THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The Dead C is the stalwart collective of free noise / avant rockers from New Zealand comprised of Bruce Russell (member of A Handful of Dust and boss of the Corpus Hermeticum label), Michael Morley (aka Gate), and Robbie Yeats, beloved of Bananafish readers and Siltbreeze junkies everywhere. We thought that perhaps their day had passed but, think again, they've gone and created a superb new album! This new, long awaited release is a sprawling double cd that finds them in the least-rock space they have ever occupied. Recorded over the past 5 years, this album is saturated in a langurous humidity produced by guitar feedback scrapes, ring modulation, and the buzzing din of improperly balanced amplifiers.
Disc One is the noisier of the two, dominated by the epic 33 minute "SpeederBot" which passes from militant percussive stabs into twin tremolo guitar feedback, similar to the controlled chaos found on their masterful "Harsh '70s Reality" album. But Disc Two is where this eponymous Dead C release really shines. Sort of like an analogue version of Main, or like a Raster record coming in badly on a shortwave radio, full of erratic hissing and eerie static. The trio striates the slow motion hypnodrone of sampled guitar feedback (yup, the lo-fi mirror version of My Bloody Valentine) with creaky little events. It's apparent that all of the recent drones from New Zealanders like Lovely Midget, RST, and Surface of the Earth have definitely made huge impact on the Dead C. They've picked up the gauntlet and, after a few years in their lonely NZ laboratory, have again come up with something that can be only called Dead C music (more so than it can be called rock or anything else). Adventurous, idiosyncratic, fantastic.
This is as recommended as it limited (to 500 copies and may not see a repress, sorry). Buy now or cry later!! (as we like to say.)
Record number three from this Italian noise rock / stoner doom power trio, and weirdly enough the first one of their records to get reviewed on the aQ list. Weird because these guys are amazing and are right up our (and presumably your) alley, a killer twisted hybrid of classic Sabbathy metal and more modern noise rock, downtuned Neurosis-y sludge and spaced out psychedelic dronemetal, a la countrymen Ufomammut. Opener "Bardo Thodol" starts out with a riff that's a dead ringer for Sleep, of course these guys add some chanted monk-like vocals, the vibe droned out and psychedelic, and when the rest of the band finally kick in, the sound is EPIC, massive, and heavy as fuck, a crushing mathy doom sludge dirge, the vocals alternating between a monstrous bellow and a wild feral shriek, the churning riffage and damaged drum pound laced with a surprising amount of melody, and all sorts of strange sounds in the background, that sound like bells and singing and other mysterious field recordings, which are apparently actual recordings of Italian funeral marches, super dramatic, especially when the band cuts out completely, leaving just the mournful wail of distant horns, draped over a strange hushed soundscape of backwards drones and muted muddied effects, the band slowly building back up again, and launching anew into another onslaught of pound and pummel, of soaring metallic heaviness.
The rest of the record unwinds in a similar fashion, the lumbering doomic heaviness tempered with long stretches of vocal drones, of spidery psychedelia, bursts of spazzed out math metal, of grinding noise rock frenzies, finishing off with the epic 16 minute two part closer, the first part of which is a gorgeous stretch of ambient minimalism, all tinkling melodies, barely there rhythms, distant swells, soft squalls of psychedelic guitar, swirling drones, and a deep rumbling buzz, that slowly builds into the second part, a feedback drenched, stop start noise rock blow out, soaring synths over crushing crashing chords, delirious drum pound and wild howled vox, a weirdly tripped out abstract psychedelic finale.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
For years now, the cryptically (and coolly) monickered Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words has been quietly and consistently releasing some of the most haunting and beautiful minimal dronemusic we've heard, a blend of soft skittery glitch, brooding guitar loops, deeeeeep drone, dreamy drift, and experimental post-everything soundscaping, that is as good if not better than anything produced by the legion of overhyped sound makers constantly fawned over by the public and press alike. We've only managed to review two DLSODW releases so far, both sadly out of print now, but the release of this new one, quite possibly his best, seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally throw our weight behind Dead Letters, and hopefully open some ears to these mysterious and wondrous sounds, and reveal to the hordes of dronelords and free music freeks just what they've been missing.
Dead Letters is the work of Swedish musician Thomas Ekelund, and over the years, his music has drifted from extreme near silent ultra minimalism, to warm whirring dronescapes to muted crunch and clatter to shimmering underwater ambience, but on Lost In Reflections, all of those elements are present, in lesser amounts, the perfect distillation of a lifetime of sounds, here presented more as background then the main event, that main event here being the guitar. Each of the six tracks, however distorted or refracted or fragmented or obfuscated, seems to be borne of the guitar, with Ekelund working his mysterious alchemy and transforming those buzzing steel strings into wholly new shapes.
The opener, "This Room Seems Empty Without You" held us spellbound from the very first few seconds, a bit of reverby guitar, moody and minor key, very post rock, slow core and abstract, the notes hovering in a dark expanse of overtones and deep low end shimmer, the guitar unfurling gradually, subtly processed, peppered with a strange percussive glitch, that gives the music a sort of downtempo vibe, still droney and abstract and free, but with a little Portishead or Bowery Electric mixed in. The glitches coalesce into an almost-rhythm, the end result is some strange minimal instrumental downtuned Galaxie 500 mixed with the brooding barely there drift of Bohren, and a sort of late night lugubrious skitter.
The next track, "Lost & Losing", takes a whole 'nother tack, beginning with bits of scrape and creak, amp buzz, muted harmonics, a subtly percussive textural soundscape, quietly and slowly surrounded by a gorgeously hazy sea of sun spots and solar flares, taking the shoegaze-y shimmer of Nadja and Jesu and dialing it way back, until it's a glimmering sheet of prismatic buzz, all the while those strange sounds from the song's beginning continuing to weave a buried barely there rhythm, everything locked into deep woozy bleary eyed swells.
We have the tendency to go song by song, describing the sound of each, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it's not just the sound, it's the mood and the vibe and the feel and the deft and delicate arrangement of those sounds. And Ekelund is a master, taking simple strummed guitars, and wrapping them in a gauzy patina of blur buzz, locking the original riff into a loop, and then gently adding bit of melody, bits of texture, turning something simple into something complex and gorgeous, there are hints of Earth all over Lost In Reflections as well, a particularly abstract bit of fuzzy drift, will suddenly part to reveal a dark elegiac guitar line, slowed way down, creating some sort of underwater blues, while elsewhere, the twang and pluck of the guitar strings is wreathed in sonic sunlight, the sounds allowed to overlap and tangle up, the notes and melodies all wound up, spinning slowly and spitting out sparks, bits of glitch and high end tones, streaks of feedback, until those sounds are smeared into one long undulating stretch, and over the top a string of chiming notes are hung like Christmas lights on a tree, the, guitar often disappearing completely, leaving just a bit of twang to hover and then fade away.
The final track is a monster, nearly 20 minutes, imagine Nadja, Merzbow and Tim Hecker covering Arvo Part, and you might be close. This is some sort of soft noise, blindingly effulgent upper register ur-drone chorale, the streaks and shards of guitars sound like voices, the distortion thick, the effects crumbling and swirling, a glancing listen reveals a wall of sound, but headphones are like a diving bell, allowing us to sink into this roiling sonic sea, that seems to stretch out forever, bottomless and endless, part way through, the song changes shape, that which constituted the whole of the sound up until that point is relegated to a background for these new sounds, a sweeping, loping epic bit of post rock, still washed out and woozy, but with a simple propulsive rhythm, and a gorgeously melodic chiming central riff, darkly fervent and slightly ominous and hauntingly epic, the swirling sounds around those new elements growing more frenetic, thickening, while the song just grows and grows, sprawls and expands, as if any second the heavens will open and the song will become the sonic manifestation of the rapture. So totally intense and powerful and moving and majestic, and simply breathtaking.
This is the first time we've reviewed anything by Swedish dronescaper Thomas Ekelund, aka Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, which is weird as folks around here are big fans. It's not for lack of releases, he's been pretty prolific, it just one of those things, so many releases, artists, records, so little time.
Well, we aim to change that all right now, with this, the latest from Ekelund, a limited cd-r released on night-ocean-drone label Mystery Sea, and Ekelund's sounds here sound right at home. Three looooong tracks, the first, ultra minimal, it takes minutes to get going, but once it does, it's a fantastic expanse of ultra minimalism, so minimal in fact that much of it borders on Francisco Lopez territory. But turn it up, and listen close, and Ekelund's soundworld will reveal itself to you. A washed out murmur, peppered part way through with footsteps, the sound of metal on metal, some sort of random field recording, of men working, the clang and clatter overshadowing the whispery sounds beneath, but by the end of the first track, those whispery sounds have built into growling swells, thick smears of muted melody, crumbling and almost industrial sounding when paired with the grind and creak of the workmen.
The second track starts off in a similar fashion, strange super close mic'd sounds, thumps and scrapes, crinkles and cracks, over a super busy microscopic dronescape, all hisses and whirs and little bits of almost invisible melody, but it doesn't take long for that track to also swell into something dense and thick, high end tones rest atop a pulsing sea swell like drone, the low end fading out leaving a strangely dreamy high end shimmer, eventually fading out and leaving just those strange clunks and scrapes and that whirling swirling whisper beneath.
