Third release in almost as many weeks from this relatively new drone-doom duo, half of which just so happens to be Brad Rose, Digitalis head honcho, as well as member of the North Sea, Corsican Paintbrush, Jade Emperor, the Golden Oaks and probably a few more that we're forgetting.
But don't let that fee folk pedigree fool you. This new outfit, Ajilsvga is certainly free but not folk at all. Exploring a world of near static heaviness similar to like minded folks in SUNNO))), Sunroof!, Vulture Club, Half Makeshift, but leaning toward the lugubrious sludgey ambient doom side of the slow and low spectrum.
On Winter Hunt, it's a thick squall of buzz and rumble, guitars, or organs, or synths, but mostly guitars we think, all set on stun and allowed to unfurl thick waves of thick viscous low end. A swirling morass of grinding glacial low end, sheets of crumbling distorted chordal whir, off in the distance, keening tones floating above the roiling rumbling below, a heaving heaviness, strangely soothing and meditative as much as dense and intense.
Fans of the above mentioned bands will dig this big time, as well as anyone into the low, slow and heavy, the dark, dense and drone-y.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Package in full color two sided sleeves.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Holy crap is this beautiful, two cassettes in a big oversized white vinyl double tape case, like the ones that language tapes used to come in, or noise tapes after that, a 4 way split of related bands, all integral parts of the Digitalis label family. The bad news, is that this is limited to only 85 copies, and is already sold out. We got 15 of those, and once those are gone, we WILL NOT be able to get more sad to say. Another awesome record that WAY too few people will get to hear. As much as we love cool limited stuff, and special releases and all that, at some point we would probably be willing to trade more releases for more copies, good music is meant to be heard by more than a handful of folks, and if your release sells out in one hour or one day or one week, then probably you could have sold a whole lot more, and a bunch of folks are gonna miss out. But heck, you all know all that, you just want us to pipe down and tell you about this super limited double cassette so you can throw it in your cart and move on. OK, then...
Up first Ajilsvga, the doomdronedirge project of Digitalis label head honcho Brad Rose and his partner in low end crime, probably the nicest thing we've heard from them, a long stretch of crumbling rumbling droney heaviness, but all tangled up with ghostly voices, soaring soft harmonies, giving the track a definite SUNNO)) meets Arvo Part vibe. Cool. Flip the tape over and we've got 4 tracks from Mass Ornament, Rose's partner Eden, who supplies much of the artwork and is responsible for those vocals on the Ajilsvga track. MO offers up some droning drifting, brooding ominous doom folk, multi-tracked vocals over moaning low end, glistening melodies, creepy and crawly and so beautiful. Fans of Inca Ore and Grouper should for sure check this out.
Tape 2 starts out with Alms which just so happens to be the other half of Ajilsvga, and treads similar ground, big billowy low end rumbles, deep and resonant, throbbing and shimmering blackly, building in intensity, all sorts of FX join the fray, and the drone gets more and more caustic and buzzy. Good stuff. Another doomdirgedeathdrone artist to look for more from.
Flip the tape over, and it's the North Sea, Rose's long running solo project, who in the past has explored the fringes of free folk and ambient drone, but lately has been exploring the world of low end heaviness, as he does here again, offering up a seriously dense and thick dronescape, a gorgeous undulating, pulsing, heavy, slow motion tarpit drift.
Definitely amazing stuff. First come, first served, one per customer, hopefully, they'll repress it or release it on cd or something, but for now, be quick or be happy without....
Brand new tape from this mysterious Texas three piece, Old Norse Mara marks aQuarius' first exposure to the sounds of Ak'chamel. They seem to be the latest in a long line of iconoclastic badasses from their home state - going back to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, the 13th Floor Elevators, Jandek, and so on - where the rules of the game are continually ignored, rewritten, and used at the band's convenience to create a sound that refuses to fit within any specific label, recalling everyone from the Sun City Girls to Moondog to Dead Raven Choir, often in the same song. Dark, folk-tinged melodies merge with a warped punk sensibility, but these songs surely exist in their own fucked up world where categories are pretty much useless. Beginning with the awesomely titled "Pussy Gloating The Give", where banjo and murmured vocals clatter below weird chipmunkish voices and an unsettling atmosphere, the tape gets weirder from there. Things get sunny for a brief moment with "Slalom", a quick Meat Puppets/Minutemen styled jam, before getting more evil sounding. "Mountain Of The Sleeping Lady" comes off like some Sublime Frequencies field recording of a street performance in Cambodia being reprocessed into weird quasi-industrial ambience. The tape is strangely and surprisingly cohesive despite its lack of easy reference points and Ak'chamel's voice is truly their own. A killer surprise from a band we can't wait to hear more from!
'The Bringer of Illness' reads the subscript on many of Ak'chamel's releases; and it's a fitting tag for the mysterious outfit of Texas witch-doctors, who seem intent on opening portals into this world to spread ill-will and malcontent from unseemly dimensions. We were immediately intrigued by Master Chemical Society's description of The Unseen Traveler: "If Smithsonian Folkways published the Necronomicon as a book on tape, it might sound like this. Psychopompic incantations and hypnotic gloom captured on cassette." That's about right for this group dedicated to crafting a fictionalized Crowleyian temple musick for tranced-out splutter on gut-strung guitars, kettle drum processionals, and deep-throated incantations. Ak'chamel's deliberately lo-fi, murky temple music conjures not only the post-industrial rituals lusting for the pagan days of Druidic Britain but also the pantheistic, impishly playful rhythms from Thai temple music as well as some choice nods to the occult ethnomusicology of their professed influences, The Sun City Girls. Super limited stock on this one, we gotta say.
Super limited release from the very cool Sewer Records in Sweden. This 3" cd-r deviates from Sewer's ususally harsh/noisy/brutal aesthetic and explores a dark shimmery, Eastern tinged soundscape, with creepy reverbed female vocals, warm dark rumbles, gentle ripples of swoosh and whoosh, and the occasional clang and clatter. Quite nice.
