Not having journeyed to the Dead C extravaganza in LA, I'm glad to see this LP by Burning Star Core, who opened that show. A project of C Spencer Yeh, whose name I've been seeing around for years, not knowing he was such a fine noisemaker. Side one of the LP is prime dronological beauty encased in fiery treated violin and carefully used electronics. The effect is a sizzling wall of
Side two is Yeh on computer and I sort of miss the violin but it's also good, unpredictable, and detailed. It seems like lots of people are stepping up to the drone plate these days, and it can be hard to sort the dilettantes still in search of their own style from the true dronemakers. Fans of the Sunroof! / Skullflower / Richard Youngs axis will like this.
Limited to 500 copies. Recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
First in a three part series from C. Spencer Yeh and his Burning Star Core. The last BSC we made a record of the week, as Yeh began to harness his noise into something way more compelling and cohesive, a propulsive melodic droneworld of sound. And this shit just keeps getting better. And this is one of those singles that's so good, it most definitely should have been a full length (and will merit much in the way of repeat plays).
Side one is a dense blurred of processed strings, guitar, violin, it's hard to tell, let's call em guitars, but the buzzing and reverberating strings are smeared into a densely layered Niblockian soundscape of pulsing looped guitars, hovering beneath squiggles of psychedelic scrawl and streaks of effulgent feedback.
The flipside is way more laid back and tranquil, a sort of Tangerine Dream-esque muted synthesizer workout, minor key tones fluttering and whirring, peppered with swooshes and space age bloops, while atop this slow moving stream unfurl melancholy melodies, stretched into long smears of warm shimmer, all coming together in a chaotic crescendo at the end, reverbed voices tangled up with the guitars, everything becoming more and more blurry and fuzzy.
Sounds just as good at 45 as it does at 33, packaged in a super spare black sleeve, on Hospital Productions.
The violin is probably the last instrument you think of when you think of underground cd-r noise drone music. Okay, maybe not the last, but it's pretty far down the list for sure. Yet Mr. C. Spencer Yeh has forged a career with his trusty violin, creating a sizable body of work, ranging from full on blown out noise assault, to breathless delicate beauty, to propulsive krautrock infused space rock, and various mixes of all three. We even Record Of The Week-ed his Operator Dead album a while back. But where that record was more of a group effort, this latest disc, Challenger, finds Yeh returning to his solo roots, getting a minimal amount of assistance on just a couple of tracks, but handling the bulk of the soundmaking himself. And while there is no list of instrumentation, we have to assume that violin is not the only instrument present. NOBODY is that good. But even so, Yeh is really really good, and with a violin and whatever else he has in his soundmaking arsenal, he has once again conceived something of great beauty and import, a collection of sounds, of SONGS, an album that is cohesive yet varied, personal and introspective, yet somehow epic and expansive. If anything, this new disc finds Yeh moving his BSC into the rarefied world of spaced out Krautrock. Neu!, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, A.R. & The Machines, Brian Eno. Much in the same way aQ faves Expo '70, channel seventies space kraut, so does Yeh, but where Expo '70 create thick heavy spaced out dronescapes, the sounds on Challenger are much more melodic, and drifty, dreamy and mesmerizing. There is plenty of noise to be found, but it's doled out sparingly, melodies are sometimes halo-ed in buzz, or delicate rhythms wreathed in feedback, but it's always muted and minimal, allowing the melody and arrangement to shine, and shine they do, each track, a gorgeously repetitive stretch of space-y abstract groove, looped, but slowly shifting and changing shape, propulsive but subtly so.
The opening two track salvo is some of the most blissfully beautiful soft noise we've heard. In fact, even calling it noise might be doing it a disservice. The opener is a slow burning slab of minimal murmur, laced with soft tinkling chimes, an abstract ghostly melody over a softly pulsing drone, eventually augmented by some shimmery hiss and random sampled ambience, but instead of distracting, these sonic events, cars driving past, wind, tape hiss, they only add texture to the glimmering drift beneath.
The second track begins with a riff (played on a violin?) that is quickly wrapped up in corrosive swaths of warbly effected buzz, the two elements twisting around one another, creating a strange churning soundscape of stretched out space rock riffage and crumbling distorted drone, that manages to be absolutely riveting.
The next few tracks offer up some more experimental fare, brief chunks of ambient weirdness, one of plastic cup percussion, heavily reverbed, in a wide open stretch of distant whir and tangled electronics, another a symphony of processed vocals, looped and chopped into a hiccupping stuttering soundscape, eventually joined by soft shimmery chords and warm chordal buzz, yet another a collection of crinkles and crackles, like someone stepping on bubble wrap, balling up wrapping paper and a campfire, all draped over the sounds of children laughing and playing.
All before returning to the blissed out dronedrift of the opening few tracks. Reverbed jaw harp floats in a field of static hum and twinkling fragmented melody, deep tones are woven into gentle lilting melodies, symphonic snippets are looped and assembled into a slow building drone, underpinned by fuzzy droney melodies, totally stirring and epic, haunting and mysterious, a bit of Jeck mixed in with BSC's usual glorious buzz, maybe one of the most moving (and possibly one of the best) tracks we've ever heard from Yeh and his 'Core. The final track is an Avarus like coda, sheets of hiss like rainfall (might very well be), bits of percussive chime and clank, plenty of hiss and whir, over the top, a shimmering high end electric melody, that drifts and stutters dreamily, like some alien lullaby.
Absolutely stunning. And thus, entirely and unequivocally recommended.
It seems like many of the least prolific noisemakers are suddenly releasing tons of material, many of them releasing more in a matter of months than they had in the last few years. That seems to be true of C. Spencer Yeh and his Burning Star Core (that is if you don't count the tons of self released and insanely limited tapes, most of which no one we know ever saw let alone heard), with at least three new releases, al of them pretty dang great.
Released on Ultra Eczema, this BSC finds Yeh abandoning the violin, his usual weapon of choice, instead opting for voice, electronics, tape, synths and 'objects'. The result is a lot different than his usual sound, this is not so drone-y or expansive, instead it's dense and busy and really really weird. Opening up with a squall of grinding crunchy insectoid chirp and stutter, draped over abstract chimes and bells, it sounds like some alien effects unit gone haywire. Not long after slow and simple, sad piano is introduced, and it too is wrapped in strange FX, swirling clouds of shimmery buzz and glitch, swooping slabs of reverb drenched pulse and pound. The record continues on, freaked out and acid fried, vocals are slowed down and chopped up, tangled into all manner of industrial crunch and buzzing squelching glitched out electronics.
Probably the biggest surprise is about halfway through side two when Yeh locks into some weird new wave groove, a simple piano and drums eighties rock break down, off kilter and mildly demented sounding but still weirdly groovy, complete with haunting melodies and fuzzy atmospheric synths.
Pressed on opaque grey vinyl, packaged in a GIGANTIC six panel fold out poster sleeve, one side a dizzying metallic silver and black optical illusion sort of pattern, inside a similar metallic gold and black pattern, but surrounding a creepy bug eyed figure and all manner of acid fried nightmare visions.
