L.A. native Alfred Weisberg-Roberts is Daedelus, and he apparently wasn't as sure about the success of this project as was Dimitri from the Phthalo label, who claims he had to pry this out of Weisberg-Roberts fingers in order to release it. "Her's Is> [sic]" is a dark electronic narrative riddled with strange answering machine recordings from a dosed-up raver girl who thinks she's a poet. Rapid rhythmic cuts and muddled electronic calliope melodies mutate into the harsh, almost industrial aesthetic of the early Rephlex catalogue. For an electronic record, this has the uncanny lo-fi feel, as if this album's originated on a 4-track rather than a computer. Odd to say the least. We haven't yet decided who (Alfred or Dimitri?) was right about the merits of this recording...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Bowed bass tones, sustained pipe organ chords. "Lichtgeschwindigkeit" is another attempt at attaining the drone supreme, and it's a good one, evocative of absolute darkness -or- blinding light, either way totally all-encompassing. This disc from Austrians Werner Dafeldecker (whom we've encountered before playing with the likes of Dean Roberts, Taku Sugimoto, Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm and many others) and Klaus Lang (whom we haven't) is a slowly developing, moodily pulsating, hour-long dronescape broken into seven tracks. Blissful, yet haunting. Gently soothing, yet massively ominous. There's enough variation soundwise to hold one's interest for the full hour -- for instance, the foghorn sounds and whistling blips of track five stand apart from the depths-of-space hiss of track six. We're told this was recorded in a church, on a snowed-in winter night. That seems about right. Recommended to all drone/improv fans for sure!
Last list (#249) we reviewed the quite lovely Hundloka, Flockblomstriga 1 cd on Hapna by this Swedish sound artiste... in which we mentioned another release of his, devoted entirely to FAKE field recordings of nature sounds. That is, what sound remarkably like real bird calls and frog croakings and insect buzzings but are totally artificial constructs made by Dahl himself. No actual creatures involved. That's this 36 minute disc, Habitat. And it's fantastic, if you (like us) revel in the organic textures of outdoorsy soundscapes. Knowing how it was made -- at home with computer, electronics, accordion, recorder, speakers, toys, etc. -- is an interesting twist, but concept aside it's just a really nice listen. And (almost) totally convincing. If you didn't know better you'd imagine Dahl stalking critters in the wild with his microphone...but there'd be something strange, sorta plastic and brightly, wrongly colored about the landscape, enhanced with CGI animation perhaps. Very pleasant and somehow peculiar...
This cd-r release is limited to 100 numbered copies, of which we got the last ten of 'em!! The label is sold out, we won't be getting any more...
Sweet! Hundloka (named for a flowering weed known in English as Cow Parsley) is another wonderful, textural, abstract release on Sweden's Hapna label, the first for field recordist/sound manipulator/visual artist Anders Dahl of Sweden, who is quite at home there (on Hapna, we mean, though he's also Swedish), alongside such artists as Tape, 3/4hadbeeneliminated, and Giuseppe Ielasi. At home in a realm of dreamy, twilit soundscapery full of snap, crackle, and drone. The three untitled tracks here, all but the middle one quite long (19:45, 6:22, and 12:37 respectively) are all performed (improvised? composed?) on stringed and wind instruments like guitar, bouzouki, violin, and recorder, also with the use on one track of computer and on another of "prepared speakers", plus percussion by Henrik Olsson. Yet the mysterious buzzingness of this sounds a lot like Dahl has woven in some field recording tapes as well. However, since he's apparently constructed *fake* nature sound recordings (digital birds!) in the past, we suspect that it's all Dahl here, no help from swarming insects or twittering birds or frolicking woodland creatures... It's all very gorgeous and glitchy, with guitar pluckings and gentle electronic hums, quiet and calm but for some moments of drone drama and surprise percussive attack.
We just love solo percussion albums. Stomu Yamash'ta, Toshiaki Ishizuka, Glen Velez, Milford Graves, Christopher Tree, Keiji Haino, Christian Vander, Janne Tuomi.... We're suckers for 'em. Something about a drummer saying, "hey, I'm more than just the timekeeper, you other guys, with your guitars and stuff, I don't need you, get lost, I'm doing this all myself my own way", is just cool, and often quite creative. So already we were interested in this debut solo album from this hitherto unknown to us (but apparently prolific) Norwegian jazz drummer, Erland Dahlen.
And then there's the title, Rolling Bomber. Sound heavy, right? We're already thinking martial drum rolls, and, uh, Motorhead's Bomber. But, the title actually comes from the name of Dahlen's drum kit, it's a vintage Slingerland "Rollingbomber" model, from the '40s, mostly made of wood 'cause of wartime metal shortages. So this isn't heavy - aside from the thump of the bass drum upon occasion - it's more of an atmospheric, textural soundscape thing. Besides the Rollingbomber kit, Dahlen makes use of multiple other percussion instruments (gongs, logdrum, timpani, maracas, kalimba, temple blocks, bells, etc.), also electronics, and some custom built gadgets, and a "monkey drummer with battery"... AND, also close to our hearts here at aQ, he plays the musical saw! That's where a lot of the (eerie) melody comes from. Not a percussion instrument per se, but cool.
So, the seven tracks here are all quite moody, dramatic, and rhythmically interesting (naturally). The grand finale, "Germany", gets kinda krautrocky, thus the title perhaps, with the beats more insistent, and the musical saw used effectively, it's an energetic culmination to this fine album.
When you hear the words Load Records, and then 'duo from Providence', you probably think of a certain sort of sound, blown out and super heavy, chaotic and noisy, the sort of sound that would be coming from a couple dudes rocking out wildly amidst a heaving sweat soaked crowd, and there could possibly be costumes involved, but odds are you wouldn't have thought of this - dark, brooding, moody, synthy coldwave, but that's precisely what you get with Daily Life, whose debut Necessary And Pathetic is indeed a Load anomaly, and we're digging it quite a bit!
Skeletal beats underpin crumbling distorted synths and lush chordal swells, the vocals deep and moody, weird processed whispery wraithlike vocals swirl around soaring melodramatic melodies, chiming guitars, strange glitchy crunches swoop from speaker to speaker, organs whir and warble, lovely female vocals offer melodic counterpoint, lots of metallic buzzing, deep bassy rumblings, all manner of keyboard and synth textures, electronic pulses, super dark and dreamy, surprisingly poppy and melodic, and all very lush and dense and really pretty great. For fans of Blessure Grave, Interpol, Cold Cave, Silk Flowers, and all that sort of stuff.
Got two new releases this week on the Ge-stell label, run by aQ pal Cameron, who before this also masterminded the Merzbild and Merz Tapes labels, one of which is this new 12" from Dalglish, aka Chris Douglas, formerly O.S.T., a big aQ fave back in the day, and whose last lp on Pan we reviewed not too long ago on list #442. Like that lp, Dorcha Aigeann continues to move away from the Douglas's old beat oriented sound, toward a more sound designed ambience and layered layered textural atmosphere, the opener here sounds like Oval, the same sort of orchestrated glitchery, but where Oval created smooth, almost liquid sounds, here, those glitches remain rough around the edges, a bristled, tangled landscape of keening longform tones an dense metallic shimmer. But the sound of Dorcha Aigeann is not so easily defined, stretches of grinding, sci-fi plunderphonia dissolves into cascades of crumbling static, and garbled alien transmissions, soft noise drift blossoms into haunting, field recording flecked dubbiness, sliced and diced into wild stuttery pulses, and clouds of truncated melodies, wound tight into ping ponging blurts and squelches, woozy kosmische thrum evolves into wild skitters across some alternate universe FM band, staticky squiggles and fractured samples, crumbling loops and malfunctioning FX, all woven into surreal, lysergic landscapes of damaged, disembodied electronica.
Both sides also finish with some killer locked grooves, which, if you're not paying attention, you might find yourself listening to for quite a while before realizing they are in fact not a weirdly repetitive track proper...
Pressed on 150 gram transparent vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker, housed in a silkscreened PVC plastic cover, with die cut slit, along with a printed transparent insert.
