In the wake of The Alps recent full length, III, comes not one, but two lengthy cd-r eps culled from the same recording sessions that produced III. Mostly improvised, those sessions for III found the trio expanding their sprawling abstract free folk into a sound much more spacious and druggy, New Age-y and blissed out, and in the process they ended up with more music than would fit on a single record. The good news is, that since the music was all improvised, and was all recorded during the same sessions, these two eps play like sides 3 and 4 of III, had it been expanded to a double album. Which is most definitely a good thing. Both of these discs, A Path Through The Sun, and A Path Through The Moon, are limited to 100 copies, of which we have 30, and those will most likely disappear in a flash. So act fast if you don't want to miss out on these. And needless to say (although we will anyway), everybody who dug III will absolutely need these.
As we mentioned in our review of III, The Alps have retained much of their free folk sound, yet have managed to incorporate more krautrock, more new age, even more space rock into that sound, creating a hybrid that manages straddle the underground cd-r scene, and something much more expansive and epic.
A Path Through The Moon, is cut from the same cloth as the sunnier Path, but offers up some krautrocky folk drift right out of the gate, reverbed guitar floats on clouds of cymbal sizzle, while a super spare rhythm holds it together, the whole track swaying woozily, the guitars laid back and softly psychedelic, the drums more of a subtle pulse than a driving force. The second track is all glistening sun baked guitar drone, the strums and picking allowed to melt into each other, creating a hazy web over the constant shimmer below, a distant rhythmic throb barely audible, very washed out an bleary eyes and lovely. The track after that sticks out a bit, a brooding low end rumble, riff with buzz and random room noise, a slow burner for sure, that at one point incorporates wailing female vocals (sampled we assume), some hip hop (!) and what sounds like random dialog buried beneath the churning buzz and rumble.
The band quickly shift back to folkier climes, offering up two chunks of glimmering steel string Appalachia, the first gorgeously sun dappled and lush, albeit peppered with bits of buzz and feedback near the end, the second much moodier and murkier, the guitar drifting through a field of soft hiss and washed out shimmer, before dropping out completely and leaving those background sounds to fade out until the end. And finally, the band finish up with a 9+ minute epic that is all over the place, starting out as a warm whirring drone, shifting to a sax flecked free jazz drift, then veering into a piano driven krautgroove, then a Reichian looped piano jam flecked with reverbed steel strings and zither like percussion, finally finishing off with a spacious stretch of free folk, minor key chords drifting through long stretches of near silence.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in a plain chipboard sleeve, the liner notes pasted on one side, a printed insert showing through a diecut on the other side.
In the wake of The Alps recent full length, III, comes not one, but two lengthy eps culled from the same recording sessions that produced III. Mostly improvised, those sessions for III found the trio expanding their sprawling abstract free folk into a sound much more spacious and druggy, New Age-y and blissed out, and in the process they ended up with more music than would fit on a single record. The good news is, that since the music was all improvised, and was all recorded during the same sessions, these two eps play like sides 3 and 4 of III, had it been expanded to a double album. Which is most definitely a good thing. Both of these discs, A Path Through The Sun, and A Path Through The Moon, are limited to 100 copies, of which we have 30, and those will most likely disappear in a flash. So act fast if you don't want to miss out on these. And needless to say (although we will anyway), everybody who dug III will absolutely need these.
As we mentioned in our review of III, The Alps have retained much of their free folk sound, yet have managed to incorporate more krautrock, more new age, even more space rock into that sound, creating a hybrid that manages straddle the underground cd-r scene, and something much more expansive and epic.
A Path Through The Sun begins with a lush layer of distant shimmer, over which steel strings shimmer and layers of background buzz swoon and swell, sounding not unlike James Blackshaw or Jack Rose, but soon the background builds unto a churning wall of distorted guitars, and the song is transformed into something wholly other. The following track is a longform near static drone, but densely layered and subtly colored with all manner of details, streaks of overlapping high end laid over a sea of rumbling overtones, laced with delicate spidery guitar melodies. Track three is the first hint of the bands more kraut side. Buzzing metallic guitars swirl over a stripped down Can like bass and drums groove, that stays solid, as those guitars twist ands turn, creating psychedelic clouds of sound over that motorik groove. The last two tracks find the band returning to a more dronefolk sound, a brief stretch of moaning bowed steel strings, glistening high end harmonics, and tinkling chimes gives way to a warm wheezing outro, guitars unfurl fragmented melodies over a slow swaying harmonium drone, lilting, and sun dappled and so dreamy.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in a plain chipboard sleeve, the liner notes pasted on one side, a printed insert showing through a diecut on the other side.
From the looks of the felt pen scrawled disc artwork you might be expecting some Wolf Eyes, Black Dice or Lightning Bolt sweaty dirge-noise bursts, but The Alps go in the opposite direction, offering up glistening meditative soundscapes well-suited to gazing at frosty mountain peaks such as those of their namesake. Makes more sense when you discover that The Alps are Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma), doesn't it?
Squeaky clarinets and alien flute toots melted into whirls of swish and whoosh, all laid over ominous drones and instrument hum and tape hiss. Quite beautiful. And as with many cd-r releases, quite limited!
Gorgeous reissue of two long out of print cd-r's from Bay Area abstract drone drift outfit The Alps, featuring AQ staffer Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma), who together weave breathtaking expanses of blissed out shimmer and glistening meditative soundscapes well-suited to gazing at frosty mountain peaks such as those of their namesake.
The Alps explore mysterious worlds of haunting folky foresty freeform loveliness, trafficking in dark dreamy wonder, disembodied strains of some lost Appalachia float weightless in a dusky forest of murky mumbly ambience, while muted guitars and stumbling tribal drumming swirl and sway amidst delicate tendrils of creepy ghostly falsetto croon and swoon. Elsewhere, deep pools of shimmering cymbal wash sparkle and glimmer, the sky above a moonlit smear of ethereal electronic effervescence, all run through with streaks of subtle melody. Squeaky clarinets and alien flute toots melt into whirls of swish and whoosh, all laid over ominous drones and instrument hum and tape hiss.