ALREADY SOLD OUT AND OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL. So act fast...
Not sure what it is lately, but there seems to be a strange occurance of not-so-prolific bands releasing a bunch of records all at once. For BSC it's three releases in the last few months. Which is actually cool since they haven't really had all that many proper releases and have been recording since at least the mid-ninties. BSC is mostly the work of C. Spencer Yeh, and Mes Soldats Stupides '96 - '04, as the title implies, collects lots of random recordings from the last 8 years or so. Limited cd-r releases, cassettes, compilations, rehearsals and a few unreleased tracks. Disc one is really strange, sounding like it was mostly constructed using voices, distorted and affected, chopped up and reassembled, slowed down and sped up layered and multi tracked into random and abstract free-noise workouts, sometimes spastic and noisy, but more often sort of droney and hypnotic. Very organic and natural sounding but quite alien sounding in their new noise rock context. Disc two is a lot more free noise, abstract rock, with stumbling percussion, feeding back guitars, lots of tape hiss and amp buzz, more along the lines of the Dead C or Total. Buzzing droning chaotic free rock splatter that slips into smeary soundscapes as often as it explodes into freenoise fragments.
Double disc packaged in a spiffy double digipak with an extensive track listing / insert.
Normally the solo project of 'noise violinist' C. Spencer Yeh, on Operator Dead... Post Abandoned, Burning Star Core has been expanded to a four piece, with Yeh on violin, voice, electronics, junkbox and trumpet, Trevor Tremaine on drums, percussion and objects, AQ fave Mike Shiflet on computer, electronics and voice, and Robert Beatty on electronics, who is also credited with being "acoustic appraiser."
As much as we've dug past BSC records, this one is definitely shaping up to be our favorite. This Burning Star Core Quartet thing really suits them. The opening track alone, "When The Tripods Came" is a serious contender for best 'noise rock' track of the year. Maybe ever. Calling it noise rock is hardly fair though. It's a rambling sprawling slow moving driftscape of buzz and distortion. It's almost how you might imagine a modern, noisier Taj Mahal Travellers to sound. In fact the whole record sort of has that same sort of spiritual organic vibe. Taking bits and pieces from other purveyors of longform drone noise, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Total, Sunroof!, mixing in some ultra-free jazz, some raga like buzz, some old school improvised ambience, then running it all through a battery of modern effects and unleashing this thick viscous, incredibly heavy, yet impossibly beautiful (especially for a 'noise' record) sound.
A lot of it has to do with the drums, a relentless chaotic octopoidal rhythmic frenzy, skittering as often as pounding, giving the thick snarling ambience direction and propulsion. Turning a record of drifts and shimmers, into something aggressive, something fierce... but the drums are just the framework, supporting the massive sonic weight of the swirling, churning lush noisiness above, beneath and around them.
The first two tracks, nearly 40 minutes, are some of the finest drone-dirge-space-improv EVER. Some impossible dream jam, The Taj Mahal Travellers vs. Crystal Fist vs. Wolf Eyes, mix in some strange disembodied horns, some Tim Hecker like blurred melancholia, add copious amounts of extra buzz and distorted crumble, wrap everything in a bleary eyed crystalline shimmer, and let the whole thing just ooze out of the speakers.
The third and fourth tracks are much more brief and less dense, balancing the bristling buzz of the first two, in the third, a muted warble underpins shimmering high end harmonics, strange muted mechanical whirs and creaks underneath, as well as burbling underwater bass, random bits of percussion, metallic thrum and long streaks of feedback, eventually building into a sort of an abstract tribal space drift, like the members of No Neck and Sunburned Hand jettisoned from the airlock into deep space mid-jam. The fourth is a rhythmic free for all, the drums a constant splatter and shimmer, spreading out like percussive ripples, the cymbals sizzling out a thick layer of constant buzzing whir to compliment the groaning blown out shimmer and reverb drenched washes of sound, everything growing gradually more distorted until it reaches a fever pitch, a lumbering swirl of crumbling low end and pounding drum damage.
A new Burning Star Core record, but not exactly a NEW record, more like a NEW record made out of OLD records, as in 4 loooong tracks, assembled and edited from 66 live recordings from the years 1997-2008, a pretty cool idea for sure and it definitely suits BSC, their songs are long anyway, but here they're transformed into epic space drone collages, a plunderphonic chunk of psychedelia.
The first part is a dense chaotic sprawl of total space rock, the drums wild and blown out and frantic, all of the other instruments in a frenzy of swirling effects and in-the-red freakout, which gives way to some glistening upper register ur-drone, like Sunroof! or Pelt, or heck, even Burning Star Core. The second half of the first part is yet more abstract drift, dense layered sound, streaked and blurred and smeared into giant swells of fuzzed out rumbles, peppered with bits of percussion and electronic glitch, finally finishing up with some murky industrial thump.
Part two explodes with some super distorted psychrone freakout, the drums so in the red they distort and change shape, the violin and/or guitar grind and scrape and squeal and howl and shriek, the drums a chaotic cacophony, like a dozen free jazz bands battling it out in an empty swimming pool, before things get a bit more mellow, the band slipping into something a little more Dead C, a meandering dirgey noise rock stumble, that works its way through still more space rock, and several clouds of crunch and clatter and creak.
Part three begins with some garbled processed sort of beatbox vocals, which gradually get more and more effected before things get noisy again, bleats and skronks, quickly subsumed by a thick wall of crumbling buzz, a thick skull rattling thrum, that dissolves into still more abstract free noise damage and haunting ambient drift.
The final part opens up with some whirring drones beneath creaks and clatters, deep bass pulses, which slowly build into some sort-of-free-jazz, which in turn transforms into some blown out industrial rumble, only to finally finish up in a blurred buzzy tangle of spidery violins and groaning low end drones. Phew. Pretty intense stuff, and while you can't necessarily HEAR the 66 source tapes, these tracks do feel dense, as if you can FEEL the fact that 66 tracks were somehow cut up and crammed and layered into just 4.
Heavy, heady, trippy, noisy and psychedelic, a cool way to experience the last 11 years of Burning Star Core in just 66 minutes...
For a band that's been around for a while now, Burning Star Core has kept a pretty low profile. Plenty of vinyl only and limited cd-r releases and loads of shows, but still they've remained pretty well under the radar. That all seems about to change with the release of three, count 'em, THREE new compact discs!! The first of those three to reach our ears, The Very Heart Of The World, was recorded between 2002 and 2004 and is everything we've come to expect from these guys (or this guy, as BSC is mostly the work of one C. Spencer Yeh), a gorgeously expansive soundfield of ruptured drones, skittering scraped violin and gurgling electronics, very gritty and crunchy, but still completely dreamy and soothing. Employing the unlikely instrumentation of violin, guitar, electronics, clarinet, organ, percussion, drums, trumpet, piano and voice, BSC conjure up a weird washed out cinematic soundscape, equal parts the Dead C, Wolf Eyes, and Birchville Cat Motel, where drone is obviously the order of the day, but with brief excursions into weird dada-ist voice experiments, blissed out post rock rhythms, skronky free space-jazz, soaring and epic spectacle and even a little full on noise. Haunting and harrowing, brooding and beautiful, this sounds like a seriously Dead C'd Godspeed You Black Emperor, but a GSYBBE with less Canada and more midwest, less Fellini and more Romero, less Constellation and more RRR. Awesome!
