The exact history behind this record is vague as no one from the recording sessions can remember when it was recorded more specifically than sometime between 1985 and 1986, placing "Dawn" nebulously as the fourth, fifth, or sixth album from Current 93. Yet, one thing remains very clear about this album, "Dawn" was the final Current 93 document that featured David Tibet's blood curdling sermons of nightmarish imagery, fronting the C93's gnarled collages of noise, tape loops, and studio effects. After this album, Current 93 pursued and refined the style that they are known for now: "menstrual minstrals and apocalyptic folk songs," where the history of UK folk was infused with pantheistic mythologies, that expanded beyond the apocalyptic prophecies of Current 93's early work. David Tibet has previously scoffed at "Dawn" because of the relative ease at which he, Steven Stapleton, and company produced this record, through the use of looping collages. While such a dismissal indicates Tibet's belief that Current 93 would be best as a UK folk vehicle, it doesn't acknowledge how powerful Current 93 had become in using this medium to convey Tibet's drug addled visions of the apocalypse. Almost all of the images of "Dawn" are recontextualizations of Catholic imagery or inverted bastardizations of Catholicism. Snippets of liturgical chants, medieval vocal chorales, and rounds of carillon bells phase in and out of loops from Aleister Crowley incantations, funeral dirges, and the ubiquitous voice of Tibet, whose snarling voice has been processed into wraith like slashes of malevolent noise. The opening track "Great Black Time" -- which appears in two slightly different versions on this CD reissue -- also features the odd intrusion of The Beach Boys' "California Dreaming" amidst crashing waves of church bells.
The recently reissued "Dawn" is certainly not as stong as Current 93's early masterpieces "Dogs Blood Rising" and "Nature Unveiled," yet it remains an solid document of post-industrial / nightmare culture from the early to mid '80s.
"In a foreign town, in a foreign land, reaping time has come." Thus spake David Tibet on the 2nd album from his heretically-minded project Current 93. Those words became commonplace within the Current 93 pantheon of poetic allusions toward Tibet's horrifying visions of the end of the world. While his tireless research and spiritual development has found Tibet nowadays with a self-constructed theology that includes elements of Christian doctrine, Coptic Gnosticism, Crowley's magick, Buddhist transcendentalism, and far more esoteric subjects, the apocalyptic visions for Tibet in 1985 were centered firmly between dual, conflicting personalities: Christ and Crowley. These two play out in the Current 93 drama built not upon the taut acoustic folk as found on Tibet's more well known constructions, but through a darkly hallucinatory collage of monastic chanting looped against thudding percussive blows that are less structural and more of a protracted stomp of corporeal punishment. Tibet has always relied upon musical accompaniments for his visionary work, and Dogs Blood Rising is no different as Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound deftly shapes the slashing feedback and growling utterances into a hellish orchestration for Tibet's bellowing not only for the Antichrist but also for the weeping Christ who suffers till the end of time in his own theological reasoning. As commonplace as Tibet's voice is on all of the Current 93 albums, he has recruited a number of guest vocalists, including Steve Ignorant of Crass and Diana Rogerson, serving to de-center the album further. The five disquieting collages of Dogs Blood Rising are totally the stuff of nightmares, long standing as one of the pinnacles of industrial culture. Now back in print on vinyl with reproductions of the original fliers from the first edition of the album, but probably not for long!
Run by the former Deerhoof bassist Rob Fisk, the Free Porcupine Society has specialized in packaging all of their releases in msyterious paper sleeves that he's hand decorated with random paint streaks splattered across silkscreened illustrations of clunky anthropomorphic figures. Musically, the label defines their releases as "no wave hermit folk" and "eco-terrorist hobbit rock," with releases by Tom Carter, Scorces, Xiu Xiu, Badgerlore, and others. So at least when it comes to the music, a reissue of the pagan-folk classic Earth Covers Earth by Current 93 is a logical one. But when it comes to the meticulously construsted imagery of Current 93, the craft-cornered artwork of the Free Porcupine Society is a slightly mismatched pairing. That said, Fisk has certainly adjusted the idosyncratic design style of the FPS in repackaging the original artwork -- with its homage to the Incredible String Band as the cover photo and a plethora of drawings from Current 93's David Tibet. And considering that this is the first time that Earth Covers Earth has been in print for many years, vinyl or otherwise; this is a very welcome reissue.
Originally released in 1988, Earth Covers Earth was the second album in which Tibet ventured down the path of "apocalyptic folk", after numerous records of frightening hallucinations and occultish chants. Languid and mournful, Earth Covers Earth taps into the eccentricities and shadows that haunt the traditions of British folk music, best typified in the work of Shirley Collins and the soundtrack to the Wicker Man. Tibet's own fascination with Christian Gnosticism (at the time, a fascination just in its infancy) and his ability to surround himself with very talented musicians provided an exceptional framework for this Earth Covers Earth, which ranks as one of the most well developed albums of Current 93's death-folk facade. Tony Wakeford (Sol Invictus) and Douglas P (Death In June) provided the melancholic acoustic guitar strum, while Rose MacDowell occasionally delivers her creepy sing-song vocals alongside the ubiqitous Tibet waxing poetic about the existential collapse around him. There are reasons why Current 93 has such an iconic status, and Earth Covers Earth is one of them.
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With their two recent collaborations with horror novelist Thomas Ligotti, Current 93 has made a few detours from their magickal folk music to get back to the style of apocalyptic collage which marked their first and best records. "Faust" is another return to those terror-filled dadaist sonic assemblages, and like those Ligotti-inspired recordings, it is based on a literary text. This interpretation of "Faust" was written by the decadent Count Eric Stenbock at the end of the 19th Century. In working with texts other than his own, Current 93's ringleader David Tibet tends to keep his voice and ego out of the process. Rather, Tibet & Stapleton have collaborated to build mostly instrumental creepy hypnotic drones. "Faust" is 35 minute piece composed of the constant chatter of voices muttering, chanting, and whispering with a lulling rhythmic plod of heavy chimes. It is as if one is eavesdropping on some Crowleian incantation. Evil stuff.