Think The Wickerman meets Jewelled Antler or Neu! played at 16rpm broadcast through a moss covered speaker on the bottom of the sea, or the sound of the Northern Lights, recorded onto a wax cylinder and played back through a shortwave radio, while a boy on a nearby rooftop hurls broken cymbals into the drained swimming pool next door, the entire thing subtly underpinned by the relentless throb and pulse of rain dripping on upended plastic garbage cans. So good.
The only drag here is that the label decided to leave off one of our favorite tracks, the final number on Spirit Shambles, fearing its lo-fi sprawl and clatter didn't fit in with the Alps' lush ambience and moonlit glimmer, which is precisely why it worked so perfectly. Oh well, to hear what we're talking about you just might have to do some internet searching or late night eBaying, but don't let that deter you from picking this up, even minus that burst of corrosive murk, you'd be hard pressed to find a lovelier batch of shambling sonic swoon...
Packaged with all new artwork in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder.
Full length number four from these Bay Area kosmische krautfolk visionaries, the sound on Le Voyage (aka IV) the perfect extension of the soundworld they created on 2008's III, and perhaps their most fully realized record thus far, as the band have developed from lo-fi drone and ramshackle free folk, abstract Appalachia and dreamy dronemusic, to something much more measured and sonically subtle, still consisting of many of the same basic elements, yet somehow more haunting and delicate, and occasionally exploring heavier more rhythmic territory.
Part of this new expanded sound is the fact that the core trio, our very own Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp, formerly of Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma), is augmented by some serious guests, who contribute tamboura, pedal steel, bass guitar and field recordings to the already impressive (and occasionally baffling) list of sonic implements: palm guitar, 12 string acoustic guitar, Moogerfooger delay, mountain drums, electric clouds, Mini Moog synthesizer, falling piano, symphony space, radiophonic synthesizer, parabolic guitar, memory man, desert guitar, melted glass guitar and more.
But don't let the bizarre instrumentation mislead, the sound here is definitely abstract and 'out there', but perhaps not as much as that list might lead you to believe. Those instruments, subtly wielded, result in something dreamy and divine, rhythmic, propulsive, and totally mesmerizing.
The record begins with some crystalline Appalachian guitar, warm and sun dappled, underpinned by upper register shimmers, bits of piano, super minimal percussion, and some gorgeous pedal steel that gives the track a sweeping, wide open space vibe, the musical equivalent of laying in knee high grass, watching the clouds drift by in a cobalt blue sky. After a brief bit of jumbled psychedelic samplage, voices, horn fanfares, explosions, dinner party strings, applause, running water and random swirling FX drenched, the band get seriously krauty, with some stripped down tribal drumming, muted squalls of wah guitar, definitely dark and brooding, but as the track progresses, and various instruments join the fray, loping bass, steel string strum, all manner of melody, the track begins to glow, a smoldering almost space rock sounding work out, that sets its sights for the heart of the sun, but instead settles back to earth in a brief stretch of piano flecked drone, before launching into the next track, a dreamy slice of classic sounding psychedelic pop, all spare drumming, and chiming acoustic guitar, not to mention some rubbery basslines and more delicate piano, the second half of the track decidedly less propulsive and more washed out rainy day contemplative.
After another brief respite, soundtracked by a warped collage of shortwave buzz, reverbed horns, electronic glitches, swirls of hiss and grit and a brief flurry of marital snares, "Saturno Contro" commences, a lazy, lugubrious bit of dour acoustic dreampop, laced with tinkling chimes, moaning strings, softly cinematic and quite lovely.
Which leads into the records closing salvo, a three track, 20 minute fugue, that is the record's climax for sure, beginning with "Black Mountain", a piano laced buzzing raga, a gorgeous sprawling slow burn, that builds to something slightly more rhythmic, a sort of brooding chamber folk, bookended by field recordings of crickets, as if the track was merely the soundtrack for an early evening stroll through the forest. The title track is up next, a lush, loping chunk of hypnorock slowcore krautdrone drift, the drums simple and skeletal, the other instruments subtly urgent, the tone tense and intense, like the final few minutes of some space rock epic, stripped way down, slowed way down and stretched way out, still psychedelic and space-y, but more earthbound, the sound of night and day viewed in time lapse, flowers opening to the sun, and then folding back up to shut out the dark, the shadows rushing across the ground, the sky and ever shifting prismatic expanse, dark and emotional and gorgeous, eventually fading into the buzzing final track, another hazy druggy raga, thick layered buzz wrapped around a simple propulsive bassline, the song building bit time, the drums crashing, the various tones and sounds seeming to blossom like miniature supernovas, the various elements bleeding into one another, a lush cloud of swirling buzzing bliss, that could go on forever, but instead, crumbles into a fractured dubby outro before blinking out completely.
A perfectly realized hybrid of krautrock, new age, raga, Appalachia, dronefolk, an ever shifting expanse of cinematic sound, a pop music redefined and reinterpreted as something much more esoteric, hauntingly beautiful, and darkly mysterious.
SF's The Alps (featuring our very own Scott Hewicker) returns with their second full length of haunting folky foresty freeform loveliness. Featuring members of Tarentel and Tussle, the Alps traffic in dark dreamy wonder, disembodied strains of some lost Appalachia float weightless in a dusky forest of murky mumbly ambience, while muted guitars and stumbling tribal drumming swirl and sway amidst delicate tendrils of creepy ghostly falsetto croon and swoon. Elsewhere, deep pools of shimmering cymbal wash sparkle and glimmer, the sky above a moonlit smear of ethereal electronic effevescence, all run through with streaks of subtle melody. Think The Wickerman meets Jewelled Antler or Neu! played at 16rpm broadcast through a moss covered speaker on the bottom of the sea, or the sound of the Northern Lights, recorded onto a wax cylinder and played back through a shortwave radio, while a boy on a nearby rooftop hurls broken cymbals into the drained swimming pool next door, the entire thing subtly underpinned by the relentless throb and pulse of rain dripping on upended plastic garbage cans. The final track however veers into much stranger territory, but somehow still sounds very Alps. An ultra lo-fi, pagan freakout, creepy and muddy and druggy, blown out drumming, bizarre animalistic vocalisations, all seemingly captured on a hand held microcassette recorder. Weird. But very cool.
LIMITED TO ONLY 150 COPIES!!!!!
