zeh might wield sandpaper to abrade the tape itself, magnetized razor blades to slice the tapes, leaving irradiated coronas of electrical hum near the edit, and even smearing globs of dirt into the gears and mechanics of the tape deck. All of these very tactile methods impart very tactile results, and as such, A Vacant Lot To Be In is much more akin to Chop Shop's obliterated tape saturation than the somber self-immolation found on William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. Both tracks on this vinyl only release rise through scabrous crumplings into a steady arcing mass of high-voltage dronework whose phase shifting patterns give the impression of an electrified sea of ferric oxide churning through tidal forces. One of the sides builds towards an intense crescendo of turbulent, boiling, junked noise, while the flip eerily navigates an insectoid minimalism. Zeh's work is very strong and deserves as much acclaim as we can muster, especially given his relatively low profile. Highly recommended for fans Joe Colley, Hive Mind, Mike Shiflet, and the more industrially slanted aspects of contemporary sound art. Oh yeah, limited to just 300 copies. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Of all of the many Zeitkratzer collaborations that have appeared to date, this one seemed the most unlikely. Sure, the amplified horns and screeching strings that came out of Zeitkratzer's orchestral interpretation of Metal Machine Music worked well in the sheer audacity of the project; but Zeitkratzer's polyphonous tonalities had mustered an engaging re-interpretation of John Duncan's work with a balance between grace and force. So, when taking on a collaboration with Carsten Nicolai, who is best known for his swaggering rhythms for pure tone and minuscule glitches as Alva Noto, we had to ask how this would work. Well, essentially, Nicolai has adapted his sound for Zeitkratzer, not the other way around, which might have been a real challenge for Zeitkratzer to attempt to adopt the thud and rumble of something like the Transall series. Instead, Nicolai and Zeitkratzer pursue long-form compositions, mostly for electronics, but occasionally with the assistance of a particular instrumental coloring from say a clarinet, a cello, or a piano. Each of the three pieces here were performed live, commissioned for this sound art festival or that in Europe. The first of which swarms around static-laden drones and crackling hiss which spirals around a Niblockian drone from a sustained clarinet, eventually a rhythmic undercarriage from a softly tapped piano ebbs against the slow-building arc of sound. The second piece seems to be staged from prepared piano, amplified televisions, and tone generators, offering another skeletal rhythm to the clinical frequencies. The third piece returns to the ideas of the first with the reprise of that piano, but here a semblance of a melody encroaches the slow-motion raga drone from low-thumbing electronics and rasping sustained strings. It's not all that far from another of Nicolai's storied collaborations, with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Both Zeitkratzer and Nicolai are guilty of playing it safe on these three pieces, but the results are striking and lovely nonetheless.
The gorgeous image of a stagecoach barreling down a mountain roadside, as if being watched by a crow perched in a fir tree, has great appeal to an imagination that begins listening the moment it beholds a record's cover. Unfortunately, the music inside this cover does not really correspond to what is evoked by that image.
Not quite so mysterious, or adventurous, this live recording, complete with polite audience applause and the pristine but cold high end of a digital room recording, is probably less satisfying than actually having been at the performance(s) that brought together Japanese improv psych shaman Keiji Haino and the German experimental chamber music outfit Zeitkratzer. The physicality of Keiji's input - his vocalizations and percussive noises - rescues Electronics (3) from the banality of the "noise" its liner notes make such a fuss about. Sometimes it's a bad idea to read the liner notes! Whether it's just very naive or, more annoyingly, a stab at self-important academic validation, the essay that accompanies this disc offers little to make Zeitkratzer's project any more exciting or "important". Some name-dropping - Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Bach, musique concrete, Carlyle, Dionysus, Susan McClary (?), Debussy, etc. - sprinkled amidst lines of academic jargon and just a bit of actual information about the "construction" of this music, and rehearsals behind this record (aren't there artists and bands spontaneously creating such 'noise' music all the time? Artists like Haino?) makes one wonder why they just didn't opt for a photo of the the ensemble's gig bags for the cover? Couldn't the liner notes have simply said that these musicians were stoked to jam with Haino, and really let their hair down??