The closing track is a continuation of track two, in fact, they all sort of fit together into one sprawling soundscape, but the closer remains murky and minimal, a subtle scraping floating on a thick, but soft and smeared low end rumble, it's only in the last minute or two that other sounds join in, strange twinkles and glimmers, like laying on the ocean floor and watching bits of sunlight slowly make their way through the swirling blue grey sea.
Amazing packaging too, full color tray card, numbered, the booklet a half booklet, leaving half of the cd face exposed. Very striking.
And as always LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! This recent Record Of The Week now on lp, lp AND 7" to be exact, as it was too much music to fit on a single lp. Fancy packaging, thick vinyl, very swank, and of course very limited!
For years now, the cryptically (and coolly) monickered Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words has been quietly and consistently releasing some of the most haunting and beautiful minimal dronemusic we've heard, a blend of soft skittery glitch, brooding guitar loops, deeeeeep drone, dreamy drift, and experimental post-everything soundscaping, that is as good if not better than anything produced by the legion of overhyped sound makers constantly fawned over by the public and press alike. We've only managed to review two DLSODW releases so far, both sadly out of print now, but the release of this new one, quite possibly his best, seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally throw our weight behind Dead Letters, and hopefully open some ears to these mysterious and wondrous sounds, and reveal to the hordes of dronelords and free music freeks just what they've been missing.
Dead Letters is the work of Swedish musician Thomas Ekelund, and over the years, his music has drifted from extreme near silent ultra minimalism, to warm whirring dronescapes to muted crunch and clatter to shimmering underwater ambience, but on Lost In Reflections, all of those elements are present, in lesser amounts, the perfect distillation of a lifetime of sounds, here presented more as background then the main event, that main event here being the guitar. Each of the six tracks, however distorted or refracted or fragmented or obfuscated, seems to be borne of the guitar, with Ekelund working his mysterious alchemy and transforming those buzzing steel strings into wholly new shapes.
The opener, "This Room Seems Empty Without You" held us spellbound from the very first few seconds, a bit of reverby guitar, moody and minor key, very post rock, slow core and abstract, the notes hovering in a dark expanse of overtones and deep low end shimmer, the guitar unfurling gradually, subtly processed, peppered with a strange percussive glitch, that gives the music a sort of downtempo vibe, still droney and abstract and free, but with a little Portishead or Bowery Electric mixed in. The glitches coalesce into an almost-rhythm, the end result is some strange minimal instrumental downtuned Galaxie 500 mixed with the brooding barely there drift of Bohren, and a sort of late night lugubrious skitter.
The next track, "Lost & Losing", takes a whole 'nother tack, beginning with bits of scrape and creak, amp buzz, muted harmonics, a subtly percussive textural soundscape, quietly and slowly surrounded by a gorgeously hazy sea of sun spots and solar flares, taking the shoegaze-y shimmer of Nadja and Jesu and dialing it way back, until it's a glimmering sheet of prismatic buzz, all the while those strange sounds from the song's beginning continuing to weave a buried barely there rhythm, everything locked into deep woozy bleary eyed swells.
We have the tendency to go song by song, describing the sound of each, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it's not just the sound, it's the mood and the vibe and the feel and the deft and delicate arrangement of those sounds. And Ekelund is a master, taking simple strummed guitars, and wrapping them in a gauzy patina of blur buzz, locking the original riff into a loop, and then gently adding bit of melody, bits of texture, turning something simple into something complex and gorgeous, there are hints of Earth all over Lost In Reflections as well, a particularly abstract bit of fuzzy drift, will suddenly part to reveal a dark elegiac guitar line, slowed way down, creating some sort of underwater blues, while elsewhere, the twang and pluck of the guitar strings is wreathed in sonic sunlight, the sounds allowed to overlap and tangle up, the notes and melodies all wound up, spinning slowly and spitting out sparks, bits of glitch and high end tones, streaks of feedback, until those sounds are smeared into one long undulating stretch, and over the top a string of chiming notes are hung like Christmas lights on a tree, the, guitar often disappearing completely, leaving just a bit of twang to hover and then fade away.
The final track is a monster, nearly 20 minutes, imagine Nadja, Merzbow and Tim Hecker covering Arvo Part, and you might be close. This is some sort of soft noise, blindingly effulgent upper register ur-drone chorale, the streaks and shards of guitars sound like voices, the distortion thick, the effects crumbling and swirling, a glancing listen reveals a wall of sound, but headphones are like a diving bell, allowing us to sink into this roiling sonic sea, that seems to stretch out forever, bottomless and endless, part way through, the song changes shape, that which constituted the whole of the sound up until that point is relegated to a background for these new sounds, a sweeping, loping epic bit of post rock, still washed out and woozy, but with a simple propulsive rhythm, and a gorgeously melodic chiming central riff, darkly fervent and slightly ominous and hauntingly epic, the swirling sounds around those new elements growing more frenetic, thickening, while the song just grows and grows, sprawls and expands, as if any second the heavens will open and the song will become the sonic manifestation of the rapture. So totally intense and powerful and moving and majestic, and simply breathtaking.
Man, as someone who works with computers a LOT, I was listening to this record while thinking about what "dead machines" means to me and hmmm... wish they titled it Fan Works, Won't Boot Up.
And even though that's sort of a joking title, it would actually describe what this noise-scape record sounds like.
On an artistic level, there is something genuinely nice here. Very little variances in overall sound level and track length make this seem almost like some sort of stilted dialogue amongst a sea of dying machines. Or very similar to the background white noise folley from Blade Runner.
Dead Machines is actually a magical New York noise couple: John Olsen (Wolf Eyes) and Tova O'Rourke (Wooden Wand, Vanishing Voice). Parts of this album remind us of SF's own Patrick Mullins from Burmese who creates aural apolocalypses in the same vein, using a multitude of electronics and sound manipulation.
With a lineup like that you'd probably be expecting some sort of ear splitting noise free-for-all. A blasting batch of brutality designed to melt your speakers into little black puddles, to send your neighbors diving for the phone to call the cops, the sort of N O I S E that is gloriously and literally unlistenable. Well, in this case, you'd be wrong. Very wrong.
In fact all four sides of this quadruple live set, are downright listenable, if not actually lovely here and there. An epic 4 sided dark ambient dronefest, that while hitting the spot for the usual suspects, will definitely also appeal to the drone minded among you as well as the Earth / SUNNO))) dronedoomdirge obsessed.
John Wiese of Bastard Noise and about a million other projects starts things off not with a bang, but a rumbling whir, a slowly unfurling blanket of crumbling fuzz and hiss, muted minimal ambience rife with pulsing low end and thick rivers of black shimmer. This is dark ambience more than noise, strange disembodied melodies, drifting all ghost like, haunting and surprisingly pretty, but without ever losing its overall bleak and ominous vibe. Definitely the best thing we've heard from Wiese.
So at this point we sort of expected Dead Machines to kick it up a notch, and they do, sort of. Beginning with a grinding symphony of buzzing analog synths and fuzzed out feedback, but that quickly gives way to a very Wolf Eyesian industrial ambient wasteland, clang and rumble, creaking and crumbling clatter, barely there dreamlike whir, distant high end melodies, downright blisssful before a coda of thick buzz and roaring damaged noise (but even then, it sounds really fuzzy and washed out)
It's up to Romero then, to get things good and noisy, but surprise surprise, Romero follows suit, offering up maybe the most tranquil and drone-y set of the bunch, thick undulating low end throb, overtones shifting and beating against each other, sounding like a doom metal Phill Niblock. Gorgeous and dreamy but still dark and menacing.
The final track, taking up all of side 4, features this fearsome foursome, Romero, Wiese and the two Dead Machines, teaming up for an epic and one would assume chaotic and noisy collaboration, but once again, we're thrown a serious curveball. Instead of all four piling up on top of each other and making a huge loud mess, they deftly intertwine their sounds into a subtle dark drift. Only once exploding into a full on noise drenched onslaught, spending most of the time rumbling and whirring and weaving a dense and dreamy world of dark drones, and mysterious sonic shapes. Really fucking awesome.
Double lp, pressed on THICK black vinyl, packaged in super elaborate, three color silkscreened fold over sleeves and LIMITED TO 515 COPIES...
One of two new releases on Flingco Sound, the other being the new one from outsider black metal horde Wrnlrd, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this one, a brand new 7" from a group called Dead Meat, who apparently call the Bay Area home, even though this 7" is the first time we'd heard of 'em. But we want to hear more, cuz these guys are SO right up our alley, and yours we'd imagine.
A twisted blend of old school noise rock, hypnotic spaced out psychedelia, gloomy post punk, and old school Midwest Touch & Go style pigfuck heaviness, the guitars crush and churn, the drums pound, the vocals lazy and laid back, drenched in reverb, the songs stretched way out, brooding and hypnotic, sinister and swaggery, exploding into squalls of full on crunch. Imagine maybe Killdozer crossed with Interpol, or Joy Division recording for AmRep, or Drunkdriver jamming with King Snake Roost, or Clockcleaner doing Wipers covers, however you slice it, this stuff RULES. We need more, NOW.