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Live in London, October 2003.
How He Loved The Moon is Current 93's tribute to the late Jhonn Balance of Coil who died in December of 2004. Balance and Current 93's David Tibet had been longtime friends, dating back to their time in the revolving door membership of Psychic TV back in the early '80s. Despite the elegaic poem that Tibet inscribed as liner notes, Tibet has stepped back into the shadows of this album, giving the helm to longtime collaborator Steven Stapleton who was given the task of reworking the early Current 93 album In Menstrual Night in honor of Balance. Given that In Menstrual Night was an exploration into the question as to where dreams go when they die, it's a fitting source material; although it has to be asked why the need to remix the album twice, as Stapleton has already remixed In Menstrual Night back in 2003 for A Little Menstrual Night Music. Anyway, the densely reverberated vocalizations, cloudy drones, and blunt post-Faust percussion from the original remain, smeared across 2LPs.
Over the past decade or so, Current 93 has steadily simplified their arrangements, moving from an impassioned psychedelic death-folk to a delicately scored sound for piano, guitar, violin, and the occasional tape loop. This transition obviously has focused the attention of Current 93 upon David Tibet, his voice, and his lyrics which become even more pronounced during their live performances. How I Devoured Apocalypse Balloon is a double disc set of the two Toronto performances that Current 93 delivered in June 2004, and showcase the radical simplicity of Current 93's music set against the complexities of Tibet's mythological revelations. For these performances, Tibet brought on board Ben Chasny (Six Organs Of Admittance) and Simon Finn along with Michael Cashmore, John Contreras, and Graham Jeffery. Many of the tracks from these two sets return to earlier work by Current 93, with a number of tracks from Earth Covers Earth and Thunder Perfect Mind, as well as revisitation of "Falling Back in Fields of Rape," which David Tibet wrote for both Current 93 and Death In June back in the mid-'80s. Unfortunately, there's no tracklisting for these two performances, although if you need to know a quick Google search will solve this dilemna. Regardless, these live performances are immaculated played, very well recorded, and certainly reflect the overall aesthetic of Current 93, making this a worthwhile document for all C93 fans.
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Ah, to be scared by Current 93 is a very good thing. The last time Tibet and co. put aside their trademarked renaissance faire folk was with their first collaboration with Lovecraftian horror novelist Thomas Ligotti. "I Have A Special Plan..." is the second collaboration between C93 and Ligotti to spine tingling results. Tibet recites a story written by Ligotti just for this release with Stapleton and Christoph Heemann providing the creepy droning and mutations on Tibet's voice. The only fault is the length, a short 22 minutes.
Current 93's epic Inmost Light Trilogy had originally been issued back in the mid-'90s as three separate releases, with the two short program discs Where The Long Shadows Fall and The Stars Are Marching Sadly Home bracketing the full length album All The Pretty Little Horses. But through a tragic turn of events that has been recounted here and many other places, the distribution company that released those discs went out of business, rendering this (and pretty much the entire Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Coil, and Sol Invictus back catalogues) out of print. Fortunately, a hearty few have lovingly reissued much of that material, Jnana being one of those labels; and it's Jnana who has thoughtfully reissued what David Tibet exclaimed as his "Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song" as a triple cd set.
Where The Long Shadows Fall opens with a stately loop of a beautifully sad / eternally holy female choral melody, obviously taken from an old piece of vinyl as the crackle and hiss of the surface noise provides a familiar antiquated patina. Additional baroque vocal melodies intertwine with a chiming 12-string acoustic guitar strum which slowly progresses with the plod of a heavy doom track, minus the downtuned distortion; and then of course, there's David Tibet reciting his trademarked revelations surrounding his heretical beliefs about Christ, Satan, and the end of the world as we know it. Where The Long Shadows Fall is an open ended piece, built upon illusion and impression. For the elegantly mangled nursery rhymes that Current 93 is known for, look to the second disc All The Pretty Little Horses. Here, David Tibet conducts business mostly as a duet with the acoustic guitar of Michael Cashmore, who has done more to define Tibet's apocalyptic take on British folk than any other guitarist (including Ben Chasny, Tony Wakeford, Douglas P, etc.). These tunes are sparsely arranged with occasional flourishes of electronic manipulation and baroque instrumentation. Along with Cashmore, other noteworthy guest appearance include Nick Cave and Shirley Collins.
The final disc The Stars Are Marching Sadly Home is one of the darker recordings that Current 93 has made since Tibet abandoned the dirge collages of tape loops and cackling voice which dominated his very first recordings. That same vocal loop which opens Where The Long Shadows Fall is the backbone to this atmospheric work, although it has been shrouded in reverb and pushed into the background of whispering drones and shadowy sounds. Tibet's voice growls with the aid of plenty of timestretched tricks that perfectly augment Tibet's already creepy voice.
If you didn't have the opportunity to pick these up when they originally came out, you really should now, and spend some time with these recordings as they have clearly aged well over the past decade and stand amongst the best of the Current 93 recordings.
Thanks to an insatiable appetite for British folk and Christian Gnosticism, Current 93 evolved out of the tumultousness of British Industrial Culture into an eccentric avant-folk ensemble grounded by the charismatic singer / visionary David Tibet (who nowadays is qualifying himself as David Late Michael after a particularly convoluted revelation he had earlier in 2005). A few years ago, Current 93's distributor World Serpent dissolved, immediately rendering the catalogues of C93, Nurse With Wound, Coil, Sol Invictus, and Antony & The Johnsons out of print. Yet all of these bands persisted, releasing their works on various labels across the globe. Judas As Black Moth is actually the third double disc anthology of Current 93's work, focusing upon the most recent releases on which C93 has exacted a very precise sound with minimal arrangements for acoustic guitar, piano, Tibet's voice, and very little else to emphasize the profound melancholy of Tibet's lyrics and the peculiarities of his revelatory poetry. This anthology takes tracks from Where The Long Shadows Fall, Soft Black Stars, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre, All The Pretty Horses, Thunder Perfect Mind, Earth Covers Earth, and a few others; it does exclude all of the exquisitely grim collage recordings from the early '80s. Nevertheless, Current 93 remains apocalyptic in the true sense of the word.