We'd been hearing about this new Dalglish for a while before we realized that Dalglish was in fact none other than Chris Douglas, formerly of San Francisco, and formerly known as O.S.T back in the day, who was responsible for some of our favorite weirdo electronica of that era, his sound falling somewhere between Autechre, Aphex Twin and Coil. But on Niaiw Ot Vile, his first for the Pan label, Douglas displays a much different sound than we remember, less about beats, and more about texture and ambience, displaying a deft hand for sound design, immediately evoking Ben Frost, or Roly Porter, a sort of twentieth century modern minimalism filtered through a cracked avant electronic filter. Sounds ooze and sprawl and drift, the opener almost sounds like a deconstructed Godspeed jam, languid guitars (at least they sound like guitars) unfurl amidst a sea of blackened shimmer, and muted melodic fragments, all suspended in a slow motion swirl. The following track adds some propulsion, but instead of straight ahead beatscaping, it's more a jumble of tangled anti-rhythms, a field of glitch and squelch, gristly and dizzying, all draped over a darkly melodic landscape of chordal swells, and moody minor key thrum, and so it goes, the whole record an homage to a friend of Douglas' who passed away, that sort of threnody vibe present throughout, shadowy and wistful, melancholic, but also strangely dreamy, and subtly academic, slipping easily from gristly crunch, to dreamy blurred ambience, to abstract fields of layered, textured dronemusic, to swirling flurries of Oval like organic shimmer.
Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker, and housed in a black and white sleeve wrapped in a super striking silk-screened PVC jacket, with the usual Pan style abstract geometric style artwork.
First we've heard from Mark Dall, aka Dalhous, who on his second record, delivers a gorgeous collection of wistful electronica, and darkly textured soundscapes of blurred samples and haunting synthesized sounds. We're immediately reminded of Boards Of Canada, but Dall's sound is even more human, and organic, just check out the one-two punch of opener "First Page From Justine", a hazy smear of hushed shimmer, and slow shifting melody, dreamy and drifty, and "A Communion With These People", which expands on that ethereal thrum, letting it blossom into something haunting and lovely, almost like a more IDM version of DJ Shadow, a simple beat, wreathed in crackle and hiss, all over a bed of minor key shimmer and swirl, soft slow-motion swells of sound, peppered with fragmented melodies, and lushly textured layers, one of those tracks that could have stretched out for two or three times its length, and we would have remained utterly mesmerized. "Function Curve" foregoes the rhythm, and instead unwinds a swirling skyful of kosmische glimmer, that sounds like stumbling upon the ruins of some old planetarium show, where impossibly, ghostly music plays on, even though the ceiling that once displayed projected stars and planets, has crumbled, the soundtrack now accompanying the actual cosmos.
The whole record plays out like that, like sound out of time, music from another world, or another plane, the sound modern, but at the same time, reminiscent of so many sounds of the past, the best moments, when the sound seems to crumble and fall apart, the sonic decay present throughout, as if the record were constantly struggling against the ravages of time, and the fading of musical memories, hints of the Caretaker abound, as well as Pye Corner Audio, and even Demdike Stare in places, but the vibe is not nearly so dark, instead it's wistful and melancholy, the beats and rhythms, instead of the focal point of the record, almost seem like bridges between the ambience, rhythmic passages connecting the strange synthscapes and hushed shimmerscapes, sometimes sounding like a lost soundtrack, other times like vintage new age, and other times like the music from some strange educational filmstrip from the seventies, but throughout, it's gorgeous, fantastic, dreamy electronica that seems like it was brought here from somewhere, or some-when, far far away.
Commotus is the debut from Spanish songstress/soundscaper Lucrecia Dalt, and definitely positions her amongst some like minded soundmakers we love - Grouper, US Girls, Valet, Chelsea Wolfe. Dalt has the same sort of knack for weaving lustrous dark dreamscapes, mixing the gothic folk of Wolfe with the hazy soft focus psychedelic drift of Grouper, but adding her own twists, in the case of album opener it's a background of layered, pitch shifted voices, which forms the whole of the sonic backdrop, all harnessed to skittery, percolating rhythms, and laced with a surprising blurt of woozy wah guitar and an out of nowhere swell of bleating brass. The overall effect is ghostly, spectral, haunting and darkly lovely, and the rest of the record unfurls similarly. "Excopolamina" almost sounds like an extension of the opener, a bit more hazy and blurred, metallic riffs muted into a churning rhythm, the beats more skittery, the vocals even more ethereal. Then there's the playful synth solo, and what sounds like an old fashioned wurlitzer humming in the background.
There's definitely a woozy, washed out sort of Caretaker vibe to the proceedings here, the sounds and songs faded and worn, transmissions from some mysterious shadowy otherworld, dark ballads that drift ominously, only to collide with tracks that are downright playful ("Conversa"), which almost sound like a slightly darker, gloomier Liminanas, before slipping right back into another sprawl of abstract shimmer, twang flecked, bass-bloop peppered minimal murkiness, or some wispy slo-mo space blues, or some tripped out doomfolk new wave dirgery. But whatever strain of Dalt's dark sonic DNA drifts to the fore, she renders it haunting and heavenly, mysterious and murky, whether it's propulsive and groovy, or blissed out and barely there, it's always dreamlike and otherworldly.
Stick around for the 8+ minute closer "Batholith", which is fast becoming our favorite, a sprawling stretch of minimal country murk, woozy, ethereal, laced with whirring organs, panned sound swooping from speaker to speaker, and some near carnivalesque melodies, all woven into a strangely psychedelic spaced out bit of lysergic dream pop shimmer. So good.
We've long championed the work of Joel Phelps, an unsung hero of the indie underground, beginning with his stint in Silkworm - he was the group's secret weapon, with an aching, about to break voice that could soar into a powerful howl, his songs tense and intense, delicate balances of hushed brooding shimmer and explosive angular crunch, his wild guitar wrangling the perfect match for that utterly distinctive voice. Then came a clutch of solo records, all stunning, and almost all completely under the radar. And then, nothing. He seemed to have disappeared. Stopped making music. Until now.
There's a new Phelps solo record, which is fantastic, and we'll review that one soon too, but this new project is something else entirely.
We often talk about bands or records that seem custom made for aQuarius, and this definitely seems like one of those. Joel Phelps, teamed up with Stuart Dahlquist, of Burning Witch, Asva and SUNNO))), the result very much like you might imagine, and like we would have hoped, the best, creepiest, Silkworm songs, fused to the slow, droned out creep and crawl of Dahlquist's previous bands, ultra-doom torch songs, indie rock fused to Arvo Part, avant drone meets intimate songsmithery, a difficult combination for sure, but one that rewards patient and deep listening. Fans of either/both Phelps and Dahlquist will marvel at this haunting soundworld the two have conjured, from the brief opening, with Phelps, crooning over simpler percussion, and slow shifting layers of chordal shimmer, aching and heartfelt, bittersweet and melancholy, seemingly setting the stage for something much more like Phelps' previous works, but instead, the sound shifts, the second track "Stravinsky" unwinding as a dense layered drone, and when the vocals swoop in, they explode into strange harmonies, those harmonies woven into thick bass tones, the result some sort of alien chorale, downcast and stirring, even sans vocals, it would be a gorgeous sprawl of bass driven droned out dirgery, at once ethereal and atmospheric, dense and down tuned, but the song, like the whole record is rife with dramatic dynamics, long stretches of airy organ, drifting weightless, other movements bordering on avant doom, and still others dreamlike and choral, which is a sonic microcosm of the rest of the record.
Dahlquist delivering some breathtaking sound design, field sod digital glitchery, wound around glimmering soft focus swirls of sound, heaving low end thrum, soundtrack like melodies, all wound into tense slow-builds, sometimes transforming into some hushed Phelps like downer slow core pop, othertimes blossoming into something even blacker. On tracks like "The Chant", simple percussion underpins Phelps' harrowing vocals, which are soon joined by keening organ drones, the vibe intense and sinister, until another cascade of thick bass buzz swoops in, and Phelps' vocals explode into incredible and alien harmonies, the sound mutating into drowsy, sun dappled doom, laced with twinkling electronics, and buried dreamlike melodies. And without going track by track, the rest of the record continues to expand, prismatically, slipping easily from strangely psychedelic indie pop, albeit fractured and flecked with weird steel drum like percussion, to field recording laced dronescapes, to quietly broody stretches of moody agent pop, psychedelic slowcore drift, to minimal, almost liturgical ambience.