Dunno about you, but man, we've always loved some sax/drums improv skree. Its just a thing that rules. Going way back to John Coltrane and Rashied Ali out there in Interstellar Space, you know. This Dutch duo are totally in that tradition, but of course (as you might guess from their excellent name) taking it to the extreme, playing essentially "acoustic noise" in freeform shred mode, one of 'em blowing like crazy, the other attacking his kit - not for nothin' that this Utech release was mastered by Jazzkammer's Lasse Marhaug. Also it's perhaps worth noting that one track is named "Yamatsuka Eye". So, yeah, this disc is intense -not unmusical, but intense - with sudden frantic tangles of tenor sax blurt and spasms of percussion slamming into your skull. Pure pleasure in other words, if you dig Peter Brotzmann machine gunning style sax, Zornified jazzcore, and/or the most aggressive Jooklo Duo stuff! Only just about under a half-hour in length, but that's fine, cuz Dead Neanderthals give it their all for the duration, ripping it up here like the sax/drums equivalent of Slayer's Reign In Blood (RIP Jeff Hanneman btw).
Droning dirge-y sludge records are a dime a dozen at this point. It's still a sound we love, but we're rapidly reaching a saturation point. The punk rock ethos of 'anyone can start a band' combined with the fact that everybody has a cd burner, and the seeming 'ease' of making doomy drone music, just means that now, it requires a whole hell of a lot of digging and sifting thought mounds of mediocre doom and so so sludge, to discover something as fucked up and far out as Dead Peni.
We first hear Dead Peni on a compilation a year or two back and were immediately smitten. The name evoked some sort of blackened take on Rudimentary Peni, but the sound was nothing of the sort, instead Dead Peni trafficked in an expansive sprawling riff based blackened doomdrone, that was anything but static, like a slowed down tarpit space rock, an even doomier murkier Godflesh, or Wolf Eyes with some rhythmic heft. It was hard to get a feel for what DP were capable of just on the basis of the music on the comp, but it was definitely enough to know we needed more.
And -more- has arrived, in the form of this three track, 47 minute, mysteriously monickered slab of blackened crush. 2-4+1 begins all hushed shimmer and deeeeeep low end whir, a sound that could be any cd-r, until some ungodly beastlike growl emerges from the depths and the guitar explodes, super distorted, crumbling and processed, but weirdly muted and warm. A single crash, allowed to ring out, transforming into a charged electronic buzz, streaked with feedback, and underpinned by that monstrous gurgling voice. Finally the drums kick in, a slow motion drum machined doomic plod, and we're gone. Total buzzing black doom industrial noise nirvana, lumbering and druggy, minor key and surprisingly melodic. A bit of Godflesh, a little Gore, some classic old school funereal doom run through a bank of Wolf Eyesian cracked electronics and malfunctioning effects, the weirdest part is the crowd noise, what sounds like the chanting of a rally or demonstration, snippets and samples, wrapped in rippling sheets of feedback, and woven into massive churning waves of crumbling distortion, a cinematic and weirdly dreamlike doom / industrial / noise hybrid. Like the sound of some super fucked up post apocalyptic political rally, tattered flags, burning buildings, a crowd of shapes and figures clad in rags, some mysterious shadow, on a raised parapet, delivering his message in a gurgling rumbling barely audible vocals, almost like goregrind vocals, but buried so low in the mix they end up sounding like another layer of droning rumble. One guitar weaves a soaring almost majestic melody, but still woozy and washed out sounding, while the track lurches glacially onward, the crowd cheering and chanting, the whole thing like some mysterious soundtrack to the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we know it. But we can't help but willingly submit.
The following track begins with nearly 4 minutes of rain, thunder and lightning, voices, field recordings, laid over an almost imperceptible high end, which gradually grows and grows into a symphony of feedback, tones and overtones tangling and intermingling, creating all sorts of alien melodies, until finally the riff comes in, a super simple caveman dirge sort of riff, locked into a neverending loop, repeating over and over and over like some sort of proto metal mantra, while all the while, the rainfall continues, the random sounds drift in and out, the feedback swirls in little squalls and tangles, the only deviation, being some brief bits of classic doom like melody, before the riff inevitably returns to it's original looping dirge.
The final track begins with an explosion of blown out guitar and buzzing rumble, before drifting off, leaving the staticky detritus over a simple robotic pulse, and a sea of glitch and squiggles, the various elements finally locking into some sort of super abstract doom metal, but one that is hardly doom, or metal, more like some fragmented space drone, peppered with squalls of superdistorted guitar, the occasional clanging crash and crunch, all very muted and muddy, wreathed in a layer of gauzy distortion, voices, dogs barking, all manner of random sounds, and finally, a fierce howled processed demonic voice, wrapped in distorted riffage, and creating a super spare, spaced out sort of doom, where the riffs spend most of the time buzzing and drifting, only to rear up and spit out a bit of fractured melody and harsh hissy pummel, before recoiling again, and resuming its slow burning black drone. It almost sounds like Butthole Surfers ultra-doom, the same sort of effects drenched trippiness, and off kilter dementia, but way blacker, and way more fucked up and frightening.
Any of the three tracks could have been stretched out to album length, and we most certainly would have bought all three, but the three pieces here definitely work together well, as some sort of hellish, demonic, slow motion black doom drone dirge, that plays out almost like some impossible Wolf Eyes / Moss / Arvo Part mash up, if that makes any sense. Which it doesn't, but which is exactly what makes Dead Peni so amazing.
In addition to the 3 audio tracks, there's a fourth track included as a quicktime video, another blown out glacial buzz drenched dirge, this time accompanied by strange abstract visuals, black and white, giving way to green and blue, what seems to be buildings or ruins, but ultimately are so overexposed they just become shapes, the perfect visual representation of Dead Peni's abject black doom.
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Dead Raven Choir centers on the person known as Smolken (a native of Poland, temporarily residing in Texas). Smolken contributed a track to the recent "Heat & Birds" compilation on San Francisco's Jewelled Antler cd-r label, and now this DRC cd-r becomes the first thing released by JA not to feature musicians from their Thuja/Blithe Sons/Child Readers/Franciscan Hobbies/Skygreen Leopards/etc. collective. So what got the Jewelled Antlers all so gosh-darn interested in DRC? This disc provides the reason: DRC specializes in a warped, weird old-timey folk music -- all sparsely strummed guitar, with dark cello drones, atonal piano, and spooky organ faintly heard in the background, over which Smolken sings, in a rather unique style. It's bizarre outsider folk made by a black metal fan. Imagine the dead bones of a rustic farmer, propped up on his back porch with a broken-down guitar, possessed by a spirit or vampire from the Old Country. This animated corpse is made to strum the guitar, and to sing and whisper in an oddly dramatic, Polish accented voice, in this case declaiming lyrics from the poems of Hilaire Belloc and Rainer Maria Rilke!! Eerily quiet (mostly, but for some violent outbursts), and very dark and disturbing, the strange Eastern European theatricality of Smolken's singing and his abstract, alienated string pluck creates a negative, but fascinating, psychological atmosphere. It reminds us a bit of Japanese avant-garde folk troubadour Kan Mikami, or the mysterious Jandek...but creepier.
Oooh. That cover photo of the fog, sheep and trees is nice. A misty meadow for your imagination to wander in as you listen to this, which happens to be the debut "real cd" release from the previously cd-r only label Jewelled Antler. For the occasion, they've chosen an artist from outside their SF-based "collective", their friend Smolken's Dead Raven Choir. (A bit like picking Merzbow, that, since he's so prolific, but still a good choice quality-wise.) Smolken is the guy who has discovered the secret commonality between anguished black metal and emotional folk-minimalism (such as that of Japanese troubadours like Kan Mikami). Some of his releases tend towards the noise and distortion of black metal, others towards the broken Jandekian folk of one man and a guitar. Death To Dead Wolves is yet another haunting/haunted DRC album on the sparser side of that spectrum. If you're already a fan, go ahead and get this one, it's good. If not, perhaps some explanation is in order. Smolken's modus operandi on this disc is to intone poetry (all lyrics here are from the works of 20th century American poet and sometime monk, William Everson) in a heavy Polish accent, sounding rather like a B-movie vampire. Smolken's sinister stage-whisper melds with piano and guitar, all notes struck stark and creepy, with drones and silence both adding to the eerie mix. Electric guitar is utilized, but the playing is in his usual damaged folk style. The final song, "A Canticle To The Waterbirds" is 23 minutes long, the music loosely based on a traditional folk melody. An epic ending to an evocative disc.
Got just a handful of this super limited cd-r from AQ pal Smolken and his folk/metal/ambient ensemble Dead Raven Choir. This one is all dark and skeletal appalachian folk, purposefully plucked steel string notes hovering motionless in the muggy, dusky air, murky reverbed piano, hushed urgently whispered vocals, and creepy, creaking ambience. Dark and intensely intimate. We only have 7 copies so once they're gone they're gone for good.
Yet another Dead Raven Choir cd-r! And again incredibly limited. We actually got the last 8 copies and after they're gone, they're gone for good. This time around, Smolken, who is Dead Raven Choir, tackles the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, composing a suitably somber folkscape around his weighty words. Jandek-ian guitar clatter, Appalachian folk, tenuous piano, dramatic almost operatic vocals, and creepy dark ambience all coalesce into nightmarish outsider-folk grimness. Two guest vocalists, one male and one female, handle most of the singing, while Smolken takes care of the rest (the rest being string bass, tenor banjo, guitar, piano and some singing). Dark and pretty, sad and somber, and really nice. Each cover is unique, with the top layer carefully singed to reveal the layer beneath, and each cd comes with a different beer label under the tray, which the liner notes explain quite simply: All beer consumption by Smolken!