Having said all that, liner notes aside, for any Haino fan, this may be worth the purchase just for the dramatic track 3 alone, the approximately 25-minute "Sinfonia", given the peaks of ecstatic beauty reached by Haino's noise-making therein... tracks 1 and 2, "Aria I" and "Aria II", are rather more typical of haunting, eerie-sounding 20th century classical, albeit with added extremity due to the Haino factor.
This is the third in a series of Zeitkratzer collaborations entitled Electronics, the other two featuring Carsten Nicolai and Terre Thaemlitz respectively, and thus this is the most "out there" of 'em all, being more about improvisation than composition, Haino himself (on guitar, Theremin, voice, drums...) the equal of the entire ensemble that's accompanying him (on tuba, trombone, clarinet, cello, drums, etc.).
And now that we're listening to the disc, rather than reading that cd booklet, we've gotta say we're also really digging the "bonus" track 4, a "Drum Duo" (presumably of Haino and one lucky Zeitkratzer member). Their freeform percussion blitz gets down to business without any of the highbrow posturing of the previous, larger scale pieces.
This is not new at all, in fact, it's from way back in 2005, we just discovered a little bundle of these in the closet, which is pretty serendipitous, considering that they're just playing this weekend at the On Land festival, and because not only is this looooong out of print, but Pseudo Arcana isn't even an active label anymore, which means you should grab one of these while you can, cuz once these are gone they are WAY gone.
Chicago's dream weavers Zelienople are masters of conjuring up gauzy washed out otherworldly dronescapes, buried melodies, billowing clouds of burnished guitar shimmer, deep smoldering low end rumbles, bowed metals stretched into glimmering sheets of reflective drift, cymbal sizzle falling like warm summer rain on old rusted metal rooftops. All of those sounds are deftly woven into the epic sprawling title track, a heady chunk of modern minimal raga, hypnotic and spaced out and abstract and pretty breathtaking.
The second track takes all that droniness and abstract shimmer, and layers them into something slightly more songy, a soporifically unfurling, glacially expanding cloud of reverbed slowcore, twangy guitar drifting in clouds of effects, the vocals a soft effected drawl, the drums a murky pulse, the whole thing hazy and hushed, bleary eyed and washed out, a dark ballad of minimal spaced out doom folk drift. So good....
Another fantastic disc of gauzy, shimmery otherworldly dronemusic, from the seemingly infallible Type label. Long time aQ faves, Chicago's Zelienople moved to Type, after a handful of releases on PseudoArcana, Digitalis and Root Strata, and it was a pretty perfect match. Rameses III, Alps, Goldmund, Grouper, Xela, North Sea, Helios, Svarte Greiner, Black To Comm, it's not difficult to see that maybe this was where Zelienople belonged all along.
On Give It Up, the group deftly mix light and dark, weaving softly smoldering dreamscapes, all muted and hushed, with sun dappled dronefolk, all chiming soft focus guitars, and minimal percussion, hazy and gauzy and slightly blurred, vocals surfacing here and there throughout. A sort of ethereal slowcore, pop songs pulled apart and set in amber, this record a shadow produced by the muted sunlight shining through.
Some tracks are brooding and doomy, laced with ominous creaks and deep moaning low end tones, wheezing organs, and layered ambience, others are folky and reverbed, strummed guitars wreathed in a patina of muted thrum, spread out over some almost Neil Young sounding vox, but buried way down in the mix, still others are skeletal and barely there, voices drifting in the ether, over spare tendrils of melody, only to slowly shift, and get lost in a cloud of prismatic chordal hum.
Absolutely gorgeous, the perfect blend of minimal doom folk, hushed slowcore and abstract dronemusic.
The lp version comes with a bonus cd (NOT a cd-r, an actual pressed cd), featuring Zelienople's soundtrack for a film called Gone, stunningly beautiful, even more minimal than the record proper, the first half of the disc all gauzy drones, the second half, bleary eyed slow motion chamber music. Be careful removing the cd from the lp, it's attached by a little dollop of glue or something, but a quick pull will take some of the lp sleeve with it...