Dizzying in scope, stunning in execution, a practically perfect, and perfectly IM-perfect, hybrid of haunting avant indie rock and modern composition, brooding, downer folk minimalism and expansive sound designed dronescapery, dreamlike torch songmithery and outsider, cinematic ambient bliss.
Recorded live in Seattle, WA, last October near the end of an all too brief west coast tour, this is an artfully packaged double cd of improv conjured by former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki, his former Can-mate Michael Karoli, Mandjau Fati, Thomas Hopf, and Alex Schonert. Additional sounds and textures created by Mark Spybey (Zoviet France, Dead Voices on Air, Download) and Dustin Donaldson (I Am Spoonbender). Nine lengthy tracks including a version of CAN's "Mother Sky".
Zach Hill (Hella, The Ladies, etc) and Nels Cline (Wilco, Geraldine Fibbers, etc) are probably two of the busiest and most prolific musicians in the 'underground' these days. They've been trying to find time for ages to make a record together, as their talents do seem to speak to a similar ecstatic aesthetic. But finding the time proved to be quite a feat. Luckily when Wilco had a day off in Chicago and Zach was also in Chicago, the two decided to have an improv jam together and Distressed is the result. Hill's trademark frantic drumming moves more towards avant jazz as Cline once again shows why he is such an in demand guitarist. What if in their prime Van Halen were cool enough to cover a Pharaoh Sanders record? Maybe it would sound something like this.
David Daniell was the guitarist for WAY underrated post rock slowcore drifters San Augustin, whose records were ultra understated and hushed expanses of soft focus guitar filigree, whispered melody, and barely there percussion, and his past solo records were super minimal as well, microsound explorations that basically required headphones to truly appreciate. So we were sort of expecting Daniell, for his entry in TOTE's Guitar series of one sided 12"s, to offer up a disc of near silence, coaxing the gentlest of sounds from his guitar, but instead, I-IV-V-I, named for the basic blues progression, is anything but. The opening track is a monstrous slab of tectonic buzz, layers of rumbling and crumbling distorted guitar, blurred into a Niblockian drift, warm and wavery, smeared and dreamy, but suitably tense and dramatic. Which is followed by a sort of looped Appalachia, steel string guitar, locked into a mantra like progression, the main figure locked into endless repetition, while in the background, a second (and maybe third) guitar offer up pretty little counterpoint and extra steel string buzz, texture and melody that seems to swirl beneath that hypnotic main riff.
"V" is all new age-y drift, another bit of soft dronemusic, laced with subtle layers of hiss and crackle, the melody a distant swell, which all gives way to a sweet melancholy guitar line that is processed into a layer of warm buzzing dreaminess, and finally the record finishes with a mournful, almost funereal sounding steel string buzzscape, that sounds almost like bluegrass, if it was stretched way out into long streaks of metallic shimmer, but Daniell drapes some playful major key melodies over the top, and the two, while seemingly at odds, mesh into something both haunting and mysterious, soft and weirdly pretty.
Pressed on super thick, swirled green, yellow and white vinyl. One sided, the other side features an etching by Savage Pencil, housed in a thick PVC sleeve, and as always, VERY LIMITED!
The guitarist from the understated post-rock / improv group San Augustin, David Daniell presents his first solo album of microsound compositions that have much more in common with lowercase artists like John Hudak and Richard Chartier than the skeletal rockisms of Loren Mazzacane Connors. Having treated field recordings from the southern regions of the US through a number digital processes (probably using Max / MSP to run treated samples at very slow speeds), Daniell arrives at a similar restraint as his San Agustin project; however, he's realized his music through muted errata of unspecified pops and clicks floating amidst gentle electrical tones, deep bass flickerings, and lots of silence. "Sem" certainly captures the sense of meditation and the methodological hermeticism that his more well known lowercase contemporaries have produced. Headphones required.
MPEG Download: "Sem 2" [/audio/daviddaniellsem2.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Sem 2" [/audio/daviddaniellsem2.m3u]
If you follow aQuarius on Facebook and Twitter, then you may have gotten a little taste of what is quickly becoming our new favorite label, Auris Apothercary. The first releases we got from them, was a tiny glass vial, with a single tape loop within, old Norwegian recordings of oceanographic instruments, the second was a series of NEC tapes, each with the original music from classic Nintendo games, with the packaging perfectly emulating the original designs. The vials sold out in a flash, we might have a couple of the tapes left (just ask), but we will henceforth endeavor to review anything and everything we can get from AA. A quick look at their other releases reveals an impossibly meticulous approach to packaging, everything in limited numbers, mostly because they are all hand designed and assembled, in fact, just take a look at this, a tape from someone (or something) called Dante Augustus Scarlatti, whose tape comes housed in a printed, clear plastic slipcover, with the tapecase itself also silkscreened, not to mention ANOTHER transparent insert, cool line drawings of mountains, and old maps, the two tape spools behind silver inked globes (the tapes cleverly not rewound, so each spool is a perfect planetoid sphere, the various layers perfectly blended into one elaborate almost 3 dimensional image, each one also numbered, limited to just 99 copies. With things like this, it almost doesn't even matter what it sounds like, it's a piece of art, that would look just as nice sitting on your shelf as it would jammed in your Walkman. But don't let its artiness keep you from enjoying the mysterious sounds inside, nearly two hours of rumbling drones and swirling atmospheric mystery, blurred industrial landscapes of dreamlike crumble, buried barely there rhythms, constantly shifting textures, guitars and oscillators woven into heaving swells of washed out decay and feedback wreathed glacial drift, each side a single slow burning expanse of tectonic creep and gauzy greyed out ambience, totally hypnotic and mesmerizing minimal dronemusic that should most definitely appeal to all the aQ shoppin' dronelords out there.
Again, LIMITED TO 99 COPIES, we got a handful, not sure we'll be able to get more when we run out...
It's like Christmas around here (we know, it is ACTUALLY like Christmas around here right now), whenever we get a new batch of tapes from Auris Apothecary, not only is it bound to sonically all over the map, without fail the packaging is totally stellar, often high (or low) concept, meticulously hand assembled, often involving organic matter, or broken glass, or sponges, or scrolls, or who knows what else. Needless to say, every AA release is special, and is often as much a work of sonic art, as it is a piece of music.
We reviewed a record by Dante Augustus Scarlatti (the group, not the person, we think) a while back, a fantastic collection of rumbling drones and blurred psychedelic soundscapery, and this latest one is sort of a continuation of that, utilizing 15 separate drones, culled from strings and voices and organs, in the form of buzz and hiss and skree and thrum and hum and whir, laid atop one another, bleeding and oozing into each other, the sound MASSIVE, and thick and layered, the sounds crumbling and constantly shifting, on the surface, this is a noise tape, but the noise is blurred and washed out, and more droney than noisy, thick billows of sound, textured and strangely lush (but still fairly low fidelity), dubbed onto recycled tapes, with the idea that any imperfections in the original tapes, be it bleed through of the original sounds or decay from worn magnetic tape, would all contribute to the sound, and those random imperfections only serve to add texture to the already heavily textured dronescapes. Fear of noise should not keep anyone from enjoying this stuff, cuz as we mentioned, it's a warm, thick, muted undulating noise, that washes over you like a glorious low end avalanche.
LIMITED TO 405 COPIES, each one hand printed, in ELEVEN different color variations, a printed insert along with the tape housed in a stickered and sealed plastic bag with a spray painted white printed label.
The wonderful Seattle-based improviser Amy Denio (sax, accordion, guitars, voice) meets up with a group of folks from the Eastern European improv/rock scene, including Czech drummer Pavel Fajt (who you might know from his work with Iva Bittova) and the guitarist and violinist from Hungarian band Kampec Dolores. The results are predictably pleasant and quirky, melding jazz, rock, and folk music.