This is the first we've heard from Akatombo in more than three years. The last cd from this Scotsman living in Japan came in the form of Unconfirmed Reports, a record we sold tons of back in the day, and even after several years, False Positives seems to take up pretty much right where Unconfirmed Reports left of. A killer collection of programmed beats, layered samples, dark atmospheres, thick guitars, and droney-ambience, sounding at times like Muslimgauze, or like a more chill Necro Deathmort, or one of those bands who might have shared a compilation with Techno Animal or Sidewinder back in the day. The vibe is definitely on the isolationist tip, murky and claustrophobic, the beats are crunchy and caustic, more often lurching and lumbering than skittering or shuffling, and those beats are set amidst thick swells of grim sinister ambience, and blackened latenight atmospheres. And as we mentioned in our review of Unconfirmed Reports, that really is just the way we like it. A sort of dubbed out downtempo dance music that's not so much for dancing, but lurking, hanging out in the shadows, in empty clubs in empty cities, everything crumbling and decayed, a seriously dystopic soundtrack for some wasted scorched earth future.
The opening track is super misleading, a Kompakt style house music rife with samples, and dubbed out snares, it has us thinking that maybe things had in fact changed, but then the second song kicks in and we're back in the dark dank world that Akatombo seems to call home, sounding like a backing track for some Sensational B Side or a long lost Spectre jam, all low slung and dirgey, twangy Morricone guitars over a loping blackened groove, very cinematic, almost like Barry Adamson by way of Techno Animal, but then it just keeps getting darker, the beats more muted, the textures more blurred and dense, the vibe sinister and malevolent, murky pulses beneath thick swirls of tarpit thrum, clouds of blackbuzz driven by a machinelike industrial pound, stuttery rhythms wrapped around fragmented samples and the occasional stretch of almost big beat groove, which gives way to some blackened slithery downtuned dirgery, which in turn becomes a gauzy almost Tim Hecker like sprawl, before once again, splintering into another stretch of abject rhythmic miserablism, or tranced out blackhole propulsion.
Packaged in an oversized full color sleeve, inside are liner notes, as well as random newspaper clippings, and like Unconfirmed Reports, False Positives also includes a dvd-r with a handful of videos.
We weren't sure what to expect from this one at all. An oversized sleeve, with Japanese characters adoring the front, as well as the sticker sealing it shut. Inside, a handful of random newspaper clippings, some oversized full color inserts. The work of a Scotsman, who once lived in SF and now lives in Japan, with a previous record released on Colin Newman's (of Wire) label Swim, and this record engineered by one of the guys from legendary Japanese psych rockers Les Rallizes Denudes... No clues at all to what it might actually sound like, but we needn't have worried, as Akatombo traffic in some seriously dark electronic throb, all deep rumbling bass, and minimal drum skitter. A strange hybrid of more modern dubstep, and old school post industrial soundscapery, the mood is ominous and haunting, the melodies minor key and sinister, the beats aren't big, although they are dense and powerful, but the bass most certainly is, we find ourselves cranking the bass on our system, and every track sets the whole house a rumbling. A super thick throbbing low end shock wave of sound, that pulses beneath the muted rhythmic pound, and the strange processed voices, the chopped and looped samples, a swirling, roiling blackened sea of low end, that sprawls and oozes. Fans of stuff like Spectre, Scorn and Muslimgauze will definitely dig, in fact, Akatombo does in some ways sound like a composite of those three. Some Eastern influence here and there, some deep bass dub dynamics, some serious industrial leanings, all woven together into a minimal/maximal songsuite of seriously deep listening blackened chillout music, a smoldering smear of some slow motion dancefloor density. We even hear some Portishead in there too, a little jazziness as well, some Bohren maybe? This is definitely some seriously aQ style electronica, a heavy, murky, lowslung late night blackend drone groove, that is more mood music than dance music, which is generally the way we like it.
Packaged in an oversized printed envelope, each one hand numbered, with multiple inserts, newspaper clippings, as well as a dvd-r featuring three video clips. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Improv guitar duets between Akchote and Ribot, and Akchote and Chadbourne (who's also responsible for some banjo and, on one song, vocals)...several Ornette Coleman compositions are essayed, and the whole thing seems to be inspired by the disturbing/erotic photography of Japan's Nobuyoshi Araki. Indeed, Lust Corner is beautifully packaged with an assortment of Araki's photos.
Artists and title says it all, eh?
Celebratum is the debut release from this mysterious ritualistic dark ambient outfit, the sounds here comprised of remixed, reworked and remastered songs and sounds from three super rare tapes originally the group released in the mid nineties. Presented here, these bleak, blackened rituals offer up a surprisingly lush sonic palette, the usual industrial/ambient tropes are most certainly present, militaristic percussion, lots of drones, and ominous low end rumbles, but the band incorporate horns (or what sound like horns), in fact the opening/intro is a haunting bit of regal sonic pageantry, echo drenched voices intoning ominously over muted percussion, and mournful horns, shimmering strings, the result very dramatic and cinematic, which is sort of what we were expecting the whole record to sound like, but the sound here are even more intense, the first track proper, the near 19 minute "Nos Dominari Noctus: The Dominions Of The Night", takes that dramatic, cinematic sound, pushes the vocals to the fore, two voices speaking the same words but quite differently, over blurts of brass, churning rhythms, swirling black drones, the vocals becoming vokills as the track progresses, the vibe blackening, building to a near frenzy, before settling into a long stretch of murky rumbles, and sinister whispers, mysterious mumbling undertones, and darkly processed shapes and sounds, blurred into a sprawling, ominous, black ambient creep.