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Nature Unveiled was Current 93's debut, with the subtitle "Antichrist Revealed." As much as C93 has evolved since 1984 when David Tibet began this project, Current 93 emerged fully formed with much of the conceptual groundwork laid out for an entire lifetime of Tibet's research into occult mysticism and heretical Christianity. This album was conceived from beginning to end as a nightmare, with all of the exaggerated sounds collaged in harsh relief against a doomscape of the blackest of sounds. Tibet employed a handful of musicians with ties to Industrial Culture -- Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound (who has gone on to aid and abed Tibet on most of the C93 records), John Murphy (once of SPK and Lustmord's ensemble), and even Annie Anxiety of Crass. But even the most abstracted sounds of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV often related or at least exposed some sort of relationship to technology, whilst Current 93 was all about creating a bleak soundtrack collaged from monastic chants, monstrous growls, and bellowing clusters of low end rumble, all coated with brimstone, sulfur, and ash. Throughout the album, David Tibet moans and spits repetitive chants that "Maldoror is dead," with no chance for hope and no escape. Perhaps even more so today with so many blackened ambient projects and feral noise technicians about, Nature Unveiled is an ever impressive document and a chilling visionary masterpiece.
United Jnana has reissued Nature Unveiled in one of its earliest forms, complete with the original liner notes, a small poster, and the bonus split 7" between Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. This probably won't be around for very long, so don't dally on this one!
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You have to respect David Tibet for never wavering from the path that he started down some 15 years ago with his "apocalyptic folk and mentrual minstrals." Recently there hasn't been much malevolence in Current 93's vocabulary as of late, but it still retains the folkish minstral element. With tremolo guitar, harmonium, bass, and "the world" - as credited to Steven Stapleton - Current 93 follows several meandering signatures that solemnly march at the pace of a funereal dirge. Any musically implied gloom is quickly eradicated by Tibet's running narrative of arcane hopefulness. "Sleep Has His House" is not as anally retentive as "Soft Black Stars" and therefore a bit more enjoyable, but its still nowhere nearly as good as the bad-acid trip collages of "Blood Dogs Rising."
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During a recent illness, David Tibet had one of his earthmoving visions in which he was told to summarize his life's work in a singular recording. The powers that be instructed him that this life summary was to be a densely layered collage of all of his recordings as Current 93 and with Steven Stapleton all piled on top of each other. When Tibet recovered from his sickness, he and
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The 1991 companion release to a Nurse With Wound album of the same name, "Thunder Perfect Mind" is a stately album of C93's bleak reinterpretations of occultish '60s UK folk. Joined by The Bevis Frond's Nick Soloman on a few tracks along with other guests including Shirley Collins, this rather sorrowful sounding album from Current 93 has a definitively psychedelic overtone to it. One of the recommended Current 93 releases, now newly reissued and remastered in a fancy double cd digipack format -- the extra disc consisting of different live/studio versions of songs from the album proper.
Both Steven Stapleton and David Tibet have been working on each others albums almost since the inceptions of both Nurse With Wound and Current 93, and the two of them have collaborated as equals on a few Stapleton / Tibet albums. But both Tibet and Stapleton
Somehow this collaboration has reawakened the nightmare culture which both ensembles propagated during the beginnings of Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, so you'll find less of the anally retentive folk stylings which have populated Current 93 and less of the smug weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weirdness from the last couple of Nurse With Wound albums. Michael Cashmore -- Tibet's favorite guitarist to play on the Current 93 albums -- does make a few appearances, offering more of a high-lonesome sound of big single plucked strings than his normal 12-string affair. Behind these solitary notes, Stapleton gradually builds a sublime collage of slashing noises, mechanical vocal loops, and generalized ominous atmospheres which is very reminiscent of his work on C93's "Dogs Blood Rising" and NWW's "Homotopy For Marie." Tibet, of course, offers an bleak recitation of one of his prophetic revelations. As in C93's previous "The Great And The Small," Tibet's inspiration comes from the near-death experience he encountered after his appendix burst and went gangrenous. However, unlike "The Great And The Small," "Bright Yellow Moon" comes much closer to explaining Tibet's horrors.
After over a decade of crafting a persona as the Gnostic court minstrel, David Tibet made a welcome return to the 'culture of nightmares' that ran through the first Current 93 records with the 1997 collabortive album / book with horror novelist Thomas Ligotti. The title itself comes from a recurring theme that Tibet brought to those early Current 93 recordings and also made their way into some Death In June albums. Cross-referencing various forms of apocalyptic literature, that unknown foreign town is the inception place for the apocalypse, with Tibet announcing the prophetic statement that "reaping time has come." While most apocalyptic literature (including the often misunderstood Book of Revelation) offers a vision of existential hope to a world shrouded in despair, Tibet's apocalyptic language concentrates on the descriptive details of how the world might end, instead of why the world is falling apart. Furthermore, these details dwell with the subjective viewpoint of a protagonist inflicted by madness, feverish hallucinations, wholly encompassing fear, and the awe-inspiring nature of terror; thus, the objective truth about the coming of the end of the world is left unanswered.
Thomas Ligotti, admittedly one of Tibet's favorite writers, has built an entire career on awakening the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft through ghastly tales of ancient demonic forces and hidden archons plotting against the rest of the world. For their collaboration "In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land," the two divided the labor evenly amongst their stonger talents with Ligotti providing a novella and Tibet's Current 93 producing the atmospheric soundtrack. Ligotti's contribution is easily the best that I've encountered of his work, favoring a Victorian sensibility of horror based not so much on the supernatural, but on the quiet whisperings of insanity. Current 93's soundtrack is a perfect fit with Ligotti's text, centered mostly upon the luminous bleak drones constructed by Current 93's line up of Tibet, Christoph Heemann, and Steven Stapleton. As a whole, the Current 93 soundtrack casts a gloomy tone, punctuated occasionally by razor-like slashes of treated noise and vocal interjections from various characters in the Ligotti text, read by Tibet, Andria Degens, and Shirley Collins. The return of Current 93's dark collage work previously found on Tibet's early masterpieces "Dogs Blood Rising" and "Nature Unveilled" is technically more refined than those rough hewn recordings, and are just as effective.