Moniek Darge is a Belgian composer, performer, and artist with quite an extensive history, but she's probably one who hasn't really gained much of an audience outside of the European academic circles. That's a shame, as she's done some amazing, wild, and engaging work over the years. She runs the Logos Foundation, which is something of a thinktank for experimental practices with plenty of high-brow theory coating their post-Fluxus happenings, many of which seem to involve a whole lot of nudity! Throughout the three decades of work through the Logos Foundation, Darge has been involved in building strange variations on music boxes, various robots & automatons, and pneumatic devices that must have been an influence on Yoshi Wada's post-bagpipe installation pieces. On the compositional side for Darge's, there's a unique hybridization of musique concrete practices, avant-garde vocalization, and a dystopic / mystical realization of minimalism.
Beginning in 2006, Darge embarked on the first of several journey to the Isle of Crete, working with local artists, presenting intermedia events, and composing the three extended pieces on this album. While one idea purported through the sound work was to conjure the mystical atmospheres of an ancient cult and its utopian principles, Darge's work here, as it typically has been, is haunting, eerie, and disarming. Deep moaning vocals open the first piece, emerging as a lugubrious chorale of intertwining ululations and eerie utterances. A melancholy drone, maybe from a harmonium, settles into the background while Darge, brings recordings of cicadas and variously untuned bells into the mix. It's not unlike Fursaxa or Christina Carter as reinterpreted by Luc Ferrari. The second piece is dominate by an impressive display of field recording prowess of the whipping winds around one of the mountains on Crete, with various clanks, metal creaking, and bells breaking up a recurring narrative of spoken texts. The final piece is a collage of aquatic tumblings, more cicadas, and more swirls of wind with an interest in the sound ecology of the island, rather than the narrative properties mentioned above. This compelling album has been released on Kye, the label run by Graham Lambkin from The Shadow Ring. Now, there's a nice endorsement!
The return of our favorite Medieval, Middle Ages, and plague obsessed ambient atmospheric dronescapers Dark Ages, who just so happens to be a member of Ukrainian black metal Hordes Drudkh and Hate Forest. No buzzing blackness here, instead Dark Ages is a sonic trip through, well, through the Dark Ages. Another Bosch / Breughel style painting on the cover, this time skeletons on horses, pulling a wagon full of skulls, driving through a town square littered with corpses and robed skeletons. The song titles are also appropriately grim: "Ships Full Of Blackened Corpses", "Rats", "Dead Desolate Villages", "The Doors With Scarlet Crosses" and of course "Black Death".
The sound this time around is even darker and scarier. This is ambient music, sure, but it's also a sonic travelogue, a weary wander through the plague ravaged villages of Middle Europe. The sky is choked with black smoke and the stench of burning flesh. Corpses lay stacked like firewood. Dead children litter the ground like leaves fallen from trees. The few survivors, walk zombie like, an endless death march with no destination other than the grave.
The music is sounds JUST LIKE THAT. It's totally evocative and ultra creepy. Thick washes of keyboard drones, chiming minor key melodies repeated mantra like, a deep churning dark ambience underpinning the melancholy ambience, stabs of atonal harpsichord add jagged shards of horror here and there. Long stretches of super dramatic cinematic shimmer definitely recall Goblin and Zombi, some tracks are super murky minimal rumbles, with the melodies muted and buried under a thick crumbling wash of mumbled whirs and swirling low end, others are majestic and grand, fanfares for the dead and dying. They're all quite grim, a bit black, super intense, and surprisingly emotional.
Sonically, Dark Ages almost sounds like a super dismal, way blacker Dead Can Dance, or like Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh covering Skepticism. Or even like some long lost Jacula album.
So gorgeously dark and creepy. Recommended!
Behold the final chapter (after Twilight Of Europe, A Chronicle Of The Plague and The Tractatus De Hereticis Et Sortilegiis) in this long running series of releases from the appropriately monikered Dark Ages, a Ukrainian duo made up of members past and present of Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu, Hate Forest and Old Silver Key, who specialize in a virulent strain of medieval dark ambience, each record brilliantly captivating in its sonic representation of the middle ages, of crumbling cities, and a plague ridden populace, each record rife with brooding, haunting atmospheres and melancholic melodies, slow shifting synthscapes, swoonsome strings, all layered and textured, cinematic and darkly mysterious. This latest might be the prettiest of them all. Although you might not have thought so, considering that once again, the cover is adorned with some horrific Bosch / Breughel style art, and the record is called Rabble, Whores, Usurers, and the song titles include: "Leprosy", "Deformity", "Malice", "Depravity" and "Sin".
And while the sound of Rabble is in fact lovely, it remains sinister, and ominous, moody and brooding. The opener "Leprosy" is all lush layered shimmer, chanted vocals, a haunting chorale, laced with tinkling chimes, of dramatic strings, what sounds like muted horns, a miserablist fanfare of sorts, you can almost imagine an imaginary camera panning across a wideshot of a post plague village, burned houses, piles or rubble, charred corpses, beggars in the street, emaciated beasts wandering throughout, the sky choked with ash, the sound evoking a sort of melancholy, a feeling of loss, and of hopelessness, those dramatic strings growing more and more feverish, the song growing more and more tense. Every time we play this in the store, someone comes up to see what it is, and always seems to find it hard to believe that it's a concept record about the dark ages.
The rest of the record is equally stunning. "Chastity" is a lush landscape of crystalline shimmer, weirdly processed into something strangely rhythmic, with ethereal female vocals, and even a pulsing beat, "Avarice" is a grim sprawl of dense rumbles, and music box like melodies, "Deformity" is super dramatic, all swirling organs, total seventies horror score, while "Malice" might be the most overly medieval of the bunch, martial snares, deep vocal chants, moody strings, clouds of cymbal shimmer. "Depravity" is a hushed, subterranean sounding creep, long droned out tones, strange percussive scrapes and mysterious synth melodies, a murky blackened psychedelia, which leads into the closer, "Sin", which is the most minimal of the bunch, a slow, softly smoldering synthscape, a little bit kosmische, a little bit black ambient, drifting vocal like tones, transform the second half into something almost liturgical, darkly lovely and hauntingly austere.
What would you expect from a band called Dark Ages? With cover art from some Hieronymous Bosch style painting depciting hell and misery and war and famine? With song titles like "Breath Of The Black Plague" and "Birth Of The Antichrist" and "Formulas Written In Blood"? A disc released on Supernal, the label that brought us Benighted Leams, Drudkh, Meads Of Asphodel, Hate Forest and the rest? What would you expect? Well, definitely not this. Dark Ages are not metal, are not even heavy actually, instead they offer up a series of dark ambient medieval dronescapes, beautifully creepy, dark and haunting and endlessly mesmerizing. There are definite sonic similarities to our favorite drone artists: Chalk, Coleclough, Mirror, Maeror Tri and the like, but Twilight Of Europe has a sort of looped hypnotic quality lending the sound a much more Jeck, Basinski vibe. But always cloaked in the tattered black cloak of the dark ages, a lonely sonic stroll through the ruins of a long gone Rennaisance Faire, a stroll that slowly shifts to an actual wander through a ruined post plague, European village, of grey stone walls, lit blue by the moonlight, casting shadows that dart and dance in the glow of torchlight, the blackened remains of fires long since burnt out, colorful tents faded by the sun now lay in ruined heaps, the stench of death and decay in the air. The sound is rich with resonant church organs, bells and buzzing strings, haunting chant like vocals all wrapped in gauzy fuzzy drones and subterranean rumbles, each track a dreamy repetition of a haunting, ghostly medieval loop. Over and over and over as you drift off, as the city around you crumbles and the sky above you darkens.
