Maybe it's a good thing that the Climax Golden Twins don't put out a lot of records. That way, when one of their damaged recordings of post-everything psychedelia marred with hallucinatory sound collages does come our way, we can savor it all the more. Along comes 5 Cents A Piece, and we couldn't be happier. Yup, this is a fucking great record. Is it their best? Maybe. But it most certainly ranks as one of the musical triumphs of 2007.
In many ways, the Twins have operated on parallel tracks to their geographical / spiritual brothers from the Sun City Girls, with the Twins mining more from the underbelly of Americana than the esoterica of South-East Asian pop. But Messrs Taylor and Millis are not without an appetite for such eccentricities, as Robert Millis continues to be an occasional contributor to the always exceptional Sublime Frequencies series. That said, the Twins are no longer a duo as they had been for so many years; here, on 5 Cents A Piece they've added the talents of percussionist Dave Abramson to their lineup. His quick turns from cosmo-rock hammerfist to free-jazz tumble down the stairs to plinkering vaudevillian backbeats make for the perfect foil to the twin guitar splatter of Taylor and Millis. As much as Abramson's presence is noticed on 5 Cents A Piece, the auditory dementia of Taylor and Millis steers the album (if it can be called 'steering,' that is). At times, they throw themselves into cacophonic skronk in a battle between finger tendon and guitar string as to which will snap first; then, they will slide easily into the ghostly folk melodies that paralleled their Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered album from 2004. Elsewhere, a blast of West Coast hesher rock erupts amidst a headspinning, subterranean echo, with the Twins giving Comets on Fire a run for their money.
Limited to 500 copies and bound to be out of print in a matter of minutes, what more do you want to know? You need this!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Climax Golden Twins specialize in the avant-garde pastiche, in which the band cuts up deep drone hypnosis, Raster-esque sinewave manipulation, and improv rock fragments. Much like the early 80s mail art projects of Bladder Flast or P16.D4.
The Climax Golden Twins have always had their hands in as many cookie jars as they could; and all of the records are true adventures in sound that could include fucked-up collages of old 78s, thudding art-rock that has earned them opening spots for Sonic Youth, blissful ambience for narcoleptic art-installations, clattering urban gamelan presentations, and plenty more. Eerie Fragrance hits all of these marks and then some, having originally been released as a cassette back in 1995. The original title to the cassette was Eyeless Formation, but has been redubbed as Eerie Fragrance for the vinyl reissue. There's also a couple of extra tracks which didn't appear on the original cassette which had appeared on compilations from around the same time period.
The album quickly revolves through a collage of improvised bursts that accelerates up to an unsettled loop of a woman possibly in the midst of a breakup repeating her pleas over a turgid thrumb of static and rumbling drone which spills out of a series of peculiar squeaks and squiggles. As such, these moments have more in common with Nurse With Wound than their geographical and spiritual neighbors in the Sun City Girls; but is certainly well within the scope of CGT's esoteric collages. Noirish loops and raucous crowd noise tumble out of the beginning of the flipside, with guitar plucks that sound more like rubber bands snapping in the distant. Artifacts of tape noise and crusty debris inhabit a set of overlapping loops topped with gnarled scrapes on the guitar. Crunches of leaves and thick industrial field recordings give way to seasick wooden creakings, laughing gulls, and bellowing foghorns. As disconnected as all of these elements appear after the fact, they all work rather effortlessly in the context of this recording. Really great!
Another brilliant, corroded, and demented facet of the Climax Golden Twins is found on the reissue of their 1996 debut full-length cd. From the release of this album, it became clear that the Sun City Girls were no longer the only game in town, when it came to fucked-up deconstructions of noise-rock propulsion with South East Asian overtones and painterly freeform improvisations. In a lot of ways, this album is a slightly more focused version of the Sun City Girls' 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, sans the Bollywood punk tunes blurted out by Alan Bishop. Yeah, it's that good!
The principle Twins (maestros Robert Millis and Jeffery Taylor) invited eight musicians to join them and producer Scott Colburn for a series of studio driven improvisations, which were in turn sculpted into this "epic masterpiece," as Colburn later quipped and to which we can certainly agree. The urban gamelan infused improvisations meander through rhythmic tinklings upon metal bells and vibraphones, which provide a queasy Martin Denny air of tropical sicknesses abundant in every buzz, rasp, and clang of the ensemble's polyphonous scatter. As much as these elements do recall the equally skittering moments of the Sun City Girls, the Climax Golden Twins growl with the best of the post-hardcore noiseniks on Blast First (e.g. Sonic Youth, Big Black, A.C. Temple, Head of David, etc.) with some volatile, Mack-truck riffage scraping across lumbering backbeats with ample amounts of amplifier mangling distortion. Fucking great, we say!
Of the three or four records that I've heard from The Climax Golden Twins, this idiosyncratic Seattle trio of sound experimentalists seem to re-invent themselves with each record, offering fractured field recordings, cannibalized ethno-rock (a la Sun City Girls), surgically creepy soundtracks (as in their 'Session 9' score), and now a sleepytime album of ambient pleasantries in "Lovely." According to the Twins, this album was recorded "sometime ago and then forgotten," only to resurface in a number of different forms, first as a sound accompaniment to some artwork at a Seattle gallery, then as a CD-R on Gravelvoice, who packaged the album with a pillow, and now with a more pragmatic package thanks to Anomalous Records. Like Robert Rich's Sleep Concerts, "Lovely" intends to lull its listeners to sleep; but fortunately, the Climax Golden Twins do not saturate their work with new age sentimentalism or factory pre-set synth sounds. While their methods are not entirely clear, it appears that the Climax Golden Twins use drone guitars, long stringed instruments, and tons of effects boxes looped back upon themselves to create a sweeping atmosphere not far from the Aeolian String Ensemble or Nurse With Wound's "Soliloquy For Lilith."
Our pals at Conspiracy Records, a label/distro based in Belgium, who in the past have brought us records by Boris, Jesu, Shora and more, are this year celebrating their 10 year anniversary. A decade of amazing music. From a bedroom based punk rock label, to one of Europe's most important and influential labels and distros, all we can say is HURRAY! And HUZZAH! It's always so exciting, when a bunch of folks get together to spread the word about great music, great WEIRD music, and survive, even thrive. Such is the case with Conspiracy. And as if that weren't already enough, just knowing that some great people were selling some amazing music, those sweeties at Conspiracy have decided to share the love with us. And you.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they've decided to do a super limited subscription series, 12 records over 12 months, each limited to somewhere between 200-500 copies, ONLY available to series subscribers. EXCEPT, they've decided to let AQ have 20 copies of each, we're the only store with copies of these subscriber only lps, and for a brief moment, we can offer them to you, our loyal AQ customers. Needless to say we are thrilled, as the series lineup reads like a who's who of AQ faves, as well as including a handful of lesser knowns. All pressed on super thick vinyl, and packaged in killer hand screened original art sleeves. But be warned, we only got 20 of each, and we will run out fast and we will not be able to get more. When we do run out, there is a chance you can still get one from Conspiracy direct, but what that means is act fast and prepare to leave empty handed.
We knew the Climax Golden Twins were a strange lot. Their records were totally unpredictable, lovely and dreamlike one moment, damaged and demented the next. This just may be the strangest one yet. Two sides, both drastically different, each side has a mysterious etching in the runoff groove, one side says "Vintage Pulchritude", the other says "Ambient Caveman", which should have been our first clue!
The first side is a woozy assemblage of sounds, seemingly drawn from old films, bits of dialogue, snippets of music, all bizarre when taken out of context and butted up against another random bit of speech or sound. But the various snippets are deftly woven into a dreamlike surreal whole, wrapped in crystalline clouds of record crackle, tape hiss, sine waves and various other random ambient influences. Really gorgeous to listen to, but truly haunting and bizarre.
The second side starts on much more familiar CGT territory, with gentle lilting folks, melancholy melodies, left to drift through soundscapes of fuzz and hiss, distant muted percussion, thumps and shuffles, a sort of abstract freak folk that sort of just hovers and drifts. But then all of a sudden, the band launches into a fully rocked out jam, that sounds more like math metal than anything. Hard to say if it was played or sampled, but it quickly dissipates into more abstract dreaminess. But they're not done fucking with us yet. The record closes with another wild jam, this time it's a old school echoey Stoogesy garage rock stomp, raw and propulsive, super distorted and ultra rocking. Cool stuff. Definitely hard to pin down, and we always seem to be knocked for a loop, but that's exactly why we love these guys so much.
Gorgeous hand screened cover and nice thick vinyl. These two will be gone before you know it...