Three new tapes this week from aQ beloved tape label The Tapeworm (out of four new releases, we'll list #4 next time, it's a doozy!), running the gamut from solo piano to opera to bedroom recorded tape experiments to this. A wild skronked out blast of Norwegian free jazz from his drum/sax duo, described by the label as "harsh free jazz" which this most certainly is, the drumming relentless and intricate and wildly chaotic, the sax bleating and squealing and spitting out insane atonal melodic runs, the two instruments sparring constantly, like dueling solos, the method to their madness surfacing here and there, but for the most part a head spinning barrage of sound, that will probably hit the spot for folks into the wildest free jazz, think Borbetomagus meets the Jooklo Duo and you'll be in the ball park.
Dizzyingly intense and wildly relentless, file under the Borbetomagus coined descriptor: 'snuff jazz'.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES.
Another glorious blast of blown out bong smoke free rock dope jams the way only these Burnt Hills cats can do it. We won't bother going into too much detail as this puppy is limited to 50 COPIES, we got a bunch, but they won't last long.�
Burnt Hills, on this particular evening in May of 2007 consisted of NINE members, seven guitars, five drummers, one bass, folks obviously swapping back and forth, and it sounds like it.�A super fluid, chaotic confluence of sound. Like some lost subterranean Crash Worship Drum jam wrapped in thick sheets of Haino-like guitar skree, everything enveloped in thick clouds of smoky FX, like some musical opium den. The bass and the guitars are thick and slippery, swooping amidst the relentless percussion, and the wild squalls of psychedelic freakout. At times it almost sounds like some DJ rocking multiple turntables, playing several different No Neck and Sunburned Hand records as the same time, a blurry, drugged out free folk tribal mash up... Awesome.�
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES. Each disc hand numbered. Full color artwork in a mini cd sized dvd-style clamshell case, inside a sticker and printed vellum insert.�
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Latest blast of skull caving psychedelia from this constantly shifting collective, on this 2 track lp shifting from 5 members to 9, from two guitarists to FOUR guitarists and two drummers, not to mention a xylophonist!!! But none of that is as important as the monstrous sounds these guys and gals conjure up, and it is MONSTROUS.
The A side is a riffy sprawl of blown out bong smoke psych sludge crush, chaotic, relentless rehearsal space drumming, churning, chugging riffage, wild tangled chaotic leads, totally burnt out (of course) and endlessly hypnotic, definitely sounds like this was a 20 minute chunk extracted from an all day, all night drug fueled orgy of psychedelic excess, which of course means FUCK YEAH, and WE WANT MORE.
All you have to do is flip it over, and voila, more. WAY more. The flipside is slower and dirgier, almost doomy, a swirly mass of garbled psych-drone freakout, crashing speaker punishing drum damage, total free for all pound and skree, like the A side, epic and endless, and no doubt part of a massive whole that had Burnt Hills' entire neighborhood, stuffing cotton in their ears and pushing furniture against the doors and windows.
This is about as heavy and druggy and noisy as improv space rock gets these days, and we LOVE it.
LIMITED TO ONLY 99 COPIES! Each one hand numbered, in cool paste on sleeves, got very few of these, so be warned.
Found a small stash of these in the back room, long gone and long out of print, we have 6 or 7 up for grabs...
We've sung the praises of Burnt Hills before. Their epic basement jams are the stuff of legend, sprawling lysergic blowouts that shift from droney and krauty to full on Japanese style psych freakouts, multiple guitarists, sometimes as many as 4 or 5, even a xylophonist (although we have a hard time picking the xylo out of the din), the recordings all start out suddenly, and end the same way, as if someone reached over midjam to push record, and then the tape just runs out, and it's not til the next day, when some hungover dude shuffles down to the basement to collect the tape. Fucking awesome. And this live set from 2007 is no different, a nearly hour long jam, the drums all lo-fi and practice space, the air filled with wailing howling guitars, scrabbling leads, gnarled riffs, long buzzing feedback drenched drones, all stretched waaaaaay waaaaaay out, the band unfurling a glorious sprawl of lysergic, blown out, in-the-red drunk and druggy psychedelic space rock bliss. RAD!
This was LIMITED TO 99 COPIES when we first got it in, each one hand numbered. Again, this is WAY out of print, so these are most definitely the last copies we'll ever get!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
In reviewing past records by this ever mutating psychedelic space rock collective, we've joked that they must be jamming 24 hours a day, never stopping, just rocking relentlessly tag team style, members playing til near exhaustion, before tagging out, grabbing some winks, a bite to eat, and then tagging right back in. Their core membership bolstered by all sorts of visiting psychedelic dignitaries, but masterminded by the tireless Jackson Wingate, who we can only imagine as some bearded wizardy type, who somehow hasn't slept ONCE in the past decade, for as long as these legendary basement jams have been going on. Hunched over a guitar, his beard nearly obscuring whatever alchemy he's working on the fretboard, while the surrounding musicians do everything they can to keep up. And here, on Non Compos Mentis, much like the handful of BH records we've reviewed before (out of TWENTY full lengths so far), the process seems similar, like someone just wandered down into the jam room, pushed record on the tape player, and just captured the jam already in progress, until the tape ran out. And like those other records, the sound of Burnt Hills continues to be loose and chaotic, noisy and blown out, heady and heavy and hypnotic, not sure if they still have a xylophone player still but we could never hear it anyway, just part of the group's glorious din, and glorious it is. Multiple guitarists, maybe multiple drummers, it almost doesn't matter, in a way, the sound is totally organic, a pulsing, pulsating, ever mutating cloud of psychedelic noise. There are definitely dynamics, and some interplay going on, but really it sounds like it's pretty much full bore, all the amps on 11, a sky full of tangled psych-shred soloing, all wound up in sheets of blurred riffage, and wild drum damage, it's almost ritualistic, an ecstatic communion of sound, the players attempting to reach some sort of musical nirvana, an ear drum shredding, knuckle busting, brain melting mindstate, attainable only through extreme psychedelia. And we're lucky enough to get a little glimpse once in a while.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! In fancy hand screened jackets. As always, these disappear super quick, and odds are, once we run out, we won't be able to get more.
Another in Noiseville's awesome new Outer Bounds Of Sound lp series (Gary Mundy's Kleistwahr is reviewed elsewhere on this list), each release hand assembled, with custom paste on artwork, each one limited to only 300 copies!