When you imagine a tribute to Austrian apocalyptic industrial / militaristic folk legends Der Blutharsch, you might not imagine it being black metal by way of Italy and the Netherlands, but that's precisely what transpired way back in 2005, when Italian black metallers Altar of Perversion and Dutch BM horde Mordaehoth each offered up their own sonic homage to DB, each taking up a side of the record with their own twisted take on DB's already twisted blackened sounds. While that slab of vinyl disappeared before we could manage to get a single copy, it's now been released on cd, with the original tracks from the 10", but with the added bonus of SEVEN Der Blutharsch tracks, over thirty minutes of grim grey sonics, the sounds which ostensibly inspired these blackened reworkings.
Altar of Perversion are up first, with a sprawling 11 plus minute epic, that blurs the line between lurching doomic creep, and frenzied black blast, the sound raw and lo-fi, the guitars murky and droney, the track a lumbering dirge for the first little bit, melancholic and depressive, the sounds seem to bleed and ooze, sometimes slipping into killer droned out stretches of blurred buzz, before slipping back into that doomy trudge. It's not really until maybe half way through that things get really black and buzzy, but even then, the production is so warped, brittle and weirdly spare, that it retains that doomy energy of the first half, while wedding it to blasting beats and soaring fast picked majestic melodies. Eventually the sound does explode into a more standard blasting blackness, still, the sound retains a sort of seasick lurch that lurks just below the surface. Hard to say if it's a cover, or just a song dedicated to the mighty DB, but either way, it definitely exudes the same sort of black energy.
Mordaehoth take up three tracks, starting off with what sounds like some wartime radio recordings, only to launch right into it, weaving pagan flute like melodies into an almost punky sounding crush, clean vocals add to the pagan vibe, lulling us into thinking there won't be much blackness until the song darkens considerable, the vocals transformed into a sinister demonic croak, the music following suit, blasting and buzzing, only to return to that opening lilting shuffling blackened folk. The second track is a bit more dirgey, and simultaneously more majestic, soaring melodies, over crumbling distorted riffage, buried lo-fi drumming, but it's the third track where the Der Blutharsch homage becomes way less subtle, after starting out with a blast of growled buzzing blackness, the song slips into a more folky buzzy sort of cadence, which is soon joined by a distorted voice, sounding like some sort of militaristic sloganeering, over loudspeakers, before the band explodes into some serious churning black buzz, still accompanied by those voices, transforming the black metal into an almost military sounding march, and then the metal is peeled away leaving, some old scratchy military propaganda record spinning, then what sounds like some super dramatic footage from a war film, all ominous horns and more mysterious voices. Pretty goddamn great. easy to imagine this is what DB might sound like if they were black metal.
But then come the DB tracks, worth it for the price of admission alone even if you're not into black metal, unclear if these tracks are exclusive, but they are fantastic, brooding and dramatic, haunting and cinematic, deep spoken vocals, all manner of samples, martial snares, woozy ominous strings, warped swirling black ambience, wheezing industrial crunch, blurred blackened melodies, darkly rhythmic apocalyptic folk, Caretaker-like fuzzy, faded atmospheric drift, mysteriously cinematic soundscapes, raga like drones, and of course plenty of military marches, snippets of propaganda films, all woven into DB's gorgeous, barren, blackened soundworld.
Gorgeous packaging too, all black on black and extremely subtle. LIMITED TO 999 COPIES.
For months now, we've been trying to list a cd from a local one man black metal band called Wikkid. And the way we know it's a one man black metal band is it says so right on the front of the cd, along with the location "Bay Area California". It's a damaged chunk of extremely weird outsider blackness, that we really want to share with you all, but the man behind the band is extremely elusive. When he initially showed up here, in a 49ers jersey, a big black straw hat, and smoking a cigar in a cigarette holder, we weren't expecting the cds he wanted to consign to be anything like Wikkid. And before you knew it, they were gone. So we pestered him for more, instead he brought in some Wikkid T-shirts that he had printed at home with spray paint. So we kept pestering him, but this time, instead of Wikkid cds, or more spray painted shirts, he brought in THIS, the first release from his "black metal influenced organ/keyboard instrumental" project. We were intrigued, not knowing at all what to expect, and while there is definitely some sort of sonic thread tying the two together, Alturaz is a whole different beast, in fact without the above backstory, this could definitely pass as some modern minimalism or spaced out psychedelic kosmische. The first track is just church organ, the chords unfurling ominously, over whirring organ drones, haunting and liturgical, sounding a bit like a black metal intro stretched out into a song proper, we're reminded of Jacula too, sinister and ritualistic, haunting and darkly cinematic, super simple for sure, but really, it's more about mood and vibe, and the sound has plenty of both to spare. The second track is even more minimal, a super spare sprawl of processed organ blurts, rumbling low end thrum, fragmented melodic swirls, lots and lots of space, creepy and soundtracky and very abstract.
It's on track three, "Split Demonic Versonalities" that things get cosmic, the organs now wreathed in space-y FX, the sound swirling and shimmering, sounding like a planetarium show composed by John Carpenter, pulsing and sinister, swirling and ominously cinematic. And then finally, another super hushed, ultra minimal, barely there coda, all low end pulsations and super subtle colorations, like black billowing ripples in a sonic pond, tranquil and hypnotic, but like the rest of the record, infused with a strange ineffable dread.
Recommended for fans of psychedelic space synth, and abstract kosmische, as well as creepy soundtrack music, and it just might hold us over until we can finally get us, and you some WIKKID!