While much of the record plays out similarly, the sound is constantly shifting, a cloud of rainfall like hiss, drifts over a murky pulse, wreathed in a choir-like chorale, once again a backdrop for strange spoken vocals, mysterious incantations, that seem to slip from English into some unknown tongue and back again, the sounds drifting in and out, lush swells, bursts of crumbling noise, streaks of textured ambience, shards of melody, moaning and keening and rumbling and shimmering. Various bits of rhythm and percussion, offering a dark propulsion, from dirge-like throb, to strangely looped skitter, to warped, fractured anti-grooves, all woven into the bleak black fabric of Akhkaru's terrifying sonic rituals.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Legendary Japanese musician / inventor / instrument builder / visionary Akio Suzuki is most likely unknown to most of you. But the more we discover, and the more of his music we hear, the more it seems like everyone needs to hear / experience his genius. Those of you who bought the recently re-listed Kogezan Koukiji double cd, a gorgeous ambient happening in a temple, surrounded by rain, have heard Suzuki performing on an ancient stone flute. And while the sound and spirit of the performance captured the tone and purpose of Suzuki's life and work, he is much more than just a stone flautist. Suzuki has been performing and building and teaching for 30+ years, exploring nature and how natural sounds can be captured and then set free, how one can get lost in the sounds all around us, and how music and creation and beauty exist always and everywhere. These tracks, as the titles suggests, are bits and pieces culled from the last 3 decades and reveal a spiritual pre-cursor to the Jewelled Antler collective, modern sound art and sound art exploration. Home made echo machines create throbbing, hypnotic voicescapes, warm and soft and naturally unique. Dancers' movements are translated into hand positions on a piano creating wild and unpredictable jumbles of notes. Hand made brick walls interact with wind and weather and expose their hidden emotions as haunting tones and subtle drones. Sounds are shuffled between multiple cassette decks creating insext symphonies of high end whir and distant chirps. Long glass tubes are struck and rubbed and bowed mimicking the sound of bird calls. Multiple turntables are used as the 'plates' in a musical game of plate juggling. Microphones are placed in rolled up tubes of paper, recording the phase shifts of people moving around the room and the sounds of the papers shifting. Roughly cut bamboo flutes accompanying the sound of a distant waterfall and the songs of birds. Suzuki's music is pure and zen, dreamy and uncluttered by the rules and worries of most modern music making. The liner notes are littered with effusive adulation from folks like Jim O'rourke ("All you have to do is listen"), David Toop ("I think of Akio Suzuki as a kind of magician") Yamatsuka Eye ("Hearing this music, I remember many things, including playing in a puddle as a tiny kid") and more. Suzuki reflects fondly on the recordings and offers us a glimpse into the soul of a shaman, truly in touch with himself and the sounds the earth has to offer. If we only know how, and where, to look.
This is the second collaboration between Masami Akita (you know, Merzbow) and Zbigniew Karkowski, yet should not to be confused with their first record, which held the same acronymic title. While the Merzbow sound has become a beast in and of itself -- lots of furious noise, tempestuous distortion, and a predilection to inspire hyperbolic rhetoric -- Zbigniew Karkowski's aesthetic
Wow! A new release on Bruce Russell's Corpus Hermeticum label! But just who the hell are these folks? Taku Sugimoto (electric guitar) is the most well known artist in this collaboration; we've heard his beautiful mimimal guitar playing previously on records with Kevin Drumm, Gunter Muller, and Otomo Yoshihide, as well as his performances both solo and collaboratively on the
Recorded in Tokyo in 1999, "Hokou" ("Spazieren" in Swiss or "Periodic Drift" in English) is an exercise in minimalist improvisation, full of abstract tones, deep droning cello swells and restrained guitar plucks. Really nice.
We loved the dreamy yet glitchy album Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep from earlier this year by Montreal electro-acoustic composer Mitchell Akiyama, as did quite a few of you...so here's something new from him that may be of interest. Akiyama's entry into Staalplaat's Mort Aux Vaches series of cds documenting live-on-the-air performances for the Dutch radio station VPRO. For this 44 minute recording, Akiyama digitally processed his own live guitar playing (no pre-recorded samples were utilized). What you'll hear are placid, ambient guitar melodies given a scratchy, static-y scrubbing, making this sound a bit like one of the loops from Philip Jeck's turntable, or the result of shortwave radio interference. In fact, it's kinda funny that this was meant for a radio broadcast, since any listeners not up to speed with the standards of "experimental" music-making might just think that they had really bad reception! This is mostly quite gentle, but with a bleeding edge of sonic overload that now and then builds to near-painful levels of distortion before subsiding and again letting the melancholic guitar wash and clicking rhythms soothe your ears. Really beautiful.
Packaged in a thin, folded sheet of embossed copper! Watch you don't cut yrself on it...
In 2003, Locust released the mighty fine Wooden Guitar compilation, featuring a tracks by some of the most interesting of the current crop of Fahey-inspired practicioners of folk-improv acoustic guitar: Jack Rose, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Richard Bishop. They've since followed up that release with solo discs by Bishop and, now, Akiyama.
Akiyama, who hails from Tokyo, was responsible for the longest and perhaps most avant-garde track on the original compilation, as his guitar playing incorporates the silence and abstraction of the "onkyo" electronic improv scene happening in his hometown. Yet the dusty, folky old timeyness key to the "Wooden Guitar" concept is much in evidence as well. So, listen to Pre-Existence and let Akiyama slowly wrap his sprongy steel guitar strings 'round your head, as he plucks and strums what almost sounds like a blues for the guitar itself. There's a lot of knock knock percussive playing and lonesome sustained tones. It's maybe what John Fahey would sound like if totally slow-mo stoned on cough syrup. Of course that sounds good to us. Can't wait for more in this series!
Tetuzi Akiyama has always been one of the weirdest of the whole "Wooden Guitar" bunch, doing the lovely steel-string, neo-Appalachian folk thing a la Jack Rose and James Blackshaw in the John Fahey tradition sometimes, yeah, but often bringing to it the fractured logic and significant silences of the experimental "onkyo" improv scene he's a part of in Japan. Then there's his whole, under-documented uber-repetitive, electrified avant-garde "boogie" side. And, when he was here earlier this year and did an instore at Aquarius, he held us spellbound with slow-motion string pluckings that we could barely hear.