Everyone went nuts for the most recent Burnt Hills full length, Tonite We Ride, reviewed here a while back, and rightfully so, a heavy dose of druggy improvised spaced out psych rock, recorded live in the basement of their house / jampad, as is everything they release, we think, all the product of a long running weekly jam, with an ever shifting lineup, but with a pretty consistent sound. In fact, it wouldn't be all that far fetched to posit that Burnt Hills NEVER stopped jamming, holed up in that basement wreathed in bong smoke, soaked in alcohol, playing on and on and on and on, every day, on through every night, and each release we get, is just a snapshot, a snippet of sound snatched from the frenzied endless riffing and the infinitized drone-space-kraut rocking. It does sound like that, these are not songs as much as movements, and they don't start and develop like a normal piece of music, it's the recorded equivalent of walking down the stairs, pushing the door open, and finding yourself immediately immersed mid-jam, and said jam continues until the record ends, or you get up off that ratty sofa in the corner, the one under the Christmas lights, and head to the stairway, the song only REALLY ending when you get up to the kitchen and finally slam the door.
Raw and lo-fi, chaotic and free, with brief stretches of lucidity, an extended free jam, wrapped in sheets of feedback and tangled riffing, the drums mostly locked into a simple motorik rhythm, but just as often splintering into flurries of free jazz splatter, the tracks themselves, two sidelong ones, veer from locked in distorted druggy groove, to total outsider abstract freeforall, drifting more toward Sunroof! or Skullflower than Acid Mothers Temple. It's a strange brew, equal parts heady experimental noisemaking, and classic garage rock riffing, blown out dronemusic, and tripped out space rock, those two disparate sonic sides get mashed together and the result is, well... THIS. A gloriously cacophonous effects drenched, outsider, heavy riffed, acid soaked, garage kraut space rock freakout. Which obviously means that this is WAY recommended.
Cool handmade covers, pasted on front and back, and again, LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Our pal Jason's Ormolycka label is home to all sorts of warped electronic music, from Southern hip hop, to lo-fy synth pop, to total summer jam radio pop, to woozy witch house to THIS, a glorious blast of super distorted blown out, boomin' system, big beat bumping Miami Bass music, but constructed entirely from samples of Middle Eastern music!! It's so nuts, but so amazing, Middle Eastern folk music, Bollywood loops, chants and prayers and all sorts of unlikely sounds wedded to booty shaking beats, nasty rapping, female call and response vox, it's like 2 Live Crew if they did a record for Sublime Frequencies, total what the fuck GENIUS. This is most definitely what we'll be blasting next time we're driving down the coast with the top down and the bass BOOMIN'!!
Super heavy, surprisingly melodic metallic hardcore from Sweden, mixing the thrash and roar of Coalesce and Converge with the anthemic melodies of fellow countrymen the Refused. Moody and intense, heavy but totally catchy. Swirling guitar melodies and
One of the things we like to do with records (especially cd-r's) from all these new freenoise forest folk abstract tribal space whateveryoucallit folks is to list the vast array of instruments utilized in the making of their records. Sometimes it's an impossible long list of everything and the kitchen sink and we have to wonder why it took a bathtub and an umbrella and an electric toothbrush and 17 different kinds of guitars and at least a few things like a boot or a lamp that don't really make any useful noise at all to make a soft barely audible drone. Or we marvel at how the heck a spatula and six pairs of unwashed socks could produce one of the most gorgeous ambient records ever (we just made that up so don't get all excited). One instrument though that we rarely see is the trumpet. We're sure someone has used a trumpet at one time or another, but probably never to as great affect as Stuart Busby, who some of you might remember from the Gold Leaf Branches compilation we reviewed a while back. This latest release from Mr. Busby is a double 3" cd-r and features two twenty minute suites for trumpet, the equally underutilized glockenspiel, ukulele (ditto!) and voice.
Disc one, North, is the softer and more abstract of the two, warm woozy streaks of muted tonal color, like staring at the sky moments after the sun sets, everything blue and purple, stars barely visible through the soft haze of the dusky not yet night sky. The trumpet is transformed into something entirely un-trumpet like, a soft billowy bed of drone and drift above which the glockenspiel tinkles soft serene melodies.
Disc two, South, is much more active, the trumpet becoming the focal point, warm weary melodies are repeated and layered into dense but still airy washes of sound, sometimes sounding almost Western, like some long lost super abstract Morricone score, other times sounding ominous and haunting, like the music that would accompany a character's flashback in a grainy black and white film from the fifties. So gorgeous.
Packaged in a cool mini-gatefold designed by Mr. Busby himself.
We had never been that interested in the music of John Butcher, an accomplished improviser and saxophonist, a master of skronk and squeal, whose electronically treated sax is capable of whipping up a serious sonic storm, and who has played with a ton of other incredible musicians, Derek Bailey, Phil Durrant, Eddie Prevost, etc. Not sure why, but for whatever reason, lots of the Butcher stuff we've heard just didn't do it for us. But doing a bit of research after getting this tape in the mail, we're thinking maybe we just weren't hearing the right stuff, seeing as Butcher is much more than your run of the mill avant improv jazz guy, treating his saxes, processing them into strange buzzing drones, and haunted layered pulses, exploring space and timbre, recording in caverns and caves, metal containers and abandoned railway stations and we should know by now that UK cassette label The Tapeworm would not lead us astray.
Two side long live improvisations, the first a three part epic for tenor and soprano saxophones, that takes the sound of the saxes and adds all sorts of grit and buzz and crackle, it almost sounds like an old crackly record of a sax solo being played in a big empty hall, multiple saxes are layered and the overtones throb and undulate, the sounds crumbling and moaning, ringing out, wreathed in a super spacious natural reverb, totally mesmerizingly intense and beautiful. It does get a bit more traditionally jazzy part way through, but even then, the sound shifts from blown out drone, to wild chaotic skronk, to spaced out fluttery dreaminess, to incredibly high pitched symphonies of tangled whistle, that at times almost sounds like guitar feedback. Intense!
And speaking of feedback, the flipside is in fact a sprawling 20 minute piece for 'saxophone controlled feedback' and piano, and consists of deep swirling tones, lustrous fields of muted shimmer, the piano not so much being played as offering up sympathetic vibrations, the whole thing delicate and crystalline, long stretches of hushed distant keening, slipping into warm bell like swells, deep low end rumbles, all laid atop one another, creating a sort of ethereal sonic field of abstract melody, until finally (or perhaps for the first time audibly) the piano enters, offering up isolated plinks, allowed to ring out, as the feedback swirls around each note sympathetically, creating something truly mysterious and otherworldly. So nice.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
Phil Durrant's "live electronic manipulation and modular feedback" explode alongside the skronk sax of John Butcher.
We're a sucker for folks who make their own instruments, for musicians who customize machines and noisemakers, who use instruments in exactly the way they were never meant to be used, extra turntable arms on a record player, loudspeakers made from car radiators, all sorts of stuff used for percussion, guitars made from steel strings and tin cans, vacuum cleaners, dental tools, if it sounds good, we're all for it.