This is a record that shouldn't be around; yet, against the odds, we have a handful of these discs in stock for the moment. The Climax Golden Twins refer to this eponymous CD as Locations although we can't find any reference to that title on the all white, embossed folding cardstock. In recent years, Robert Millis of the Twins has produced some of the finer contributions to the Sublime Frequencies series of obscure ethnomusicology, including the Phi Ta Khon DVD and the Harmika Yab Yum compilation from Tibet. And, had this 1998 collage of field recordings and shortwave radio transmissions been released in this day and age, it surely would have warranted a Sublime Frequencies release, as it fits so closely within their agenda. Yet, it remains a Climax Golden Twins production, and given CGT's radically eclectic aesthetic sensibility (Victrola 78 collages, cannibalized psychedelia, horror soundtracks, long-form dronemusik, etc.), why not call this a Climax Golden Twins record? So what we have here is an interwoven collage from unspecified locations, with some of the locales being more obvious than others. The temple gongs and bells getting banged about with jubilant indeterminance are from South-East Asia (probably being Javanese Gamelan), the deeply reverential incantations set against clouds of crickets could be from any Muslim temple in Asia, and only an etymologist could pinpoint where in the world those cicadas could be residing. Altogether, a mighty fine collage of phonography before such a term was coined.
This new release from AQ fave avant-guitarist Mr. Nels Cline sees him teamed up with his old compatriot Devin Sarno, the avant-bassist who records solo under the name Crib. An exploration in ambient, instrumental, percussion-free postrock, Buried On Bunker Hill is labeled as being part of the Ground Fault label's Series I, which supposedly means "quiet" experimental music as opposed to loud and noisy experimental music (it's a three-tiered system, with Series III being the extreme end of sheer power electronics noise, and Series II somewhere in the middle). But hey, a lot of that has to do with where you set the volume knob on your stereo! So don't get the idea that these abstract, presumably improvised guitar/bass duets are in any way tame, though they are quite pretty, and yes, sometimes quiet, at which points you'll recall for a moment that Nels is supposed to be a jazz guitarist. But then the volume swells to room-filling heights... These four tracks (totalling 55 minutes) are gorgeous, detailed drone works, soothing but active and dynamic. If this is 'experimental music', the experiment in question was undoubtedly a success. Recommended.
It's been a while since we've heard from one man, lo-fi, outsider, doomdrone, blacknoise weirdo Cloak Of Displacement, and fans of any of the other CoD cd-r's we've raved about in the past know just what to expect, which is to NOT know what the fuck to expect. This time around, it's three tracks, all dramatically different, the first hint being the instruments listed on the sleeve: guitar, knife, drums, vocals, and POWER SAW. Hell yeah.
And the first track, the epic 21 minute "Torture Beckons Me" definitely follows through on the implied promise of sonic whatthefuck. A spaced out abstract ultra doom crawl. But instead of heaving avalanches of blown out downtuned riffage, and massive pummeling beats, the reality is way more bizarre and baffling, tons of space, occasional swells of muted guitar buzz, some SUPER abstract drum thump and plonk, and some seriously SICK vokills, super skeletal and minimal and in its own way sort of hypnotic. Like a way less harsh, way more spaced out blackened Khanate maybe? The riffs pulled so far apart they're more like occasional squalls of thrum, the track nearly free of momentum or propulsion, more an ooze or drift, the vibe ritualistic and primitive and totally fucking strange.
The second song picks up the pace, but if anything gets even WEIRDER, with some muted rhythmic riffing, lots of seriously stumbling drumming, and twisted freaked out hysterical vox that make the dude from Lifelover sound like Neil Diamond. The song weaves and wobbles drunkenly, reminding us a bit of Varghkoghargasmal or a more brain damaged Hypothermia. And finally, the saw make an appearance, the brief closing track / outro, that plays like the bloop bleep of ambient Burzum, but the whole thing is wrapped in the harsh buzz of the power saw, which is presumably being used, at least judging from the song title, in the "Disposing Of The Body".
Some of you might remember Gargotheron, whose cd-r we reviewed a while back, a blurred baffling black metal horde from Arizona, whose sound was grim and raw, primitive and pummeling, spastic and hyper kinetic, octopoidal drumming, insectoid riffing, we described it as "Bone Awl meets Lightning Bolt", so what might we expect from Cloak Of Displacement, a strange ritualistic avant doom offshoot of the mighty Gargotheron? How about long expanses of processed downtuned guitar drone, gurgled distorted vocals, abstract riffage and clouds of glitch and buzz and electronic interference, brief bursts of in-the-red ultra distorted noise drenched black metal. And more fucked up weirdness. We're tempted to describe it as a black metal Faxed Head, but it's not quite so purposefully damaged, although it's plenty demented. There are stretches of almost prettiness, in the guise of sprawling low end buzz, a little Earth (circa 2), a little Khanate, a pinch of SUNNO))), but filtered though some sort of sick Abruptum like sonic ritual, in fact ritual is an apt description, as the performance was literally part of a REAL ritual, with a real live witch performing incantations and spells, at one point snipping locks of hair from the various band members while they recorded, even the packaging, sealed with wax, have been cursed, so open at your own peril!
Grim and fucked up, mysterious and abstract, definitely essential listening for ambient noise metal freeks into stuff like Abruptum, Emit and the like, but also might hit the spot for the slow and low obsessed, Khanate, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Vulture Club and other purveyors of minimal blackened filth.
Packaged in a hand stamped black envelope, sealed with wax, hand numbered, LIMITED TO ONLY 45 COPIES! We took most of those, inside a hand written missive from Cloak Of Displacement, to YOU.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We originally discovered Cloak Of Displacement, via baffling black metallers Gargotheron, whose cd-r we went a little nuts for when we had it way back when. But it didn't take long for CoD to win us over, transforming the "Bone Awl meets Lightning Bolt" sound of Gargotheron into something filthier and blacker and doomier, a downtuned crusty blackened sprawl that seemed to ooze evil. Totally not typically black metal, or even metal really, more a chaotic stumbling super distorted electronic flecked blacknoize. Needless to say, we were down with the Cloak.
So we waited patiently, for going on two years now, and finally it's here, actually, THEY're here, two new discs from the mysterious Cloak Of Displacement, both of these are ultra limited, and we mean ULTRA, as in there are ONLY 24 COPIES!!!! That's it, and of those 24, we got TWENTY of them. So you know what that means, first 20 evil bastards to jab a gnarled claw into that add to cart button, will be feasting on CoD's grim black sonic banquet(s). And yeah, you're probably gonna want both, cuz they're both way different...
Vernal is all ambient, a 43 minute black ritual, that finds the man behind CoD, teamed up with two other players, one who simply wields "magick", while the other two handle guitar, keyboard and percussion. Guitars throb and drone, low end rumbles reverberate ominously, sheets of feedback undulate, layers and tones lock into a sort of Niblockian drift, super hypnotic and intense, eventually, the drone begins to fragment, pelted by FX and various shards of buzz and hum, seemingly crumbling to pieces but always coalescing back into something heavy and hypnotic, thick throbbing pulses, over shards of high end skree, bits of abstract minimal almost doom, barely there rhythms, strange processed crunch collides with lush doomdrone riffage, bursts of distorted rrrooar, strange clunks and creeps, definitely less metal and more abstract free drone weirdness.
Way recommended for sure, and not just for weirdo metalheads, dronelords and ambient explorers will find a lot to dig here too...
Once again, these are crazy limited, and handmade, each one comes with a hand-glued sleeve (made from the very evilest of construction papers, and in various grim shades) each with a pasted on front and back cover image, burned around the edges by the flames of hell...
Another release from the newly launched KV&GR/Recs label, run by weirdo black metal one man band Cloak Of Displacement. All of the releases so far (Mavra, Edasi) criminally limited, and this one is no different. LIMITED TO JUST 20 COPIES, of which, we got ALL twenty. But judging from the last batch, these will likely be gone in a flash, so don't dawdle.
Cloak Of Displacement, a long time aQ outsider black metal fave, offers up another set of twisted low fidelity blackened what the fuck, murky warbly riffs, primitive recording, stumbling damaged drumming, and some of THEE weirdest vocals ever, slipping from goofy grunt to croaking quack, the sound itself stumbling from abstract drift, to pounding dirge and back again. Occasionally within these three tracks, the sound does explode into a sort of blast, but it's a lurching lumbering blast, on the verge of total collapse, a chaotic careening black weirdness that sort of rule. Elsewhere the sound shifts to something more abstract, a sort of spaced out doom, a demented detuned creep, all warbly chords and rehearsal space drum splatter, and those creepy alien vox. Folks who loved past CoD releases will NOT be disappointed.
The flipside is taken up by another one man band, the mysterious and oddly monikered Blood Escutcheon, whose sound is more of an ambient blacknoize, riffs stretched out into layered drones, warm and whirling one second, caustic and buzzy the next. The side opens up with some dreamlike ambient drift, that slowly builds to a blowout of Merzbowian noise, infused with fragmented riffage an strange disembodied heavily effected vocals, which leads directly into a super creepy stretch of processed vocal dronemusic, a sea of hiss and static, underneath which a super processed voice drift creepily, before the sound blossoms into some blurred blown out almost Skullflowery noise, which with headphones strapped on, reveals all manner of sonic weirdness lurking below the surface, the side ending with some cool, softly distorted industrial crunch, blurred out and smeared into something much more soft focus and ambient.