SPECIAL SALE PRICE! Even though this split release is from a few years back, it really couldn't be more timely. Two groups, two songs from each, both dedicated to the loss of their countrymen. Up first is Dark Ages, the medieval dark ambient project of Roman Saenko (Hate Forest, Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu, etc.), who hails from the Ukraine, which is, as we write, in political and social turmoil, so these two haunting elegies are even more moving. Unlike past Dark Ages recordings, that conjured up visions of ruined villages, and crumbled cathedrals, the first track here is achingly melancholic, brooding and moody, and truly haunting, soft swirls of string like synths, drift beneath delicate piano, the sound laced with delicate percussion, the sound cinematic and darkly sweeping, the sort of heartbreaking instrumental you would expect in the denouement of some bittersweet drama. The second track though slips back into the Dark Ages of old, unfurling a gristled expanse of crackle and deep chordal thrum, strange industrial percussion, and tranced out synth drones, but over the top, more aching melodies, strings this time, like some gypsy folk troubadours, playing for their fallen, the static almost like the sound of rain. So so lovely.
Dark ages share the split with a duo from Ireland, with the mouthful moniker From The Bogs Of Aughiska, and whose sound, while ambient, is a much different beast, murky and muffled, thick, rib cage rattling tones, smeared into tectonic rumbles, rife with buried shadows of melodies, a rich, churning thrum, peppered sporadically with scraping, groaning tones, and what sounds like mutated slowbuzz guitars, transformed into grinding hums, the whole thing is closer to SUNNO))) or Phurpa or Mohammad. The second From The Bogs track cranks everything up, building a wall of sound, that seems to be constructed from white noise, but that white noise has been blackened and curdled, a suffocating grey wash of sound, laced with subtle slivers of melancholy melody, softly swirling and darkly psychedelic, there's a brief bit of sampled voices, and then the sound seems to blackly blossom into more sinister noisiness, still murky, but with some grim black heft, that at the very last minute, seems to peel back, and reveal a little bit of choral dreaminess beneath the roiling black surface.
Synth punk at its best! Here is the long overdue reissue of Dark Day's homage to the Luis Bunuel film of the same name. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks to work with.
On Exterminating Angel (originally released in 1980 on the Lust/Unlust imprint Infidelity), Crutchfield recruited Phil Kline and Barry Friar to flesh out the Dark Day sound. At the time, Kline was an emerging composer who had worked with Glenn Branca and at least here, he styles himself after Mark Ribot or Arto Lindsay with his expressive shards and bends of guitar melody; and Friar follows the tom-heavy patter that Nancy Arlen brought to Dark Day on the "Hands In The Dark" single. But Dark Day is truly Crutchfield's vision, with his heavily syncopated synth chords, elliptical repetitions, and spiral staircase ascensions in lieu of the traditional verse-chorus song. Crutchfield preferred to keep a very restrictive use of synth tones and filters, all the while crafting a very claustrophobic, horror-laden atmosphere. The inventiveness of his minimalist melodies and twisted lullaby-like structures are all the more impressive, perhaps only matched by Young Marble Giants or Suicide. Motorik yet stumbling, Dark Day's songs are stark and bold in their poetry about freaks, suffocating anxiety, and the toxic life of contemporary society circa 1980. "Trapped" was a strange song to be the single for the album, as it's an epic, spiralling number with those ominous synths and siren-like blurts from a distant saxophone. Many of the other songs on the album were short and condensed, jabbing the grimly simple melodies deep into the ear-canal and then moving on. Like "Trapped" the album's finale - "No, Never, Nothing" - is another lengthy track, appropriating a Moroder like disco-syncopation to a sinister, nihilistic collage of texts taken from a children's book about raising unusual pets such as squirrels and chimpanzees. The more the song spins through it's punchy chords the creepier it becomes.
Exterminating Angel is the high-point of Crutchfield's recorded works, and stands also as one of lost gems of the No Wave era. This should have been released long ago, so we have to commend Dark Entries once again for their reissue campaign.
The Hermetic Drone is the first release from Dark Matter Halo, the most recent project of Monte Cimino, aQ pal, and head honcho of brooding twang flecked heavies Burial Tree, as well as the man behind BT ambient offshoot Time Spent. Dark Matter Halo has more in common with Time Spent, but pushes the sound even further into the kosmische drift, ditching all of the rhythmic elements that drove Time Spent, barring the subtle pulsations caused by the ever shifting overtones, these two lengthy tracks, sprawling expanses of dreamlike shimmer, lush layered tones infused with a warm energy, softly undulating chordal swells, wreathed in a soft halo of gauze-y blissed out blur. The first track, "A.M.", definitely has a sun dappled morning vibe, bleary slowly unfurling melodies, a time lapse exploration of tonal color, a grey landscape gradually taking on color, the tones here seeming to fill the sky with a prismatic palette of warm sonic hues, gorgeously mesmerizing and dreamily meditative.
The second track, appropriately titled "P.M." reverse engineers the first, effortlessly conjuring up a world in hibernation, a sky full of darkened blue, casting lengthening shadows, a lush crystalline expanse of low tones, woven into a gloriously textured backdrop, for the glimmering, glistening ghostlike melodies that hover above, spectral streaks of somnambulant mesmer, gliding lazily toward the dark, a soundtrack for drifting off, a sonic gateway to what lays beyond the veil. So lovely.
A little while back we reviewed the first installment of The Hermetic Drone, which was the first release from Dark Matter Halo, the most recent project of aQ pal Monte Cimino, who is head honcho of brooding twang flecked heavies Burial Tree, as well as the man behind BT ambient offshoot Time Spent. That original cd-r has now been reissued as a proper cd, with a second volume/disc added on!!!
Dark Matter Halo has more in common with Time Spent than the more rocking Burial Tree, but pushes the sound even further into the kosmische drift, ditching all of the rhythmic elements that drove Time Spent, barring the subtle pulsations caused by the ever shifting overtones, these two lengthy tracks, sprawling expanses of dreamlike shimmer, lush layered tones infused with a warm energy, softly undulating chordal swells, wreathed in a soft halo of gauze-y blissed out blur. The first track, "A.M.", definitely has a sun dappled morning vibe, bleary slowly unfurling melodies, a time lapse exploration of tonal color, a grey landscape gradually taking on color, the tones here seeming to fill the sky with a prismatic palette of warm sonic hues, gorgeously mesmerizing and dreamily meditative. The second track, appropriately titled "P.M." reverse engineers the first, effortlessly conjuring up a world in hibernation, a sky full of darkened blue, casting lengthening shadows, a lush crystalline expanse of low tones, woven into a gloriously textured backdrop, for the glimmering, glistening ghostlike melodies that hover above, spectral streaks of somnambulant mesmer, gliding lazily toward the dark, a soundtrack for drifting off, a sonic gateway to what lays beyond the veil.
The second volume, more recently recorded, doesn't deviate too far from the template laid out by part one, the bulk of the new disc taken up by the sprawling cosmic transmission "Caravan To The Stars", clocking in at nearly 42 minutes, and making the most of all that time spent (ahem) weaving lush swells of softly pulsing chordal shimmer, and slowly swirling clouds of ethereal thrum, the first ten minutes passing like some time lapse film about the galaxy, a hazy dreamlike minimal drift, before some subtle tabla like percussion surfaces, giving the nebulous sonic mesmer some muted propulsion, like a heroin house Muslimgauze, soon the background sounds arc and soar, keening high end streaks, long tones undulating and pulsing, all the while, that motorik rhythm burbling just below the surface. The synths coalesce into string-like swoons, the vibe super cinematic, with a definite Eastern tinge, before all blurring into a much more subdued final movement, the last few minutes in particular, some seriously ominous black ambience, that manages to sound sinister, without losing any of its psychedelic dreaminess. The relatively shorter second track is dedicated to ambient electronic pioneer Pete Namlook, who died tragically earlier this year, the sound slowly unfurling diaphanous sheets of soft focus sound, seemingly time-lapse shifting overtones, buried melodies, the whole thing glimmering and glistening and shimmering, so so lovely.
Just the other day we had someone come into the shop looking for ambient music on cassette� well, we do have lots of DRONES on cassette, but they're often the dark, dire, experimental kind, at the extreme end harsh and noisy, or at best still fairly grim and gritty. Which is great, but not quite what the customer was looking for. They wanted something more dreamy and blissed out, pretty and Eno-ish in its ambience. We did manage to find them a tape or two that fit the bill, but had this new Dark Matter Halo cassette been in stock then, it would have been absolutely perfect!