In the age of YouTube and MySpace, the idea of the music video has changed dramatically since the days of MTV (or at least the days when MTV actually played videos). In the past, only bands on major labels could make a video, often hiring a real director and dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, plenty of bands have videos before they even have a record out. Super 8, digital video, Final Cut Pro, anyone can put together their own video and have it look as good if not better than the classic videos of old.
Old news maybe, but the thing is, most bands seems to use the video as simply a promotional tactic, or an excuse to fuck around and film it. Instead of, dare we say, ART. In the underground though, it's not at all uncommon for like minded musicians and filmmakers to join forces. In fact, with the advent of live performances featuring laptops and other sedimentary sound making devices (when is someone gonna make a laptop guitar, so left out laptoppers can windmill and leap about with the rest of the band?), often it's the accompanying films that are way more compelling. Often, a show is touted as some band performing "with films by so and so", but in fact, more often than not, it plays out more like seeing a film, that just so happens to feature live accompaniment by some band.
Few labels have really taken advantage of this new technology as much as Root Strata, who have quietly and steadily been releasing a series of super limited dvd-r's, each featuring new compositions by a small handful of artists, coupled with original films. The results have been pretty sublime, the films tending toward the abstract and impressionistic, the music following suit. When watching / listening to these, it's hard not to imagine laying on the floor, propped up on cushions, lights low, the film being projected on a huge blank wall, the band hunkered over their instruments in the corner, which makes sense as that's most likely how these films/sounds were conceived.�
So we have two new super limited dvd-r releases, one from Zelienople and one from Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Paul Clipson, both limited to 100 copies, both already out of print, so these are the only copies we'll ever get.�
We've only ever had one other release by Zelienople in the past, the gorgeous Stone Academy. A smoldering noise drenched folk, simple strum surrounded thick sonic swells, tons of effects, often evolving into a blown out druggy haze. The music here is similar, but a bit more post rocky, a little Velvets, a little Bohren. A simple main riff, repeating over and over, wreathed in reverb, the vocals a hushed plaintive murmur, while all around, those elements, softly swirl, streaks of blurred effects, spidery reverbed guitar melodies, all heavy with reverb and delay, the sound super laid back and weary, dreamlike and drowsy. Which perfectly suits the visuals, a film by Donald Prokop (and the band), an endless shot of the world passing by outside a car window. In the first half, the various sights are rendered an impressionistic blur, long streaks, fields of color vibrating, whirring past, sometimes the screen is mostly sky, peppered with glimmering streetlights, but often it's a a jittery assemblage of shapes and colors and lights, here and there, more of the landscape is revealed, eliciting a strange sense of melancholy, of loneliness, enhanced by Zelienople's moody musical drift. Near the end, the camera seems to be traveling through a series of tunnels, the film offering up long stretches of blackness between smeared glass views of passing towns. So lovely.�
Packaged in printed, folded papers sleeves, and again, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, and already out of print. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Another beautiful sounding and gorgeously packaged super limited release from Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's (Tarentel) Root Strata label. This one, from a mysterious band of noisemakers from Chicago (even though they're named for a city in Pennsylvania), Zelienople. Having lurked on the periphery of the underground drone / noise / free folk scene, releasing a handful of limited cd-r releases on labels like PseudoArcana, 267 Lattajjaa and others, Stone Academy finds the band at their darkest and most expansive, droney and buzzy but still so delicate and beautiful, hopefully this release will be the one to get these guys more widely heard 'cuz they do belong right up there alongside Avarus and Starving Weirdos and Yellow Swans and Birchville and all of those ambientdronefolk household names.
Stone Academy, at its core, is basically a stripped down folk record. Simple strummed steel string guitar, wavery plaintive vocals, warm swells of ambience, wrapped in TONS of thick reverb, like it was recorded in a cave or a gymnasium or empty swimming pool, and while each song has this strummy folk center, each track evolves or devolves in a totally unique way, into a barely there minimal crawl, into grinding washes of distorted guitar, into warm thick swirls of My Bloody Valentine like buzz, into weird 20th century abstract clatter, into Murky Dead C like blurry noise rock, and sometimes into nothing at all, just sort of quietly and contemplatively drifting along, shimmering in a druggy haze of warbly ephemeral folk and whirring ambient rumble.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Each copy hand numbered. Thick brown sleeves, each with an original ACTUAL photo by Diane Jones affixed to the front. Five different, equally striking images. So lovely.