And again, we only have 20 COPIES of these, and there are in fact ONLY 20 copies, so act fast.
Includes killer cover art from Blood Escutcheon mastermind Thaniel Lee. Each copy hand numbered.
Crank this album all the way up at the beginning and slowly begin to back down the volume on this, lest you want to set off car alarms outside your building or trigger seismic sensors or just have this recording be way too fucking loud. On the first side of Creek, an ominous hum rises out of icy silence, following the path set forth on Kevin Drumm's unsettled ambient opus Imperial Distortion or even some of the Eliane Radigue constructs. These are sounds that could hail from field recordings of massive tanker ship engines or a bank of oscillators tuned to be as low as possible or the thrum of feedback from a bass guitar slumped over an amplifier. Very little happens in this arcing, darkly meditative offering; but that's exactly the point. The second side picks up exactly where the first left off, with a similarly oppressive tone exhibiting some minute ripples and variations on the theme. No idea who or what Cloaked Light happens to be, but he/she/they managed a cassette on Monorail Trespassing. And that always causes us to perk our ears up a bit. Limited to 125 copies.
Those guys in the Starving Weirdos have been kicking our asses with one amazing release after another. And as if that weren't enough, now they've started signing other like minded noisemakers to their Atheists Are Gods label.
The first release comes from Cloaks, aka Spencer Doran, who for his first readily available domestic full length release, offers up two gorgeous lengthy pieces, one for piano, tapes, zither and bells, the other for electric guitar and piano with harmonium and electronics. The result is lush and spellbinding. The closest comparison that even begins to come close is Lubomyr Melnyk, with his dense flurries of notes, creating dizzyingly intricate swirls of melodic fragments that while ultra complex are so intricate they seem to melt into long dreamlike drifts.
Such is the case with Cloaks. And then some. The opening track begins with a strange jumble of chaotic percussion, weird boings, effects drenched squiggles, sounding like something that could be a bit goofy for our liking, but after a burst of record crackle and needle on vinyl static, the track settles into a gorgeously sun baked, glistening shimmer, a fine mist of notes enveloping the listener like a warm fog, multiple abstract melodies drifting into one another becoming gloriously intertwined, hovering ghostlike over soft drifts of smeared piano in the background. It almost sounds like Oval's Diskont, but with soft shimmery piano instead of skipping cds. Fluid and organic, softly swelling, so many notes... you know how you can sort of blur your eyes and make everything look all fuzzy, well imagine you could blur your EARS, it's like listening to Reich or Riley or Palestine with blurred ears. Soft focus and indistinct, every once in a while bits of melody coming into view but quickly fading into the sounds around it. So pretty. One of those rare tracks that we wish went on forever and ever...
The second track is a subtly different beast but with a similar vibe. Beginning with spare spidery electric guitar, suspended in a wide open expanse of near silence, a sort of skeletal post rock, which quickly slips under a gradually building wave of dense Wave-Lox like piano. Thick roiling low end squalls of reverberating rumble and rich overtones, very lush and intense. Near the final few minutes little bits of electronic glitch and grrr begin to surface, slowly wrapping themselves around the piano flurries, eventually surrounding it completely, becoming a dense buzzing electronic drone with almost no trace of the piano remaining...
Packaged in super striking silkscreened digipaks with pasted on textured paper, full color art, and with a hand screened insert.
It's been a while since we've heard from the Cloaks, aka Spencer Doran. But the first Cloaks cd, A Crystal Skull In Peru, is still a steady seller, and for good reason. Two tracks of piano, electronics, guitar, zither and bells, all woven into lush dreamlike soundscapes. The Starving Weirdos released that first one on their label, which made a lot of sense, as they two seems to share a distinct aesthetic, but with the SWs taking the darker path, while Cloaks path was dappled with sunlight, and would around grassy knolls and windswept vistas.
We're pleased to report, that on this latest release, another two tracker, Doran and his Cloaks haven't altered the formula too much. Another couple of fuzzy, gauzy, washed out dronescapes, the first rich with flurries of muted piano, and processed guitars, the emphasis on the piano, which, much like the first disc, reminds us of continuous music guru and master pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, albeit less frenzied. Instead, the clouds of notes emerge from the piano and drift like motes of dust, swirling in the slightest breeze, surrounded by bits of glitch, and crumbling effects, backwards melodies, soft swaths of buzz and whirring shimmer, delicate and crystalline, but so warm and rich and soporific, 35 minutes of dense, swirling soft focus bliss, utterly mesmerizing and hypnotic, yet another one of those tracks that should go on forever and ever.
The second track is much more brief, and acts more as a sort of addendum. A dark, languorous avant Appalachia, dark notes tumbling from the guitar, soft swirls of steel string shimmer, the subtle buzz of deftly fingerpicked melodies, minor key and melancholy, hovering over a backdrop of watercolored whirs, a near static drone beneath the gorgeous little tangles of guitar, laced with spare, spacious piano melodies, a gorgeous late afternoon drift, that near the end, builds to a swirling, densely layered, subtly kinetic coda. So nice.
Packaged in a beautiful full color sleeve, hand stamped and numbered cd-r's, photocopied inserts, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES...
It's been almost 5 years since we last heard from Dead Reptile Shrine black ambient offshoot Cloama, the two records featuring Cloama alongside another mysterious entity called Blutleuchte (or perhaps that was just some sort of affectation, and not actually another person/group?) being big favorites with the drone obsessed aQ-ers, the sound on those records weirdly ritualistic and industrial, expansive blackened soundscapes, minimal yet strangely and hauntingly lush. So what has changed since 2008?
A lot actually. In fact, right out of the gate, Cloama unfurl not some dark lugubrious rumble, but instead, a soaring sort of almost shoegazey swirl, a coruscating crumbling distorted droned out shimmer, over which a vocalist howls abjectly, buried in the mix, while all around, sounds chime and buzz, the whole thing laced with subtle melodic flourishes, and lush textural shifts, it's a heady bit of psychedelic ur-drone soft noise, that leads directly into a sound much more Cloama-like, a grinding crumbling bit of low end, wreathed in thick streaks of feedback, sprawling and oozing in another near static buzz drenched blur, underpinning more bellowed vox, the sound of Cloama seeming to have shifted closer to the power electronics / blackened industrial axis that the black ambience that used to define their sound. Drums surface sporadically, or perhaps it's just bits of percussion, crunch and clatter, a weirdly hypnotic, droned out stretch of crumbling rumbling mesmer, which is how the rest of the record plays out, a series of industrial dronescapes, that sound like Wolf Eyes crossed with Whitehouse, the song shifting occasionally into something much more restrained, the sounds muted and washed out, the various bits of percussion locked into a stumbling abstract rhythm, while elsewhere, the sound blossoms into a sort of late period Skullflower psychedelic noise freakout, Merzbowic in intensity, but more textural and densely layered, rendering even the most caustic sounds weirdly mesmerizing and hypnotic. Another deep listening record that reveals a whole other microscopic sonic world lurking just below the roiling blown out surface.
Fans of the old Cloama discs might find this too abrasive, but anyone into dense psychedelic noise and experimental blackened soundscapery will definitely dig, although it definitely requires an appreciation of noise. And the last song is a creepy surprise, a choir of female voices harmonizing over streaks of low end buzz and pipe fight clang and clatter, peppered with little bursts of grinding distorted guitar crumble, and booming distant percussion, epic and haunting and strangely cinematic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
By now, most readers of the AQ list should be quite familiar with our unfettered love for Finnish outsider black metal horde Dead Reptile Shrine (who have a new double cd coming out soon on Andee's tUMULt label!), a band whose sound, while ostensibly black metal, seems to be more damaged folk, black ambient, and demented metallic psychedelia. Which is precisely why we're so obsessed with them.�
So when we discovered that there was a related band, featuring member(s) of DRS, we were definitely intrigued, and we did manage to get a couple releases, but never more than one or two copies. So here we have the very first proper release from Cloama +�Blutleuchte, not sure if that's the name of the band, or if this is indeed a collaboration between Cloama and�Blutleuchte, but what we do know is it's very dark and very strange, and really goddamn amazing.�
The music of Cloama +�Blutleuchte is some haunting mysterious primal drone ritual, equal parts shimmering dark ambience, the low end rhythmic explorations of fellow countrymen Tiermes, jumbled Dada-ist soundscaping and damaged and disembodied free folk drift, it's scary and mysterious, but weirdly subdued and lovely as well.�
The cover is black and white, adorned with spiders, and a gorgeous crest, the title and credits in a handwritten scrawl, the song titles are strange hinting at the mysteries within: "Archean Quartzite Hammer", "Arcjaic Waters Enshrine The Seer", "Lord Of The Equinoctical Fountain", the book is peppered with mysterious diagrams and illustrations, photos and drawings, lyrics and this haunting passage: "That glimpse of left eye is distorting my right eye. Sparce [sic] exhaustive dimension, misguided enrichment. Usually sharp model at the lower right. The line of sight operates the automatic systems positions. Those shattered lights, occupational dysfunction. Characterized by sight cycling and shifting. Curvatory illusion is dependent on a adjacent edge. Eyeless. A contempt of legislative compulsion." Woah. But strangely enough, that's sort of what the music sounds like. Perplexing and confusional, with some damaged internal logic, that almost has you convinced that this is what sound is -meant- to sound like. That these are not songs, but messages, missives from the past, or the future, or the beyond, in musical code, hiding secrets as old as the earth, as the universe.�
Long drawn out stretches of cavernous rumble, the distant whir of machinery, voices wrapped in reverb, drifting amidst black swells, creepy melodies muted and stretched into mysterious pulses, glitched out electronics like pesky insects, funeral horns over abstract far off clatter, thick corrosive bursts of crumbling distortion, slowed down vocals, huge arcs of buzzing hiss over strangely mournful layers of keening feedback, throbbing bassline strung across undersea caverns, glistening and lit with some strange un-natural light, lurching industrial percussion like some damaged alien procession, creepy angular guitar leads suspended in a cloud of swirling hiss and whir, epic swaths of blackened guitar buzz, like some black metal track stripped down to its very essence and blurred into a strange funereal lament, all of these various sounds and occurrences, woven into some haunting black ritual, ancient and timeless,�as fucked up and freaked out as it is hypnotic and beautiful.