So it's something of a surprise to find that this new seven-song, 15 and a half minute ep from Akiyama is entirely song-based, and not only that, he SINGS. There's lyrics printed on the cd sleeve, cryptic poetry suggestive of Biblical commands. Vocally, he sounds something like Devendra Banhart, believe it or not! But his nasal vocals are stereo-effected (double tracked), and maybe a bit off-key... so imagine The Shaggs doing a Devendra impression. The music fits with that to, as of course being Akiyama his compositions aren't gonna be easily grokked by your typical folk-fan. There's a definite Jandek-ishness to this, but by way of Takoma, an alienated, atonal quality that (for us) feeds perfectly into the strange dismal blues mood he's trying to conjure. With wheezing harmonica drones, rattling maracas, Akiyama's delta-delic acoustic guitar, and some dabbling in electronics, he has us spellbound again with these atypical Akiyama-ized death chants.
Another nice one from this avant garde guitar/lute improv duo!
Japanese 'onkyo' (and sometimes minimalist electric boogie!) guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama is always up to something interesting. Here he engages in live improvisation with Dutch avant-garde lute player Jozef van Wissem, who plays some sort of Renaissance lute while Akiyama chimes in on a nylon string resonator guitar that has been tuned to Renaissance lute tuning. The two long tracks here are both gentle, yet sorta jarring... a bit like some traditional Chinese music in that way (to our ears). There's lots of near-silent, pregnant space betwixt the quavering string plucks and resonating notes, as you might expect from any recording featuring Akiyama. Quite nice if you're up for this sort of thing -- a fan of the more abstract "wooden guitar", "deltadelica" stuff on Locust, for instance.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Blues Deceivers! Huh? Yes that's what this trio is calling themselves, says so right on the back of this spooky lil' 3". These three guitarists (representing Japan, Australia, and the USA respectively, all well known in underground music circles) agree that the tradition of 'the blues' should or could be (or already was) an aspect of their approach to experimental improvised guitar, and so teamed up for this live recording at the 2004 Bomb the Space Festival in Wellington, New Zealand to let their guitars gently weep and moan (like the willow of the title) in desolate and dismal blues style... avant "blues" that is, droning and eerie and abstract and evocative. The Blues Deceivers are definitely not the sort of blues band you'd find booked at the Boom Boom Room fer instance. No vocals, no drums... the only voices those of their guitars and the ghosts they conjure. For fans of Loren Connors, for sure, and also all three of these players, who have explored such old timey territory in their work to some degree or other before.
It's 18 minutes, 47 seconds long in case you're wondering about how much music they fit on the 3" format, in this case.
Very Special Nothing Music. Well, that's what Ed Pinsent at The Sound Projector calls the stuff found here. Recorded live at the Offsite space in Tokyo when London's uber-minimalist Mark Wastell was touring Japan in early 2002, this quartet revolves around the principles of very spare gestures for improvising. So quiet are these sounds that if someone were to wander into the performance off the street unawares, they might think that they found an audience staring at four men sitting quietly on a stage. But in fact, Wastell was working with three heavyweights of the Japanese improv community: Tetuzi Akiyama, who splits his time between the 'onkyo' aesthetics for generated silences and his avant-boogie rock explosions; Taku Sugimoto with his own take on minimalist compositions for numerous instruments and electronics; and Toshimaru Nakamura, whose no-input mixing board can emanate blistering feedback loops and systems of rarefied drone. Put these four artists on stage and their respectful hush only intensifies with subtle smears, acoustic scrabblings, a tiny arc of sinewaves, and pointillist plucks becoming a punctuation marks across vast silences. This is one of those records that is not served very well by the street noise bleeding through from outside. Headphones are recommended, if not required, and in doing so, you will most definitely be rewarded.
So imagine some sort of ultra doom band, like Bunkur or Moss or Corrupted, the downtuned low end heaviness, the brooding, harrowing blackened sound world; now imagine, if you can, a band like that that doesn't make doom metal, or sludge, or even dronemusic, but instead makes electronic music. Imagine some hellish danceclub, hidden away in some cavern, far below the surface of the earth, where only demons, and those that dwell in the shadows, could be found. And certainly not on the dancefloor - this music is not for dancing, it's too ominous, too grim, too blackened. That club is wreathed in shadows, with some mysterious DJ spinning records with ribcage rattling lowend, skull caving beats, the sounds droney and bleak, blown out and minimally murky, some sort of black avant dub maybe? That may all sound too good to be true, or classic aQ hyperbole, but this debut full length from Akkord, definitely evokes exactly that sort of scenario. Just check out the opener, "Torr Vale", preferably on a really loud speaker, or in a car, system BOOMING, or in headphones, volume cranked, it's stunningly immersive, the low end a physical presence, less dance music or electronica than abstract sound design, we're tempted to make comparisons to Ben Frost, Roly Porter, Pole, Demdike Stare, there's definitely a huge hauntological vibe going on for sure, but somehow, this is even more grim and sinister than anything Demdike Stare has conjured up. Swaths of blackened shimmer, clipped beats, submerged in a murky sprawl of tarpit ambience, squelchy synths add subtle colorations, but it's all about the low end, the rumbling, whirring, churning bass, peppered with sonar pings, and rhythmic pulsations for sure, but those elements play out more like light desperately trying to escape from a black hole, and that's what Akkord have conjured up, a sonic black hole, crushing, and blackened, dark and yeah, doomy. It took us ages before we could make it past that first track, and while nothing on the rest of the record is nearly as black and bleak, that dark energy definitely surges throughout, or more accurately, oozes. "Smoke Circle" cranks up the rhythm a bit, the feel sort of double dutch, a little tribal, with little blurts of free jazz skitter mixed in, but all draped over another ominous backdrop of low end rumbles, this time accompanied by a cool looped vocal, buried way down in the mix, the vibe undeniable groovy, but with a seriously sinister undercurrent.