It seems many moons ago now that a mysterious man sporting a black cowboy hat with a cigar (in a cigar holder!) perched upon his lips first strode into the aQ shopfront to thrust upon us some of the weirdest, most damaged outsider black metal we have ever heard, under his one-man solo project Wikkid, and since then we've had further unexpected visits where we've been blessed with weird home made spray painted t-shirts along with cut and paste printed cassettes and cds by Alturaz, this same mystery man's "black metal influenced instrumental organ" outfit. And now here we have a split between those two projects - Wikkid and Alturaz (a split between two one man projects that both feature the same one man! How amazing of a concept is that??), and it's just as fucked up as we'd hoped. Not only in the music disarmingly bizarre, but even the little details are bewildering. The album cover simply features the same cover art from both previous Wikkid and Alturaz releases, but squashed together so they'll both fit on one cd sleeve (but make no mistake, this is all new music!). The track names at first seem to be delineated by Roman numerals, except when you get past "III" they just become "IIII", "IIIII", etc.! The beauty of these bizarre Easter eggs is it's truly impossible to determine whether this is totally calculated, or just genuine weirdness on the creator's part (but personally, we're betting on the latter.) As for the music, Alturaz starts off this strange journey with "In the Name of Self", a full 37 seconds of genuinely creepy horror movie ambient reverb accompanied by some truly bizarre pitch-shifted echo chamber death growls. The second track "Forbidden" (and second Alturaz track) is literally just three minutes of desolate Arctic tundra winds. It's not until track three where Wikkid first emerges and the weirdness truly begins. "Worship of Fire" kicks off with some guitar work (the word "riff" doesn't really apply here) that sounds like someone chewing on metal, before the song dizzily tumbles into some crazy d-beat drumming, constantly drifting in and out of time. The vocals exist on some other audial plane, like a nervous muttering goblin having a panic attack. The affect is a bit like Hellhammer crossed with The Shaggs (Shagghammer??), or as one aQer puts it: Wikkid make Striborg sound like Steely Dan. With the next Wikkid track, the sound quality totally changes (a real trademark of this split - things like levels have no meaning here!), getting way louder with much more low end. "The Unreleased One" is an instrumental mid paced plod, all chugging guitars and intermittent double bass that seems to start and stop with little regard for the song's timing. And then there's this sudden abrupt high pitched beep, way way louder than anything else in the mix, like something's being censored, and suddenly "Putting The Black Birds Blood In Your Veins" (what a title!) bursts forth with some truly demented blast beats and tinfoil tremolo guitar, before Alturaz returns to close out the proceeding with more lonely howling winds and creepy instrumental clean guitar. Needless to say, if you're interested in the shadowy fringe areas of black metal, you need to check this out, but really, we'd recommend this to anyone truly fascinated by those strange outsider records that seem to exist free of any genre constraints, and any petty earthly concerns like "listenable" or "musicality." Utterly weird, utterly fascinating, and totally amateurish but all the better for it. How could we not love it??
Most aQ customers are familiar with Roland P. Young, whose Isophonic Boogie Woogie album, reissued a while back on EM from Japan, blew our minds sky high. The ultimate culmination of Young's quest to create what he called "Afro spiritual minimal electronic space music" which is exactly what it sounded like, minimal free jazz, but cobbled together out of strange unlikely instruments, woven into long stretches of dronemusic, or freaked out almost psychedelic sounding swirling murkiness, the whole record was an otherworldly mind expanding avant jazz masterpiece for sure.
So somehow it makes perfect sense, that Altz, an electronic musician and DJ from Japan, who we know mostly from remixing the Boredoms, wanted a crack and remixing this records and creating his OWN isophonic boogie woogie. So here you go.
It's kind of a tall order since the original is pretty awesome, and way wacked already, but what the heck, Altz does his thing, chops and edits, adds effects, loops flutes and introduces fuzzy synths and skittery bits of buzz, distant voices, but what he does mainly is add beats, it's definitely cool and groovy, but does tend toward the cheesy here and there. The best moments are weirdly enough the most beatless, where the free jazz is matched with some seemingly free drum freakouts, or when the original drums are somehow looped into a fragmented beat, or when the various elements are blurred into a weird buzzy drone, rife with buried horns, and rumbling bass. A lot of the more beat heavy tracks chop up and recontextualize the originals so much, that if you weren't familiar with the Young original, you might not even know they were samples, you might just assume they were some cool weird sounds. Which they most definitely are. Check out the sound samples. This won't necessarily appeal to the same folks who loved the original, but if you're in the market for some twisted up free jazz avant beatmaking, then this might just hit the spot.
A few months back we bellowed loudly about the impressive Berlin Super 80 DVD / CD compilation, which presented the parallel activities of the nascent German DIY film community and the incendiary musical scene which collectively qualified themselves as The Ingenious Dilletantes in the late '70s and early '80s, after a huge arts festival co-curated by Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld. Exasperated by the pressure cooked environment, the members of this very loose community which also included painters, performance artists, actors, etc. embraced an aesthetic of bleak nihilism often tinged with post-ironic absurdity. While not being featured on the musical program of Berlin Super 80, Alu was one of many bands mentioned in passing in that document, having played alongside the likes of Sprung Aus Den Wolken, Neubauten, and Malaria back in the day. Like many of those terminally obscure but often exceptional electro/post-punk projects that Vinyl-On-Demand has reissued in recent years, Alu set forth Frankensteinian, synth-punk and monotone grooves, upon which they chanted dead-pan German vocals sounding not too far from early SPK, Throbbing Gristle, or even Suicide. What's curious about Alu is not the fantastic sound of this, their only studio recording Autimenschen (which actually never saw the light of day back in the '80s, and only now has been discovered and released by the good people at C.I.P.), but in the fact that the two members of Alu also hailed from the obscure '70s Krautrock trio Sand. The morose hallucinations and sprawling psychedelia of Sand are a far cry from the tense, motorized bleakness of Alu; but nonetheless both Alu and Sand stand out as magnificent discoveries from their respective genres.
Finally, the first full length from these mysterious French post black metal krautrock alchemists. And if you think calling a band French post black metal krautrock alchemists might be overdoing it, you haven't hear Aluk Todolo.
An offshoot of black metal horde Diamatregon (who have one record on tUMULt, and another one coming soon), this trio, just guitar, bass and drums, are most definitely alchemists, working some sort of ancient magic, turning the simplest of rock band instrumentation, into something massive and mysterious, heavy and haunting, brutal and mesmerizing, repetitive and motorik. Crafting songs, that manage to be both pieces, in the classical sense, abstract and intellectual collections and arrangements of sound, subtle shadings, tonal color and timbre, harmony and dissonance, and SONGS, in the rock sense, fucking kick ass jams, that seem to go on forever, killer riffs, and relentless head nodding rhythms, like krautrock, only heavier and darker and way way blacker. Like black metal but without all the buzz and howl, stripped down to its very essence, to just mood and rhythm, ambience and propulsion.