Not sure how we managed to sleep on this record when it came out last year. Had we heard it then, it doubtless would have made it into the year-end top tens of many of the metalheads here for sure. Fortunately, we did eventually get a clue - we realized we had to check out this Greek one-man-band after reading the interview with Zemial in the latest issue of Chips & Beer, 'cause any supposedly 'black metal' outfit that name checks Karlheinz Stockhausen*, John Cage, and Magma drummer Christian Vander, amongst others, sure sounds like something we'd dig here at aQ! And dig we do.
So, here's Zemial's 2013 opus, Nykta. Majestic, propulsive, spacey, epic, catchy, hella weird, yeah, Nykta is right up our alley. Zemial has actually been around since 1989, but this is still only the band's third full-length album - and it's a doozy if you like extremely original 'extreme' metal music. The guy behind Zemial, multi instrumentalist Archon Vorskaath, is into modern composers and prog/jazz fusion drummers, but he's also big into Bathory. So this has got to be one of the only 'progressive metal' albums we've heard that's chock full of raw, dirty riffing and gruff vocals that sound right off a Venom album. But there's also out-there spacey synthscapes, Eastern-sounding exoticism, esoteric lyrics, suddenly prominent prog rock keyboard parts, and tons of uber talented and effective percussion from Vorskaath (that's his specialty, having played percussion professionally in an orchestra). And, he's pretty impressive in the vocal department, too, doing some semi-melodic, 'clean' but not too clean singing, with heaps of gusto and strangely effected weirdness.
Zemial really manage thee perfect, hithero unattempted synthesis of savage, driving riffage and tripped out experimentation here. We don't think we've ever heard a metal band that sounds so 'old school' and yet so avant-garde and original at the same time. We fear we can't do this album justice in this review, it's one of those that we just gotta say, trust us, it's brilliant and weird and kickass and totally recommended to open-minded metallers (and non-metallers too), especially fans of Absu, latter-day Darkthrone, and Enslaved (circa Mardraum). Blizaro too - the moody, bombastic synth instrumental "The Small", at least, sounds a lot like something they would do.
By the way, there's nothing wrong with your stereo - the final track here is an homage to Cage's famous composition 4'33", and has thrown a lot of unknowing metal reviewers for a loop, being of course (almost?) totally silent. Hey, it could have been on that Sounds Of Silence lp we made Record Of The Week a while back! (Note to Vorskaath, however: placing the silent track at the end of your album is less effective than if you'd put it right in the middle!)
*In that Chips & Beer interview, Vorskaath talks about how he's played with Stockhausen's jazz musician son Markus, in a piece that involved the musicians fasting and meditating for, like, two straight days before getting on stage to improvise - now that's extreme!
Swans. Godflesh. Big Black. Melvins. Eyehategod. Unsane. Zeni Geva. We're concerned here with the latter, who maybe aren't as well known as the first half dozen bands mentioned, but sure as heck belong in that illustrious company... and sound VERY much like some unholy, heavier-than-thou hybrid of all of 'em!! It's been a long time since we've had a new Zeni Geva album to write about... and no this isn't actually a new album. But we're still pretty excited. Every once in a while, we have the opportunity to list and review an old favorite. Something that's been out of print for longer even than we've been doing the Aquarius website and New Arrivals emails, that we'd never had the chance to stock and recommend before, that finally at long last gets a well-deserved reissue and is cause for much celebration 'round here. For instance, to name a couple of recent examples, Harvey Milk's My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. And Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper. You'll note the examples we just cited are all on the "heavy" side... well that's 'cause what we're about to recommend here also pretty darn heavy. To say the least.