Originally, "In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land" was published as a hardbound book with an accompanying cd. This, the second edition, has been condensed down to a smaller CD-sized book. Other than that, there are no changes to what is easily one of the highlights to both artists' careers.
We've been hearing about these guys for a while now, often mentioned in the same breath as other hyped underground groups like Natural Snow Buildings, King Kong Ding Dong, Barn Owl, etc. But this is the first time we've actually heard them, and we have to say it does live up to the hype. Although in many ways it reminds us way more of the Finnish forest folk(s), sort of abstract, meandery, a little clattery, spacious and skeletal, haunting and otherworldly. Another record it reminds us of a little bit is Smog's Julius Caesar, although this is way more abstract and deconstructed, but it has the same sort of barebones lo-fi songsmithery. The guitars creak and groan, the vocals are moaned and crooned, effects swirl, flutes flutter, all spread out in a slow shifting, dreamily drifting psych folk, that should definitely appeal to fans of Six Organs, Avarus, Steven R Smith and the like. But Cursillistas can be dark and noisy too, some of the songs building to sinister climaxes, plenty of careening FX, some WAY up in the mix, while others continue on lilting gently, vocals always distorted, but they still creak and crack with emotion, hand drums crank out tribal rhythms, bells chime, everything hazy and washed out and dreamy. A few tracks get all back porchy and twangy, reminding us of Red Red Meat or Souled American, while others get all droned out and effects drenched, twisting tangled stretches of overlapping tones, tweaked effects, garbled vox, and blurred melodies.
Beautiful hand screened sleeves, with printed vellum inserts. NICE.
Charles Curtis is a classical cellist and avant garde composer and this is a reissue of a super limited double lp released only in Germany last year. Four long tracks that can be played separately, or in different combinations on multiple stereos. Three of the tracks are gorgeous drones built from cellos, electric guitars and sinewaves, while the fourth track is a dreamy hypnotic mini-epic ala Godspeed You Black Emperor; dark rumbling post rock with a monotone disembodied voice rambling throughout. Quite nice.
Dom Fernow (Ash Pool, Vegas Martyrs, Prurient, Cold Cave) of Hospital Productions insisted that this record from mysterious USBM outfit Curved Blade was totally aQ worthy, and boy was he right. A stumbling damaged chunk of plodding, lumbering outsider death-obsessed doom flecked black metal grimnity.
The guitars are warbly and warped, the drums are loose and chaotic, the keyboards add a twisted droned out vibe, the vocals are barely vocals, more an inhuman moan, the tracks plod along, always seemingly on the verge of total collapse, constantly shifting tempos, giving the record a seriously twisted seasick feel, and when the band do attempt to blast, or even just up the tempo, they sound like they're struggling desperately to keep it together, only making it sound that much more primitive and raw and fucked up.
It's super short, one track split over two sides, but it's everything you could want in some mysterious weirdo black metal record, it's twisted and damaged, repetitive and droney, murky and atmospheric, buzz drenched and grim, and totally and brilliantly bizarre.
Great San Francisco musician and composer Beth Custer (Club Foot Orchestra, Eighty Mile Beach) assembled these players and instrument builders for the Yerba Buena performance recorded on this disc.
Now on limited edition vinyl, split into two volumes, each with bonus tracks!!! Here's what we wrote about this awesome, intense album when it came out on cd earlier in 2011...
What happens when a middle aged, extreme noise musician suddenly gets all voodoo "drum circle" on us? Cut Hands is what happens. Ethno-forgery, not exactly, ethno-freakery more like it!
Let's say this up front, so there's no confusion: this Cut Hands disc is bloody awesome, and nobody here at AQ (except maybe Jim) is all that big of a Whitehouse fan, either. We mention that 'cause Cut Hands is the new project by William Bennett, the perverse genius (?) behind infamous '80s industrial noise terrorists Whitehouse, who are up there with Merzbow in the noise that annoys pantheon. We appreciate the extremity of Whitehouse, sure, but unlike Merzbow, never really enjoyed listening to 'em all that much (maybe that's the point). As a result, we really weren't aware of the extent to which, in recent years, William Bennett had been getting into this so-called "Afro Noise" bag of his, with some of his more recent Whitehouse albums (like 2003's Bird Seed, which contained a track called "Cut Hands Has The Solution") incorporating the use, and probably abuse, of authentic ethnic Central African instruments.
Although, we do remember when, in 1997, Bennett's label Susan Lawly put out an amazing compilation, now long out of print, called Extreme Music From Africa, that we totally loved. It featured a bunch of mysterious artists like Rorogwela, Vicious Teengirl, Electricity Featuring Fire Eater, and National Bird, that we'd never heard of before or since, doing tracks that somehow combined what sounded like genuine African tribal music with Whitehouse style noise... and was really quite listenable, too! We always half-suspected it might not have been on the up and up, that the bands weren't really from Africa, and were instead the work of Mr. Bennett and friends, and we'd still like it just as much anyway... Cut Hands certainly makes us further assume that might be the case, since our description of the sort of sounds found on Extreme Music From Africa would also describe this Cut Hands disc quite well: "Chanting and hand drums are buried in washes of hiss and white noise. Merzbow style blasts of crunchy feedback dissolve into tribal rhythms and explode again into shards of jagged buzz. Intense and aggressive and totally great."