Holy crap. 30 seconds into track one of this new Dead Raven Choir opus and we're like, what the heck is goin' on? Is this really our Polish pal Smolken, the avant-folk poetry-readin' cd-r makin' black metal lovin' weirdo?? Well it must be, but that track he sure sounds like some sore-throated Japanese man, fronting an intense industrial distorto-drone metallic pipe-fight dirgerock explosion, with the sawing strings of a cello (or bass) suggesting the funereal-folk of another Smolken project, Wolfmangler.
It's not like Dead Raven Choir wasn't scary before, either in acoustic Eastern European Jandek mode or doing the (Cask Strength) black-metal-as-sheer-noise thing, but good grief! In some ways, this is the perfect, sick hybrid of those two approaches, sounding something like a weird-folk version of Khanate or SUNNO))), with blown-out bulldozer bass frequencies utterly overrunning songs that Smolken probably originally composed on acoustic guitar, sitting on a back porch somewhere, staring at the sunset. What could have been sparse folk numbers are instead fully distorted and doomful and get a big thumbs up from us.
Ok, we must admit we wrote all that before bothering to look at the song titles (or read the press-release). Now we know why some of these tunes maybe somehow sounded slightly familiar, or as if transposed from a less-dire domain... he didn't compose very many of 'em at all, instead My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind is for the most part an album of covers! 7 out of the 10 tracks here are Dead Raven Choir interpretations of some of Smolken's favorite country, folk, and popular tunes by artists/victims as dissimilar as Richard Thompson and Cole Porter (!!). They're all done in Smolken's special skewed style of outsider black metal, as described above, and needless to say most of 'em are darn close to unrecognizable! We liked this a lot to begin with, now we're even more into it knowing we're actually hearing songs by late great country western songwriter Townes Van Zandt (Smolken used to live in Texas after all), alt-country chanteuse Neko Case ("Favorite"), and even obscure New Zealand drone-pop artist G-Frenzy ("From The Stars", a song that originally appeared on an out-of-print PseudoArcana cd-r we reviewed a few years back). There's also a maritime ballad by Stan Rogers, and oh yeah, the vocals on that very first track sound Japanese 'cause it's a song, "Kigi Wa Haru", by PSF-label folk troubadour Kazuki Tomokawa, an sensible choice on Smolken's part since Tomokawa's work aligns closely with that of Kan Mikami, with whom we've compared DRC's starker acoustic guitar n' vocals tracks before.
And if you like this as much as we do, you'll be happy to learn that he has another, all-country-covers album coming up, entitled Lonesome Drinking Metal...
Polish Texan avant folk experimentalist Smolken has released three cd-rs so far of his Dead Raven Choir output on the Jewelled Antler label. Now DRC makes an appearance on Jewelled Antler side-imprint Pink Skulls, with a disc that is just too nasty and noisy to fit in with the JA aesthetic... With "Sevenfold Songs Of Death" he really indulges his black metal inspired side, resulting in 32 minutes of what might be called noise-folk. It's as if you took all the most raw, distorted, shrill, buzzy, chaotically noisy parts of your favorite black metal albums, cranked 'em up to 11, and tried to pass it off as folk music (supposedly, all words and music here, with the exception of one song, are "traditional"). Sure, Smolken and his friends are playing mandolin and banjo and percussion, but all that's buried beneath so much grinding hiss and drone that if you listen to this at more than the barest, most minute volume you'll endanger your ears/lease/stereo/sanity (not necessarily in that order). A low volume, you can make out the folky melodies and scary vocals. Turn it up at all, and it's like Merzbow meets Abigor meets Kemialliset Ystavat... More evil atmosphere than even Abruptum, seriously. Apparently, this was originally intended for an aborted split release with AQ black metal fave Leviathan, and we'd have to say that Leviathan's probably lucky that he didn't have to go up against this!
The missing number 5 in the Jewelled Antler Library series of 3" cds turns out to be by Dead Raven Choir, the Texas-by-way-of-Poland based folk/improv one man project that the Jewelled Antler powers-that-be seem to be totally in love with of late -- this is their 3rd DRC release this year! As with his previous Jewelled Antler cd-rs, DRC here conjures up some eccentric vocal theatrics and sparse, haunted acoustic guitar playing, like some sort of Eastern European Jandek. And his black metal obsession with wolves continues in the title here as well. Scarily beautiful, with atmospheric piano and unknown other sounds providing a hissing soundscape for his vocal, all three tracks here featuring macabre poetry by Paul Verlaine.
MPEG Download: "Night Scene" [/audio/drcnightscene.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Night Scene" [/audio/drcnightscene.m3u]
Another transmission from the Dead Raven Choir, the work of a Polish ex-patriate Texan who calls himself Smolken. Followers will understand when we say that this falls into the sparse, dramatic folk half of his ouvre, rather than on the black metal noise folk side of things. Whispered, accented vox deliver the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hilaire Beloc, Charles Baudelaire, A.A. Milne and others over doleful strings and abstractly strummed guitar. Smolken seems to be a creepy, well-read Eastern-European version of Jandek, and he's a master of atmosphere, going totally over the top with minimal means. Every note played, and every hiss between notes, turns the blood colder. If an album could sound cursed, this is it.
Fans will of course pick this up, but if you haven't yet delved into Smolken's haunted sound-world, perhaps this is the one to try. For one thing, it's the man's first 'proper' cd after many cd-rs and tapes. And one of his best album titles too! The clincher, perhaps, is that aside from Smolken himself, the only other musician to appear on this recording is our friend, Jewelled Antler stalwart Glenn Donaldson (Thuja, Blithe Sons, Birdtree, Skygreen Leopards, etc.). Ever since, he's had a hollow look in his eyes and his beard seems paler and wispier... Or so we imagine.
One of our all time absolute favorite outsider weirdo black metal records, long out of print on cd, with no plans to re-press, is finally available again, on cassette, for a super limited time. If you missed out on the cd, don't blow it again (and new 2cd coming soon on Andee's tUMULt label)...
When it comes to black metal, our tastes most definitely run� toward the damaged, the demented, the fried and freaked out, the totally baffling, the weirder the better. And there's no shortage of black metal misanthropes, holed up in their caves, or their cabins, or their flats, or their grandfathers' basements, meticulously crafting, ultra personal, maddeningly idiosyncratic outsider black metal. And we are constantly digging for more. The bar has been set pretty high, Benighted Leams obviously, the reigning champions of damaged outsider black metal, then there's Furze and his�'cogent black metal necrosis', let's not forget Emit, Rehtaf Ruo, Necrofrost, Hidden, Vorak, Contra Ignem Fatuum and the elusive Striborg. Phew. That's a pretty heady constellation of bizarre black metal royalty, for sure. So you know, that it is not without some serious soul searching that we would dare declare a record quite possibly the weirdest black metal record ever. But we have searched, and it is thus. Dead Reptile Shrine, from Finland, the record is A Journey Through Darkened Forests and it does indeed sound just like that.
We had practically given up on getting these for the store, Andee had even contacted the band about re-issuing the disc in the states, but luckily we discovered a distributor in Australia who had 30 copies and we took all of them. Now the cd is gone, and while they last we have the tape version... Hmmm. Finland to Australia to the United States, a long journey but it was well worth it we think. Everything about this band is bizarre, the name obviously, the song titles: "A Cave Full Of Corpse Lanterns", "The Snakes Of The Earth Pt. II", "Exekutioner Of The Final Solution", "Above The Ziggurat They Dance", "Clouds Of Doom Gather..." and of course "A Beastcults Procession", the artwork, an appropriately illegible band logo and album title, both peppered with eagles and stars and scorpions as well as loads of squiggles, the band photo of DRC, in a an army jacket, head hung low, hair obscuring his face, in front of what appears to be a huge mound of mud and sticks, with a waving hand emerging from a tiny hole in the mound, and the music, oh the music, so warped and lo-fi, buzzy and doomy and just plain freaky and far fucking out. Wrest from Leviathan bought a copy, and even he could barely handle the Dead Reptile Shrine, which speaks volumes!�
A stumbling, staggering black metal buzz, struggling through walls of haze and fuzz, sounds a bit like a Burzum record with someone constantly fiddling with the pitch control, a warbly seasick black droning whir, with splattery drums, clanging super loud cymbals, and some of the weirdest vocals ever, going from the evil black metal rasp, to an atonal Jandekian croon, to a strange falsetto, to a warm whiskey soaked growl, often within the same song, sometimes within the same line! The entire record is murky and thick with oozing black atmosphere, some songs are loping doom dirges, others race along at breakneck (for DRS at least) speeds, threatening to fall apart completely, riffs sometimes stumble to a halt, before lurching back into action, rhythms stutter, pause, leap forward, the vocals a chaotic swirl around the rickety song structures, minor key melodies and woozy guitars tangle and untangle as the songs slither and slide, leap and careen wildly, there are warbly mumbly soundscapes of droning rumble and otherworldly creaks and groans, tracks of spoken word over chanting monks, an electronic beatscape with garbled growls and haunting clean vocals, even a couple�bizarre acoustic tracks, one with throaty crooned vocals and deliberately strummed steel string guitar, some sort of Jandekian forest folk, with a riff that almost sounds like Nirvana. In fact the forest folk tag is not that far off really. Must be something in the Finnish atmosphere, but without the vocals, huge swaths of Dead Reptile Shrine could be some lost Uton or Avarus recording, or a furtively captured Tivol live session, and yet even with the vocals it still retains some haunting wild woods feral feeling. A Journey Through The Darkest Of Forests is indeed a fearful traipse through a black forest, the overhanging trees blotting out the moonlight, the sounds of the forest a murky buzz, insects and demons, wild beasts and lost souls. A baffling and frightening sonic world that should appeal to metalhead and free folkie alike.�
This tape is super limited (300 copies we think) and will be gone in a flash.... We have a bunch, but we're not sure we'll ever be able to get more...