You may already be familiar with Japan's Zeni Geva, as they've been around for years and years. This cult "progressive hardcore" trio is the brainchild of guitarist Kazuyuki Kishino Null, also well-known for his "nullsonic" solo recordings. Definitely influenced by early Swans, KK Null started up the doomy and noisy ZG in about 1987. Previously he'd done time in Tokyo underground industrial noise-terrorists Absolut Null Punkt, and with prog act YBO2, which also featured drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, who of course later went on to lead the incredible Magmoid duo Ruins. Meanwhile, post-YBO2, Null formed the far more metallic* Zeni Geva. Null did draft Yoshida in to play drums on some early ZG material (wouldn't you?), and you'll here him here on about half of this disc's tracks, contributing his distinctive vocals as well to a couple songs. Ikuro Taketani (ex-Hanatarashi) plays drums on the other half. The lineup also includes Tabata Mitsuru (ex-Boredoms and Leningrad Blues Machine) on guitar. That's right, there's no bassist in Zeni Geva which is pretty incredible considering how hellishly heavy they are! And it's clear that ZG are something of a underground Japanese rock supergroup.
MMM was ZG's first cd release, coming out originally in 1990 on the UK's now long-gone Pathological label. It's a lumbering juggernaut fully blessed and bloated with everything we LOVE about Zeni Geva that would also be heard on later, Albini-produced releases like Total Castration and Desire For Agony: Utter headbanging, slo-mo, dirt-plowing destruction. Molasses thick riffs dripping from electric axes. Frenzied, technical bashing. Mathy post rock song structures. High-end guitar solo skree. Mean misanthropic attitude. Pounding repetition. Pounding repetition. Pounding repetition.... adorned with the aforementioned guitar soloing, providing a crashing, crushing soundscape to underscore the throaty proclamations of "Sweetheart!" or "War Pig!" or "Blackout!" from gruff vocalist/guitarist Null -- the lyrics to these tracks being little more than the song title shouted over and over with fervent anguish. Glorious stuff, massive and mesmeric.
From the first track, the 16 minute harrowing dirge-stomp "Slam King" that ends terrifyingly with waves of unaccompanied, effected vocals, to the last, the rhythmic and witchy "On Suicide", featuring lyrics borrowed from Bertold Brecht, this is scary, monolithic, artistic heaviness of the highest order.
Let's give a big thanks to Cold Spring for making this classic available once again (as part of a wave of Japanese releases including a new disc from noise legends CCCC). Though we don't see why Cold Spring felt the need to replace the original, much more colorful, and in our opinion, superior artwork, we are happy to note that they did make one major improvement. While the eight songs on the original disc were inexplicably presented as one loooong track with no separate-song indexing (annoying!) they're thankfully corrected that. Now you can skip right to "Guystick Bodie", or put "Skullfuck" on repeat. And in addition to the eight original tracks, they've added three previously unreleased bonus cuts as well! Devastating live versions of album cuts "War Pig" (a Zeni Geva song, not Sabbath's "War Pigs" plural) and "Skullfuck", along with "Dead Car, Sun Crash" (an early ZG number not included on the album proper), recorded in Tokyo circa 1988-89. Whee! Like we said, we're so stoked to get to list/review/recommend this!
*Though not metallic enough to be accepted by the online metal authority Encyclopedia Metallum it must be noted...
Three new releases on weirdo UK cassette label The Tapeworm, one a sort of anti-remix of the Fennesz Tapeworm cassette Szampler, one a gorgeous selection of deep kosmische dronemusic played on just intonation toy organs and boomboxes, and this, the latest from Zerocrop, the solo project of a UK musician called simply Parker, whose music is described by the label as "hypnotic mix of complex vocal melodies and spoken word sequences on unsettling themes, set against a rich backwash of pedal steel, guitars and electronics", but to us sounds more like some old school eighties cold/new wave, at least on the first of the four tracks here, old analog synths, primitive programmed beats, deep crooned vocals, propulsive rhythms. The second track begins to sound more like the label description, getting a lot trippier, deep dark synth swells, beneath echo drenched spoken word, super cinematic and haunting, creepy and otherworldly.
The sound then veers right back into something more new wavey, a sort of eighties electronic pop, that fits perfectly alongside the new wave of new wave revivalists.