In the review of the previous 7" we described the band's sound as: Ominous krautrock rhythms over Einsterzende style industrial clatter, some lost seventies psych rock holy grail channeled through modern post rock. Dreamy and dark and mesmerizing. Hypnotic guitar lines and simple shuffling rhythms that build into clattery propulsive jams, all clanging angular riffs and dense tangled drumming. VERY This Heat like, and reminiscent of the late great Laddio Bolocko. Some sort of dangerous and mysterious postrock / krautrock hybrid, lo-fi but thick and dense and amazingly heavy.
And the full length essentially still sounds like that, but having loosed themselves from the shackles of the way too brief 7" format, the band can take all those elements, and lay them out, an epic massive post rock, krautrock, dronerock, experimental post black metal sprawl. These are the kinds of songs and sounds that need space, and time, need to lull the listener in, to entrance, ensorcel, the rhythms are stripped down and repetitive, looped and hypnotic, simple, but surprisingly and subtly complex at the same time. It's not hard to hear other hypno rockers in Aluk Todolo's sound, Circle, Salvatore and the like, but also space rock masters of repetition, Hawkwind, The Heads, and of course krautrock legends Can and Faust. Especially Can, with their focus on the power of the rhythm, no mater how seemingly simple or plain. But more than anything, it's legendary UK experimentalists This Heat whose, haunting mysterious rhythmic influence is all over Descension.
The opening track is the heaviest, a brutal slab of in the red distorted riffage, the actual riffs barely discernible, more like a heaving mass of crumbling distortion and space rock FX, but the rhythms that frame the whole record are already in place, pounding steadily beneath the buzz and skree. A head nodding pulse underpinning the swirling distorted clouds above. A bracing and white hot burst of blackdronekrautpsych that has the speakers rattling for all of its 8+ minutes.
But that track mostly serves as an intro to the complex and moody rhythmic sprawl that makes up the other three tracks. "Burial Ground" begins with what sounds like a slowed down This Heat rhythm track synched up to the free abstract drift of legendary seventies dronepsych collective Taj Mahal Travellers. The drums unwavering, but the background constantly in flux, swaths of black buzz, brief flurries of chaotic FX, distant low end swells, haunting fragmented melodies, a gorgeous spare kraut rock jam dropped into the abyss.
"Woodchurch" is a dense wall of high end buzz, all swirling distorted hum and keening feedback, tones all tangled up, a chordal wash of tuned vacuum cleaners, a sort of Sunroof! Style urdrone, but beneath it, the simplest of bass lines, distorted and downtuned, a heartbeat like throb, only a handful of notes, just enough to tie into the even simpler drum part, just kick drum and snare, a two step tattoo, as completely mesmerizing as it us utterly simple. The background buzz, swaying and pulsing, like some massive black sea, or clouds of insects ravaging a blighted sonic landscape.
The disc closes with "Disease" which opens with an ultra heavy slide guitar, unfurling a slow motion blues riff, caked in black buzz and thick distortion, the notes left to hang, ringing out until the tones slowly transform into feedback, immediately being swallowed up by the riff right behind it. It's like Robert Johnson playing SUNNO))), and then suddenly, the sound shifts, and the band reverts to its murky trawl, a thick throbbing bass line, another Can like rhythm, guitars warm and warbly, more like a layer of wet fuzz than distinct riffing, but occasionally, bits of that opening salvo return, offering up brief blasts of speaker destroying crunch, or brief bits of grinding buzz, a sudden start that almost, but doesn't quite wake you from your soporific reverie. Near the end, the distorted slide guitar returns, and drums drop out, and the track finishes with a thick coda of pealing guitar roar and shimmering chordal drone�
Intense and hypnotic and heavy and fucking genius. Ritualistic sounds, both black and brilliant, pulled from the void, a mysterious and sonic netherworld. Definite contender for record of the year.
It's been two long years we've been waiting for this, another mysterious rhythmic communique from French blackened post krautrock alchemists Aluk Todolo. But it's not like they've been idle. Since 2007's Descension, two thirds of Aluk Todolo have recorded a record and toured the world as Gunslingers, and all of Aluk Todolo do double duty in French black metallers Diamatregon, who recently released a new full length on tUMULt called Crossroad.
But as much as we love those other two bands, and we do, there will always be something magical about the strange sonic world Aluk Todolo are able to conjure up. Especially considering they're a three piece, a power trio, drums, guitar, bass. Nothing else, no synths, no strings, just the basic rock band instruments. It's testament to the power these three wield, that they can do so much with so little. Or more accurately, so little with so little. As the music of Aluk Todolo, is disarmingly simple, subtle and minimal, but in its minimalism, lies its power. The power of rhythm, of texture, of mood, these five long pieces are so evocative, so expressive and strangely emotional. Even at its most spare and skeletal, the sound is palpable, almost a physical presence, which is surprising again considering just how stripped down Finsternis actually is.
Descension, Aluk Todolo's debut, was heavy and space-y and rhythmic, we described it as a buzz-less black metal, some of the songs were thick and caustic, others were loping and motorik, but on Finsternis, it's as if the band decided to strip away all the extraneous sounds, leaving just the core, the root, the heart of the music, and that heart beats out a simple, hypnotic rhythm.
The record is split into 4 parts, with a brief interlude, but those four parts are split into two distinct movements. The first, which comprises the first two parts, is much of what we described above, simple skeletal rhythms, surrounded by minimal guitar whir, bursts of grinding distortion, fragmented jangle, keening feedback, but it's all about the rhythm. After a brief burst of mathy chaos, the track reverts to its initial rhythm, this time the bass more prominent, fuzzy, distorted, woozy and mesmerizing, the band locked in tight, the bass and drums solid and unwavering, while the guitar sings in the background, moaning and keening and howling, giving the track an ominous otherworldly vibe, a trudge across some hostile alien landscape, a weary, washed out deathmarch.