Some tracks, like "3dOS" get downright house-y, sounding like they wouldn't be out of place on some Kompakt release, but even here, the sound is wreathed in shadow, about as feel-bad as a feel-good music can get, especially when it breaks down into, some swirling, pulsing death dub drifts. "Folded Edge" is another groover, almost jungle-y, but wreathed in creepy slowed down vox, and in the background, all manner of low end warble, and rib cage rattling thrum, the echo drenched vocal snippets dubbed out and psychedelic, the whole thing tripped out and trance-y. The rest of the record offers up variations on Akkord's grim sonic theme, pulsing, motorik rhythms, some house-y, some jungle-y, some techno, all clipped and fragmented, and all sort of shadowy and sinister. The best moments though remain tracks like "Channel Drift", where the beat is a monotonous pulse, buried beneath a sprawl of cinematic shimmer, weird field recorded clatter, all hazy and murky and washed out, it's not until more than halfway through that the beat emerges from the murk, a bit of skittery jungle, that devolves into a woozy lope, or the killer closer "Undertow", another bit of creaking low end grimnity, hauntological for sure, swirling and heavily panned, sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, sounding more like Nurse With Wound via Demdike Stare, some mutant strain of abstract industrial electro-dub minimal murk. So killer.
Fans of the Basic House record we made Record Of The Week recently, or Ben Frost, Roly Porter, Demdike Stare, Andy Stott, Vatican Shadow, Silent Servant, all all those various strains of dark mutant electronica, this could very well be your new favorite record. It is ours!
This is the debut cd by AQ pal Jeff Sampson and his partner Jeph Jerman (Hands To), who live 2000 miles apart and have been playing on and off together for 20 years! This is noise-y intense music concrete but filtered through a more modern noise/found sound/freejazz aesthetic. Two 30 minute pieces. The first starts out with struck bells, shimmering into nothingness, chiming and ringing, lots of overtones and lots and lots of space. Soon the whole thing implodes into an orgy of clatter and thumps and creaks and splattery percussion, wild freeform rhythms and non-rhythms, and all sorts of strange sounds. Whining strings that sound like the cries of a wild animal, moaning lower register drones, all manner of bowed, and strummed an plucked instruments, making sounds they weren't designed to make. Track one is half hippy psych clatter, half 20th century freak out. A weird combination but it works somehow. Track two uses the same elements but spreads the clatter out a bit, making for a more sort of haunted soundscape, done musique concrete style. Really cool.
Latest jam from local improvised noiseniks Al Qaeda (featuring one of the guitarists from aQ SF black metal faves Sutekh Hexen), here expanded to a sprawling septet, recorded live on the radio in LA. Guitars, tape loops, oscillators, drums, percussion, metal, and trumpet, all woven into a strange sort of abstract avant free noise minimalism. Spidery free jazz tendrils underpin thick swaths of brooding low end, industrial percussion and room sound are blurred into backdrops for swirls of white noise hiss, streaks of feedback, and lurching loops. It's noisy, but more a soft cacophony, a slow build, the drums not about propulsion, at least not at first, eventually the cymbal sizzle and drum splatter coalesces into a sort of krautrock groove (although that other stuff does continue right on, there are multiple drummers after all), but once the drums lock in, the clouds of ever shifting noise and texture get the anchor they need, and you can almost hear it in all the players as they seem to lock in alongside the rhythm, playing more fierce, the sounds more jagged and caustic, but the whole thing sort of more structured. The sound shifts eventually, the drums becoming more motorik, while the sounds around the drums grow more abstract, like a field of electronic buzz, sheet of billowing low end, before eventually fading out.
The second piece starts out drum heavy right off the bat, and the track is a murky monster, the guitars not so much riffing and unfurling swaths of soft focus guitarnoise and little curlicues of melody, this one does get heavy, a churning slab of krautnoise that sounds like an updated version of Parson Sound or Faust. The next track set dials back the heavy, letting the trumpet drift in a field of skittery snare and abstract electronics, the drums eventually coming together, into something like abstract krautjazz, left to meander into the final number which is a hazy washed out expanse of layered tones, of distant melodies, of overlapping loops, a blurred droney drift, that thickens as the set progresses, darkening too, before the drums kick in hard, and the sound solidifies into a droned out blur, the trumpet playing a strangely mournful lament over the top, while the rest of the band churns and chugs their way through a final blackened free noise blow out.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one machine numbered.
Gorgeous collection of psychedelic guitar drone from one half of Destructo Swarmbots. Lovely hushed dreamlike shimmer meets buzzy druggy blur.
Public Guilt is quickly turning into one of our favorite labels. A definite sound and vibe, but no two releases alike. An amazing visual aesthetic, sublime packaging, and some of the most beautiful, the heaviest, and most fucked up sounds we've heard in ages.
Public Guilt were one of the labels responsible for the amazing triple cd Untitled collection, a box gathering up some of the best 'noise' music of the last few years, they were also responsible for both discs from ambient guitarorrists Destructo Swarmbots, and this here super limited 3" cd-r just so happens to be the work of one of those Swarmbots.
The sound here is similar to the DS records, but where those records took guitars and stretched them into spaced out drones and whirring soundscapes, the music on Saturday, is much more obviously guitar music. Swarmbot Bianca Ala Muerte, is joined by Max Bondi, a UK experimental soundmaker, and the two, create a glistening, sublime world of subtly processed steel string buzz, breathless drift, and occasional bursts of fuzzy softpsych buzz.
The opening track is a lovely little tangle of playful guitar melodies, woven tightly amidst drifting wordless vocals, dreamy and hypnotic, the second track takes the same guitars and runs them through the computer, transforming them into stuttering soft edged swells, culminating in a crushing slow motion metallic dirge coda, throbbing crumbling heaviness, pulled into bleary eyed sheets of distorted bliss. The rest of the disc tends more toward the lovely and soft focus, with only super brief bits of downtuned crush. Instead, bits of glitched electronics, distant whistling, whirring chordal swirls, choral like voices, are all laid over the framework of delicate spidery guitars, and drifting melodic blur.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Packaged in screenprinted mini 3" foldout sleeves, blue black and metallic silver ink, with a printed vellum insert.
Bardo Pond records may only come out every year or two, but we need more fingers if we're gonna keep track of all the Bardo side projects and recordings that have been surfacing every few months for the last few years. Records by 500mg, Takeda, Dechemia, Alumbrados and of course these guys, 3 parts Bardo with some added electronic muscle, Alasehir.