But then things switch gears again on the side long single track B side, which is somehow a mix of the two, warm whirring new age, wrapped around swoonsome deserty lap steel, laced with samples, all laid atop softly pulsing synths, almost like some weird hybrid of Zombi and Scenic, a sort of Carpenter-y synthscape set amidst ghost towns and tumbleweed, the ranting female preacher religious sample just makes it sound even more cinematic and like some strange transmission you might stumble across on cable access at 4am in a motel room off the interstate somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
What do you do when the rules are simply: compose a piece of music using only one note? Well, the folks at SF label Tell-All Records decided to explore the possibilities with a 3" cd-r series titled "Twelve". Each of the participants was assigned (or perhaps chose for themselves) one note of the 12-note scale. Here's one of the first two volumes released thus far, it's Dave Zohrob in 'E' (the other is Liam Singer's compositions in 'F').
While Singer's treatment of his note is quite an active and rhythmic affair, Zohrob takes a very different approach. There are no hard lines in these aural sketches. Zohrob draws out his 'E' in a fog of drones. Solemn and calming.
It seems like only yesterday that Nika Rosa Danilova was thrilling us with her outsider gothic basement recordings. Now, she's a full-fledged international pop diva working with none other than David Lynch! Danilova seems to be dealing with her new recognition well. Her live shows have gotten consistently better and better, her songwriting has become more focused and has not lost its edge, despite losing most of its reverb. The Zola Jesus aesthetic - the beauty within the noise, the darkness behind the veneer - seems to fit right in with Lynch's work, both sonic and visual, without much of a struggle. The A side here is a head-bobbing, booty shaking synth-pop classic: one of those songs that no matter how shitty your day was, it'll make you tap your feet and/or dance like crazy. For the B side, David Lynch slows the tempo a bit and adds a bit of dreaminess. The drums are smoother and less frenetic. Lynch's (now somewhat trademark) reverb-laden guitar replaces some of the synth pads. A must have for any Zola Jesus fan and a good starting place for those (few) of you who haven't yet fallen in love.
Zombi must feel like Neurosis did back in the day. Returning after a few years with a brand new record, only to gaze out on a sea of bands who sounded just like them. And discovering that their sound, in their brief absence, had become an actual genre, and a ridiculously overpopulated one at that. But like Neurosis, Zombi return as royalty, their cinematic space psych and soundtracky synthscapes untouchable, even by the legions of wannabes, fellow Carpenter / Goblin worshippers all, Umberto, Applehead, Zander Harris, Gatekeeper, Dylan Ettinger, Nightsatan, Roll The Dice, Soft Metals and all the rest, as good as they may be, and as much as we dig all of them, still bow before this dynamic duo, whose epic stretches of spaced out synths are wrapped around REAL drums, propulsive and powerful, the sound a perfect hybrid of washed out retro-futuristic synth swirl, and churning kraut flecked post rock, the tracks extended trancelike epics, the pulsing synth bass looped and mesmerizing, peppered with warm melodic swells, the drums pounding out equally mesmerizing tribal rhythms. The opening title track here sounds almost too short at 7 minutes, and like it could erupt at any moment into a second, even more epic movement, but instead, remains locked tight, cyclical and hypnotically repetitive.
The next few tracks slip closer to the cosmic dancefloor, wild squalls of tangled synths, woozy, melancholy melodies, but again, the real drums make all the difference, on "Slow Oscillations" adding some awesome rapidfire fills and flecking the grooves with little bits of double kick filigree, while on "DE3" twisting up a classic disco rhythm into something a bit more fierce, anchoring the new age swirl, all building to a seriously epic sci-fi climax. "Shrunken Heads" is a minimal groover, the synth buzzy and distorted, but the rhythm more programmed sounding, a looped chase scene soundtrack, tense and intense and darkly propulsive.