Then the interlude, a haunting abstract percussive sprawl, simple percussive thuds set amidst a sea of warped distorted low end, bits of glitch and hiss, and grinding shards of industrial clatter, which gives way to the second, noisier movement, the drums transformed into a simple machinelike pound, snare and cymbal crashing over and over and over, the guitars whipped into a frenzy of blurred buzz and warped swirling blackened chaos, what at first sounds noisy and harsh, soon reveals itself as strangely textural, and as hypnotic as the more stripped down first movement, the guitars slip from monochromatic whir, to insectoid black metal riffing, constantly swirling around the motorik pound and pummel, the final track finds the guitars slipping into ever higher registers, blissing out, laced with feedback, smoothing out into warm smears and blurs, before a brief deconstruction, and a surprisingly tranquil last few minutes, the drums back to a woozy lope, the guitar offering up warm swells and shimmering thrum, the bass throbbing beneath, eventually stumbling to a halt in a cloud of creaking metals and static-like tape hiss. Woah.
Just like Descension, Finsternis is an intense and emotional journey through sound, a haunting and hard to describe exploration of rhythm, mood and texture, a slow shifting otherworld defined by This Heat, Geronimo, Laddio Bolocko, Can, Faust, accessible only via the three shadowy figures that make up Aluk Todolo, whose magic and mystery has been rendered in these glorious black rhythms.
Housed in a multi panel jacket with super striking original artwork by Stephen Kasner, on the always impressive Utech label (whose other two new releases, from Gog and Olivier Dumont, we'll review on the next list, although we do have both in stock if you want 'em, and we're fairly sure you do!).
Third album from French post black metal instrumental kraut-psych occult rock trio Aluk Todolo, and third time Record Of The Week! We've just resigned ourselves to the fact, that every record from these guys is gonna blow our minds, and by extension, we imagine, yours as well. In the musical math that makes up many of the bands we love, the convoluted equation that resulted in Aluk Todolo is tough to beat. Featuring members of black metal horde Diamatregon (whose last two records were released on Andee's tUMULt label) and psych rock outfit Gunslingers, AT takes some elements from both of those groups, but also This Heat, Faust, Can, the Necks, Circle, Hawkwind, and Taj Mahal Travellers... They are most definitely sonic alchemists, as we've described them in every review so far, distilling all of these disparate sounds and influences into something all their own, and something that obviously pushes all our buttons.
This latest double disc takes everything we dug about them before, and somehow makes those things more, and better, given the space to stretch out, the songs become MORE epic, MORE intense, MORE tranced out, MORE heavy. There's 8 songs over 2 discs/lps and 2+ hours. Imagine a super charged Necks or Circle fused to the blaring psychedelic heaviosity of Psychic Paramount, and the furious grim buzz of some obscure black metal horde, the sounds repetitive and cyclical, hypnotic and mesmerizing, the opener here displaying their black metal roots, and just how those roots can be sculpted into something trance-y and droned out, while remaining pretty goddamn grim and blackened. Launching immediately into a fierce frenzied blast, all tremelo picking and blast beats, a churning, roiling single riff, overlaid with soaring minor key melodies, slipping easily from classic black metal blast to dense static mesmer and back again, until almost 4 minutes in when everything is swallowed up in a blast of whit noise, before the frenetic riffing tapers off, leaving just the bass and drums to churn frantically, beneath thick swirls of effects, only to gradually build back up, and during the last three minutes, unleash the sort of dense, brutal, buzzing black metal, most proper BM bands can barely pull off.
If that opening track is sort of the shot across the bow, the second track is when things get serious, slowing things down to a super distorted post-rock lope, the drums driving and the guitars thick and distorted, keening melodies, the Slint vibe looms large, before the band dial it down, and lock into a totally mesmerizing, dizzyingly dense roiling 'groove', that sounds like amped up Circle, grinding away hypnotically, peppered with occasional bursts of metallic crunch, and near black metal blowouts, always slipping right back into that mesmeric churn, the guitars impossibly distorted and fuzzed out, the bass super melodic, the sort of track you never want to end, slipping easily from progged out psychedelic buzz drenched tangle to warped noise rock minimalism and back again.
The rest of disc one finds AT dialing back the buzz and crunch, and weaving lush landscapes of woozy melody, and darkly driving hypnorock, the songs wreathed in keening feedback, moaning melodies, lush layered guitars, swaths of melodic jangle, of shimmering chiming harmonics, the sound drifting from minimal chugging dirge to loping psych rock meander, and from wild krautpsych blowout to swoonsome Slintish slither.
Disc two offers up 4 more sonic invocations, heavy on the noise rock, but dipping into super minimal minor key mesmer, low slung almost gothic sounding dirgery, the seriously Circle-like seventh track, that takes the sound of our favorite Finns, and douses it in clouds of shimmering noise, and freaked out freeform psychedelic shimmer, and finally, the record finishes off with an epic doom jam, the band pounding away malevolently, the bass distorted and blown out, shards of feedback everywhere, noisy and psychedelic and a bit chaotic, but all anchored to the unwavering rhythm section, the song gradually losing momentum, slowing way down, getting doomier and doomier and dirgier and dirgier, transformed into a slo-mo tarpit crawl, the riffing bleeding into long droned out tones, the sort of doom-noise creep that folks into Bunkur and Monarch and the like will flip over, but here it's more atmospheric, a heady doomic coda, the sound seeming to decay naturally, shedding layers along the way, until finally the drums go too, the record continuing to fade away, to drift heavenward, eventually dissolving into a cloud of feedback.
Like past Aluk Todolo releases, the sounds and songs here are so intense and hypnotic, heavy and heady, it's the rare sort of record that somehow appeals to metalheads and post rockers as much as experimentalists and avant gardists, a sound transcendent and tranced out, dense and sinister and somehow still strangely beautiful, and obviously well worth Record Of The Week honors for sure. And then some.
Finally, the long awaited return of these mysterious French audio alchemists, whose sound is a strange amalgamation of black metal buzz, krautrock mesmer, and psychedelic ambience. And the aforementioned mystery lies not with the group itself, whose lineup features members of black metal outfit Diamatregon and psychedelic rockers Gunslingers, both big time aQ faves, but rather in their sound, and how a sound so minimal and spare, how seemingly reductive on the surface, manages to transcend, to exist as something wholly other, a band who at times can sound like other bands that came before, but only fleetingly, those sounds subsumed and reimagined, and spit back out in a shape that is distinctly Aluk Todolo.