This is record number two from this Bardo brothers project and is maybe the riffiest and heaviest Bardo side project recording yet. Three loooong tracks, each one some strange blend of abstract Appalachia, slippery slide guitar, tripped out druggy ambience, and seriously blown out dirgey metallic space rock, with simple pounding drums, huge distorted riffing, wild swirls of freaked out psychguitar leads, dense clouds of cymbal sizzle, tons of wah wah, streaks of screeching feedback, everything in the red and overblown, like some wild Hawkwind / Black Sabbath / Growing / Monster Magnet / Acid Mothers Temple / Amon Duul 2 mash up. This is wild and heavy, free and fucked up, spacey and trippy and druggy and far far far out.
Packaged in one of those cool aRCHIVE style 6 panel fold out sleeves.
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES! And already almost sold out so once these are gone we probably won't be able to get more.
This is the musical project of artist Marcel Dzama, who you should know if you're at all clued into the hipster art world. His drawings are Henry Darger-esque and he seems to have a thing for vampires. This limited edition 9" ep is part of a larger project that involves a custom made miniature log cabin, a beaver pelt, 20 limited signed prints, and this here record. Well, if you'd prefer not to drop the $10,000 the deluxe version will set you back (really!), then just the record is the way to go. Colored vinyl, packaged in a full cover sleeve, with an original Dzama painting depicting a morose looking black and white vampire family perched amidst a full color collage. The music of Albatross Note is a ramshackle, home recorded, chaotic indie pop. Damaged blues collides with sweetly soulful melodies, plaintive folks songs stumble and struggle through a thicket of amp buzz and tape hiss. Weird and wild and pretty wonderful. And buying just the record you save $9,980!! But if anyone -is- actually interested, there are a few of those Dzama cabins left....
Alboth! (yes, the exclamation point is part of their name, and deservedly so) was once known as the Swiss answer to Naked City (replacing Zorn's saxophone squalls with some amazingly fucked piano playing, however). Here they continue in their explorations of sonic extremity. Post-industrial jazzcore progrock? The current lineup dispenses with their signature piano, although there is use of a xylophone, as well as drums, guitar, vocals and electronics. Intense, crazy, like nothing else. But still recommended to fans of Naked City, Ruins, Oxbow, 16-17, etc.
Alejandra and Underwood are actually Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, the folks responsible for the always-interesting Lucky Kitchen label, devoted to unusual releases like Alejandra's childhood tape experiments, or the fabulous "Blip Bleep" videogame electronic music comp. For this album they took material recorded live over the past year and created fragmented soundscapes with snatches of music, spoken word, and environmental sound, representing their collective subconscious, a "notebook" of sound-thoughts and memories.
Another amazing Italian Library missive from the same folks who brought us the Daniela Casa we reviewed a while back. Alessandroni, most famously known for being the whistler for Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks, was a fantastic composer in his own right as we heard previously on Prisma Sonoro, a haunting library score reissued on the Australian Roundtable label last year. On this 1970 release he created the vocal group, I Cantori Moderni Di Alessandroni, an eight to sixteen person choir, who have lent their talents to many soundtracks by Morricone, Piero Umiliani, and many other Italian composers of the 60's and 70's (and were also featured recently on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained soundtrack). This was the only full length the choir recorded. Through 12 original compositions by Alessandroni, the choir evoke a lilting cinematic pop sound of Italian Bossa vibes and moody themes, augmented by harpsichord, flutes and twangy guitars. The choir not only featured Alessandroni's first wife, Giulia De Mutiis, but also the incomparable Edda Dell'Orso whose wordless vocals epitomize many of Morricone's Italian western and horror scores. Fantastic and Limited!!
We'll pretty much get anything on the Roundtable label right now, as they in collaboration with The Omni Recording Corporation, have been on a winning streak of reissuing on vinyl the most farflung and obscure library records, documentary soundtracks and other psycho-cinematic sonic ephemera from far off corners of the globe. Trouble is, they have been especially hard to get, and even more difficult to get enough of for us to list. We've literally been waiting for these latest two releases for nearly a year and our hopes of ever getting them were diminishing by the week. And all of the sudden, we got the news they were on the way and we were so seriously psyched! Two Italian library gems, one of haunted choir compositions from Egisto Macchi, founding member of the mighty Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova con Sonanza and the other from the wonderfully named Alessandro Alessandroni who is perhaps more well known as Ennio Morricone's guitarist and whistler! (Yes, whistler, of course he had to have one!) Both are pretty essential for lovers of seventies dreamy, otherworldly, acousmatic psychedelia!
Alessandro Alessandroni was a key player in shaping much of the classic Italian soundtrack sound as we know it today from such comps as Delirium Of The Senses: Psychedelia In Italian Cinema. As guitarist for Ennio Morricone, his famous whistle pretty much defined the whole Spaghetti Western sound. He was a session player for nearly all the well known film composers, Piero Umilani, Bruno Nicolai and Francesco De Masi, yet his own solo work often was overshadowed. It's hard to figure out why with such a beautifully brilliant album as this mythical library album for the Sermi label. Like the most sublime Italian soundtracks from Ennio Morricone, Prisma Sonoro is phantasmagoric exotica of strangely compelling and lush melancholic moods. A lysergically-minded sound design creates druggy cinematic compositions of harpsichords, mournful strings, psychedelic guitars and haunting female vocals. Seriously beautiful and limited to 500 copies, get one while you can!