"Time Of Troubles" finishes things off, beginning with a hazy cloud of softly swirling sun dappled synth shimmer, and then big ominous low end, the perfect ending, especially if Escape Velocity was actually an eighties soundtrack, you can almost imagine the credits rolling as the hero and his motley gang of intergalactic misfits walk off off into the alien sunset, the sound majestic, but minor key and a little bit melancholy, the drums adding a sort of kraut/post rock vibe, totally mesmerizing, and definitely making us wish the deliriously over the top cover art (replete with running naked women and, yes, a Delorean, gull wing doors wide open, on what appears to be the floor of a sauna floating in a blue sky) was in fact a real film, and this was the soundtrack!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The last time we heard from Zomes, aka Asa Osborne, he of the mighty Lungfish, and later, the stripped down but equally mighty Pupils, we couldn't get enough, declaring his self titled debut on Holy Mountain our Record Of The Week, a stunning collection of fragmented loop music, single melodic figures, repeated and layered into trancelike shortform miniature ragas, as shamanistic as his long time partner Daniel Higgs, but taking a much more subdued and kosmische path.
On this way too limited cassette, Osborne continues on his sonic path, but expanding his sound, or rather the scope of his sound, the source is still minimal, warm layered synths, but here, those layers are stretched into slowly undulating sidelong swells, like Riley or Reich, Osborne, unfurls lush melodies, lately them drift and shimmer, melodies surfacing and then fading out, before a new set of melodies take their place, dreamlike and softly psychedelic, sun dappled and gorgeously gauzy, this is total krautdrone new age bliss, utterly lovely and serene and tranquil and divine. Both tracks here are transcendent and transport the listener to some hazy otherworld, everything blurred and muted and washed out and soft focus. Imagine a way prettier and more minimal Expo 70, and you'll get an idea of what sort of spaced out cosmic drift these 2 improvisations offer. So totally lovely.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Already out of print, these are the only copies we'll be able to get... ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
So far we've made both full lengths from Asa Osborne's Zomes project Records Of The Week, and for good reason, each one a gorgeous assemblage of lo-fi keyboard mediations, and haunting rhythmic ragas, hiss drenched melodies unfurling over murky beats, everything blurred and bleary and meditatively blissed out. Many recent converts to Zomes might not realize that Osborne was previously the guitarist in late great Baltimore hypnorock combo Lungfish, which also of course featured mystical musical shaman Daniel Higgs, who also gets a lot of love on the aQ list.
Between those two ROTW full lengths, Osborne released a cassette called Improvisations 1 + 2, which as the title suggested, found Osborne improvising on some similar sonic themes, that tape fitting perfectly between those proper albums. Variations takes up where that tape left off, with a series of short form tranced out synth mediations, rhythmless this time, so the feel is much more abstract and free, more celestial and yeah, even more kosmische. It's hard not to draw a parallel, at least melodically, to another aQ fave, Amps For Christ, Zomes' sound treading similarly warped electronic ground, with some tracks revealing playful melodies, as if reinterpretations of some old folks standard, played here on some primitive analog synth, and recorded onto old dusty tapes, while others blossom and unfold like some long lost new age prog artifact, captured surreptitiously on a handheld tape player, the strange low fidelity production and soft swirls of tape hiss adding all manner of texture and grit to the proceedings, so even at its most washed out and serene, the sound is rough and raw, the tones gristly and crunchy, everything gloriously warm and buzzy.
Not much else needs to be said really, Zomes fans will want this for sure, but really anyone into tripped out lo-fi kosmische explorations and hushed minimal synthscapery should grab one of these, and will most likely find themselves falling under Zomes' sonic spell.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
Big new Zorn composition. "Written for solo piano, six boy sopranos, and full orchestra...monumental" it sez here.
We'll let the obi speak here: "Over thirty minutes in length, Duras is a major new composition inspired by the romantic writings of Marguerite Duras and the mystical music of Olivier Messiaen. Seductive, elusive, ritualistic, Duras is a hypnotic work of startling clarity and complexity. 'Etant donnees' is the perfect companion piece to Duras: a provocative noise trio inspired by the enigmatic last masterpiece of Marcel Duchamp..." With Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander, Anthony Coleman etc. [/cat/experimental208.html]
"Originally released in 1992, Elegy, one of Zorn's most important compositions, creates a mysterious world of erotic perversion, drawing inspiration from the writings of Jean Genet, and features an unusual collection of some of San Francisco's most interesting musicians: David Abel, Barbara Chaffe, Mike Patton, David Shea, David Slusser, Trey Spruance, William Winant."