It makes perfect sense that Closer To Carbon would qualify their experimental-chamber-pop opus II as 'scores for unmade films.' All of these instrumental numbers enjoy a theatrical sentiment, as expressed through a variety of strings plus a cavalcade of junkstore objects whose offkiltered quirkiness add many a Tom Waits / Sleepytime Gorilla Museum reference. When not exploring the eccentrically cinematic, Closer To Carbon finds themselves in much darker waters, more comparable to the maudlin Victorian waltzes of Rasputina.
We love Drone records. And their series of ultra limited, hand assembled 7"s. There's even a forthcoming 2cd on Andee's tUMULt label collecting a handful of the early long out of print 7"s. We can only ever manage to get a tiny handful of these singles since they're so limited, but when we do we try to list them, and it's definitely lucky for the tiny handful of you who are quick on the buy-it-now trigger. Some of the best drone and dark ambient music around.
Closing The Eternity sound like some lost dusty old tape, slightly warped from laying unused in an old box a the bottom of some forgotten crawlspace. Warped and warbling whirs, a bit like some old William Basinksi 78 played on a rickety old turntable, with a damaged speed mechanism, causing the tempo to fluctuate and subtly shift. Eventually, this antique warble is overtaken by dense melodic washes of more and more drone, layer after layer, a huge dense drift of sound. The B side is a bit more abstract, a sound much more cavernous and haunting, a delicate slow burning whir.
First Edition. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Clear swirled blue vinyl. Plain black sleeve with a little silver metallic plastic emblem affixed to the front. Includes liner notes and insert.
Latest from these long time aQ faves, a heady blast of kosmische kraut-synth bliss, released on the always ruling Trensmat label, and like the last few records, this new 12" finds them continuing on in their deep space-ward trajectory, the sound minimal, but simultaneously dense and driving, a relentless cascade of pulsating synths, swirling sequenced melodies, like the best bit of the Logan's Run soundtrack, looped and layered, and distorted and sent swirling into the ether. It's like the soundtrack to some tripped out sci-fi art film, totally hypnotic and WAY psychedelic, new age cranked to 11, at least until about 6 minutes into the first track, where programmed drums come crashing in, bringing with them, a thick pulsing bassline, and dreamy ethereal female vox, the resulting hybrid a rad mix of dubbed out electro pop and swirling kraut-drone synth-wave.
The flipside is more rhythmic and industrial, a sort of looped and lumbering robo-kraut, crunchy beats, jagged melodies, super distorted buzz drenched bass rhythms, swirling sci-fi shimmer over the top, dense and driving, and relentless, less dancefloor groove, and more fever dream freakout. These guys just keep getting better.
The lp includes a download of the two tracks on the record proper, as well as two extra bonus tracks, nearly fourteen minutes, the first some seriously dreamy celestial new age, all swirling synths, and woozy rhythmic pulsations, the second a dense tangle soft chaos, a roiling cloud of intertwined melodies, swooping effects and processed synth squelch, dreamily hypnotic and cosmically psychedelic.
Already out of print and sold out at the label, we got a bunch, but once we sell out, we may not be able to get more, so best grab one before they're gone. Packaged in super striking, hand screened pink on white jackets.
Cloudland Canyon always seemed like some impossible classic krautrock / noise rock hybrid, their records equal parts German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, My Bloody Valentine and the Dead C, a washed out sonic world of gritty hypnotic haze, of lumbering psychedelic grooves, of twisted FX drenched drift and looped druggy ambience, as likely to explode into a super rocking fuzzed out dronejam as they were to emit thick billowing clouds of swirling blurred psychdrone shimmer, but always, at the core of their sound was pop. Little hooks buried in the murk and the mire, catchiness subtly woven into the fabric of every bit of spaced out crush or raga-like skree, the thread that held their sound together was spun from melody and harmony, no matter how much those elemental forces were obscured.
Recently CC shared a split with Citay, both bands paying homage to fuzzy dream poppers Galaxie 500, CC's version was especially fantastic, drugged out and hypnotic, somehow transforming the original into what could have been a proper Cloudland Canyon jam, and in the process, revealing, more explicitly than ever, the warm glowing pop heart, that beat inside the buzzing, lysergic krautrock chest of Cloudland Canyon. Which it seems, lead to this, Fin Eaves, a fully realized exploration of pop music, filtered through CC's gloriously cracked kraut/drone/noise filter, the result, one of the fuzziest, most washed out, dreamiest noise pop / dream pop records in recent memory.
Every track a swirling morass of druggy effects, of muted melodies, of buried reverbed vox, of subverted jangle, muddy grooves, subtle hooks, a soft focus collision between My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Galaxie 500, a three way pileup where the various elements simply sink into one another, blurring and smearing into fantastically new shapes, a little bit of looped hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug rock here, a little super distorted minimal Jesus and Mary Chain stomp there, slipping seamlessly from gauzy soft pop shuffle, to dense crumbling popnoise damage, to hushed loping slowcore haze, to soaring prismatic space psych bliss, each and every track is dense and spacious and layered, the various sounds constantly shifting, transforming, pealing melodies sloughing off only to reveal even more subtle melodies beneath, streaks of electronic glitch and clouds of warm whirling hiss drift amidst deep thrummed bass, and simple motorik rhythms, gorgeously out of focus vocal harmonies, and all manner of texture and timbre, a rare record as much about song as sound, strip away the sound, and you'd have a surprisingly perfect pop record, take away the songs, and you'd still have some fantastically abstract sonic earcandy, but combine the two, and you have this, an utterly gorgeous disc of otherworldly noise drenched lysergic dream pop. Fans of Teenage Filmstars, Beach House, Jesus & Mary Chain, Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Candy Claws, Mercury Rev, School Of The Seven Bells, and other psychedelic dream poppers, this is your new favorite record.
This record totally knocked us for a loop. And the thing is, I'm not entirely sure we can explain why. This is one of those rare records that is darn near indescribable. The label suggest Cloudland Canyon would appeal to fans of Boards of Canada, Animal Collective, The Dead C., Ash Ra Tempel, This Heat, Gong, most of which we can definitely see (maybe not the Boards Of Canada), there is a definitely a far out krautrock vibe, some classic long lost, extra damaged super freaked out sixties or seventies psychedelia, but filtered through modern technology. It's almost like some super computer a million years in the future began picking up these strange transmissions from the old Earth, German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, but after traveling billions of miles and being interpreted by some alien machinery, those songs and sounds came out sounding, well, completely fucking nuts!!!
It's like some sort of laptopped Dead C / Ash Ra mash up. Rich clouds of metallic shimmer surround looped guitars, creepy chanted vocals are submerged in demented spacey FX, dense deconstructed pop songs emerge from the chaos, rife with swirling vocals, and layer after layer of drone and processed harmonies, fuzzy shopping mall synth warbles beneath straining lo-fi vocals, the whole thing run through some intense stereo panning. Suddenly the band burst into some stomping propulsive psych rock jangle before the whole thing splinters into a gorgeous expanse of tranquil ambience, beneath delicately finger picked guitars, everything always within a cloud of mysterious sonic events. Dense cinematic soundscapes of keening high end and minor key pizzicato strings melt into super fuzzed out classic rock jams, with horns and pulsing basslines, but buried in a dense swirl of My Bloody Valentine haze, with relentlessly squiggly riffing, buried vocals, a dizzying array of chaotic sound, tinkling chimes and little bits of percussion. Strange collages of warped warbly sound drift into weird seventies circusy prog with calliope like organ, moody riffing, and awesome male / female vocals, like some totally drug drenched unhinged Fleetwood Mac. Nearing the end of the sonic journey, the record devolves into huge stretches of squiggly analog synth, tangled and intertwined into fuzzy warped low end drones, squirming and buzzing with the different layers constantly shifting and slipping in and out and around each other. Woah. Gorgeously and incredibly fucked. And thus completely recommended!!