While the world of indie underground rock continues to fawn over the new free folk movement, Feathers, Banhart, Vetiver, Brightblack, Fursaxa, Faun Fables, Espers and the like, out there, deep in the forest, a similar breed lurks in the shadows, one that shuns the light, and the magazine covers, and the collaborations, choosing instead to pursue their own muse, perform their own rituals, create their own sonic magicks deep in the shade of the wood. Their music is of a much darker hue, drawn from a much more mysterious source, and the results aren't fuzzy or shimmery, they are chaotic, ominous, intense and intensely emotional, a modern folk by way of Comus, via the Wickerman, but without any frilly folk trappings, instead the sound is magical yet murky, morose and moody, a strangely hauntingly creepy crawl. Such is the music of the duo known as Alethes. Doom laced pagan rituals assembled from strummed acoustic guitars, tribal percussion, and growling gravelly vocals. Imagine some impossible mix of Kiss The Anus Of The Black Cat, Comus, Swans, Der Blutharsch, Woven Hand and an acoustic Neurosis. Gorgeously nihilistic, a somber and shadowed forest folk, lilting and lovely but always with some haunting uneasiness lurking right below the surface. A world of stygian shimmer, of doomic desolation, of blackened beauty. Truly stunning.
Gorgeous black glossy print on oversized, fantastically tactile rubberized six panel deluxe fold out sleeve. Wow.
One of two new releases from local label Time Released Sound, this one from Canadian songstress/soundscaper Lyndsie Alguire, who we had never heard or heard of before, and who apparently used to traffic in a sound more rooted in piano/vocal interplay. But the sonics here however are much more suited to TRS's aesthetic of field recording flecked cinematic ambience, with Alguire weaving a lush landscape of collaged sound, the vibe reminiscent in fact of Nurse With Wound's prettier moments at times, but exploring a sound much more tranquil and lovely at others, with her piano still the focus. After a brief opening track of swirling atmospheres and slow shifting layers, ominous rumbles and blurred soft focus psychedelic shimmer, the first song proper unfurls, lyrical lovely piano, set on a bed of processed voices, manipulated field recordings, all smeared into a dreamlike haze. But Alguire has more up her sleeve, the sound slowly shifting into something that sound much more 4AD or Projekt, a sort of gauzey shoegaze, driven by programmed beats, and ethereal vocals, all wreathed around her melancholic piano. The record finishes with the epic 10+ minute "All Possible Stories", a dense collages drift, sample voices and layered field recordings woven into a softly undulating field of warm whirring chordal thrum, the piano here washed out into hazy clouds of color, the whole thing a haunting, filmic, dreamlike drift. So lovely.
And as always, Time Released Sound has pulled out all the stops, no standard version on this one, just the pricey special art edition, a sealed printed envelope encloses a folded foot long accordion like insert, made from a hundred year old educational flash card, mounted with 8 reproductions of polaroid prints of the rather attractive artist mostly nude, the insert printed with sentence fragments, the whole thing as mysterious as the music it contains. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Utilizing the same sort of packaging (dessicated leaves, twigs, and lichen encased between the jewel case and the tray) and exploring similar sounds as AQ fave l. chasse, this collaboration between Alio Die and Ora (here Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate) is a beautiful shimmering synthesis of dark ambience and organic droning. Recommended as with all of the Andrew Chalk releases we have heard to date!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The long overdue return of these Belgian musical miscreants, whose last release, the super limited tape and then not so limited cd Luizig, was a huge favorite around these parts, and why the hell not, a blown out blackened smear of in the red doom dirge weirdness, that we compared to folks like Ash Pool and Akitsa and Ancestors. But that had a lot more to do with the quality of the sound, the timbre and tone, the brutally lo-fi recording, the music itself was much more twisted and blurred and tangled and whatthefuck.
For this two song follow up, Alkerdeel change gears pretty dramatically, opening up with nearly 4 minutes of super spare stripped down doom. The guitar distorted, but surprisingly clean by Alkerdeel standards, the drums a simple funereal plod, until finally the vocals swoop in, a hellish shriek, WAY up in the mix, before just as quickly drifting off, leaving the same skeletal doom, but this time, the guitar explores a bit more, more melody, more sprawling ambience, and again, the vocals come in and the track shifts gear into a pounding lo-fi midtempo dirge, all buzzy guitar, stumbly drumming, growled howled vocals, even a stretch of buzzing blastbeat blackness, before fracturing into something more mathy and woozy and off kilter, and for the remainder of the track (a long one at 13 minutes) slipping from super dirgey atonal crawl, to furious frenzy of chaotic buzz, to blurred washed out blackness. Pretty awesome stuff. This time we might add to the above mentioned bands outfits like Moss and Bunkur and the like, much doomier this go round.
But then band go and follow up with an Ildjarn cover, total raw and primitive buzz drenched black metal d-beat pound. As crusty and punk rock as it is kvlt and grim, simple pounding drums, hypnotic almost looped sounding riffage, even a sort of double time more punk rock second half, the whole thing laced with perfectly yowled whiskey soaked crusty vokills.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! We managed to get the last 20, it's already out of print, so once these are gone, they are gone forever. Packaged in a cool mini 3" dvd style plastic clamshell case, full color insert, each one hand numbered of course.
We had a handful of customers recommend these fucked up doomdamagemetalnoise weirdos, and around the same time, in some glorious moment of serendipity, the band dropped us a line so we grabbed as many copies as we could of their super limited (only 66 copies) cassette, released on the same label that fellow countrymen Silvester Anfang call home...
These Belgians create a serious ruckus, pounding super distorted grim necro ultra raw dirgey droney doom metal, we saw it described as filthyblacksludgedoomdrone which pretty much sums it up. Pounding sludge, with blown out practice space production, grinding guitars, blasting super distorted drums, filthy super sick vocals,�with bursts of blackness and stretches of loping minimal crunch, sort of mathy, very doomy, all very very heavy and noisy and awesome. One of our favorite new bands easy.�
Essential for fans of Bone Awl, Ancestors, Ash Pool, Beherit, Akitsa as well as other practitioners of grim buzz and noise drenched sludge...
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES!!! In super DIY packaging, printed sleeve, photocopied insert, each tape hand numbered...
We knew this was gonna be good. Long time aQ fave Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk (MZ.412, Toroidh, Folkstorm, etc.), who is responsible for some of the most haunting and unsettling dark ambient drones we've ever laid ears on, teams up with his countryman Tim Bertilsson (Fear Falls Burning, Switchblade) for a record of extreme minimal heaviness and gorgeously abstract and bleak grimness.