Finally a domestic version of the hard-to-find Japanese release, to fill the gap in your collection between Filmworks II and Filmworks V (uh, what happened to IV?). Anyway, this features a bunch of great stuff played by a bunch of great musicians, including the very first Masada recordings, a Zorn/Marc Ribot duo, and cues for commercials directed by the likes of Godard and Cronenberg.
Subtitled "S/M + More"...
From the obi: "Augmenting the exciting Masada String Trio with Anthony Coleman, Marc Ribot, and pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen, Zorn's Masada music has never sounded as beautiful or as evocative as in the soundtrack for a film documentary about the Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi Germany by resettling to Shanghai. Also included is a quirky all-percussion score for Ela Troyano's exotic gay porno film 'Latin Boys Go To Hell', featuring the driving rhythms of Cyro Baptista and Kenny Wollesen."
From the accompanying obi strip: "Hypnotic, sensual and evocative music for Martina Kudlacek's brilliant and detailed documentary on the life and work of underground film legend Maya Deren. Mixing myth and ritual with avant-garde dance and film techniques,
Alright, now that you've read all that, and if you're at all familiar with Zorn's Filmworks series, you probably know whether or not if you want / need this. I must admit, I didn't expect to like this disc, considering the high proliferation of compositions from Zorn in the past fifteen or so years. But the man always seems to come through somehow. One of the two major highlights of this disc are the subtle beauty in the performances of Erik Friedlander (actually some of the most touching and heartfelt playing that I've heard from him!). The other is the rare performance by Zorn on piano, beautifully rendered - a rare homage to his love of Feldman, maybe? There are moments of minimalist texture, however brief and overshadowed by Friedlander's sweet dynamicism. Always one to cross over styles and display technical virtuosity, this installment of Filmworks could do without the bongo drumming or faux-exotic parts, but then again, it is about Maya Deren whose films themselves included Haitian drumming in them. Overall a nice disc and one that almost lives up to its obi strip comments.
"A peek into the secret world of a teenage weirdo, revealing the early seeds that developed into the composer's later dementia." (--from the obi)
add to cart [/images/addtocart.gif]/af4105.html It's hard to believe it's already been half a year since John Zorn's 50th birthday party. People are STILL talking about what a great party it was and what an excellent batch of new Tzadik releases related to his septuagenarian anniversary we've been blessed with. Wow. Wow! I mean WOW! And what more of a suitable way of kicking off the second half of this year's batch than with First Words. Recorded in the early months of 1955 by his doting mother (using a portable Wollensack recorder purchased at Sears) as he lay in his crib in his yellow and gray camouflage pajamas, the first track of First Words is exactly as one would expect: The very first words uttered by John Zorn! These two syllables, spoken in the interval of a major second, have mystified Zorn for most of his life. This kernel of music, this germinal source of inspiration, was it meant to lead into something, or was it a cadence? Frustrated in his attempts to understand the genius of his earlier self, Zorn went so far as to enroll in Columbia University's Ph.D. program in musicology in an attempt to analyze and break the code on the brief musical passage. The fruits of his labors resulted in the completion of his thesis: The Ontological Implications Of My First Utterance, which is included in hardback form in this limited edition first pressing. The remaining 11 tracks on the album are all compositions commissioned by Zorn and performed by the Downtown scene's greatest: Steve Lacy, Wayne Horvitz, Ikue Mori, Fred Frith, Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp, Dave Douglas, Otomo Yoshihide and more!
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Willie Winant has a star turn here on the track "Gris-Gris" for 13 tuned drums.
Again, the obi: "Recorded in 1993, Kristallnacht is Zorn's most powerful and unforgiving composition. This premiere work of Radical Jewish Culture features a virtuosic ensemble of creative Jewish musicians: Mark Feldman, Marc Ribot, Mark Dresser, William Winant, Frank London, Anthony Coleman, David Krakauer."
An early Zorn game-piece, circa 1977. Musicians/game players include Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser, Bruce Ackley, LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams, and Zorn himself. Crazy-sounding results as you might imagine. Previously available on the "Parachute Years" box set. If you didn't spring for that seven-disc brick, here's a more affordable taster of the late '70s work that set John Zorn on his path to today's superstardom...