This ritual is not a new recording, but in fact archival material recorded at the same time as their Descension record, and is a This single track, spread out over both sides of a 10", and begins with a loping dirgey rhythm, pounding through clouds of swirling cacophony, shards of jagged guitarnoise and layers of chordal shimmer, an electrified field that seems to crackle around the groups core pulse/groove, the surrounding noise, not so much just noisy as haunting and ominous and textural. A brief bit of super creepy, deep garbled vocals intone what must be some sort of warning, as the sound continues to drift, mesmerizing and hypnotic, dense but at the same time almost ethereal, seasawing between noisy and chaotic, washed out and woozy, until eventually the noise recedes, leaving just long streaks of hiss and glitch and static, all wreathed in a blurred melodic haze.
Finally an even slower, more spare rhythm begins, this one plodding along through a black haze, pelted by squalls of super distorted buzz, quick blasts of blown out crunch, those blasts themselves strangely melodic, as if they were spaced out notes to some other, mysterious melody, the sound eventually building to a much more rocking final blast, organ like whirs underpinning muddy riffage and still more explosive bits of grinding guitar crunch.
The flipside is much more relentless and abrasive, the dynamics ditched in lieu of something more textural, a wall of buzz and crumbling crunch, the drums an anchor, buried in the murk and mire, the noise surprisingly nuanced, textural one minute, caustic the next, blurred and melodic, but also hissy and harsh, creating all sorts of constantly shifting and evolving textures and overtones. A washed out spate of abrasive guitardrone fashioned into something almost riff-like, wrapped around that constant motorik beat, that krauty rhythm that definitely reminds us of German Oak, albeit way noisier and more blackened, the track pounds and drones and buzzes away before finally finishing off with a surprisingly woozy, buzzy, drifty dramatic outro. Wow.
As always, super striking packaging, pressed on heavy vinyl, and yeah, most likely very very limited.
Holy fuck, this record is amazing! You'd never guess it, but Aluk Todolo is the occult trance rock side project of French black metallers Diamatregon. OK, maybe it doesn't seem that off the wall, Diamatregon definitely dabbled in strange rhythms and distinctly non-black metal sound forms. But this is definitely something else altogether. Ominous krautrock rhythms over Einsterzende style industrial clatter, some lost seventies psych rock holy grail channeled through modern post rock. Dreamy and dark and mesmerizing. Hypnotic guitar lines and simple shuffling rhythms that build into clattery propulsive jams, all clanging angular riffs and dense tangled drumming. VERY This Heat like, and reminiscent of the late great Laddio Bolocko. Some sort of dangerous and mysterious postrock / krautrock hybrid, lo-fi but thick and dense and amazingly heavy.
Gorgeous packaging, white and silver on black, a fold out die cut sleeve with a Japanese style obi, and a cover image that manages to be totally familiar ('got yer nose') but somehow creepy as hell.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
AQ has been all Gibbons Brothers all the time lately. First these Bardo bros hit us with maybe the best record yet from their main band Bardo Pond, Ticket Crystals, which has stayed in seriously heavy rotation all summer long. Then we got floored by Alaeshir, another of their many side projects, that one a sort of headbanging rock meets daydreaming bliss-out. And then Vapour Theories with its droning sax and psych guitar offerings, AND a super limited ultra kick ass live Bardo Pond release on Archive, and now... --pause to catch breath-- this two track, 40 minute disc of deep in the forest ethno-drones, drenched in buzz and shimmer. Sitar, guitar, cumbas and all sorts of percussion create exquisite layers psych drone Nirvana that will transport you to another dimension. Strangely peaceful, the music we hear in our heads when we lay in grass at night staring at the stars. So very nice!
About a year and half ago, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) dazzled us with the Transall trilogy of cd eps that bristled with crisp sinewave shards and low slung rhythmic blasts that sounded down right funky from time to time. For is an entirely different facet for Mr. Nicolai, as he's soothed the systematic sex machine grooves for ionized molecules into a shimmering palette of elegant vibrations. As Nicolai explains in the liner notes, For "brings together disparate recordings created throughout the last four years, unified under a theme of dedication. All nine studies share the history of being made specifically for someone or for a project that for one reason or another remains open ended." And those individuals earning dedications include John Cage, Jhonn Balance, TVPow, Jeff Wall, Peter Roehr, Ernie & Bert (we can only assume he means the Sesame Street characters), and a few others. Nicolai gently crafts each of the dedications into a polite, electronic ambience cobbled from intertwined sinewaves and hushed rhythms.
Part two of Carsten Nicolai's (aka Alva Noto) apparently ongoing 'For' series, in which he composes songs for specific people, the first volume featured tracks dedicated to and composed in honor of John Cage, Jhonn Balance, TVPow, Jeff Wall, Peter Roehr, Ernie And Bert (!) and several others. This time around it's A Garment, Chain Music, Marta Feuchtwanger, two for Heiner Muller, Andrei Tarkovsky, Camera Lucida, two for Dieter Rams, Phill Niblock, Evgeny Murzin and the kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland. Don't recognize most of those names? Neither do we, it doesn't matter that much though really, the important thing is that these people inspired Nicolai to create some of the warmest and most melodic music of his career. Like the first volume, this is anything but cold sterile glitch and click. The tracks here and lush, and elegant, warm and melodic, rhythmic, dreamy and quite lovely. Opener "Garment" could have gone on forever, a woozy downtempo groove composed from short bursts of static, beeps, smears of hiss, all draped over a looped low end melancholic melody. Some of the tracks are quite brief, field recordings, room sounds, planes passing overhead, lush bell-like tones stretched into hushed streaks of whispered ambience, glitched out high end bleeps and bloops, but those act more as interludes for the longer form pieces. "Argonaut" is breathtaking, long slow tones woven into a sweet soft melody, peppered with looped melodies, soft streaks of barely there hiss, tinkling chimes, while "Stalker" is a haunting stretch of subterranean outer space minimalism, the various tones and textures heavily reverbed, wrapped in a blurred sonic gauze, while that low melody from the previous track resurfaces, plus a creepy spoken word part, intense and beautiful.