Dark Matter Halo of course is the solo ambient drone project of our pal Monte (also of Burial Tree and Time Spent), and this is DMH's latest release, following closely on the double cd collection Hermetic Drone Vol. 1 & 2 we reviewed here a couple weeks back.
This new opus was recorded using both digital and analog technology, a process influenced by Monte's work with another local dronester, Black Thread, who got Monte thinking in terms of ye olde 4-track cassette deck again. And of course it's been released on limited edition DAA cassette as well, though if you check out DMH's Bandcamp page for this release, you can also download a free bonus digital only track, just fyi.
Side one, the title track, is all whispy and drifty and quite lovely, total waking-moments music, ethereal sounds to be heard at the dawn, of the dawn, of something wonderful. Introduced by some appropriate nature sounds, it then flows into gentle, cyclic synth washes, shimmering and warmly embracing, but light in touch, slowly moving along for over 22 blissful minutes. In a word, nice!
Side two, "Under The Sky" (named for the Paul Bowles story) is equally lovely, but a bit darker in tone, denser and quietly "howlier" if that's a word (ok, it's not). The cyclic whoosh of the drones and tones woven into this piece build and build, and go on and on (over 24 minutes this time), still shimmering, but in more of a haunting way. Its prettiness is tempered by a unsettling, foreboding feeling. It'd be a great isolation tank track (for the brave psychonaut) or excellent for cinematic soundtrack purposes.
Like all music nerds, we love to read record reviews, even of records we have no interest in hearing, in fact especially those. And we find ourselves turned on to (or off of) records all the time, based on what we've read about it. But generally, even if something gets a terrible review, we still need to hear it for ourselves, considering the fact that there are so many things we love, that lots of other folks didn't dig, or even get. But there are a select few, whose opinions hold great weight, and who with a thumbs up can have us scrambling to track down a record, or a thumbs down can have us not bothering to check something out, no matter how much everyone else seems to love it. A recent addition to that pantheon of reviewers, would no doubt be Jarred and Petey (we are obsessed: http://singintothecomputer.tumblr.com/), a 10/10 Stars!!!!!!!! from those guys and we're all over it. But for a longtime, the mighty Julian Cope, via his amazing Head Heritage website, has been a sort of all seeing mystic, well versed in the arcane arts of drone / metal / psych, and weirdly attuned to EXACTLY what we love. So knowing that Cope had flipped his lid for this, the debut from Dark Sunny Land, we were prepared to dig mightily, and were not disappointed.
This Boston based one man outfit delivers a sort of dense psychedelic kraut-drone that balances somewhere right between the hushed guitarscapery of Stars Of The Lid, the abstract avant drift of Taj Mahal Travellers, and the soft noise blackened ambience of the best floorcore technicians. DSL weaves all of that into something heady and hypnotic, ritualistic and mesmeric, long tones blur into soft sheets of billowing feedback, synths and theremins drift and waver, melodies surface, and fragment before submerging beneath the softly undulating thrum, it's the sort of ambient dronemusic that's anything but tranquil and/or new agey, the sound here is dense and tense and rife with some sort of dark energy, while it may be hypnotic and mesmerizing, it's also intense and aggressive, moody and atmospheric, but sinister and shot through with a sort of impending doom, whereas a lot of this sort of music drifts and floats ethereally, the sound of Emanations For A Returning sounds more like the soundtrack to a black hole, to collapsing universes, the score to the scorched expanses of dead planets, to a mysterious blackness that lurks in the shadows, it manages to sound like all that, while being breathtaking beautiful at the same time. Obviously so recommended!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, and housed in super striking silk screened sleeves!
We remember AQ pal John Gossard, from doom-mongers Asunder and defunct SF black metallers Weakling, talking about one of his favorite pastimes,�black metal tennis! It was tough to discern exactly what was involved, but we do know it included a couple rackets, LOTS of wine, and typically took place in the middle of the night. We can only assume, after some black metal tennis, those guys would unwind with some dark yoga, and we're not even gonna guess what that might entail, but judging from this disc from Northwestern drone psych fuzz groove ensemble Dark Yoga,�it most likely included an entire pharmacy of drugs, a suitcase full of FX, and amps and guitars galore.
So yep, another winner from the Yarnlazer label (Acre, Valet, Ghosting, Bonecloud), a live recording from 20006 featuring a whole posse of�Portland noisemakers including�Yarnlazer head honcho Honey Owens (who also records as Valet). Dark Yoga is a sprawling psychedelic krautrock free fuzz jam,�simple throbbing basslines,�slowed down vocals, shimmering clouds of buzzing effects and swirling disembodied guitar fuzz,�blown out guitar leads, simple tribal drumming, propulsive and motorik, with long stretches of tinkling effervescence and spaced out ambience. The sound is super heavy on the Can, even down to some of the very (infrequent) Damo like vocals. Or imagine�No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand Of The Man in full on psych jam mode, less tribal and clattery and more druggy and space-y and languidly rocking. There are some groovy stretches of fuzzy funk too, like some tarpit demonic dance jams, but even those parts are dense with fuzzy murk and spacepsych swirl.�
Packaged in cool hand screened sleeves, so heavy with paint and intense smelling, that all you really need is to toss the sleeve into a paper bag while you're listening and huff your way into the perfect Dark Yoga mind space. Also contains a little full color metallic insert.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
- MPEG stream: One
- MPEG stream: Two
Low-end drones, mysterious field recordings, sitar, haunting melody... and crushing electric guitar heaviness? If your tastes are at all similiar to ours regarding this sort of thing, then Darsombra's Ecdysis is already sounding pretty intriguing! This 34 minute, six-track debut cd from Baltimore's Brian Daniloski (a member of metal mongers Meatjack) is right up our alley, and yours too if you dig the more abstract, arty, ambient sides of, say, Thrones, Melvins, Harvey Milk, Earth, and Fantomas. Ecdysis is just a bit scary, and full of super-heavy moments, so it could be taken as some kind of nightmare soundtrack. But there's much beauty and gentleness here too. You'll hear some major-key melodies, surprising in such a context, and a plethora of sampled sounds, from sinister voices to religious testifyin'. Anytime we find a disc where, y'know, one track sounds like 20th century classical meets Melvins and another like the labored, ritualistic breathing of some sort of demonic creature, and it's metal but not really, and kinda pretty too, well, there's only one way to end the review: recommended.
Break out the headphones, relax the body, and close the eyes, it's another one from the devastatingly droney and dark Darsombra, whose debut Ecdysis disc we really liked a couple years back. We like this just as much, maybe more. There's a great deal of melancholic, mesmeric beauty in Darsombra's isolationist grinding and evil ambient shimmer. We can imagine Darsombra's human operator, Brian Daniloski from the Maryland metalcore band Meatjack, up late at night alone in his home studio, lights dim, wreathed in smoke, hunched over his guitar and synth and effects and whatever else he uses to conjure this music, willing himself off into another place, out into the void of space, riding the dense waves of his own creation, returning only at dawn with another track for this album finished.
Let's discuss these tracks, but not in order... The echoey minimalism of "Drops Of Sorrow" is simply glorious, it's Riley or Reich from a psychdronedoom perspective. Or perhaps krautrock's Achim Reichel & The Machines playing Black Boned Angel!? Elsewhere, there's more gloom and glory, from the hushed sinister soundtrack melodies of opener "Auguries" to the haunting, spacey drone-whispers of "Night's Black Agents" - this disc's longest track at 17:34, reminding us of the 'Vox Insecta' work of old AQ fave Q.R. Ghazala. Then, with an intro of ommming voices (or synth) there's "Lamentings / Auguries", featuring sparse melodic guitar weepery buried beneath fuzzed out layers of deep, electronic drone and distortion. Again, this definitely sounds like it would make good soundtrack material for some eerie, arty Italian horror flick. And further cementing our love affair with the abstract attractions of Eternal Jewel, the calmly vibrating "Incarnadine" brings some rays of light to this disc at its very end, with its peacefully repetitive clusters of gentle chimings over a quiet drone.
Packaged by Public Guilt in a nice black, gothically graceful gatefold sleeve, this is definitely recommended. Imagine Expo '70 cloaked in black, performing a seance with Tony Conrad and Lustmord, and you'll have an idea of how much we must like this!