More damaged demented Finnish madness from outsider black metal weirdos Dead Reptile Shrine. We only got EIGHT copies of this, so we won't bother going into too much detail as we tried to order three times that. Needless to say, this is fucking unhinged and completely brilliant. From the first track, a lurching soundfield of disembodied vocals, a strangled evil mewling, and chunks of downtuned guitar, spread out into a weird slow motion staccato rhythms, it just gets more and more amazingly confusional. After that, the band lurch wildly from slithering doom metal beneath wailing vocals that squeal, howl, wail and moan, the rhythms convoluted, the guitars a rumbling buzz, to thrashing raw grim buzz, still peppered with stumbling drums and bizarre over the top vocals. Might be ultra weird, but it also might be DRS at their heaviest as well...
Again, we only got 8 copies, so be prepared to leave Dead Reptile Shrine-less (or better yet, grab the other DRS cassette we're listing elsewhere on this week's list).
We're always �going on and on about the weirdest, most fucked up black metal bands ever, even elsewhere on this list, we review the new one from Tasmanian one man band Striborg, and declare it maybe the weirdest yet. But there's weird, and then there's Dead Reptile Shrine, who beyond being weird, are barely even black metal, the metallic elements far outweighed by the fractured folk and total whatthefuck elements, and the blackness, well that infuses pretty much every sound they produce, just not in the way most folks are used to or most metalheads want. Instead, DRS do their own thing, and their own thing is some fucked up mix of dark dronemusic, detuned free folk, stumbling chaotic black metal, some orchestral bits, tortured vocals, all wound into a confusional world of black rituals and mysterious sonic otherworlds. While we anxiously await the forth coming double cd on tUMULt, we have THREE new tapes to tide us over, two reissue of long out of print rarities, and another brand new album, to be released soon on cd and vinyl as well, but for now on the oh so cult cassette format. Each of these is limited to 400 copies, we got a bunch, 30 or so, but odds are those will go fast and we probably won't be able to get more.
Burning Black Intensity is the new album, and offers up a taste of what will be found on the soon to come sprawling tUMULt 2cd full length, and if BBI is any indication, then two whole cds of this stuff is going to DESTROY. This record begins with some creepy, orchestral Peter And The Wolf type sounds, strings and percussion, sampled we assume, while DRS croon over the top, offering up wavery clean vocals, strange incantations, and various other vocalizations, the result is truly twisted. This goes on for several tracks before the band launch into some black metal, but DRS black metal is a whole other thing, the drums buried in the mix, barely audible, the guitars strangled, and gnarled, buzzing, blurred and murky, dueling vocals, one a high howled screech, the other a rumbling demonic gurgle, both drenched in reverb, both howling maniacally, and relentlessly, while the guitars churn and the drums stumble, the whole thing lurching drunkenly, super raw and primitive and lo-fi and fractured and FUCKED for sure. The next track demonstrates that no matter how weird it gets, everything they do is deliberate, the guitars are thick and fuzzy, the drums simple but propulsive, the riff a near static black groove, the bass, pulsing and undulating, more typical black metal vocals screeching over the top, while way in the distance a voice shrieks hysterically, the two vocals all tangled up, the guitar spewing forth a super mesmerizing singular riff, totally hypnotic and trancelike, the vocals growing more and more unhinged. The next track is a murky muddy Wold style soundscape, melodies and guitars smeared and blurred into bleary eyed streaks of sound, the vocals an ominous rumble, the drums a chaotic blast beat, while the guitars swoon woozily, the whole track dizzy and druggy and weirdly dreamlike, the vocal eventually growing more and more warped, almost cartoonish, sing songy and almost operatic, wrapped in fluttery flutes and more distorted soft buzz.
Needless to say, this is brilliantly twisted stuff, totally wacked, outsider blackness, as true as any of the more classically TROO black metal, but unlike those, DRS are true only to themselves, any resemblance between their music and other black metal is not only coincidental it's a fluke, as most of this sounds like nothing you've ever heard.
We're always going on and on about the weirdest, most fucked up black metal bands ever, even elsewhere on this list, we review the new one from Tasmanian one man band Striborg, and declare it maybe the weirdest yet. But there's weird, and then there's Dead Reptile Shrine, who beyond being weird, are barely even black metal, the metallic elements far outweighed by the fractured folk and total whatthefuck elements, and the blackness, well that infuses pretty much every sound they produce, just not in the way most folks are used to or most metalheads want. Instead, DRS do their own thing, and their own thing is some fucked up mix of dark dronemusic, detuned free folk, stumbling chaotic black metal, some orchestral bits, tortured vocals, all wound into a confusional world of black rituals and mysterious sonic otherworlds. While we anxiously await the forth coming double cd on tUMULt, we have THREE new tapes to tide us over, two reissue of long out of print rarities, and another brand new album, to be released soon on cd and vinyl as well, but for now on the oh so cult cassette format. Each of these is limited to 400 copies, we got a bunch, 30 or so, but odds are those will go fast and we probably won't be able to get more.
Isth Naral Ja was one of two full lengths released in 2002, but whereas N.t.K. was a proper DRS release, Isth Naral Ja was a three track, 65 minute, all ambient record, originally given away with another disc, and later reissued, but both times in incredible limited amounts. While much of DRS's output is truly twisted, sometimes to the point of sounding a bit goofy to the untrained ear, the sounds found on Isth, while still twisted, are woven into what seems to be a much more serious soundworld. Epic sprawling expanses of whirring low end, deep throbbing bass, strange disembodied voices, fractured truncated guitar melodies, very haunting and peculiar, incantations surface throughout, long long long streaks of sound, trance inducing minimal rumbles, hissing almost industrial high end, long stretches of hushed murmured blackness, that bass pulse creepy and recurring, the whole thing very cinematic and evocative of some grim black wood, or some abandoned house, or some vast black sea, seemingly serene on the surface, but with who knows lurking beneath.
Isth manages the difficult task of being twisted and strange, haunting and mysterious, still embodying the musical ethos of Dead Reptile Shrine, while pushing the sound into new directions, without losing any of its power, any of its mystery, its blackness.
Whereas other DRS records are most definitely an acquired taste, this disc, while definitely still essential listening for DRS fans, would most definitely please the abstract drone and cd-r crowds. Tunnels, Bones Of Seabirds, Drommer, Expo '70, Nordvargr, Acre, Bonus, Encomiast, Starving Weirdos, Metal Rouge, Trollmann, folks who dig any or all of those might just dig this particular chunk of Dead Reptile Shrine black ambience.
We're always �going on and on about the weirdest, most fucked up black metal bands ever, even elsewhere on this list, we review the new one from Tsmanian one man band Striborg, and declare it maybe the weirdest yet. But there's weird, and then there's Dead Reptile Shrine, who beyond being weird, are barely even black metal, the metallic elements far outweighed by the fractured folk and total whtthefuck elements, and the blackness, well that infuses pretty much every sound they produce, just not in the way most folks are used to or most metalheads want. Instead, DRS do their own thing, and their own thing is some fucked up mix of dark dronemusic, detuned free folk, stumbling chaotic black metal, some orchestral bits, tortured vocals, all wound into a confusional world of black rituals and mysterious sonic otherworlds. While we anxiously await the forth coming double cd on tUMULt, we have THREE new tapes to tide us over, two reissue of long out of print rarities, and another brand new album, to be released soon on cd and vinyl as well, but for now on the oh so cult cassette format. Each of these is limited to 400 copies, we got a bunch, 30 or so, but odds are those will go fast and we probably won't be able to get more.