Amongst those instrument builders and sonic experimentalists, we're partial to those who gravitate toward the discarded, toward junk, old broken records, busted up guitars, malfunctioning electronics, tape players with dying batteries, one string guitars, NO string guitars, so we were pretty sure that this Nick Butcher guy would be right up our alley.
He only uses broken and found things to make sounds, not even instruments necessarily, old busted up keyboards, crappy tape players, old guitars missing strings, and coolest of all, cassette tapes that have been taken apart, cut up, looped, reassembled and played again on said crappy tape players. He also does a sort of primitive real time multitracking, playing one tape and recording it on another, making a loop, then re-records those to make another loop and so on, and so on, using the various loops, room sound, broken instruments and whatever else, to create gorgeous haunting mysterious soundscapes.
These 4 tracks were recorded live, in a big room, you can tell from the echo, the footsteps, the bits of shuffling, every little creak or scrape, magnified and wreathed in natural reverb, but even knowing what we know about the process, just listening, it's hard to imagine how he makes these sounds. Dark minimal gorgeous drone-y drifts, hushed and melodic, like Basinski or something, looped, but subtly so, the tones overlapping into subtle harmonies, the sound of the room and much of a presence as the music itself, gauzy and hazy and so so divine. The second track begins similarly, but almost sounds like some sort of modern microdub, Pole or something, the loop stuttering and allowing small bits of empty space in sort of like anti-beats, a softly propulsive ultra minimal minor key krautdrone, like the hushed shadowy, whispery side of a group like Expo 70, except made with busted tapes and broken tape recorders!
The third track is the first with guitar, a couple strums a few plucks, it seems like maybe he was recording them, cuz fragments of those first guitar scrabbles return in fuzzy, fractured loop form, and again are assembled into a warm woozy series of soft swells, that are eventually overwhelmed by another soft loop, this one swirly and softly psychedelic, finishing off with a brief bit of, yep, warm, weary, dreamy, softly looped washed out drone-y ambient bliss. So so so so so nice.
In Tzadik's "Lunatic Fringe" series, hybrid instrument creator and composer Ken Butler! Strangely klezmery. (Mr. Butler was featured in the Gravikords... unusual invented instruments book and cd.)
We're willing to bet that Kurt Buttkrieg is the only musician you can think of that calls Malta home. This is gorgeous otherworldly musiqe concrete. Far away drones, swoops of modulated electronics, keening feedback and speaker rattling low end
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Olaf Bender - founder of the Rastermusic label and member of Signal - provides us with Volume 5 of the 20 to 2000 series. As this series has been progressing, one gets the impression that each artist (or the curator of the series) is attempting to link these bursts of minimalist electronica into a cogent whole pieced together of disparate fragments. From the rhythmic shards of Ilpo Vaisainen & Komet violated by Ryoji Ikeda's blistering sine waves, the series took a pleasant shift into the minimalism of Coh and now Byetone, who has expanded the spaces of silence to wrap around warm hypnotic pulses which erraticly appear.
It's been a while since Pan Sonic released anything new, with four years passing since their 2004 4cd boxset of crunched post-techno and electro-shock minimalism. And it's actually been even longer since we've heard anything from Raster-Noton's Byetone. That said, we didn't recall Byetone sounding so much like Pan Sonic. With the lack of Pan Sonic releases anywhere in sight, a Pan Sonic clone is as good as the real thing at this point. On Death Of A Typographer, Byetone lays down plenty of low-slung breakbeats for his caustic hiss of electricity coaxed into arpeggiated melodies (think Coh, also from the Raster-Noton camp) and disciplined basslines (again think Pan Sonic). All of the digital clicks, distortions, abrasions, and pixel-points which comprise the Raster-Noton glitch aesthetic are present, but Byetone (aka Olaf Bender) does not seem to force any of these tracks into one of the conceptual frameworks which may have hamstrung some of Alva Noto's concept-then-execution albums. As a result, Death Of A Typographer is an immediately compelling electronica record, and who the hell cares that it sounds so much like Pan Sonic?
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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It doesn't happen very often, but occasionally, TWO aQ staffers accidentally review the same record, and usually, we try to just cram them together into one (sort of) cohesive single review, but this time we figured, screw it, here's two different aQ-er's takes on the latest from Byetone, a record we liked so much we reviewed it twice! See if you can guess who wrote which!!
Review one:
It's weird to say, but it seems like the most compellingly funky electronic music is coming from a camp that pretty much perfected the ultimate cold clinical electronic sound. Raster-Noton for years has been home to icy cold collections of bleep and click, him and hiss, taking music and seemingly reducing it to it's most elemental form, and arranging it into machine like rhythms. Don't get us wrong, we LOVE that stuff, and hearing pristine arrangements of ultra low, rib cage rattling lows, and dog whistle highs, rhythms created from clipped static and 1 bit bursts, total mad scientist genius. But all along, it seemed like something lurked just below the surface. A funkiness that the artists seemed to be combating, as if the whole thing was an elaborate sonic ploy to keep the funk at bay. And then suddenly, one of the brave ones, decided to let a little of the funk seep into his audio experiments, and it was good. Too good. Too good to not let more in. And soon, it was too late, and then against all odds, and in an ironic twist of sonic fate, people like Alva Noto were crafting some of THEE funkiest sounds we'd ever heard, all assembled from the same elements, beeps and clicks, 1 bit bursts and sine waves, culminating in the recently reviewed Univrs record.
But then along comes Byetone, not to be outdone, takes those same elements, and decides to not just let the funk seep into his sounds, but to go all out, and craft lush expansive soundscapes, epic and cinematic, proving that those same ingredients could be twisted up into all new shapes, which brings us to Symeta, a gorgeously lush collection of electronica, that slips easily from super clinical click and buzz, to warm lush chordal swells, often in the same song, the various elements arranged into killer grooves and funky beats, with some of the tracks sounding almost Pop Ambient, that lush and lovely, while others stayed more clinical, and still others found a middle ground, which strangely enough sounds like a weird take on the whole Goblin/Carpenter sci-fi future-retro synthscape thing, but somehow cooler, and more -actually- sci-fi sounding, and more hauntingly futuristic, with Byetone coaxing some seriously gristly buzz and tripped out psychedelia from his strange sonic laboratory.
Awesome!
Review two:
Olaf Bender's Byetone project is hardly prolific, but he has proven to be strongly consistent in his clinical electronica, which nudges the signature Raster-Noton sound of glitch 'n' tone on a trajectory that might not be all that averse to the dancefloor. Symeta comes three years after the much acclaimed Death Of A Typographer; and like that earlier record, this one also owes quite a bit to the formative work of Pan Sonic and Mika Vainio's solo album Metri. The hypnotic, adrenaline-pulsed piece of minimalist techno on "Opal" is right out of the Vainio playbook, slowly ramping a militant drum-roll from Bender's drum machine out of a throbbing basspulse radiating ominous hisses and x-ray frequencies. "Helix" and "Black Peace" nod toward the latter Pan Sonic works of gnarled, distorted electronica through an excellent track of grimy blocks of electronic riffage, caustic blasts of noise, and dubstepping electro backbeats, in the construction of some exceptional, high-pressure chamber electronica. Lest you think that it's all Vainio all the time, the first three blips from the album opening "Topas" are devilishly close to the robotic sequencing that Kraftwerk used to build their onomatopoeic "Boing Boom Tschak." Another great record from Raster-Noton.