This is a match that makes perfect sense. As Lichens and Cloudland Canyon have both been making some of the most compelling and rewarding crystalline soundscapes of the last few years. One long track clocking in at around a half hour "Exterminating Angel" does sound like the sum of both of these artists' parts. With the first half sounding much more like Lichens, gorgeous deep in space hazy explorations while the krautier leanings of Cloudland Canyon come into focus in the second half of the track propelling the sounds into their kosmiche orbit. Fans of mid-late '70s Tangerine Dream and early Heldon will for sure want to jump aboard this cosmic adventure.
The first Clouds record, the project of Cave In guitarist Adam McGrath, was a freaked out hodgepodge of stoner rock, hardcore, prog rock and seventies boogie rock with definite nods to Beefheart, Zappa, Comets On Fire, the Cave In mothership, it all worked, the result a heavy slab of FX laden riff heavy RAWK with lots of twisted detours.
If anything, this newest Clouds disc takes all that same stuff a little further, with a bigger focus on the riffrock aspect, and a huge infusion of POP. Not always obviously so, but some of these hooks slay. Think the beefy lumbering almost grunge of Scissorfight, melded to the pounding retro metallic pound of Karp or Big Business, some of that Cave-In magic and voila!
The second track, "Feed The Horse" sounds like it was yanked off a late era Cave-in disc and given a serious metal makeover, while the opener "Empires In Basements" gives Torche a run for their sludge pop money.
And then the band go all strange and angular and off kilter with "The Bad Seat", sounding almost like Randy Newman if he was 20 years old and signed to Hydra Head, and we know that sounds weird, but it's actually quite cool.
The record is all over the map for sure, exploding into frenzied punk rock as often as sprawling out into huge lumbering sludgey doom, offering up soaring metallic pop gems, or stripping it down to chugging classic rock grooves, but no matter what these guys do, or what sound they're tackling and making their own, the songs rule, and the band kick out the jams big time. And like we've said before, in a perfect world, instead of Green Day and the Foo Fighters, you'd be hearing Torche and Clouds all over the radio. Ahhh, maybe some day...
Two fantastic new releases from the Khrysanthoney label, elsewhere on this week's list, you'll find the latest from UK dreamo / screamo blackened bliss-pop combo Sleeping Peonies, and then there's this, the first full length from Pennsylvania one man shoegaze / blackgaze / blackbuzz bliss metal outfit Clouds Collide, and holy cow, the opener is maybe the blissiest black metal we've maybe ever heard, wintry winds over spidery minor key guitars, haunting and melancholic, warm shimmery chordal strum, and then suddenly, the song explodes in a gloriously prismatic blast of blown out beats, and blurred snowstorm riffs, all wreathed in a fuzzy cloud of crumbling shimmer, thick swaths of swirling sonic glimmer, and hazy smears of fragmented melodies, all tangled up into a softly having blackened dream pop psychedelia, before switching gears and slowing down to a darkly moody post rock lope, still wrapped in sheets of soft focus shimmer, harsh vokills surface at this point, but do nothing to distract from the pure buzzing blissiness of the sound. Fans of outfits like Alcest, Fen, and other post BM shoegazers will be in heaven.
Elsewhere it does get more metal, and more black, but even on tracks like "Endless Silence", with its shrieked vokills and brittle insectoid guitar buzz, the sound is still doused in FX, pushed WAY into the red, and blurred into indistinct black-gaze smears, and when things slow down, it gets all echo drenched and drifty, the guitars weightless and ethereal, the drums, booming and reverby way off in the distance. The record flits easily between pure dream pop shoegaze shimmer and wintry black buzz bliss outs, with most tracks settling somewhere perfectly right in between!
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES, housed in a blue parchment envelope, with a printed cardstock Japanese style obi, an 11" x 17" poster, an 8 page 5.5" x 8.5" booklet, the envelope hand decorated with metallic ink!
File this one right next to your Alan Lamb discs of singing telegraph wires and the Broken Hearted Dragonflies album on Sublime Frequencies, as the British sound art duo of Isobel Clouter and Rob Mullender have presented us with some seemingly implausible recordings of 'booming sand.' These are monotone frequencies generated by an avalanche of a sand dune under just the right environmental conditions. Such sounds have been reported in numerous times and places with Marco Polo recounting them on his excursions to China, and with Charles Darwin finding similar sounds in the deserts of Chile! At the onset of one of their recordings, we hear Isobel huffing and puffing up to the top of a massive sand dune, before she puts her ears to the ground (quite literally) in order to locate the origin of the rumbling drone. Such a bracketing episode of human presence is very useful to frame the stillness of the desert even as the booming sound resonates through the landscape. It also helps to distance these natural sounds from their manmade doomscape kin of a lowslung bass slumped in subharmonic stupor against a rumbling amplifier. Aside from these impressively heavy recordings, Clouter and Mullender offer some additional recordings from elsewhere in Asia: hissing textures from windswept sand comingling with cicadas buzzing in the summer sun, and a Tibetan prayer wheel revolving through its wooden cycles of creaks and moans. These are good extracts of pure phonography, but pale next to the thoroughly impressive booming sand phenomenon.
Clouwbeck is yet another pseudonym for the British ambient folk experimentalist Richard Skelton, following A Broken Consort, Carousell, and a couple others which haven't yet found their way through these doors. Each of his monikers has its own slight yet particular bent on his signature sound of rough hewn melancholia, with Clouwbeck being the most somber and abstract that we've heard from him so far. He strips down the instrumentation to just the violin, although he does allow for a considerable amount of processing and thick applications of layered drone from that instrument, building up a ponderous atmosphere of wintry sadness. The album's opening track "Gossan" scratches out the melody as if the bow were dragged across a piece of barbed wire instead of violin, yet the buzzing, luminous beds of sound that Skelton broadcasts around these scraped recursive melodies prevents the whole thing from tumbling into dissonance. "Leached" softens the rustic buzz with a majestic billowing of overlapping violin melodies, distended and blurred into a rich mass of sound. The rest of the album continues to dive deeper with each track becoming incrementally more submerged in the dense loopings and hazy drones. Throughout, Skelton's album sounds like those beautiful orchestrations from Johann Johannsson as played by Alastair Galbraith and produced by the Caretaker. Really, fantastic stuff.
One of two discs vying for our personal dubstep disc of the year. The other is the recent Mordant Music disc, which we'll try to review next time, an unlikely collaboration between Mordant and the Skull Disco crew, and this, the first full length from mysterious atmospheric dubstep soundscaper Clubroot.
We know nothing about this guy (or these guys?), other than he takes that dubbed out skitter we love so much and sets it in expansive fields of swirling ambience, creeped out dronescapes and all manner of super evocative and gorgeously textural soundworlds. Where as most dubstep is super spare and stripped down, skeletal even, the sound here is lush and sprawling. Thick layers of synths whir and shimmer and buzz, deep swells throbbing and pulsing, everything hazy and gauzy and washed out, every song some sort of otherworldy dreamscape, shot through with some super bad ass bit of pounding churning dubstep stutter. The massive basslines and fluctuating synth buzz that usually adds texture to typical dubstep, here just becomes another element in Clubroot's mysterious mist shrouded sonic landscape.
The cover features a lonely tree, set atop a rocky outcropping, the sky dense with clouds, the picture all misty and hauntingly lonely seeming, which perfectly reflects the mood of the music here. Strip away the beats, and you'd still be left with an incredible bit of blackened new age swirl, of abstract kosmiche krautdrone, but add the beats, and these sounds become something entirely other. This is definitely not dancemusic, this is mind expansion music. Late night, lights off, starting at the stars drifting off, other dimension, spaced out, dream dub music.
Clubroot taps into the same darkside as Burial, and Kode9, and the more atmospheric beatmakers, but where those guys pull back before the fog grows to thick, Clubroot pushes forward, traveling through the dark forest, into some forbidden zone, some land lost in time, lost from time, a massive emptiness, as beautiful as it is lonely and ominous, and this is the soundtrack to that lost world. So intense and haunting and unlike any other dubstep, or electronic music even, that we've heard before. The rare sort of record that lets even the most jaded and heard-it-all listener get totally, and fantastically lost.