Hopefully you already know Darsombra, seeing as we made their last Public Guilt release, Eternal Jewel, a Record Of The Week not too many moons ago. Atmospheric dark doom-drone experimentation not unlike a more sinister Expo '70 or a proggier Nadja. If you don't know 'em, get this and you'll get to know at least one of their songs really really well, in a way.
Track one here, "Nymphaea", is a head-nodding exercise in bass heavy, slow-building psychedelic instrumental throb. It starts out with plenty of distortion, and only gets heavier and more blown-out as it plods forth, adding a snakily melodic guitar line to further entrance the listener. It originally appeared as Darsombra's contribution to the "untitled" 3cd comp PG help put out last year, and now it has spawned this collection of remixes, a dozen of them, tracks 2-13!
It's pretty fascinating to hear this single song morph from track to track, 'cause they're all very different, the each remixer definitely making it their own, from blissed out vocal pop (Max Bondi & Bleeding Heart Narrative's "Hyena Amp mix") to big-beat crash-boom electro (Pulsoc's "True Love Never Dies remix") to creepy drone-noise ambience (Guilty Connector's "Dotonburi Neonnights") and that's just the first three mixes on here! Elsewhere, Ala Muerte adds eerie female voice doing Latin chant, Destructo Swarmbots strip the track down to a minimal low-end hum, The Heirs Of Rockefeller crank up the fuzz, focussing on the song's incessant hypnotic plod... all these and the rest of the remixers generally fucking with this track in many compelling and often unexpected ways. Darsombra have every reason to proudly approve what's been done with, or done to, their "Nymphaea" here. Remixers not already mentioned above also include Perfekt Teeth, Magicicada, Strotter Inst., Decimation Blvd. & Darla Hood, Blood Fountains, and le knell.
LIMITED EDITION! 250 COPIES ONLY! We only got 20! On a black cd-r in a slim, screen printed sleeve with vellum obi.
Attention all blackened drone heads!!! We've managed to get a few copies of the new Digitalis release from Darwinsbitch, and it's super dark and super gorgeous! Ore is a slow burring monumental slab of post-apocalyptic dooooomy ambience. Using violin and oscillators, Mills graduate Marielle Jakobsons creates a dim world where Eastern folk melodies meet damaged textures and desolate atmospheres. Not too far off from anything on the Miasma label, we're hearing strong similarities to the recent Elegy release, but Ore takes a different more melodic route through smoldering layers of buzzing drone and washed out haze. A nice balance between industrial filth and organic beauty, Ore is quite the accomplishment and should definitely not be missed! Limited to an edition of 500, don't be left in the smoldering ruins without it!
A member of Myrmyr and Date Palms, Marielle V. Jakobsons has been a busy bee lately. Since graduating from the prestigious Mills College where she was involved in various sound art installations (including building a self-oscillating violin!!) she's been recording constantly, and honestly we can't get enough of what we've heard so far. Steel Hums is her debut tape release on Digitalis Ltd. under the name Dawrwinsbitch, and it's a mystical venture to unknown crossroads where Indian classical music meets modern composition. Combining the ever-growing possibilities of tape manipulation with long tone violin composition, Steel Hums is dark, dim, and somehow lush and beautiful. Kinda sounds like a lost recording of some ancient violinist, dug up in midst of some industrial ruins, or if Henry Flynt went gothic. Really awesome stuff!! AND Darwinsbitch has also just released a debut cd on Digitalis, much more on that once we get a hold of it. But for now, feast your ears on this little slab of gorgeously dark ambient beauty. And as usual for stuff on Digitalis Ltd., this shit is super super limited. Like, so limited we only have four. So if ya got your heart set on this little gem, we suggest you act fast. Oh and also, this tape ain't cheap, but trust us, the music on here is totally worth it!! Don't miss out this limited release from one of Oakland's finest female artists!!
Limited tour-only cd-r of demo versions, live recordings and unreleased tracks from the same sessions that produced their gorgeous Thrill Jockey debut album. We only have about 10 of these and are not sure if we can get more, so act fast.
Highlighting the core tracks of the Dusted Sessions in illuminating stripped down versions, the first track "Dusted County Stomp" establishing itself on a repetitive Hex-era Earth electric guitar riff, before Marielle Jakobsons' violin responds in counter-play in true Henry Flynt-ish fashion. "Yuba Groove" is a faster version of the sprawling majestic central suite "Yuba Source parts I and II". Then there's a live on-radio version of "Exodus Due West", that the band performed on KFJC, a heavier demo version of "Dusted Down", a majestic flute-fronted demo of "Mercy Springs", not really featured on the original album and finally, "Sky Trails" which has a really nice Fripp and Eno "Evening Star" vibe with gorgeously picked guitar and pedal steel. There's even a secret track at the end. Beautiful!
And like we said, SUPER limited. Get one while you can, Date Palms fans!
The Date Palms debut lp on Root Strata, Of Psalms (now sadly out of print) was one of our standout favorite records from last year. A blissful combo of Eastern drone classicism and hypnotic psych fluidity. Now the core Oakland-based duo of Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons follow their debut up with this stunning, no doubt limited, vinyl-only release on Mexican Summer (which comes with a download card).
Composed of two side-loooooong tracks, the structure of Honey Devash is set up in the form of two ragas as their basic foundation but open wide enough to allow a number of key compositional elements to play through. The title track is the morning raga stirring softly at first with slowly energizing phase shifts and bowed violin drones setting up the mood before the heavy bass riff bursts forth into a forward moving momentum aided by percussive elements and all sorts of sonic layering: oscillating bloops, arc-ing violin loops and modal electric piano phrases. Slowly-burning upward toward a white hot light, the gorgeously smoldering momentum breaks off into a purifying hypnotic cosmic bliss punctuated by spacy violin figures before a long slow fade.
The second side track, "Honey Dune" is the evening raga and it cools down with a wide drifting expansiveness lke the end of a long desert heat just before twilight. The mood is less propulsive, more contemplative but beautifully rich with added instrumentation of bass clarinet, tampura and cascading piano motifs. Melodically pretty and explorative, the track gives ample room for each instrument to stretch out and play yet remain tethered to a unifying whole by the grounation vibes of Trevor Montgomery's basslines.
Like some heady hybrid of spiritual Eastern jazz and rockish psych extrapolation, fans of Bruce Palmer, Dadawah, L. Shankar, Brightblack Morning Light, and Spacemen 3 should definitely scoop this up.
This is the perfect soundtrack for hot desert nights, staring at the stars. Sooooooo gooooooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Date Palms is the new project of heavy electronic / cassette tape manipulator Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons (Myrmyr, Darwinsbitch) and is a strange, yet fantastic fusing of Eastern style raga drones, and hypnotic Spacemen 3 style bass buzz, which seems like a weird combo, but it definitely works, situating the Oakland duo right between those two not so disparate (as you might think) sounds, the music almost like some sort of slowcore spacerock dronedrift, writ abstract and minimal and Eastern, if that makes any sense. Sure it's on Root Strata, and both Date Palms are individually involved in the avant garde, but this could have easily come out on Kranky, or some other similarly outrock label, and these two could totally tour with a band like Low, or Stars Of The Lid, their slow smoldering drift a perfect fit, but the exotic array of Eastern instruments, and the duo's deft arrangements, and meticulous crafting of this hushed meditative minimal dronemusic, most definitely positions this just as easily outside the realm of 'rock music', and firmly in the world of the 'experimental'.
The opener is a perfect example, beginning with layered drones, the sound is immediately recognizable as some sort of Eastern raga, but the minute the bass comes in, the sound is transformed, and we can't help but hear Spacemen 3, at their most blissed out, and heck, they did make a record called An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar Music after all, which if we're not mistaken contained no sitar at all, the point is, Date Palms are channeling the same sort of druggy psychedelic minimalism, but adding that distinctly Eastern element, this opening track sounds like a way slowed down Moon Duo, with the keyboard swapped for some mysterious Indian instrument, and the guitar swapped for a bass, the groove is glacial, and is the perfect anchor for the more abstract buzz and drift. The bass does dissipate briefly, and at that point it sounds like Indian classical music, but then when the bass comes back in, along with some gorgeous melodic guitar counterpoint, the sound is brought right back to something more Western. The push and pull is dizzying, but subtly so, a fantastic hybrid, that works perfectly, combining to musics that both traffic in repetition and drone, the resulting hybrid is absolutely mesmerizing, the sort of rare sound that would appeal to the space rock bliss out crowd as much as the abstract minimal dronemusic crowd.