N.t.K was one of two full lengths released in 2002, originally a super limited cd-r, and yet another piece of the missing pieces puzzle that is the bizarre soundworld of Dead Reptile Shrine. The opener is a super creepy slab of ritualistic drone, the low end drenched in hiss and disrtortion, the vocals a harsh whisper, seriously haunting and intense, a murky mystery that soon gives way to a more 'traditional' DRS, a fractured buzz drenched fragmented black metal, ultra lo-fi, the guitars so distorted they almost sound like a solid hum, the drums a buried muffled thump, the vocals harsh and venomous, until they shift gears and become swoonsome wailing, the sound more Urfaust or Jandek, a wailing clean voice that goes from deep bellow to off kilter howl, as fucked up and out there as the music behind it. Later, the sound veers into all sorts of unimaginable territories, one track offers up a weird almost bouncy stumble, with sing songy clean vocals, underpinned by a super creepy death metal gurgle, the track like some blackened chunk of French outsider new wave, the vocals slipping from hysterical shriek a sort of creepy scatting, another track unleashes some super grim, old school raw plodding black metal, like Darkthrone and Von, but filtered through a broken boombox and a fractured psyche, while still another is a gorgeous black folk drift, all muted strum and mumbled melody, before it suddenly transforms into a stuttering dizzying off kilter doom, with some deep demonic vocals that sound almost like Darth Vader, and another sounds almost like crusty punk, pounding riffage and simple drumming and weird nasally punk rock vocals. It's all over the place, but some twisted black thread holds it all together. We've mentioned it time and time again, but the music of Dead Reptile Shrine is not for the faint of heart, or even the black of soul, it's for the twisted, the warped, the musical misanthropes, in search of sounds mysterious and baffling, and no band was ever more of both than DRS.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We love Stars Of The Lid. So it should come as no surprise that we love The Dead Texan as well, since the Dead Texan just so happens to be Adam Wiltzie, who is one half of Stars Of The Lid. Wiltzie no longer lives in Texas (hence the dead Texan monicker) but has continued in his new European digs, to craft utterly sublime, slow creeping, gorgeously cinematic ambience. This could just as well have been a Stars Of The Lid Record, with the difference being that instruments here are more readily identifiable. In SOTL, the sound was huge murky smear of indistinct instrumental impressions and abstract ambient. You'd be hard pressed to believe that those sounds were made with a 4-track and a guitar. But as The Dead Texan, Wiltzie takes simple guitar figure or mournful piano melodies and lets them unfurl lazily, in a spare landscape of distant rumbles and warm purrs. Occasional abstract female vocals and otherworldy chimes add to the dark sweet mystery of the Dead Texan. Disc two is a DVD featuring animations by artist Christina Vantzos (who also contributed vocals) that perfcetly visualize Wiltzie's sweet swooning gloom. Simple, quavering lines slowly grow into innocent drawings of figures and shapes, filled with bold swatches of color and texture. The strongest and most moving pieces are the bonus videos that feature grainy, home video footage of a family playing on the beach, all within Vantzos' simple lined frames and set to the sweet strains of the Dead Texan.
Mark Spybey (Zoviet France, Download, and innumerable collaborative projects) and friends -- among them some members of Legendary Pink Dots -- meld together their individual sonic imaginations, seemingly shatter the outcome, and piece it all back together again to bring you this long-titled, meticulously beautiful work. Constructed from recordings made in Canada, Cuba, and Germany (the latter by krautrocker Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia and Cluster). It was produced and engineered by Spybey along with the multi-talented Frank Vershuuren (LPD engineer) and Darryl Neudorf (who's worked with such divergent artists as Neko Case, Twilight Circus' Ryan Moore and the New Pornographers). At times, swirling and crystalline. At others, sputtering, heavy, and percussive.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Yet another far out release from the genius Public Guilt label, this one an experimental hip hop avant drone soundscape record from a group called dEADVERSE MASSIVE, made up of experimental hip hop outfit Dalek, East Coast spaced out dronescapers Destructo Swarmbots, and hop hop weirdo Oddateee. And you know it sort of sounds just how you might expect. Dark and droney, stretched out and abstract. Only the first track really sounds very hip hop, and even then it's freaked out and pretty far out. A grinding low end, a squelchy electro beat, a long stretch of some dude swearing and cursing a blue streak, eventually the rapping comes in, a mellow, laid back flow, perfectly complimenting the washed out murky drones in the background. That track segues into something way more abstract, bits of wah guitar and fragments of melody drift aimlessly in a shimmery expanse, with what sounds like a muted song, or a mysterious radio broadcast unfurling way in the background. The side finishes off with a strange looped soundscape of hiccupping guitar riffs, chopped into little pieces, then strewn over a lengthy stretch of near nothingness, a haunting minimal jam for sure.
The flip side, is all one track, but moves through all sorts of moods and movements. Beginning with a muddy DJ Shadow-esque soundscape but with a bit more drone and glitch, a thumping blurred rhythm way down in the mix, a constant drone of fluttering guitar and washed out keyboards drifting over the top. This murky midnight groove turns into a swirling morass of disembodied guitars and keyboard chaos, over the top a confusional mix of voices, spoken, sampled, some right up front, some distorted and buried beneath the music, three, maybe four voices, constantly drifting in and out of earshot, eventually fading away, leaving a melancholy, minor key stretch of backwards guitar, looped and dreamlike that unwinds until the disc ends. Really cool stuff. Maybe more for weird music fans than hip hop headz, but either way, would love to hear some of this in some crazy DJ set...
Gorgeous picture disc, original Paul Romano artwork (you know, the guy who did those Mastodon covers), in a thick plastic sleeve with a metallic silver sticker along the top.
Deadwood the group, existed long before the HBO series of the same name, but it some ways, they have a lot in common, mostly in the bleak, hopeless, windblown vibe that permeates them both. Featuring a member of Swedish black metal horde and long time AQ faves Blodulv, Deadwood offer up extended tracks of ultra creepy low end explorations, that run the gamut from abrasive power electronics, to slithering drone drenched black ambience. Fans of stuff like MZ412 and other purveyors of bleak abstract sounds will definitely dig this.
From thick squalls of white noise hiss, like rain on a metal barn roof, to super blown out Merzbowian hiss, almost black metal in its buzz and intensity, to crumbling landscapes of tape hiss and low end rumble, slowed down vocals, and mumbled scrape and shimmer, to strange murky tribalism, to skipping soundscapes of demonic vocals and ultra distorted slowed down beats, to decayed orchestral snippets chopped and looped into impossibly mesmerizing rhythms, a dark and damaged world of sound, though while at its heaviest could be the harshest, hissiest BM you've ever heard, spends most of its time crawling and lurching through slow motion fields of rumbling sound. Awesome.
We really can't get enough of the dark, cinematic soundscapes conjured by so many of the artists on such likeminded labels as Type (UK) and Miasmah (Norway). This new release on Type by Norwegian duo Deaf Center (cellist Erik K. Skodvin and pianist Otto A. Totland) is our current fave, it's just their second full-length in six years, as clearly it takes time to craft music this moody and gorgeous, this time around produced in a proper studio, in Berlin, on analog equipment for maximum fidelity. Also the two members of Deaf Center have been busy with their own, individual projects - Skodvin, for one, is the man behind another AQ fave, Svarte Greiner, plus he also runs the Miasmah label! And if you like the "acoustic doom" of Svarte Greiner, you should also appreciate Deaf Center's evocative combination of modern classical, ambient, and electronic strains on Owl Splinters.
Atmospheric opener "Divided" sets the mood, all abstract, monastic moan and droning string-scrape, hushed and floating. Then "Time Spent" introduces sparse melody, played on pensive, pretty piano, alone in the dark. Third track "New Beginning (Tidal Darkness)" is one of subtle crackle and glitch, the music ebbing and flowing through drone build-ups and more exquisite piano reveries. Once again, moody and somber, but beautiful. And so it goes, Deaf Center getting much heavier (eventually) in the midst of the grinding epic, "The Day I Would Never Have", the album's nearly 11 minute long centerpiece (which is infinitely longer on the vinyl version, as it ends the first side with a locked groove). Dense tones resonate with great emotional presence.
Skodvin's deep cello sawing can get spiky too, as on the nervously dramatic "Animal Sacrifice", though all is soothed by the luminous fuzz of the ambient background. Another epic track appears before the end of the disc, "Close Forever Watching" being 8 minutes of glorious, massing drone shimmer - play loud!!
With its balance of delicacy and weightiness both, Deaf Center's Owl Splinters coincidentally in some respects reminds us of two other releases recommended on this week's list - the new album from Earth, and also the Klute soundtrack! The recent Ural Umbo lp highlighted here last time also comes to mind.
Essential for fans of all things Type and Miasmah, particularly (of course) Svarte Greiner, also Elegi, Jacaszek, Fjellstrom, etc. A great going to sleep album for some of us, if you're ready for some perhaps suspenseful dreams.
Please note that the vinyl version, as is often the case with Type releases, is packaged with a bonus cd, in this case containing a 46 minute reworking of the album tracks by Skodvin under his Svarte Greiner guise, entitled Twin. Why they want to deprive cd purchasers of that, we don't know.
The Death & Beauty Foundation is an odd footnote in the history of The Hafler Trio. It's a project that began sometime in the early '80s presumably in and/or around Newcastle, UK featuring a young Andrew McKenzie (who later went on to found The Hafler Trio) and Val Denham, a visual artist who has some history with Psychic TV, Marc Almond, and Cyclobe. Only a couple of compilation tracks of the Death & Beauty Foundation had appeared on Touch cassette compilations, and a tape-only release emerged in 1986; but beyond that, the story to the Death & Beauty Foundation is pretty mysterious. This CD represents the complete 'Darlington Tapes' which the two began in 1982. Instead of the media-savvy collages and psychoacoustic investigations which The Hafler Trio mastered throughout the '80s, the Death & Beauty Foundation penned songs, really weird and fractured songs; but these are nonetheless tunes. A curious falsetto (which we're presuming to belong to Denham) floats in flanging tremolo haze above odd, Spartan electronics, sounding somewhat like "In Heaven" from the Eraserhead soundtrack, but ever more evasive and purposefully meandering. In line with primitive BBC Radiophonic tricknology meets Cabaret Voltaire cut-up methods, tape manipulations guide the bulk of the arrangements to that fluttering voice, with Shadow Ring like splutter across guitar and tin-can percussion on a few tracks. Some of the electronic sounds seem to have reappeared on the h3o album Sea Org; but those recognizable instances are few and far between in this confusing album.