And if you need more than our effusive gushing praise, look no further than Fenriz, 1/2 of legendary black metal duo Darkthrone, a long time lover of techno and electronic music, who has this to say about Clubroot:
"This is the sort of soaring dubstep I'd never expect to come out of the US! I just transferred the adorable "Embryo" track to my MP3 player FAVES 09 list, as I am going tenting and swimming in a forest lake tomorrow with some connoiceur-friends [sic]. It's sleek and not nasty, the melodic kind and not the grimy. But wait a minute, it seems like the newest tracks are on first, as the last songs drift into some de-tranced balearic style, even with vocals stabs and 90s synths! Blimey."
And if you can't trust Fenriz on matters of dubstep, then who can you trust? WAY recommended. And quite possibly dubstep record of the year!
The later Cluster records, Grosses Wasser and Curiosum, recorded after the Cluster and Eno collaboration in 1977, often undeservedly get short shrift. Marked by a move back to Berlin to work with former Tangerine Dreamer, Peter Baumann, 1979's Grosses Wasser shows Cluster moving forward expansively in their "nature-man-machine" aesthetic while at the same time harkening back to the unformed melodies of their debut. This album is quite the grower, five short pieces with a nineteen minute closing track that is always a dramatically different listening experience each time we play it. Slippery and evasive, shifting subtlety from oceanic piano passages to lurching bell rhythms, trumpet call and responses, woozy funk, hints of klezmer, machine dub, even whale song, all soaking in an elementally warm haze that only Cluster could conjure. Soooo Nice!!!!!!!
Hopefully Water will consider reissuing Curiosum as well. AQ customer Wobbly, who is an avid Cluster fan, noticed that in the liner notes for this, that Water included the Cluster photo from the Curiosum album, sparking fears that a Curiosum reissue is not in the works. We can only hope this isn't so.
A name that seems to be popping up more and more among the new breed of new folk / free folk underground noisemakers is�Tirath Singh Nirmala, who has released a series of limited cd-r's on various microlabels, as well as a handful of lps and cds, the only release we've had was an lp collaboration with longtime AQ fave Richard Youngs, and even in that review we were lamenting the fact that we had yet to review a Tirath record proper. Well, while this isn't a proper Tirath record, per se, it is a brand new recording by John Clyde-Evans, who just so happens to be the man behind�Tirath Singh Nirmala, and while the name may be different, the sound is quite similar.�
Asian instruments are bowed and coaxed into unfurling long dreamlike drones, shrouded in Sunroof!-like clouds of glistening sparkling high end skree, like a sky full of shimmering metallic confetti, simple percussion peppering the gauzy swirl, haunting melodies wrapping themselves around thick sheets of crystalline feedback, a fantastic slab of shimmering trance-like upper register ur-drone drift.�
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Already SOLD OUT and OUT OF PRINT at the label. We have a bunch, but they obviously won't last long. The tapes are all psychedelic and hand painted, with tripped out full color covers.�
We love the No Neck Blues Band. And we're always eager to hear everything any of those guys do. Most of them have their fingers in so many pies it's hard to believe NNCK get anything done at all. Coach Fingers' One For The Road, released on No Neck's Sound@1 label, is the latest from this unlikely underground combo featuring 3 members of the No Neck collective.
And while the first few seconds might convince you you're about to bee treated to more of the usual abstract No Neck free stumble, don't let the backwards guitars and FX drenched swirls of sound fool you, soon you'll find yourself in bell bottoms, wearing a head band and a paisley shirt, smoking pot, standing in the middle of a field somewhere in the seventies, soaking up Coach Fingers' boozy, countrified rock. That's right. Country rock. Think the Allman Brothers, the Band, Grateful Dead, Skynyrd, ZZ Top, a groovy, jammed out, slightly psychedelic boogie rock, and you know what, it's pretty bad ass. Sloppy and loose, stoned and laid back, guitar leads everywhere, lots of strum and shuffle, lots of crunchy guitars and bluesrock riffage even some horns, but c'mon, this is No Neck related, so between the glorious bouts of hippy jam rock twang, are plenty of strange ambience, lots of backwards guitars, stretched out bits of propulsive rhythmic grooves and all manner of sonic weirdness.
But be well, aware, this is NOT weird, if the above bands send a shudder down your spine, this is not for you, but if you're up for some twangy foot stomping groove rock, channelling all the best bits of seventies rock into one tight ass slab of RAWK, then check it out.
TOUR ONLY RELEASE, we managed to get a handful, not sure how limited, but they're hand numbered, and ours seem to bee in the 40's so guessing these won't be around for long. Packaged in nice chipboard sleeves, hand screened in metallic gold ink.
There should be little surprise that Alex Cobb is the man behind Students Of Decay, a publishing house of impeccably blissed-out albums of post-everything melancholia that might very be able dissolve the entire history of recorded music into a puddle of tears if given the chance. Kyle Bobby Dunn with his self-deprecating minimalism and Secret Pyramid crafting rainy-day mantras are two of the more recently championed artists published by Students Of Decay. The bulk of Cobb's own work has come under the Taiga Remains banner, and he brought that project to a close with the maudlin collection Works For Cassette. Despite this terminus of Taiga Remains, there's nothing so dramatic as an aesthetic rupture; and the transition from the work as Taiga Remains into that of his birth name is as fluid and seamless as the music that he produces. In other words, Cobb produces another beautiful album of frozen stare dronemusik captured through a lens that's been smeared with ample gobs of vaseline. The opener "Famosa" glistens with a radiance of liquid golden light held in permanent suspension before Cobb delves into a very Andrew Chalk like piece of audio impressionism in "Rain At The Fete" with its chiming drones and slow ellipsis of cyclical notes washed out in reverb, delay, and more reverb. The rasping tones of "Oversong" are courtesy of Maxwell Croy's koto whose sibilant textures are softened into a muted hum, cohabiting the mindgaze euphoria of stoned pharmacology and the earnestness of an enlightened calm. "Marine Layer" effortlessly floats from one Aeolian harmonic thrum into another, as if the graphical score followed the crest and fall of the Pacific fog surging to and fro against the California coast. Beautifully rendered through and through.
The quietly menacing, and curiously mesmeric, NYC trio Coconuts (that's plural, not to be confused with SF band Coconut, singular... nor should it be confused with what you probably THINK a band called Coconuts might sound like, either!) offer up what we'll assume to be their debut, on the always interestin' No Quarter label (home to Burning Star Core, Circle, Psychic Paramount, and many other faves). This self-titled disc comprises 5 tracks, mostly all but one of 'em pretty long (but not in the double digits or anything), 34 minutes or so total. When it's on, though, you'll sink pretty deep into their sounds, that it'll seem like it would take much longer to swim back to the surface, helplessly drifting with the wave-action of their heavy plodding rhythms, Coconuts' semi-skronked, but not un-melodic, keening guitars like the plaintive calls of homeless, strung-out whales...
We noticed they thank Blues Control, we can see how they'd fit in with those guys, this has got an abstract, similarly droned-out vibe, darker though, and more spare, maybe like void-travelling Moon Duo, stripped down and spooky, a downer-dosed slo-mo krauty psych groove, spacey and druggy. The vocals are hushed moans, drafty exhalations to go with the droney murk and mope of the music, which slowly throbs and buzzes, the percussion an echoing thud, the electric guitar an avant acid blues wash... The confusional element of all this is perhaps accentuated by the digipak packaging, which is oriented with the spine on the longer side, what's normally the top, or bottom... some of us here (ok, it was Allan) griped that this means when you file it on a standard cd shelf, you won't be able to fit it there with the spine facing out, you'll have to have it facing either up or down, so the name of the cd won't be visible, which is normally one of the functions of the spine, but whatever, not a big deal, at least it fits on a cd shelf at all unlike a lot of other cd packaging options. In any case, it's a cool disc!
We'd been trying to get copies of this record for ages, but couldn't find it anywhere. We loved the first Code record so much, a record we described as sounding a bit like a black metal Interpol, and we had heard bits of the new one, and if anything the two disparate elements that made the first record so good, the strange croony gothic component, and the blasting classic Norwegian style black metal, were both somehow MORE and BETTER, if that was even possible. Well finally, we managed to get in touch with the band directly, and ordered a bunch from them, and it's just as good as we hoped or imagined.