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Third (but first we've had) in a new series of ULTRA LIMITED hand made drone / ambient cd-r's (we'll try to list the other two soon) from this new boutique label specializing in short form 3" cd-r's of dark drone drenched ambience.
This disc, Easter Invocation, features guitar, theremin (courtesy of Kris Thompson of The Lothars), and processed cello, all stretched and twisted, tangled and warped into a single 21 minute soundscape of gauzy creep and haunting shimmer. Simple, heavily reverbed martial percussion, muted and murky, more of a pulse or a throb than a pound, underpinning a landscape of distant low-end swells, slow building waves of creak and moan, soft swirls of hiss and fuzz, languorous stretches of slow motion rumble. Dreamy but also quite dark and ominous.
ULTRA LIMITED and painstakingly hand assembled. Tiny 3" black fold over sleeves, with a glossy full color image affixed to the front, sealed at the bottom with two rivets, tied with a ribbon, with a little circular badge. Inside the disc nestles between two sheets of gorgeously textured paper, hand printed and so lovely.
VERY RECOMMENDED!
I've not heard much from C-Schulz in a long time, recalling his name popping up a bunch about ten years ago along side hyper-prolific sound artists like Asmus Teitchens. At the time, it seemed that C-Schulz released a bunch of records that nobody cared about and then vanished. With the release of this album, I might have missed out on something pretty spectacular. His collaboration with fellow Cologne resident Hajsch is more of a history lesson into what the 'sound of Cologne' was long before the forest-disco of Wolfgang Voigt or the disjointed electronica pop of Mouse of Mars. C-Schulz & Hajsch's interest lies in a mesmerizing analysis of sound, discovering the mysteries that lie dormant in a textural field recording or a melancholic drone from a Harmonium. This is a beautiful album that certainly fits alongside the esoteric dronology of Andrew Chalk, Zoviet France, and even Fennesz. Oh yeah, this was released on Mouse On Mars' label.
Here's a 'what the fuck?' tape for you to sink your teeth into. Bernard C. was part of a French DIY avant-garde community which loosely banded together under the flag of Illusion Production beginning in 1979. The surrealistically charged ensemble DDAA was probably the best known entity that came out of Illusion Production. Stylistically, DDAA came across somewhere between Nurse With Wound's autodidacticism, Franco Battiato's concrete-songwriting, and Alain Neffe's idiosyncratic vision across all of his Insane Music projects; and Bernard C. is not all that far removed from that aesthetic synthesis.
Lieu Magique was Bernard's only full album, getting pressed up in 1985, sporting a broad catalogue of aesthetic frameworks all of which are typically sparse, held together by minimal electronic rhythms and loosely clattering tribal percussion that bend more towards a free-jazz mode than the ritual-industrial sound that was commonplace in the underground at the time. The vocals, often whispered or situated low in the mix, seem to harken from the sound-poetry of Dada and some of the tamer variations of the Aktionists. It's an eclectic mix for sure, but one that held nicely by the claustrophobic atmosphere and primitive use of effects / electronics. On this Sanity Muffin reissue of Lieu Magique, one of Bernard C.'s other rare recordings - the Socialist Realism single from 1981 - is tossed in at the end as bonus tracks. Limited to 100 copies!!!
Drone Records has a pretty good track record introducing unknown artists in their ongoing series of 7" singles that sonically embody the label's name. C.D. is the work of Christian Dergarabedian, who had spent some time working with the conceptually invigorating omni-Dada rock ensemble Reynols when he lived in Buenos Aires. Now residing in Barcelona, Dergarabendian reflects the drone facets of Reynols with six interwoven tracks of lovely distorto-feedback waves that decompose into irridescent digital twitches. The noisier stuff by Drone Records hosts Troum is clearly a reference. A very nice entry from the ever exceptional Drone Records series. Limited to 300 copies, with the first editions pressed on red vinyl. We have VERY FEW of these! Don't dawdle.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
C.O.C.aspar is a Geman conceptual / sound artist who seems to have been quietly making interesting and puzzling work over the past three decades. "Grand Mal 2" is based around a series of live-recordings made inside a partially submerged fuel tank left over from the German occupation of a Norwegian harbor. C.O.C.aspar treats the metallic clangs and deep resonant vibrations with an excess of flanging electronics to sound like some fictional remix project between Leif Elggren and Maeror Tri.
We've been diggin' some killer late '70s, early '80s French punk rock lately, or "paink" as the as the recent compilation of that name has it, discovering some new obscure faves from the scene we hadn't known of before, bands to file alongside Soggy and Metal Urbain in the realm of Stooges-y, snotty, sometimes synth-laced underground French-speaking rawk from the new wave era. Here's a good example, reissued for the first time on cd (and also on vinyl too, backordered at the moment - but the the cd has 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks anyway).
C.O.M.A., aka Clinik Organik Musak Anatomik (great name, whatever it means exactly!), originally unleashed this way weird and super rare full-length, their only album, in 1979. It's some intense & experimental, minimal wave synth punk, manifested with shamboblic precision, their odd "musak" loaded with blurting synthesizer, noisy guitar, mechanical drumbeats, distorted disembodied vocals (often a gravelly croak), and electronic FX galore. Some tracks are more abstract, like the soundscapey segue of "Consequences", consisting of about 50 percent feedback, while others, like "Demain", are more groove-oriented, dark and dancey new wave numbers, still loaded with synth strangeness, to which we can totally imagine stylish French punks doing some kind of robo-pogo.
Yup, it's a diverse disc, wherein a moody, sparse piano piece like "Coma" could be followed by the hard-charging mechano-aggro beatdown of "Assaut", complete with wiggly wild guitar/synth solo.
The sporadic mad scientist's laboratory bleep bloop of "La Valse A Mutant" kinda has a Francophone "Hardcore Devo" vibe, and definitely Devo were an inspiration on this groop, along with the likes of Kraftwerk, Wire, and The Residents. Think Devo meets Metal Urbain, you're on the right track. Great stuff. C.O.M.A. didn't appear on that Paink comp, we don't know why, they shoulda been, though maybe just a bit weirder than the others. Fans of stuff on Medical and Dark Entries ought to check it out...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
C41 is a collaboration between Joe Banks (Disinformation), Ashley Davies (Project D.A.R.K.) and John Everall (Sentrax Records). Based on N.J. McCamley's psycho-history "Secret Underground Cities," C41's first album reflects the "X-Files" claustrophobia of abandoned missile silos, subterranean research labortories, and forgotten labyrinthian warehouses filled with out-of-date weapons systems. It's a bleak album with distant metallic clangs, static electricity bursts, and shattered glass.