Death Cheetah is probably a name new to you, it was to us, the man behind Death Cheetah though you might know as the guy who painted that bad ass pile of skulls album cover for the recent AmocomA record on tUMULt, he also contributed to the short lived Matter tape of the month series we reviewed a while back, but this super limited 3" is the first recording from the curiously named one man band, a teaser for an upcoming full length, but it's doubtful that could possibly be as cool as these. LIMITED TO 20 COPIES, of which we got ALL 20, each one hand painted, every single one super striking and unique, just like the music inside.
Three tracks, the first one is some sort of brooding Bohren like crawl, all skittery brushed drums and deep rumbling low end, ominous hushed vocals, little muted flurries of soft focus keyboard, a blissed out nightmarish creep, slithery and shimmery and dark dark dark, almost jazzy, but more in a Necks sort of way, some seriously deeeeep slowcore minimalism, that builds to more of a downtempo plod near the end.
The second track is totally different, stuttery dubbed out drums, dubstep style fuzzed out synth bass rumbles, shouted distorted vocals, a woozy post punk dubby groove, flecked with shards of reverb drenched guitar, streaks of synthesizer, it sounds like some lost eighties DIY deathfunk jam, but a bit more freaked out and abstract. The closing track veers more toward the minimalism of the opener, spare bits of guitar flutter, jazzy skittery drums, flickers of flute, acoustic guitar, tons of space, a slow slow late night drift, abstract and dreamy, smoke-y and gauzy and so so nice.
Hard to get a handle on just what Death Cheetah is all about, three tracks, three different directions, but we like them all, and in some strange way they do all link together, and flow, and when taken with the meticulously hand painted covers, this is a gorgeous piece of outsider soundart, and one that won't be around for long, grab one of these quick or steel yourself for a long wait for the full length...
This record has been floating around for a while now, in various permutations, tapes, downloads, and now finally an lp, and a cassette again, maybe in anticipation of Death Grips' Epic label debut which is slated to drop later this month. And if you've yet to hear Death Grips, you might be a little surprised that they got snapped up by a major, cuz this is some fierce, grim, mean sounding shit. This Sacramento crew specializes in a twisted hybrid of hip hop and experimental electronics, the sound a dizzying assemblage of buzzing metal guitars, skittery programmed beats, bizarre samples, fractured glitched out buzz, twisted loops, seriously raw and lo-fi, but at the same time urgent and intense and fucking far out and super original.
The vocals are fierce and furious, not so much just rapped as bellowed, and howled, which suits the heavy sounds in the background. While much of the drumming is programmed, the drummer in Death Grips is none other than Hella's Zach Hill, but don't be expecting much of that furious Lightning Bolt style frantic drumming, this is after all a hip hop record, so most of the beats are spare and stretched out, as much about their tone and timbre as the rhythms themselves. Opener "Beware" is about as close to perfect as the troublesome hybridization of hip hop and metal has ever gotten, with big chiming distorted chords, an epic almost rock song arrangement, skittery rhythms, and DG mainman Stefan Burnett laying down a fierce flow over the top. "Guillotine" sounds more like a super charged Sensational jam, the beat spare and skittery, the main loop a thick buzzing low end synth, the track laced with little flurries of sci-fi FX, and weird random blasts of psychedelic sound, not to mention a having chain clatter crunch and some motorcycle rev thrum, and the rapping, twisted and deliriously off kilter. "Spread Eagle Cross The Block" is a dizzying assemblage of looped pop song, big sing along verses, stuttery handclap beats, while "Lord Of The Game" is a head spinning shuffle with the main loop made from sliced and diced vocals, there's also Beastie Boys horn bleats, and a Crazy World Of Arthur Brown sample, all tangled up into a crazy rapid fire blast of rhythmic crush. The rest of the record is just as twisted and all over the map, and while we could go song by song and describe each one in turn, it should be obvious by now if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, we'd be surprised if it wasn't, this is the sort of hip hop record that sounds like it was made for aQ, fucked up and funky, heavy and tripped out, groovy and super twisted. For a genre that seems to do less boundary pushing than it should, this is the sort of hip hop record that shakes shit up big time, and suddenly it's not such a surprise that this is getting the big underground buzz AND major label attention it so strangely deserves. Quite possibly our hip hop record of the year, and yeah it came out last year, but it's our favorite this year so far too!
Holy shit! Not for the faint of heart, the easily offended, the soft eared, or empty pocketed, this 20th anniversary reissue of Death In June's controversial 1987 release Brown Book, is a stunner. A legendary slab of politically charged post industrial neo-folk. Remastered, with a bonus disc featuring 14 tracks, alternate versions, outtakes and rarities from other long out of print reissues.
But it's the packaging too, that pushes this over the top. A circular marble container carved with the DiJ Totenkopf skull, weighing in at almost two pounds, slip the cover off and inside is a brown velvet pouch, housing the two cds, atop those are circular cards with photos and liner notes and other text, remove everything and there's a little recess in the bottom of the container which holds 4 fabric patches. Wow.
We only have two of these, as they are pretty pricey, but we figured there was bound to be a Death In June fan or two out there who would flip for one of these...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Here's a another brief blast of cassette goodness released by AQ pal Mike Donovan (Big Techno Werewolves, Nam, Sounds Of The Barbary Coast, The Ropers, Dial Records) of local jazz noise outfit Death Sentence: Panda. As with most releases by the very DIY San Francisco fella Mr. Donovan, there is only going to be a very small homespun run of these made, so needless to say, don't snoooooze!
Pssst... we also have a small number of some other Folding cassette releases, all with hand made covers -- a short one from Donovan's own current band Sic Alps, plus a compilation he compiled with artist Chris Johanson called SSSSSOSS2 and ones by Dark Yellow Swans (aka Yellow Swans) and NVH with Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny. Dust off yer cassette deck!
Archival recordings (the final unreleased tracks apparently!)from this local noise rock outfit, 4 tracks of rhythmic, hypnotic, spaced out, psychedelic noise rock, that sounds totally alien, like some alternate dimension marching band scoring music for cartoons. Heavy, but lo-fi; murky, but strangely playful; thir sound a grinding hypno-rock churn, over which woodwinds flutter, strange vocals soar and shimmer, theremin and electronics shimmy and squiggle. Dynamic and proggy, some moments sound like Deerhoof, others sound like Raymond Scott (albeit more blown out and distorted), and still others sound like some lost seventies prog-psych freakiness. The tracks are on the short side, but DSP pack plenty into each, with long stretches of hazy hypnotic drifts, bursts of stuttering prog pop, jazzy psychedelic dreaminess, fluttery distortion drenched acid folk, and of course violent squalls of amp abuse and drum damage. But all of it surprisingly melodic, and weirdly catchy, and not sure if it's the songs or the recordings, but a lot of this is just downright pretty. And yeah, noisy. Oh, and super LIMITED too! Housed in a hand stamped cardstock sleeve, in an edition of only 50 copies...
Right off the bat, I'm not sure whether this video from Death Squad is more of a stupid spectacle like MTV's "Jackass," or an Industrial production worthy of comparisons to autopsy-film era SPK, or as a very sad piece of confrontationist art that purposefully seeks to terrify its audience. The simple fact that Death Squad -- the former moniker of San Francisco's Michael 9 --
The first portion of this video is a live documentation of a performance Death Squad gave at The Lab back in 1999 called "Intent." After starting off with a backing tape of� blasting screeches and power electronics / death industrial noise accompanied by two video projections of medical footage, war atrocities, and putrefaction, Michael switches on lamp revealing that he is at a desk, with a small box of razors, a syringe, a gun, and a box of bullets. The assumption is that the needle is for heroin, and Michael taps his arm and shoots up. As the backing noise increases in intensity with higher frequencies, he picks up the razors and begins slicing his forearms. Michael then proceeds to load the gun, knocks the desk over, and menacingly stalks through the space, screaming and pointing the loaded gun at members of the audience. At this point, the documentation of the performance gets rather vague, as you can't really see Michael acting out his agressions on the audience. Yet, there are plenty of people quickly leaving the space, and the video also contains several written confessionals from members of the audience decrying this performance. The second video is almost tame in comparison, situated much more within the aforementioned SPK agenda of exposing society's "cathedral of death" as public spectacle in which catharsis is actively pursued, but never actualized.
Michael 9 seems to truly believe that there are *no* absolutes in culture and society, thus there is no one that can wield a moral judgement, claiming that his performances are not art. If Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh can qualify their shared life from 1983-1984 in which they were physically bound together by a rope, as art, then shouldn't Michael 9 be able expose his nightmares in a public venue? As art? I can't honestly say whether I approve or disapprove of this work, which left me quite uncomfortable and disturbed, even in witnessing it through the safety of a television. And I can't say if I would have shit my pants had I personally witnessed Death Squad's "Intent" performance at The Lab. But it's quite possible. Proceed with caution.
A pretty serious noise rock (heavy on the noise) head to head on the mighty aRCHIVE label, responsible in the past for killer discs from the Goslings, Bardo Pond, Astral Travelling Unity, Growing, Keiji Haino, LSD-March, Nadja and Jack Rose.