Like the first record, the root sound is full bore, super tight and polished Norwegian black metal, a la Satyricon, incredible blackened riffs, insane super technical drumming, majestic melodies, dense convoluted arrangements, but here, those elements have a strangely industrial vibe, not to mention that weird coldwave goth pop influence that so infused their debut. The arrangements this time around are impossible, constantly shifting and twisting, dizzying song structures that manage to baffle and confuse, but remain fierce and furious and most importantly catchy. The band are not shy about their black metal, often lurching into furious bursts of black blasts, howling shrieking thrashing mayhem, but just as often, they shift gears, and the music stretches out and in come the clean vocals, very much like later Borknagar, and like we mentioned before, Interpol, although on Resplendent Grotesque if we needed to break it down comparison-wise, we might describe the sound as Satyricon meets Katatonia meets Deathspell Omega, the pop element is certainly undeniable, but even at its poppiest, the guitars are still grinding away underneath, or the band is lurching through mathy breakdowns or seasick rhythmic changeups, there's plenty of other weirdness too, spaced out collaged interludes, with processed vocals, and delayed acoustic guitars, super hooky Khold-like riffing, but it's the songwriting that really makes Resplendent Grotesque so transcendent, "The Rattle Of Black Teeth" almost sounds like black metal Morrissey, and "Jesus Fever" has a super impassioned wailing clean vocal finish, that is as dramatic and emotional as any of the blacker more metal moments, if not more so, and "A Sutra Of Wounds" starts out as pure pop, before the clean vocals are teamed up with harsh vokills, for a seriously demonic harmony, that extends throughout the whole track. The whole record is a constant battle between light and dark, pretty and ugly, harsh and melodic, and that battle is exactly what makes the sound so unique, so intense, so weird, but so utterly enthralling and fucking brilliant.
Definitely a weird record, and probably not for everybody, grim TROO metalheads might scoff, but we're all about pushing the boundaries of the genre, and moving beyond the typical tropes, hearing sounds and songs that confound and confuse and perplex, we love pure black metal, the grimmer and colder the better, but we also love the endless hybridization of that sound, seeing where it can go, and how far out it can be taken, and these guys have taken the sound somewhere entirely new, and we're loving it. Definite contender for black metal record of the year...
For those versed in all things Jewelled Antler, Loren Chasse should need no introduction thanks to his magnificent elemental scraping and poetic hymnal minimalism in Thuja, The Blithe Sons, The Franciscan Hobbies, and others. As prolific as Jewelled Antler have been, Loren has somehow still managed to find the time to continue his Coelacanth collaboration with AQ's very own Jim Haynes. There are a lot of similarities between Coelacanth and Jewelled Antler stuff, as Loren and Jim do perform with a mess of rocks, moss, twigs, rust, wind, water, copper, metal, etc. and apply that source material to their own imagined sciences and areas of sound research. Through their expressive performances, hermetic field recordings, and site-specific events, Coelacanth transmits empathic swells of organic textures nestled into immersive droning sounds.
Mud Wall marks the third album for Coelacanth; and rumor has it that Mud Wall may have been partially recorded in what we call "The Slaughterhouse", the storage area behind Aquarius which acts more as a damp repository for grit and dust than for anything macabre. Mud Wall nevertheless is Coelacanth's darkest album to date, begining with intense low rumblings that inevitably give way to sustained tones encrusted with shadowy textures. It's one long 60 plus minute adventure of sonorous physicality, which moves in a number of different directions yet all the while maintains a singleminded focus. So beautiful.
This is actually the second pressing of Mud Wall, and we desperately tried to get our hands of some copies of the first pressing which came out as a CDR on some label from Belgium. That first pressing proved to be prohibitively expensive (who wants to pay $22.00 for a bloody CDR?). Fortunately, the enigmatic Helen Scarsdale Agency, who released Jim's first album Magnetic North, decided to repress Mud Wall as a proper CD. The second pressing is a vast improvement, not only featuring 20 minutes of extra material culled from the original sessions seemlessly interwoven into the composition, but also some very nice silkscreened artwork.
Once known simply as "the rust record", this is the debut recorded collaboration between AQ-fave sound artist Loren Chasse (id battery, Thuja, himself, etc.) and AQ-fave staffer Jim Haynes! Jim, known for his decay-oriented visual art, provided the
Second release from this droning duo. Coelacanth is our very own Jim Haynes and AQ pal Loren Chasse (Jewelled Antler, Blithe Sons, Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, Id Battery et al). Four extended tracks of gorgeous space-y drone-y almost-ambience. Forests of cricket-like chirps are blurred into smeary ambient washes of cool greys and pale whites, beneath smatterings of clinking clicking clatter. Keening, indistinct moaning tones sound like distant foghorns, reflected from the slowly shifting terrain. Underwatery warped sonic shudders billow outward as vague melodies drift and float, chiming and reverberating, eventually dissipating into misty clusters of ethereal almost transparent notes. Hissing, fuzzy high end buzz whirs machinelike over industrial clatter that has been smoothed out into pulsing, barely-there rhythms. So so nice. All of the sounds were collected from various public and private Coelacanth performances over the last couple years, before being assembled into the Glass Sponge. Released by local sound art nonprofit 23five.
In the two years since we last heard from Coelacanth, other drone based groups have unleashed hundreds of cd-rs of extended vibrations, treated field recordings, and fucked-up droning noise; and Coelacanth could have easily fallen into that camp, releasing any number of perfectly adequate live recordings. But they didn't. Instead, Loren Chasse (Thuja, Blithe Sons, Of, Child Readers, and many things Jewelled Antler) and aQ's own Jim Haynes chose to labor on the details of their recordings so that every timbre, every drone, and every tactile grain of sound was perfectly aligned with the sounds of their elemental objects and particular environments. In the world of Coelacanth, there are rocks, rust, sand, leaves, strobe lights, weird electrical devices, shortwave, and plenty of oceanic field recordings (in honor of the fish they're named after); and from those sounds, Coelacanth creates multiple layers and deep textures, all together in a mesmerising tapestry of sub-aquatic abstractions and chiming reverberations. Perfecting their tactile dronework was just the beginning in preparing for their fourth album Wrack Light In Copper Ruin, as they also began collaborations with the film/sound artist Keith Evans in finding a visual corrolary for their sonic abstractions, utilizing breathtakingly hypnotic film and video installations to compliment Coelacanth's music and vice versa. Evans is also a member of Silt, a multimedia collective that specializes in elaborate multi-projection / kinetic-sculpture installations -- one of which was featured at the Whitney Biennial back in 2002. Given that Evans has previously worked with Chasse for a Thuja performance in Scotland a couple years back, a Coelacanth / Keith Evans pairing seemed logical.
So, Wrack Light In Copper Ruin is both a CD and DVD, with the audio portion finding Coelacanth not only collaborating with Evans on some of the recordings, but also Matmos who had asked Chasse and Haynes to join them for part of their 96 hours of performances at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Underwater bell tones, raked stringed instruments, ringing glass harmonics, and gaping drones saturated in a density of texture so complex that it almost sounds like an acoustic version of a Fennesz album! The DVD features Evans' jaw-dropping video work: abstract undulating landscapes of refracted light, all scored to a subtle Chasse / Evans remix of the sounds on the CD. The rippled linear patterns seem innocuous at first; but like the hypnotic primal power of fire, it totally sucks you in. So gorgeous!
Of all the folks involved in the world of ultra stark, minimalist techno and barely there click and glitch, we've always been pretty partial to Ivan Pavlov, aka COH. Not sure exactly what it is, but he always manages to take his stark minimalism somewhere full of life and emotion and energy. What in other hands would be nothing but a sonic experiment, in Pavlov's becomes a song, or a groove, or just a big chunk of sound that resonates with energy and creativity and power. Not sure if the title is supposed to intimate something about the music within and it's supposed relation to classic pop constructs. But in no way is this Pavlov's poppiest material, not by a long shot. That's not to say it isn't great, it is, it's just much more barebones and barely there. Disc one sounds like Neu! after being dipped in acid, so all the flesh and organs have liquified and sloughed off, leaving just a skeletal framework, an intricate assemblage of static and stutter, hiss and click, with an innate funkiness that might just be flecks of melody clinging desperately to the already picked clean bones. Disc B is a reissue of a 1997 release originally released in a limited run of SEVEN copies and given only to friends. This disc is a little more all over the place, while the recurring theme is still definitely Pavlov's microscopic glitch funk minimalism, there are random moments of Ikeda like test tones, stuttering synth squelch, and once in a while even a little bleeping blooping outer space swoosh. Packaged in a cool geometrically abstract double digipak.
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The fourth in the monthly series of 20 minute compositions that countdown the end of the Millenium. COH has provided perhaps the most 'listenable' so far (which isn't to hard after the gut wrenching sine waves of Ryoji Ikeda's contribution for March)... slippery layers of soothing drones. Drifting and dreamy minimalism.
Russian sound artist Ivan Pavlov aka COH returns with a new album of ultra minimal, ultra pristine electronic ambience, a tribute to recently passed Coil mainman Jhonn Balance, who was a good friend and frequent collaborator of Pavlov's. COH, for us, is best when Pavlov is manipulating organic sounds into warm rich swells of sound, most notably on the LP-only Seasons (now out of print). But while Above Air is a much more clinical affair, Pavlov manages to somehow imbue each song with all manner of warmth and emotion. He may be a master of the glitch and the click, and the digital squelch, he proves once again that he can create art, feeling and emotion with the slightest of sounds. Above Air is a subtle, dark, contemplative mix of whispery sine waves, distant chimes, speaker static and white noise, tolling bells, gently ringing chimes, an ultra subtle glitch here and there, creating fetal rhythms, that never quite mature, remaining just another layer of sound, haunting electronic drones that waver and drift as if being broadcast from afar, pulsing chopped melodic fragments, all deftly woven into a dark but somehow surprisingly sanguine elegy for Balance. The whole record is minimal, but active and alive, subtle, but infused with disarmingly complex arrangements and dark emotion, a bit like the best Coil records, which we're sure is exactly the sort of memorial Pavlov intended.