In any event, Cut Hands is the next logical step in Bennett's "Afro Noise" obsession. While there is of course an electronic noise component to this, it almost takes a backseat to the rhythmic, almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion. Bennett has apparently amassed quite a large collection of Congolese and Ghanaian percussion instruments, and he puts 'em to use here, 13 varied tracks of primal, polyrhythmic, electro-acoustic pulsations. Djembes and doundouns played with jackhammer precision, mixed with washes and waves of hiss and drone. Some tracks attack with feedback, others are more quietly sinister and even shimmeringly atmospheric. There's one track with vocals, declaiming something in what sounds like an African language, amidst divebombing distortion and shuddering glitch, while the rest are purely instrumental. And all it is frighteningly trance-inducing. It's kind of insane, kind of incredible. We like, a lot.
Now on limited edition vinyl, split into two volumes, each with bonus tracks!!! Here's what we wrote about this awesome, intense album when it came out on cd earlier in 2011...
What happens when a middle aged, extreme noise musician suddenly gets all voodoo "drum circle" on us? Cut Hands is what happens. Ethno-forgery, not exactly, ethno-freakery more like it!
Let's say this up front, so there's no confusion: this Cut Hands disc is bloody awesome, and nobody here at AQ (except maybe Jim) is all that big of a Whitehouse fan, either. We mention that 'cause Cut Hands is the new project by William Bennett, the perverse genius (?) behind infamous '80s industrial noise terrorists Whitehouse, who are up there with Merzbow in the noise that annoys pantheon. We appreciate the extremity of Whitehouse, sure, but unlike Merzbow, never really enjoyed listening to 'em all that much (maybe that's the point). As a result, we really weren't aware of the extent to which, in recent years, William Bennett had been getting into this so-called "Afro Noise" bag of his, with some of his more recent Whitehouse albums (like 2003's Bird Seed, which contained a track called "Cut Hands Has The Solution") incorporating the use, and probably abuse, of authentic ethnic Central African instruments.
Although, we do remember when, in 1997, Bennett's label Susan Lawly put out an amazing compilation, now long out of print, called Extreme Music From Africa, that we totally loved. It featured a bunch of mysterious artists like Rorogwela, Vicious Teengirl, Electricity Featuring Fire Eater, and National Bird, that we'd never heard of before or since, doing tracks that somehow combined what sounded like genuine African tribal music with Whitehouse style noise... and was really quite listenable, too! We always half-suspected it might not have been on the up and up, that the bands weren't really from Africa, and were instead the work of Mr. Bennett and friends, and we'd still like it just as much anyway... Cut Hands certainly makes us further assume that might be the case, since our description of the sort of sounds found on Extreme Music From Africa would also describe this Cut Hands disc quite well: "Chanting and hand drums are buried in washes of hiss and white noise. Merzbow style blasts of crunchy feedback dissolve into tribal rhythms and explode again into shards of jagged buzz. Intense and aggressive and totally great."
In any event, Cut Hands is the next logical step in Bennett's "Afro Noise" obsession. While there is of course an electronic noise component to this, it almost takes a backseat to the rhythmic, almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion. Bennett has apparently amassed quite a large collection of Congolese and Ghanaian percussion instruments, and he puts 'em to use here, 13 varied tracks of primal, polyrhythmic, electro-acoustic pulsations. Djembes and doundouns played with jackhammer precision, mixed with washes and waves of hiss and drone. Some tracks attack with feedback, others are more quietly sinister and even shimmeringly atmospheric. There's one track with vocals, declaiming something in what sounds like an African language, amidst divebombing distortion and shuddering glitch, while the rest are purely instrumental. And all it is frighteningly trance-inducing. It's kind of insane, kind of incredible. We like, a lot.
Black Mamba was the 2nd full-length album from the amazing "Afro-Noise" project of Whitehouse's William Bennett. We made it a Record Of The Week when it came out on cd in 2012. Now, at last, the tracks from that cd (most of them anyway) have made their way to vinyl, spread across two records - Afro Noise Volume 3 and 4. Two of the tracks from Black Mamba aren't included, but making up for that, these records DO contain a bunch of non-album tracks, including all four tracks (in remastered and/or reworked form?) from last year's hard to find Madwoman 12", plus what appears to be an entirely new cut, "Vaudou Take Me High" to lead off Volume 3.
Our review of Black Mamba is pretty big so we're not going to repeat it here (you can look it up elsewhere on our site if you like) but just a brief excerpt for those unfamiliar with Cut Hands:
...It's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty.
Vol. 3 features "Vandou Take Me High", "Krokodilo Theme", "Immersion", "Erzulie D'En Tort", "Witness The Spread Of The Dream", "No Spare No Soul", "Kongo", and "Madwoman". Volume 4 has "Eat Them Like Bread", "El Palo Mayombe", "Black Mamba", "Inchantment", "River Mumma", "54 Needles", "Nzambi Ia Ngonde", and "Nine-Night".
Each limited to 750 copies only.
Black Mamba was the 2nd full-length album from the amazing "Afro-Noise" project of Whitehouse's William Bennett. We made it a Record Of The Week when it came out on cd in 2012. Now, at last, the tracks from that cd (most of them anyway) have made their way to vinyl, spread across two records - Afro Noise Volume 3 and 4. Two of the tracks from Black Mamba aren't included, but making up for that, these records DO contain a bunch of non-album tracks, including all four tracks (in remastered and/or reworked form?) from last year's hard to find Madwoman 12", plus what appears to be an entirely new cut, "Vaudou Take Me High" to lead off Volume 3.
Our review of Black Mamba is pretty big so we're not going to repeat it here (you can look it up elsewhere on our site if you like) but just a brief excerpt for those unfamiliar with Cut Hands:
...It's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty.
Vol. 3 features "Vandou Take Me High", "Krokodilo Theme", "Immersion", "Erzulie D'En Tort", "Witness The Spread Of The Dream", "No Spare No Soul", "Kongo", and "Madwoman". Volume 4 has "Eat Them Like Bread", "El Palo Mayombe", "Black Mamba", "Inchantment", "River Mumma", "54 Needles", "Nzambi Ia Ngonde", and "Nine-Night".
Each limited to 750 copies only.