Members of German avant-jazz outfit Bretzel Killing Machine take their interest in horror films/music a step further by forming this two-man experimental BLACK METAL band! Yes, B.K.M. leader (and solo electronics artist) Bjoern Eichstaedt has finally delivered his his long-promised (threatened?) Caacrinolas project. Keyboardist/vocalist Bjoern, together with guitarist/bassist
It's definitely something for fans of Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Abruptum, Nokturnal Mortum, Potentiam, and similar avant-ambient-black-metal trips. Excellent! We look forward to their next recording, which we're told is already underway, entitled "Satan et les légions fantastiques tourmentant le Crucifié"...
It's been over FIVE years since we last heard from German duo Caacrinolas and their strange brand of constantly changing black metal weirdness. The two were fixtures in the avant garde jazz / experimental electronic German underground, fronting the group�Bretzel Killing Machine, but the two became fixated on black metal, and horror movies and decided to do something about it. Their debut,�A Thousand Cries Has The Night, was a brief black assault, with buzzing riffage, sweeping black ambience, and some of the most intense wailing vocals we'd ever heard. We compared the music on the disc to groups like�Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Abruptum, Nokturnal Mortum, Potentiam, bands who took black metal and shaped it into something more unique, and often more disturbing. The duo returned soon after, with a second salvo, the ominously titled�Valley of the Dead, another lengthy single track, but the black buzz was pulled back to reveal a haunting Goblinesque soundworld of lugubrious dark crawls, and Bohren like blackjazz slowcore. Granted, the record was like a haunted house, with creeps and starts lurking around every corner, but the focus was a long droning black drift (btw, both of those were SUPER limited so don't try to order 'em...)
Now here we are 5 years later (although most of this was recorded in 2003 and '04), and Caacrinolas take up just where they left off, creating a gorgeous epic creepscape of drifting pointillist pianos, long drawn out minor key chords, whispery ghost like voices, dark cavernous drones, and streaks of fuzzed out ambience, all smeared into ominous, yet strangely lovely stretches of cinematic tension. Hard not to hear Bohren, and again Goblin, but also Stars Of The Lid, and even bits of Tim Hecker, Aidan Baker, and other subtle sound sculptors... Most AQ drone-heads are already in love with this kind of sound and it only takes a minute or two before those folks are ready to close their eyes and drift off... but not so fast....
About halfway through the opening track, some keening distorted high end guitar, begins to repeat, over and over, like some lonely distant minor key siren, until they're joined by some downtuned low slung slow motion riffage, that buzzes and crawls, over a warm warbly bed of synths... it never explodes into black action though, instead, it slowly twists and turns, the various layers of keyboard and synthesizer, getting all tangled up and drifting darkly above a swirling sea of subtle black drone.
The second track follows a similar pattern, a slow building horror movie ambient epic. Keyboards drone and shimmer, muted melodies drift right beneath the surface, bits of percussion pepper the Niblockian blur, the tension builds, the production crackles and hisses, a strange textured underlayer to the near static drone, until a mournful strummed guitar surfaces, and the track transforms into some strange lonely lament, drifting, drifting, drifting, until the band suddenly launches into full on rock mode, crunchy riffage, eighties synths, simple propulsive drumming, and the band is squarely in Goblin (or Zombi) territory, weaving a tense soundscape, dramatic and a little over the top, eventually, becoming -slightly- black metal with some super brittle high end insectoid buzz and some blasting double kick buried in the mix, like a black metal Goblin scoring one of those scenes where the terrified girl in her nightgown is running through the midnight forest, being chased by a mysterious maniac. Eventually, the band settles back down into a haunting slithering creep, but now with mysterious female voices mumbled beneath the buzzing synth, the sizzling cymbal swells, the spidery sad guitar melodies, and the slow motion downtuned riffing, until it all fades to black. Awesome!
Like the other discs, this one is also limited to only 100 copies, so we're not sure how long we'll be able to keep these in stock. If people freak out over this one the way they did over the first two, probably not long. But UNLIKE the other ones, which were packaged in slimline jewel cases, 3 is super elaborate, housed in a gold metallic hinged box (like those old Chain Reaction releases), with the artwork silkscreened directly onto the metal, the cd affixed to a metallic nub on the inside, and a printed black on black insert with all the liner notes tucked inside.
Latest analog onslaught from this Midwestern duo who add a distinctly kitchen sink aesthetic to their brand of guitar/synth/effects soundscapery. After a brief bit of simulated field recording, cricket like electronic chitter and deep low end thrum, the record slips right into a swirling soft cacophony of warm whirring tones, wild electronics careening every which way, fragmented rhythms, clatter and crunch and bloop and bleep, spidery guitar melodies, on the surface it's a big old swirling mess, but there does seem to be a method to their madness as the various and disparate sounds seem to coalesce into something that does in fact have design, and ends up somehow listenable and not a little bit dreamy. The record continues on, shifting into something a bit more blissed out, a hazy smoldery shimmer peppered with tinkling chiming melodies, and a blurred gauzy drift, before finishing off the side with a weird bit of cartoony sonic chaos.
The B side begins with what sound like it could have been a prime slab of heroin house or minimal dub, but here it's gone totally haywire, all robotic glitch and sputter, everything reverby and echoey, clicks and pulses swooping to and fro, simultaneously dizzyingly disorienting and mesmerizingly hypnotic. The rest of the side plays out as a hazy, druggy, blurred soft psych drift, everything woozy and washed out, before finishing off with another brief bit of twisted electronic faux field recording.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Already sold out from the label, these could very well be the last copies we're able to get�
Includes a download coupon as well.
Caboladies specialize in ecstatic electrical jams that have been making the rounds of the various psychedelic-post-noise-zonked tape and cd-r labels (Arbor, Gneiss, Peasant Magik, Digitalis, etc.). And at one time, these two Kentucky ex-pats (now living in Chicago) shared a tape release with Oneohtrix Point Never. They've always been a bit loopier and more shambolic than Oneohtrix, elevating their work to the druggiest plateau of spiralling bloop and eyes-dilated sparkle that you might expect from an Astral Social Club reworking of J.D. Emmanuel. Many of those tape and cd-r releases had disappeared from physical distribution, although some less than stunning sounding mp3s are making their way around the blogosphere. So, it's really great to hear Caboladies on wax, which is certainly the best medium for these celestial crystallizations blossoming from piles of analogue gear. Taken separately, each piece of electronic gear is dialed to a twitchy spasmodic set of bleeps and swoops, that would be ungainly had Caboladies not playfully situated five, six, eight, ten complementary sets of tones that smear together into an ambient shimmer that's anything but static. These irregular vibrations and delirious patterns are alive with psychedelic energy, that you could almost see fitting into some freak-folk nature jam session... but then again, everything needs to be plugged rather heavily into the grid. Great stuff!
Missed out on this the first time around, but the label pressed up a second batch, just as small as the first so don't dawdle...