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A lot more action packed and a bit more accessible than most Noton / Rastermusic releases (like Noto, Miko Vainio, Kim Cascone, and Signal) but still just as minimal as fuck in places. After a minute of ear shredding schreech and a few downright 'poppy' moments, the record settles down into looped out bliss. Beeps, clicks and stuttering tones coalesce into a soothing minimal whole. An exceptional record for fans of Oval.
COH, aka Ivan Pavlov, has been a long time favorite, taking that click and beep and buzz we love so much, that austere clipped electronic minimalism, and somehow infusing it with melody, and emotion, and while we love Pavlov's contemporaries, that might just be what makes the music of COH sound so special to us. And as if we weren't already excited about a new COH record anyway, IIron is Pavlov's 'metal record', a continuation of 2000's Iron, which was ostensibly his rock record (thus the title IIron should be read as Iron with the Roman numeral two replacing the 'I', as in part two), and much like other COH records, his take on minimal electronica bears little resemblance to his peers, especially here, taking acoustic guitars, chugging metal guitars, skittery electro rhythms, synth new wave, droned out low end crush and nineties style electronic industrial, and tangling it all up into some weird electro-avant-metal hybrid, that varies wildly from track to track, but manages to weave them all together into a somewhat cohesive whole.
Besides the usual minimal buzz and click programming and electronic beat crafting, Pavlov incorporates both recent guitar recordings as well as various guitar recordings made back in the eighties during Soviet era Russia, when even listening to metal music, let alone crating it, was expressly forbidden, Which also adds to the tension and emotional resonance of these tracks, which vary from propulsive and electro, to blackened and sludgey, to chuggy and noisy. The opener "Red Square" begins with a bit of delicate fingerpicked steel string guitar, wreathed in record crackle, which is soon overtaken by some pulsing industrial pulse and pound, a little Skinny Puppy, a little Ministry, but a bit more skeletal and cinematic, the crunchy distorted guitar, chopped up and spaced out into a weird sort of rock riff chug, all wrapped around a seriously creepy bit of soundtracky ambience, and a tangle of melodies that sounds almost like a electro-metal version of gypsy folk.
"War End War" is where the record first gets truly metal, after some deep barely audible subsonic rumbles, the low end roils and churns, a Tim Hecker-ish bit of blurred bassy melody, all hazy and indistinct, which builds and builds until a lurching lumbering doom-ic riffscape stumbles from the murk, wreathed in swirls of glitched out electronics and strange spacey FX, the sound crusty, and crunchy, distorted and crumbling, all wound around a big thick metallic riff just chugging away, the sound gradually smoothing out, until the song has returned to the murky muddy thrum that started things off, this time laced with a simple guitar melodies, and distant little curlicues of effects, all beneath a patina of crumbling gauze, before that riff returns, only this time to get all glitched up like a super scratchy skipping record, and then to get fused with some pulsing trancey electronica, the result a buzzy, metallic bit of doomy abstract industrial electronica.
The metal element is not so pronounced on some of the other tracks, or at least not obviously so, "Soii Noir" is a super minimal bit of pulsing electro, spare and spacious, sounding almost like a game of Pong, until another crunchy, lo-fi distorted riff enters the picture, but like before, it's all twisted up and distorted, wreathed in crackle and crumbling buzz, and molded into something distinctly UNmetal, but still heavy and riffy, where as "Slowup (Quadrate Fur Jah)" begins like some old demo tape of garage band riffery, only to become something much more playful and pulsing, like Neu! if they had drafted a metal guitarist to join, the same sort of sun dappled krautrocky drift, albeit with that one extra six stringed element.
"Fist Of Glory" distorts the guitars even further, turning a buzzy lo-fi riff into a layered bit of glitched out textural ambience, cutting out, skittering and skipping, clipped and looped, like some decaying reel to reel of plunderphonic metal, dizzying and abstract, but in its own way strangely rhythmic and hypnotic.
"All Lights Are Fire" is super spare and skeletal, the guitars muted and muddy, the electronics glitchy and squiggly, the sound somewhere between the electro dub of Pole and the krautrock of Can or Neu!, motorik, meditative, hypnotic, but as the track progresses, the guitars grow more buzzy and insistent, the production more noisy and distorted, the arrangement more chaotic.
Finally, IIron finishes off with "Satsugaii", which starts out all minimal murk, spare electronic pulses, and deep low end thrum, before some seriously Shellac-y noise rock guitars come in, which are mirrored by some pulsing synths, creating a weird bit of metallic electro-noise-rock, or something, whatever it is, it's like the perfect middle ground between old school krautrock, modern Carpenter / Goblin style cinematic electro-wave, nineties industrial and noise rock, especially with the addition of wild squalls of psychedelic guitar tangle, all over thick pounding pusling electronics and crunchy clipped riffage, heavy and heady, eventually slipping right back into that opening bit of minimal electronica, and finishing off with some hushed steel string guitar, and one final blast of psychguitar skree.
Awesome stuff for sure. And quite possibly one of our favorite COH records yet, which we should have assumed, considering the record bears the irrefutable legend: "HAIL TO WORLD PEACE AND DEATH TO FALSE METAL!"
Swank gatefold sleeve for the double vinyl, the cd version in a nice digipack, with art and design by Stephen O'Malley.
Raster-Noton contributor Coh (aka Ivan Pavlov) has dedicated his Wavetrap album "Iron" to heavy metal fans all over the world and has even given some of the tracks metal puns for titles ('For Whom The Dell Falls' and 'Rubbing Free' for example). Of all of the electron modulators populating the Raster-Noton roster, Coh has always had the keenest pop sensibility, often infusing his near catchy melodies with static-laden feedback bursts and pure sinewaves. "Iron" is Coh's most aggressive recording to date, filled with staticky melodies that soften (only a little) his morass of digital black box effects and synthetic noise. While you'd be hard pressed to hear anything definitively metal on this record (i.e. guitar solos, double bass-kick blastbeats, wailing vocalizations, Satan), the massive ebb and flow of the music takes its starting point from the epic heaviosity of metal and turns it into something uniquely Coh. Recommended!
"Love Uncut" is the newest EP from Russian electron engineer Coh and it features vocal contributions from various members of Coil. More so than any of the other Raster-Noton artists, Coh is not afraid of the power of the pop song, turning Pan Sonic minimalist
According to Raster-Noton who first released this album back in 1999, "Mask Of Birth" was the debut recording for Coh, the Russian born programmer Ivan Pavlov. Originally, this was a vinyl only release published by Raster-Noton, who made a point of stating that they had a difficult time cutting the frequencies of these recordings onto wax. A mere three years later, Mego has taken up the task of re-issuing this album on CD, a medium more appropriate for dynamic frequencies. Despite his origins with Raster's pristine electronics, Coh has continued to present himself as a post-techno reincarnation of the bleak industrial arpeggiations from the early-'80s, sharing the common urgency of early Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, Fad Gadget, Konstruktivitis, Skinny Puppy and the like. He's just been using much more high tech gear than abused samplers and overblown drum machines. After his recent collaborations with Coil on the "Love Uncut" EP, the revisitation to his first productions draws the same conclusion of his historical citations. The darkened loops, tremolo vibrations, and static pulsations have similar tonalities to his peers on Raster (Noto, Mika Vainio, and Komet), but the structure of the his music is fixed back in time on those aforementioned references. As many of those bands have been forgotten, marginalized, or dismissed, Coh's electronica revisionism is certainly welcome!
For his contribution to the "Mort Aux Vaches" series of radio broadcasts commissioned by VPRO radio, Coh (the Russian laptop technician Ivan Pavlov) continues in his electronic revisionism which defined the successes on his albums "Mask Of Birth" and "Enter Tinnitus." Again, Coh offers a constant fluctuation of arpeggiated patterns that are post-techno recapitulations of '80s new wave. Be forewarned, the buzz and blurp breakdowns may trigger visions of a bathing robot (not necessarily a bad thing!) - sonic splashing and bubbling, submersion and resurfacing throughout this 38 minute track. Seemingly straightforward techno beats emerge, but as in this track's mid-stretch of whirring, sawing rhythm, before you know it Coh has drenched it in hiss and rumble until it dissolves into something altogether different. Quite pleasant reminders of Fad Gadget, Konstruktivitis, and Giorgio Moroder with all of the kitsch elements filtered out. Limited to 1000 copies and packaged in a silkscreened piece of folded woodpanel-patterned plastic.