Recorded live at Tonic in NYC last year, this double 3" cd set chronicles what must have been a night of serious ear damage. Up first, Death Unit, a noisy super group made up of Carlos Giffoni, dudes from Mouthus and Hair Police and Chris Corsano (what band doesn't feature Corsano at this point?), and it's mostly Corsano's show, a 20 minute blast of drum freakout, all over the place, dizzyingly complex, a furious nonstop drum solo, eventually joined by thick sheets of squealing feedback, layers of guitar buzz, strange synthy warble and what sounds like short wave interference. A brutal but surprisingly listenable sludge drone / noise rock / free jazz mash up, but again, it's all about the drums, splattery and crashing and chaotic with the various synths and guitars just wrapping the spastic rhythms in thick layers of buzz and grit.
Disc two features another 20 minute blast of caustic sound, this time from Prurient, purveyor of old school noise, a one man Whitehouse, who unleashes loads of ear shredding high end, all the sounds distorted and crumbling, some gorgeous low end drones and ultra creepy vocals, mostly whispered more than shouted, sometimes even spoken, sounding like snippets from some film. Near the end, things get even more intense, the vocals howled and the squall of electronics underneath erupting violently all around crunching grind and anguished guttural cries. The sound is so dense and heavy and noisy it almost sounds like there's some sort of industrial percussion at times.
Plus lots of crowd noise, cheers and shouting too as the show was obviously being recorded from the crowd. Just makes it weirder and more surreal...
So while this is definitely noisy, both discs are pretty listenable. Harsh enough for the noise obsessed, but just accessible enough to maybe convince some folks that maybe they do in fact like themselves a little noise now and again!
Packaged in a cool 6 panel fold out sleeve designed by Dominick Fernow aka Prurient. Mastered by James Plotkin.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! And already almost sold out so once these are gone we probably won't be able to get more.
Ultra limited, vinyl-only 10" record collecting tracks from various sources as remixed by legendary producer and dark ambient dronelord Deathprod. It sounds like the idea here was to take the already impossibly dark and doomy originals and attempt to make them even more gloomy, murky and black. And the results are quite gloriously grim. Tracks from Nils Petter Molvaer, Murcof, Larsen and Deathprod himself get reworked into utterly bleak and dismal doomscapes, still warm and thick but equally oppressive and desolate. Cavernous slow motion rumbles, smeary black ambience, all suffused with black hole desolation and utter sonic abjection. Two of the tracks do manage to reach out from the murk, but just barely. The first, by Cloroform, is still minimal and murky but it's wrapped around a muted percussive soundscape, like an underwater slow motion pipe fight. Soft shimmery clank and clatter beneath an ocean of dark ambience. The other, another track from Nils Petter Molvaer, is dreamy and slightly more melodic with slowed down rhythms, and distant keening melodies drifting gently a slowly shifting ocean of subsonic rumbles and whispery whirs. Quite beautiful.
Minimally packaged in an all black gatefold sleeve and with an oversized 10" booklet with liner notes and lots more blackness.
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Previously the only work by Deathprod we stocked here at Aquarius was the split cd with Biosphere on Rune Grammofon in which the two artists reworked fellow Norwegian Arne Nordheim's electronic compositions. Having enjoyed that disc very much, we were pretty excited about the mysterious looking matte black four CD box by Deathprod that arrived at our laboratory recently. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music the music contained within surely did not betray our hopes. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delay and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound -- such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence -- into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. The tracks on these four discs were recorded between 1991 and 2000, and while some of the material was released by Sten on cassette through his own label (also titled Deathprod), much of it is previously unreleased or was super limited in number. Two tracks in particular, a six minute narration from American born Oslo resident Matt Burt and a couple tracks of an organ, vibes and drum trio not unlike Sagor & Swing stick out in this four disc set. More typical are tracks which blossom out from a single cell of an idea: one chord, or one blast of noise. At times Deathprod sounds almost like an attempt at recreating Thomas Koner's soundscapes using the audio palette of Mauricio Bianchi. On Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha, Sten went so far as to record tracks on a Nagra deck, transfer them to wax cylinders and then transfer them once more to digital media. The result are authenticly old and decaying tracks which are hauntingly beautiful as well. Other tracks feature deteriorating blasts of what sounds almost like a fog horn progressively decaying into grinding metal; throbbing drones and eerie female chorus -- a la Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001 -- building with layers of feedbacky washes of sound. The four tracks that make up Sten's most recent album on the set -- Morals And Dogma -- are possibly his best works yet: icey, bleak soundscapes of drones. Any of the tracks here would make an excellent soundtrack. On "Dead People's Things", the most sorrowful of melodies is played on a theremin over a foundation of delicate, scratchy bowing of violin and a deep bass throbbing drone. "Orgone Donor" consists of a slowly shifting chordal drone of whispy violins, harmonium and saw, with each instrument leading and then resolving the chord in turn.
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Back in 2004, we were totally blown away by the mysterious looking matte black four cd box by Deathprod. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music contained within surely did not disappoint. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delays and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound - such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence - into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. Here, we have one of those discs from the boxset reprinted individually.
Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha was Sten's graduation project from art school, inspired by the remotest inhabitated island in the world - Tristan da Cunha, located nearly 2000 miles away from the mainland. Here, Sten went so far as to record tracks on a Nagra deck, transfer them to wax cylinders and then transfer them once more to digital media. The resulting sounds are authentically old and decaying tracks which are hauntingly beautiful as well. But the bulk of this disc is comprised of the live recording of "The Contraceptive Briefcase II" with a large ensemble of vocalists who are also apparently playing glass. Sten's composition of dramatically minimalist dark loops whose phrasing is damn close to what you'd hear on Morals & Dogma, progressively decaying into grinding metal; throbbing drones and eerie female chorus - a la Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna" from 2001. Stunning.
It's a bit tough to recommend buying this CD... Not because we don't like it -- au contraire, we do like it lots -- but because, for a bit more moolah, you can get this CD along with three other excellent Deathprod discs by buying the box set which we're also listing this week. Apparently those three other discs are not going to be released individually, so if you do end up really digging Deathprod and want more, you'll have to buy this disc again with the box set. An abridged version of our review of the box set will thus do for this item: Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delay and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound -- such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence -- into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. The four tracks that make up Sten's most recent album Morals And Dogma are possibly his best works yet: icey, bleak soundscapes of drones. Any of the tracks here would make an excellent soundtrack. The first, "Tron" is a shimmering plane, the source material for which sounds like short wave radio noise processed in such a way not entirely unlike John Duncan's Phantom Broadcast. On "Dead People's Things", the most sorrowful of melodies is played on theremin over a foundation of delicate, scratchy bowing of violin and a deep bass throbbing drone. "Orgone Donor" consists of a slowly shifting chordal drone of whispy violins, harmonium and saw, with each instrument leading and then resolving the chord in turn.
Deathprod is the solo experimental audio project from Supersilent and Motorpsycho member Helge Sten of Oslo, Norway. Back in 2004, we were totally blown away by the mysterious looking matte black four CD box by Deathprod. If the black box was evocative enough to pique our interest, the music contained within surely did not disappoint. Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delays and sundry other electronic devices, Helge Sten manipulates fragments of sound -- such as a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence -- into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. Often it is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an oversaturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice, or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. Here, we have one of those discs from the boxset re-printed individually.
Treetop Drive was the earliest of Deathprod's albums, originally released in 1994. Structurally, Deathprod's brooding scores are starkly minimal, with a solitary loop of a mournful note from a string quartet comprising the base for the first track of Treetop Drive. Around this base, Deathprod sweeps pallid noise and harsh acoustic scrapings, cycling around the track's central theme. It would fit a David Lynch film perfectly, with its distorted sentimentality and violent darkness. The twin note electronic bellows of the second track take the dark ambient mode of Cold Meat Industries to a reductionist strategy of a turgidly slow Terry Riley. The third track reprises those sweeping blasts of white noise from the first track around an incredibly sad melodic drone that sways in the distance. The final track revolves upon quite deep-space beacon of electronics whose darkened frequencies refract into a bleak soundscape.
Afro-Booty Musique! That's not just one of the song titles here, that's what this is. French techno producer Debruit makes his debut with this lively disc, that weaves both samples and rhythmic inspiration from various sorts of African music old and new (including stuff from "lost African VHS") into a slightly hip-hopped, drum-machine driven, largely instrumental techno funk full of fat, squelchy bass lines and infectious chants. It comes off like a mad, manic mix of the hyperactive, synthed-out sound of South African "Shangaan Electro" and the funky-but-fucked up approach of another aQ fave style, namely "Skweee"!! Syncopated, surreal like the cover art, exotic and energetic, great for a sweaty dance frenzy or fast driving in the car (simply sitting at home in front of the stereo, maybe that too, but you might not be sitting still for long). And track 7 is called "Zef", so now we know Die Antwoord didn't make that up.
Fans of skweee, of Shangaan stuff (particularly the Shangaan Shake remixes Honest Jon's put out), the electrified thumb-piano "Congotronics" of Konono No.1, and that great Francis Bebey "African Electronic Music" collection on Born Bad, all will hear things they like here, in one chaotic, jubilant, groovy jumble!
Next time, we'll probably have the double vinyl version of this too, plus also a remix 12".
The fifth archival document from Jackie-O Motherfucker's U-Sound series features Decaer Pinga, whose members had previously explored the nether regions of shitnoiserock as Prick Decay. The Scottish duo of Dora Doll and Dylan Nyoukis now have quieted