Mysterious and cinematic, every track here is immersive and overwhelming, like stepping through a portal into some hellish otherworld, a soundtrack to the subterranean depths, an endless expanse of charred remains and crumbling ruins, a bleeding black sky and an ash covered landscape, voices drift like lost memories, tones rumble and whir, melodies are pulled apart, their remnants left to float among the dead leaves and detritus. The deep low end slips from crystalline hush, to super distorted crunch, often ground into a wavering black streak, sometimes allowed to melt into oozing pools of reflective layered hum.
Organum like bowed metal underpins fragments of riffs, shards of guitar, engulfed in slow motion swirls of distant hiss, the various elements sometimes tamped down into a muted crawl, lit up from within by lightning like crackle, obscuring the strange incantations drifting up from below. Here and there the guitars do emerge from the roiling blackness nearly unscathed, offering up a handful of truncated riffs, before they are quickly subsumed by the surrounding darkness. The record culminates in an explosion of psychedelic skree, a chaotic confluence of brittle crunch and smeared high end clang, only to slip into an outro of ultra minimal hushed tectonic rumbles.
Gorgeous and grim, harrowing and heavy, dense and dark and so recommended.
Never really thought we'd ever see anything from Allegory Chapel Ltd ever again. This was the project of one very dark soul named Elden M, who resided in the Bay Area throughout the '80s and '90s, lurking about the experimental / noise / industrial crowd and working in the dank warehouse at Subterranean Records. He released a dozen or so cassettes during that time period, of bombastic, synth and sample heavy noise that lumbered between the sewer-dwelling of Factrix and the dystopian electronics of Dissecting Table, with plenty of more noise filling in the gaps. Much of his cassettes were self-released, though the work was also published by G.R.O.S.S., Sound Of Pig, and Charnel Music. By 1996 though Elden shifted his attention to the realm of black metal, running the label / distro site blackmetal.com. Some 18 years later, we have the return of Allegory Chapel Ltd. - on a cassette of course! Resurrection is an apt name, but only in terms of the ACL reboot. Aesthetically, this has a very different bent with Elden eschewing midi-based lattice works of rhythm and melody and focusing instead on the dynamic interplay between several streams of aggressive noise. Tone pulse monstrosities trudging through toxic blooms of asbestos dust, long dive-bombing arcs of atom-smashed noise gliding in and out of blackdrone morass, and a fraught psychic energy that equivocates between nihilist torpor and vehement antagonism. One could think of the more mature works of Grey Wolves or Consumer Electronics, if mature and power electronics could cohabitate in the same descriptive arrangement. Wholly recommended, regardless.
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.
Allfang Mit Pferdekopf unveil, very slowly, a super minimal shimmer and glisten, with a barely there glitch and click percussive filigree. Slightly metallic reverberations with high pitched overtones shifting and drifting. Side 2 is much thicker, and much more active, a thick crust of sonic grit over haunting industrial chimes, ringing out in a slow motion sorrowful melody, very grim and cinematic.
First edition. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Marbled lime green vinyl, in a hand painted abstract water color sleeve with liner notes and insert.
Record number two from the acclaimed Norwegian duo. Alog's Eide and Haugan discreetly tiptoe their way through a plethora of styles, as on their debut "Red Shift Swing". "Duck-Rabbit", however, was mostly inspired by ideas and themes created through
Funny to discover a project from San Francisco by way of LaGrange, Georgia; but that's the way it goes some times. Aloonaluna is the one-woman project of Lynn Fister who landed her first cassette of thoroughly drugged-out drone-pop on the thoroughly drugged-out imprint Hooker Vision (run by Grant and Rachel Evans, of Nova Scotia Arms and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel respectively), and it's a warped gem of twisted psychedelic lullabies that seem to bridge the damaged tape resurgence with a Jewelled Antler style miasma of half-dreamt songs and half-remembered drones. She loops bells, guitars, field recordings, gristly synths, her own voice, and whatever else she can find into hazy, atmospheric songs that turn inward on many tracks (a la Grouper) but at times like on "Watercolor Rabbit" she breaks out a punchy drum machine to turn her somnambulant, stumbling songs into giddy, lo-fi dance numbers (sorta like Kwjaz remixing Julee Cruise). "Antarctica" could almost be her homage to Richard Pinhas' "Iceland" in terms of coldwave synth propulsion. Twelve tracks in all over this 45 minute tape. Nice stuff, but unfortunately this tape is already sold out at the source... so what we got now is all we'll ever get!
Alp is the work of Roger Horberry also known for his participation in the ethno-ambient affairs of O Yuki Conjugate. Here, Horberry engages the far more ubiquitous sounds of boiling water, fax machines, furnaces, and other household items which emit teeny-tiny sounds lost in the excess noise of everyday life. After contact miking these objects, Horberry has amplified and processed the whirring drones into an extraterrestrial arena of reverberating washes with a particularly digital clarity. A solid deep listening project not far from Toy Bizarre or even some of the later Zoviet France recordings.
Intense, intentional hiss and distortion masking a lovely, minimalistic folk music is what we have here. Or, on some tracks, gentle acoustic folk derived from Welsh tradition, and on others, purely piercing tones and grating electronic drones. This split release from inter-related outfits Alphane Moon and Our Glassie Azoth is haunting and gorgeous, but not for those whose ears aren't also in the mood for some isolationist noisescapes... Seemingly on the same (distorted) wavelength as fellow pastoral experimentalist Richard Youngs, the Wales-dwelling duo of Ruth and Daf are both AM and OGA (which the liner notes admit "have always naturally been mixed up"). This cd brings together previously unreleased material as well as music that has appeared before only on comps or limited vinyl releases. The first half of the disc (tracks 1-5) are the work of AM, the "folkier" of the two groups perhaps -- one of their selections is a traditional Welsh number, "Cyngor Y Biogen" ("The Magpie's Advice"), whose delicate vocals and acoustic guitar stand in contrast to the noisier textures found elsewhere... Like, on the disc's 2nd half (tracks 6-8) which is dominated by OGA's 26 minute "The Magican's Heavenly Chaos", more of an industrial, sci-fi soundscape.