When the first Cut Hands disc came out in 2011, we raved, saying "It's kind of insane, kind of incredible", and a year later we're still pretty obsessed with it. In hindsight we feel we should definitely have made it a Record Of The Week, just like this one. Not sure why we didn't, but maybe at the time we were taken so much by surprise, since it was the work of William Bennett, the Englishman best known for the misanthropic harsh noise of underground '80s outfit Whitehouse. But even those of us who don't care at all about Whitehouse, absolutely loved Cut Hands. It has a noise element, but also an "Afro" one. "Afro-Noise" instead of Industrial Noise. Meaning, intense rhythmic workouts utilizing authentic ethnic African hand drums, mixed with electronics and distortion, in the tradition of a (possibly fake) compilation he released some years before, called Extreme Music From Africa. Pretty original (excepting perhaps the "cultural appropriation" factor, which can be debated) and compelling and so incredibly well done. Really remarkable that the person famous (or infamous) being a seminal artist in the noise genre would, later in life, come up with something if not completely different, at least pretty darn different, and do it so well that we suspect Bennett could have a career with Cut Hands to rival the success of anything he did with noise terrorists Whitehouse. Bravo.
So, here at last is Cut Hands' follow-up full-length, named for an especially venomous snake, and we're excited, our appetite for this whetted also by having seen Cut Hands in person down the street at San Francisco's Elbo Room a couple months ago, on his US tour. When we went to that show, at first we were a bit disappointed that the stage wasn't covered with exhibits from Bennett's extensive collection of Congolese and Ghanaian hand percussion instruments to be played live, and instead it was evident that he was going to be performing like a techno DJ, mixing pre-recorded sounds from multiple laptop computers, all the while dancing spasmodically and ecstatically with his shirt open. But pretty soon we, and everybody else in the club, were completely enraptured and entranced, the frenzied rhythms invading our nervous systems. Sure, some of the people in the place were probably on drugs, but they didn't need 'em. When his set at a certain point devolved into a rhythm-less Whitehouse-like pure noise barrage, that broke the spell, but up 'til then were were, in a word, possessed. We were wondering if this new Cut Hands would go to that level, and have that same raw, quasi-techno sound to it, some of it does, but there's also lovely stretches of much mellower, if eerily sinister, ambient/drone drift here too. But for us, yes, it's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty. Easy to understand why several tracks from this have already been utilized for cinematic soundtrack purposes (even for a documentary set in Siberia, oddly enough, didn't know they had voodoo cults up there). Very impressive and immersive, and highly recommended! (By the way, if you're a fan who has been desperately looking for the expensive, hard to find, Japan-only Cut Hands cd ep release that came out sometime last year: among the twelve tracks here you'll find all 3 songs from that ep, yay.)
Another blast of twisted rhythmic "Afro-Noise" from William Bennett, most famously known for his confrontational harsh noise combo Whitehouse, but who around here is probably more beloved for this project, Cut Hands, his most recent project, which fuses traditional African rhythms, with industrial electronics and techno rhythms, creating a series of dark tangled grooves, that somehow push all our buttons. And this new one basically continues on where the recent Black Mamba ep left off. The A side is a furious polyrhythmic barrage, that slips easily from tribal groove, to lurching, loping, stuttering, industrial crunch and back again, driving and fierce, percussive and pretty goddamn hypnotic, the sort of thing we could listen to forever, and we just listened to the A side about four times in a row, and basically had to force ourselves to stop.
The tracks on the flipside are a bit less aggro, sounding a little like old Muslimgauze, or like some current Dom Fernow project (Christian Cosmos, Vatican Shadow, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement), the beats muted and blunted, at times downright mellow and blissed out, at others, rhythmic but dialed back, sort of murky and moody, but still tranced out and seriously psychedelic...
William Bennett (of White House infamy, the misanthropic '80s UK noise terrorists) is back with another chop-chop-chop attack from his amazing, electronic-ethnic "Afro-Noise" project, Cut Hands. The previous Cut Hands, Black Mamba, we made a Record Of The Week, and this new third full-length album is just as good, Bennett further refining and honing his precision, hyper-rhythmic hybrid of traditional African hand percussion beats and computer-aided techno-like track construction. We've been mainlining it since it arrived, makes you work faster and more accurately! (Maybe.)
By now, we can probably assume most of you are as big fans of Cut Hands as we are, after spinning their records many times, and witnessing one of Cut Hands' intense & ecstatic live shows a while back. So not a lot more to say here, then, really; it's just another heavy dose of what we love about Cut Hands. Machete-like slicings of beats, kind of like some isolationist, industrial-techno artist on the Hospital Productions label (say, Vatican Shadow) hacking their way through a dark jungle, the rhythms wreathed in a miasmic swamp gas of distortion, atmospherically drone-cloaked.
Festival Of The Dead is another essential entry in the somewhat convoluted Cut Hands discography - by which we mean, of the dozen excellent tracks here, most are brand new, though a few it seems are reprised from 2013's Damballah 58 and Madwoman 12"s, and one, "Vandou Take Me High", appeared earlier this year, added to the first half of the two-part vinyl incarnation of Black Mamba.
What happens when a middle aged, extreme noise musician suddenly gets all voodoo "drum circle" on us? Cut Hands is what happens. Ethno-forgery, not exactly, ethno-freakery more like it!
Let's say this up front, so there's no confusion: this Cut Hands disc is bloody awesome, and nobody here at AQ (except maybe Jim) is all that big of a Whitehouse fan, either. We mention that 'cause Cut Hands is the new project by William Bennett, the perverse genius (?) behind infamous '80s industrial noise terrorists Whitehouse, who are up there with Merzbow in the noise that annoys pantheon. We appreciate the extremity of Whitehouse, sure, but unlike Merzbow, never really enjoyed listening to 'em all that much (maybe that's the point). As a result, we really weren't aware of the extent to which, in recent years, William Bennett had been getting into this so-called "Afro Noise" bag of his, with some of his more recent Whitehouse albums (like 2003's Bird Seed, which contained a track called "Cut Hands Has The Solution") incorporating the use, and probably abuse, of authentic ethnic Central African instruments.