The rest of the record follows suit, the warm liquid basslines introducing a looped style mesmer, while all around, the duo introduce various bits of percussion, tinkling chimes, processed tape loops, sympathetic overtones and harmonics, on at least one track, the sound grows particularly fierce, the drone and drift wrapped in a squall of tangled psychedelic guitar, but that leads directly into the most blissed out of the bunch, the nearly 14 minute centerpiece, a smoldering drift where the bass part is so slow it almost sinks right into the background buzz like another layer, this time the processed guitar shimmer definitely evokes Sound Of Confusion era Spacemen 3, a gorgeous blurred dronescape that is utterly hypnotic, and 14 minutes is not even nearly long enough. The record closes though with what to us is the strangest of the bunch, definitely the most traditionally melodic, with a proper 'riff', the bass pronounced and fuzzy, and the melody played on an organ, the vibe almost classic rock, weirdly enough, but again, slowed waaaaaaay down and stretched waaaaaaay out, resulting in another gloriously abstract bit of raga drone slowcore drift.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
We're huge fans of NZ guitarist Craig Williamson and his space raga rock outfit Lamp Of The Universe, whose sound is actually light on the rock, and heavy on the space and the raga, with buzzing sitars, and loping krautrock grooves, blissed out ambience and wispy clouds of spaced out FX. But way back in 1999, before the birth of LOTU, Williamson was doing time in a little band called Datura, who shared some sonic sensibilities with his later outfit, spacey, groovy, buzzy, but Datura rocked, we mean ROCKED, some serious stoner rock�Hawkwind / Monster Magnet worship for sure. Big�ol' wah wah guitar riffs, pounding drums, downtuned fuzz guitars, BIG BIG amps unleashing thick walls of sun baked drug drenched sound. The kind of sound we could gladly listen to forever. But...
...It's the vocals that will make it or break it for you. Super throaty rock croon, very reminiscent of Kyuss, some folks here thought it sounded a little too bar rock, or like the one rock guy on every season of American Idol, channelling some Eddie Vedder with that "yyyyuuuuuaaaayy" sort of classic rock yowl. But if you were into Kyuss, or any of the first wave of stoner rock bands (Beaver, Dozer, tons of other Man's Ruin bands) or any bands on the Small Stone label, this will definitely push those space rock, desert rock, stoner rock, slow groove, blown out guitar, beer and pot laced laid back groove buttons for sure.
The liner notes state that this is "an homage to young hares and their fascination with bells." Well, we learn something new everyday, as we had no idea that cute, little baby rabbits had an affinity for bell tones one way or the other. The field recordist and sound sculptor Yannick Dauby offers forth this lovely piece of manipulated, dulcet bell tones, but does he intend this piece to be the equivalent to Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds For Babies, but for rabbits? It is certainly soothing to these human ears, regardless of the lapine allusions. Semi-melodic phrases from various chimes and bells are multi-tracked and processed with degrees of pitchshifting, reversed playback, echo, and reverb, removing it from the context of a field recording of a set of windchimes, and situating it into a far more abstract musical one. Dauby's pace is suitably slow and somewhat sensuous in its langour, all suspended within a sedate fog of droning mystery. Not too far from some of the Mirror records that Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann released back in the day. This is a super limited release - just 100 copies - from the folks at Invisible Birds, who as always do a classy job on the artwork.
A French born composer now living in Taiwan, Yannick Dauby comes from the same school of concrete-centric field-recording as Eric LaCasa, Tarab, Jean-Francois Laporte, and to a lesser extent Francisco Lopez. As such, Dauby pulls his compositions together from a near constant investigation of the environment, with the chorales of frogs and cicadas situated next to the thrum and hiss of heavy industry. Where LaCasa in particular is interested in matching particular textures and frequencies into sympathetic collages of intertwined sounds from any number of sources, Dauby has more of an interest in emphasizing a divergence in his sounds, juxtaposing comparatively dissonant field recordings to force them into a dialogue. So you'll find rasping blurts of locusts buzzing above a constant hum of some unnamed high-speed electrical dynamo, which gradually fades against a backdrop of metallic clinking, that almost sounds like the ambience of an ancient blacksmithery, becoming a smart counterpoint between two forms of human innovation. Dauby's composition is one of slow evolution with his numerous passages of water (thunderstorms, streams, subterranean dripping), the din of distant traffic, various bird utterances, windstorms, and clattering squeaks and whirls from industry effortlessly moving in and out of each other. All of these field recordings originate from France and Taiwan, although Dauby is very cautious not to make either locale too obvious, even when the chatter of children intermixes with that of incessant insect noise. It makes for a great, psychogeographical listen!
For many years now, Yannick Dauby, Hitoshi Kojo, and Michael Northam have collected environmental sounds with varying degrees of obfuscation and abstraction, often melding such sounds with sympathetic electro-acoustic noises, textures, scrabblings, and lots of heady drones. Northam's work is certainly the most well documented at least here at aQuarius (most recently through his ongoing collaboration with holy minimalist CC Hennix), although we have stocked much of Kojo's work in his various projects (e.g. Spiracle and Juppala Kaippo). The Frenchman Dauby (currently residing in Taiwan) is the purist amongst the three, prefering to contextualize untreated field recordings within his compositions, which is especially true for his most recent body of work. Kojo treks back and forth between tactile, growling harmonics and playfully dream-time minimalism, often sourced from his field recordings; and Northam's recently forays into psychedelic ragas morphed out of a conceptually rigorous and industrially grim sound design. Corgilon seems to have emerged from several recording sessions that convey the introspective mystery of a private ritual, with all three participants generating bright tones from various bells and pieces of scrap metal along with the organic crunch of stick, rock, and sand. The tactile sounds find themselves at the foreground at the beginning of the record, only to be slowly consumed in reverberant drones and golden ambience. If this sounds like something that might emerge out of any given Jewelled Antler offshoot, you're awfully close to the earthen mysticism found here. Limited to a mere 300 copies.
If anything, the Estonian countryside is quiet. The clockwork schedule of the network of rural buses and the cackle of a black swan racing high above the trees is about all that you'll hear. I (Jim) had the pleasure of experiencing this Estonian quietude a few years back, and I have to say that Yannick Dauby's collection of field recordings is way more active than any i actually encountered. Estonia is known for its avian diversity, although when I was there during the brief transition from summer into winter (literally, three weeks!), the birds had all flown south... so Dauby must have been there in later spring or summertime as he does capture a number of chittering sounds from those birds passing through from Russia and Finland to Southern Europe and North Africa (or vice versa). Between these avian recordings, Dauby documents another common denizen of the Estonian countryside - the giant chunks of metal dumped unceremoniously by the Soviet agricultural industry. Even without much wind, these abandoned grain silos and oil tanks resonate with thick rumblings and subtle overtones, which Dauby dutifully records with contact microphones. These thrumming drones recall the Alan Lamb wire recordings as much as they do Thomas Koner's deep gong recordings.
Disc one of this two disc set features Dauby's "songs for birds and metal" while the second features reworkings of Dauby's source material by John Grzinich and Murmer (aka Patrick McGingley), both of whom have exceptional catalogues of electro-organic compositions based often on phonography. Grzinich's two lengthy pieces are quieter and more subtle, focusing on the patter of dripping water and melting ice with flickering drones and harmonics forming arctic halos around those aquatic textures. The two Murmer tracks intensify things comparatively against Grzinich's lowercase work, with thick drones amassed around what sounds like somebody trekking through the deep snow. Those Coleclough / Koner drones manifest ominous black clouds and unsettled vibes, not heard elsewhere on the album and turning that Estonian quiet into something haunting. All in all, a magnificent piece of manipulated field recording and sound ecology.