Caboladies are a duo from Chicago, who traffic in the same sort of rhythmic lysergic antipop as the current crop of hyped lo-fi 4-trackers. Heaping on layers and layers of woozy warble, and stumbly clatter, warped guitar FX, super lo-fi but weirdly lush as well. Reminds us a bit of James Ferraro and his 'hypnogogic pop' but a bit more spaced out, louder and druggier like it could have been played live by a proper band instead of assembled by dudes sitting on the floor in front of their gear. Trippy and dreamy and washed out and just the sort of thing we've been digging like crazy lately. And definitely a good match for...
Oneohtrix Point Never, aka Daniel Lapotin, whose presence on this tape will no doubt ensure that these are gone in a flash. But that sort of obsession is well deserved, we definitely find ourselves a little bit Oneohtrix obsessed these days, and Lapotin's contribution to this split certainly does nothing to dull that obsession. A hazy, spacey retro-future sprawl of Tangerine Dream synths, ominous John Carpenter like eighties soundtrackery, a little Goblin, beginning with a Technicolor explosion of prismatic synths, only to give way to something much more creepy and subterranean, slithery and somber, only to shift gears again into a blissed out 8-bit drift, like the interlude music from some lost Commodore 64 game, albeit layered into a strangely symphonic bit of lo-fi melancholia.
Gorgeous as always. And crazy limited, we got a bunch of these, but odds are these will indeed be the last copies we can get our hands on, so snag one quick!
We've been working backwards in the Roberto Cacciapaglia catalog. We started with the eccentric pop of The Ann Steel Record from 1979, then a few lists back moved on to his minimalist systems composed piece, Sei Note In Logica. We'd planned on reviewing his first record, 1975's Sonanze, when Wah Wah originally reissued it, but are glad we waited for this Mupymup version which contains a bonus disc of 15 extra pieces from the period which really detail the beautiful range of this experimental classical composer with both Italian prog and Krautrock ties, and this will most definitely appeal to fans of either genre.
Sonanze is perhaps the most classical leaning release of the bunch, but it definitely has a deep kosmiche feel. Its 10 movements begin with cascading gongs filtered through tape loops against an airy atmosphere of piano runs. Chamber string dramatics lay out the definitive feel of the entire piece of plaintive horns and kettle drums before getting full on cosmic in the Second Movement with pulsating synths and deep phased chanting leading to a percolating soundscape of jaw harp vibrations and swelling strings. The third movement brings in Lubomyr Melnyk-style piano cascades, while the fourth movement introduces a disembodied angelic choir, reminding us of Ligetti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 5th movement brings in Peter Michael Hamel-style organ arpeggiations devolving into bowed gong scrapes. The 6th movement is very Michael Rother like, with cloudy gliding guitar and on and on it goes, a different feel or instrument in each changing movement, but somehow tied into a deeply introspective and gorgeous whole. Mixed by legendary krautrock producer Rolf-Kaiser Ulrich (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel), Sonanze is definitely our favorite of the three releases we reviewed thus far (though the Ann Steel scores major points because it's so dang out there!).
The bonus disc is also pretty killer, filled with cosmic new age compositions of Moog and piano, filled with wonderful vocal experiments (check out the proto-Grouper track, "Manuela"), gongs and some abstract soundscapes to boot. So totally recommended and these reissues don't stick around long, so get it while you can!
Ok, let's start adding 'em up. This band gets point for their name, first off. 'Cadaver In Drag' is both disturbing and humorous enough to be worth a nervous chuckle (it's even funnier if you imagine that they know something about the Swedish death metal band Cadaver that we don't know). And their knack for names extends to album and song titles too, especially that of track two, "Fuck This Place". Could be an anthem for folks sick of living in, say, Kentucky (from whence Cadaver In Drag hail). Plus, they get points for this being released on the Animal Disguise label, run by one of the guys from Mammal, whose recent album was an Aquarius Record Of The Week, last week. That certainly piques our interest. And also then there's more points for this being picked, before it was even released, as an Album Of The Month (October 2007) by pagan pope Julian Cope on his Head Heritage website, which puts 'em in league with such past heavy AQ faves as Harvey Milk, Orthodox, Om, Death Comes Along, Vincent Black Shadow, The Heads, SUNNO))), and others. As always, we recommend reading his reviews.
So, before we even heard this, Cadaver In Drag had already run up the score pretty high in their favor. And now that it's here, and blasting on our stereo, the verdict is: hella more points!! For being a totally fucked, mesmeric mash of doooomic sludge metal and shrill psychedelic noise rock... part Khanate, part Wolf Eyes (or Mammal), and, as Julian Cope sez, part Les Rallizes Denudes. Nasty, noisy, nauseous. Early on in both the first two of this disc's three tracks, some angsty, wretched screams carry on about something or other, but those are quickly forgotten as Cadaver In Drag concentrate on their plodding, powerful instrumental raison d'etre: monomaniacal repetitive riff-bashing, each track an extended, distorted, metallic, trebly throb, crashing and clanging, staying more or less the same for up to 19 minutes in the case of the first and longest cut, the aptly titled "Walking Through The Gates Of Hell". However, subtle, simple shifts in sound do occur, almost as if they're playing their own destroyed dub versions of these compositions. It's like Skullflower covering Super Roots 3 (or 5) by the Boredoms, if you can imagine that sort of sickeningly hypnotic hybrid. Or Eyehategod and Hair Police (a member of whom contributes synths here) locked in a minimal march to death, freaking out with as few chords as possible, but plenty of FX. Or Cavity vs. Harry Pussy... Yowza. And it must be said that Cadaver In Drag does mellow the fuck out for the almost melodic, calm-in-comparison album closer "Secession '61". Nice. Points for that too.
From the same mysterious Russian otherworld that brought us the blackened genius of Ithdabquth Qliphoth comes the amazingly monickered Cadaver Yelleth At Amber Tower, which as far as we can tell is one of the many side projects that IQ mainman AL-LA-ShT-ORR employs to explore some seriously twisted and esoteric sounds.
And it doesn't get much more esoteric than this. Falling somewhere between the mysterious shortwave broadcasts of the Conet Project, and the disembodied ghostly blacknoise of Prurient, Code:Algeria is a strange sonic artifact, a manufactured lost transmission from the abyss, voices from some recovered black box recorder, broadcast from some other dimension, travelling through the atmosphere, gathering strange distortions and interference as it goes, a dizzying assemblage of beeps and hiss and warm buzzing textures, the voices speaking French? Arabic? Russian? Hard to tell, distorted as they are, 3 voices, 4 voices, the cadence and interplay almost musical, interrupted by bursts of hiss and sonar like pings, by the second track, some woozy warbly organ has joined the mix, the hiss sounds more scuplted, stuttering and skittering almost rhythmically, still wound around those strange voices, and the hiss taking on an almost Sunroof! like melodiousness, but those voices, continue to haunt and perplex, is it a military exercise? Is it something more sinister? Definitely sounds like it. Whatever it is, it's fantastic, and enthralling, and like the Conet Project, transcends its parts to become melodic and musical and surprisingly listenable. For field recording freeks too, especially ones into EVP and the Ghost Orchid and the like...
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