Although, we do remember when, in 1997, Bennett's label Susan Lawly put out an amazing compilation, now long out of print, called Extreme Music From Africa, that we totally loved. It featured a bunch of mysterious artists like Rorogwela, Vicious Teengirl, Electricity Featuring Fire Eater, and National Bird, that we'd never heard of before or since, doing tracks that somehow combined what sounded like genuine African tribal music with Whitehouse style noise... and was really quite listenable, too! We always half-suspected it might not have been on the up and up, that the bands weren't really from Africa, and were instead the work of Mr. Bennett and friends, and we'd still like it just as much anyway... Cut Hands certainly makes us further assume that might be the case, since our description of the sort of sounds found on Extreme Music From Africa would also describe this Cut Hands disc quite well: "Chanting and hand drums are buried in washes of hiss and white noise. Merzbow style blasts of crunchy feedback dissolve into tribal rhythms and explode again into shards of jagged buzz. Intense and aggressive and totally great."
In any event, Cut Hands is the next logical step in Bennett's "Afro Noise" obsession. While there is of course an electronic noise component to this, it almost takes a backseat to the rhythmic, almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion. Bennett has apparently amassed quite a large collection of Congolese and Ghanaian percussion instruments, and he puts 'em to use here, 13 varied tracks of primal, polyrhythmic, electro-acoustic pulsations. Djembes and doundouns played with jackhammer precision, mixed with washes and waves of hiss and drone. Some tracks attack with feedback, others are more quietly sinister and even shimmeringly atmospheric. There's one track with vocals, declaiming something in what sounds like an African language, amidst divebombing distortion and shuddering glitch, while the rest are purely instrumental. And all it is frighteningly trance-inducing. It's kind of insane, kind of incredible. We like, a lot.
BACK IN STOCK!!!
First release from the oddly named Cvbe Ov Falsehood, the new project from one of the guys in aQ faves Servile Sect, and like that group, whose connection to black metal is tenuous at best, CoF deliver some seriously avant blackness, to sidelong 15 minute tracks that combine drifting drones, with symphonic fragments, layered strings, pizzicato melodies, churning blurred riffage, swirling psychedelic FX, what sounds like field recordings, the first track/side begins with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up, while in the background, the earth begins to rumble and the crust of the earth collapses into subterranean caverns. But that tectonic/Teutonic rumble, is soon smoothed out into a glorious bit of black drone drift, laced with all manner of subtle sonic fluctuations, buried industrial rhythms, the whole thing coalescing into a sort of murky kraut-psych, wreathed in dense black ambience. Soon the sound is wreathed in hiss and static, a cloud of swirling sibilant shimmer, that gradually becomes more and more caustic, before transforming into a strange staticky rhythm, churning machinelike to the end of the side.
The flipside begins with the sounds of a gamelan (we think), lush, lustrous, resonant tones, ringing out, the sky filled with the ripples of subtle overtones, mysterious samples surface from the murk, the low end becomes more active, a strangely muted melody, pulsing, super distorted, over another barely there industrial rhythm, the result a pulsing sprawl of blackened kosmische, that gradually becomes more and more abstract and tranquil, before beginning another slow build, beginning with a burbling thrum, laced with cricket like chitter, and distant keening melodies, all draped in a black sonic gauze, suddenly erupting into some serious caustic crunch, grinding and corrosive, but somehow also weirdly melodic and psychedelic, the burst brief, soon settling back into a final stretch of deep tones, and hushed ambient dronemusic.
Gorgeous packaging too. A clear tape in a black and white J-card adorned with black and white space diagrams, the whole tape then housed in a black on black embossed, textured cardstock slipcover. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Some of which include a Tarot card!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The return of this minimal bleep-glitch super group, or maybe super duo would be more accurate. Cyclo is Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), and for their second record, they've upped the ante conceptually, as the project was already focused on the visualization of sound, on Id, this is taken to its logical extreme, where the duo focused on the actual images of the sound, using stereo image monitoring equipment, and these pieces are the results of creating sounds, by manipulating their visual components, there is a forthcoming book of the images, but THIS is what those images SOUND LIKE. It's pretty awesome. We're fascinated by wave forms as well and had actually often wondered about reverse engineering sound, but these two have done it, and the results are pretty amazing. And as always, not that far removed from the Raster-Noton aesthetic, extreme lows, impossible highs, sine wave tones, rumbles so low you can almost feel them more than hear them, skittery glitches, and abstract squelches, rhythmic, but not seemingly purposefully so, just a result of crafting particular sonic shapes. Headphones are definitely required, but be careful, even at low volume, some of these sounds seem to bore right into your skull, especially the low tones, the opening few seconds is a field of static and barely there dog whistle tones, but when the bass comes in, it rattles your brain, and might hurt your ears if you have it cranked. We couldn't help but imagine blasting this in a lowrider with a massive booming system, it would probably level everything for blocks.
Minimal, austere, haunting, clinical, weirdly lovely, some of the tracks crafted into actual grooves, but strangely alien robotic hyperminimal clean-room click-buzz grooves, some of the sounds super thick and buzzy, these guys could definitely give Justice and Daft Punk some pointers, in fact, a few of these tracks are ready to be sampled, and transformed into dancefloor destroyers.
As always fantastic stuff, and simultaneously the most groovy, and most sonically extreme sounds we've heard from these two, and we're digging it like crazy.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Holger Czukay (ex-Can, y'know) starts out "La Luna" on the right foot with Zoviet France-like dark ambient electronic loops, but to my ears missteps with the inclusion of new ageist female vocal incantations (from his wife, U-She) intended to draw from the power of the universe. Those who liked the long, ambient track at the end of his last solo album should check this out, however. And it's not deliberately wacky like some of his earlier solo work.
The latest from Tokyo's PSF label isn't one of their usual offerings of free jazz, outsider improv folk, or garage psych... it's not even "Japanese noise". It's actually Chinese noise. Not that that sounds much different from the Japanese variety! The oddly named D!O!D!O!D! are a raucous n' rowdy guitar and drums duo hailing from Hangzhou, China. Guitarist Li-Jianhong and drummer Huang Jin lay it on thick here, freaking out with the best of 'em. Crashing, clattering drum battery versus scrabbling, feedback guitar overload. Non-stop madness. If loud n' noisy improv is your thing, if you dig Hijokaidan and Ascension and Rudolph Grey and Harry Pussy and suchlike skronk and skree, you'll be happy PSF hooked up with these two frenzied Chinese noisniks to bring you this disc. Includes liner notes in English translation.
An improv duo from Brooklyn, New York. D'Angelo (who has several solo recordings to his credit) plays alto sax and bass clarinet, whilst Fennelly plays double-bass. But both guys also manipulate their acoustic sounds electronically. Doubtless they could stir
An impressive third album! The trio known as D. W. Holiday (yes, they're a band not an individual!) have been around since 1992. For well over a dozen years, they've been crafting their particular brew of darkly brooding spacey rock. Brings to mind a cross between the Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd and maybe Animal Collective too. A novel side note: there will soon (if not already) be two versions of this band -- one here in SF (the local roster currently includes former members of two other Bay Area bands, ex-Slow Poisoners drummer Chris and Ex-Bother bassist/guitarist Djuna) and one in Minneapolis -- with different lineups playing the same set of songs and everything. The reason? Band member Craig recently moved east, and simply didn't want to sever his longstanding musical ties.
Of all the dark, drone-y, druggy synthiness that's been popping up lately (and believe us, it's a LOT), this lp from mysterious Los Angeles duo D.A. is most definitely our favorite. A heady collection of dark and dreary, lush and spaced out sci-fi synth creep that tapes into classic Goblin soundtrack music, the best John Carpenter scores, and mixes in plenty of modern lysergic lo-fi experimentation, conjuring up some of the most tense and dramatic and hypnotic sounds we've heard in ages.
Like some strange mix of Zombi and Expo '70, but with a hint of new age-y drift that makes these songs sound like they could only be the music from some lost eighties film, only the visuals could never hope to match this haunting otherworldly music.
Looped synths are looped into slow shifting swells, pulsing over a bed of softly swirling minor key tension, alien tones, blurred buzz and dense shimmery drones, shot through with moody melodies, laced with super spare abstract percussion and everything wrapped in a gauzy warmth, total kraut drone new age soundtrack bliss.
The second side changes gear toward the end, evolving into a sound akin to Godspeed meets Zombi meets SUNNO))), a thick thick buzz wrapped around twisted looped melodies and all sorts of simulated haunted forest sound effects, growing ever more harrowing, ominous and dramatic, and surprisingly, yet subtly heavy.
The flipside is much more minimal and abstract than the A side, but no less intense and mysterious. Reverbed piano is sent drifting into blackness, tons and tons of space, softly wheezing organs, deep muted tones, that distinctly eighties sounding bass pulse, long thick swirls of softly distorted synth buzz, tinkling high end tones, all of that gives way to another thick, and surprisingly heavy space synth drone, a starlit slow motion swirl, abstract, super space-y, dark and emotional, tense and INtense, it still boggles the mind that filmmakers aren't constantly on the lookout for groups like this, whose cinematic soundtrack ambience is way more compelling and original and ruling than 90 percent of the music that actually ends up in movies. But who needs the movies, best to just throw this on, close your eyes, and let these sounds ooze into your consciousness, creating a fantastical and unreal world all for you, populated with far out sights, worthy of these far out sounds.
Incredible hand silk screened, ultra thick card stock sleeves, LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
"Showroom Dummies" is the latest performance piece developed by the Grenoble, France dance company Groupe DACM. The acclaimed organization is known for its maverick and unorthodox approach in their use of new media and radical experimentation. Don't know too much about the full story behind "Showroom Dummies", the images accompanying the Mego packaging bring to mind a macabre Vanessa Beecroft performance. In conceptual essence, it places characters -- based on icons of fiction Wanda Von Sacher-Masoch and Yvonne, Princess Of Burgundy -- in situations of submission and resistance, studying the fine line between desire and disgust. In their attempt to complement the confrontational nature within these themes of repulsion and erotism, Groupe DACM had employed the notoriously abrasive (and confrontational in his own right!) Peter Rehberg aka Pita. Unlike the full on scathing aural tornado prevalent in his solo recordings and with Ramon Bauer, Rehberg splices snippets of his aural shrapnel into rhythmic repetitive patterns of subtlety. Perhaps the involvement of Japanese musician Noriko Tujiko in early constructions of the pieces could explain the reserved intensity. However, this release does not credit her for any part of the production, though she is given an acknowledgement of gratitude. Having said that, Rehberg is still extremely effective in his own attempt to exploit the dichotomy of harshness within a docile and inviting arrangement, the pieces here subversively insert a sense of intemperance in a "safe" habitat. Somewhat suspicious of his intent in creating linear cosmopolitan "dance music" under the guise of performance art, some of these pieces could very well be mistaken for fluid dancefloor rhythm tracks, aesthetically resembling a chance meeting between Pan Sonic and Merzbow (like that hasn't happened before). At least one track is an obviously deconstructed trance techno track, pummeled out of its own melody into another dimension. Ultimately, Rehberg regurgitates these consummations into his own beast child. Frigid and austere, yet wholly engaging and seemingly harmless on its surface, "Showroom Dummies" lures you into its web only to chew you up and spit you back out. Lovely.
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For years, Darren Tate has made his way into Colin Potter's studio for help in reconstructing field recordings and improvised events for both the dronological investigations of Ora and Monos. Rarely would you find in those recordings much indication that Potter has amassed a huge battery of analogue synths, effects, and filters. This is the first document for the Potter / Tate project Dada Lives which focuses upon that collection of gear. The instrumentation has changed from manipulated field recordings to analogue synths, but the compositional tactics of slow hypnotic drones remains. Plastic bleeps fire through slow proccessions of aerated electronic sweeps, sounding a lot like the '70s era Conrad Schnitzler recordings. Limited to a whopping 50 copies.