Elsewhere Nicolai dabbles in glistening crystalline pop ambience, fuzzy spaced out dream dub minimalism, thick layered dronemusic, and the cool thing is, the more you listen, and the further you get into the record, the more you realize, Nicolai is using mostly the same sounds, recontextualized for each track, for each person, a slowly shifting, interconnected song suite culminating in a strange snare driven buzzscape, and the almost jaunty sounding final track, that sounds almost like traditional chamber music, filtered through Nicolai's buzz/click/glitch/hiss/hum approach to soundmaking. Gorgeous!
Recording with addition of Alva to his Noto moniker, Carsten Nicolai hasn't altered his palette of sine wave oscillations, modulating tones, rhythmic clicks, and other electronic gizmos, all bathed in a clinical purity of sound. Surrounding himself with these machines, Nicolai sets up little repetitions that build to, dare I say, catchy complexities full of rhythmic invention and hinting at melodies.
Two new batches of ultra clinical, vacuum sealed, glitched out minimalism from Alva Noto and Raster-Noton. The difference this time around is that these tracks are FUNKY. Well, sort of. Gorgeously packaged in oversized cardboard sleeves, printed with tripped out geometric patterns and pressed on those 3" cds embedded in 5" clear plastic, and assembled in such a perfect way, it's obvious that the Raster folk are designers first, musicians second. And that feeling comes across in the music as well. Painfully precise, perfectly constructed, and completely sterile. But in a good way. From the song titles ("Funkbugfx") to the head nodding rhythms contained within, this is obviously Alva Noto's funk record. But it's unlike any funk you've ever heard. Sine waves, and test tones and rumbling bass frequencies, white and pink noise, are all painstakingly constructed into a delicate lattice of alien funk, an extreme (and extremely rigid) dance floor music for some unimaginable outer (or inner) space dance party. Where the guests are all blocks of crystal, or swirling clouds of molecules, or pools of gelatinous ooze that sort of undulate sexily to the glith and click of this unfunky funk. These are the kind of grooves that you can picture scientists in sealed vacuum suits rocking out to in their lab on their ipods. Or maybe imagine Ryoji Ikeda and Sachiko M getting together to "jam" and running through some James Brown tunes, but in their inimitable, barely there style. Weird but pretty wonderful too.
The third in a trio of new releases of ultra clinical, vacuum sealed, glitched out minimalism from Alva Noto and Raster-Noton (the other two, Transrapid and Transvision we listed last time). What's Alva Noto up to with thise? These tracks are FUNKY. Well, sort of. Gorgeously packaged in oversized cardboard sleeves, printed with tripped out geometric patterns and pressed on those 3" cds embedded in 5" clear plastic, and assembled in such a perfect way, it's obvious that the Raster folk are designers first, musicians second. And that feeling comes across in the music as well. Painfully precise, perfectly constructed, and completely sterile. But in a good way. From the song titles ("Funkbugfx") to the head nodding rhythms contained within, this is obviously Alva Noto's funk record. But it's unlike any funk you've ever heard. Sine waves, and test tones and rumbling bass frequencies, white and pink noise, are all painstakingly constructed into a delicate lattice of alien funk, an extreme (and extremely rigid) dance floor music for some unimaginable outer (or inner) space dance party. Where the guests are all blocks of crystal, or swirling clouds of molecules, or pools of gelatinous ooze that sort of undulate sexily to the glith and click of this unfunky funk. These are the kind of grooves that you can picture scientists in sealed vacuum suits rocking out to in their lab on their ipods. Or maybe imagine Ryoji Ikeda and Sachiko M getting together to "jam" and running through some James Brown tunes, but in their inimitable, barely there style. Weird but pretty wonderful too.
Two new batches of ultra clinical, vacuum sealed, glitched out minimalism from Alva Noto and Raster-Noton. The difference this time around is that these tracks are FUNKY. Well, sort of. Gorgeously packaged in oversized cardboard sleeves, printed with tripped out geometric patterns and pressed on those 3" cds embedded in 5" clear plastic, and assembled in such a perfect way, it's obvious that the Raster folk are designers first, musicians second. And that feeling comes across in the music as well. Painfully precise, perfectly constructed, and completely sterile. But in a good way. From the song titles ("Funkbugfx") to the head nodding rhythms contained within, this is obviously Alva Noto's funk record. But it's unlike any funk you've ever heard. Sine waves, and test tones and rumbling bass frequencies, white and pink noise, are all painstakingly constructed into a delicate lattice of alien funk, an extreme (and extremely rigid) dance floor music for some unimaginable outer (or inner) space dance party. Where the guests are all blocks of crystal, or swirling clouds of molecules, or pools of gelatinous ooze that sort of undulate sexily to the glith and click of this unfunky funk. These are the kind of grooves that you can picture scientists in sealed vacuum suits rocking out to in their lab on their ipods. Or maybe imagine Ryoji Ikeda and Sachiko M getting together to "jam" and running through some James Brown tunes, but in their inimitable, barely there style. Weird but pretty wonderful too.
Although I don't predict that Carsten Nicolai (aka Noto and Alva Noto) will be taking a sabbatical any time soon, the global electronica community might be better for it if he did. Not because his work's not great -- quite the opposite. It's just that the proliferation of Noto imitators might subside, and maybe artists would be more inclined to try something new. Maybe.
We love Alva Noto. His minimal rhythmic soundscapes are just so fantastic, dense and complex but at the same time impossibly simple and spare. And everything he does is so high concept. But in a way, that's not obvious just listening to the music. This may be art, high concept art, but the resulting sounds transcend art, and become music, and grooves, pleasing to the ear, not only the mind.�
Unitxt is Alva Noto's (aka Carsten Nicolai) return to 'the rhythm' after a handful of releases (in several different series) that were much more esoteric and ambient. Unitxt is still pretty ridiculously high concept, with the songs developed through various methods: one song is a portrait of Nicolai converted into sound, another is based on the golden ratio, a recitation of an endless row of numbers, another is based on a reading of the various items in Nicolai's wallet, credit cards, business cards, notes, just reading the words and numbers and converting the resulting information into sound. Endlessly amusing for sure, but it wouldn't mean shit if the music was bad. Thankfully, this is exactly the stuff we love from Nicolai, super clinical machine like soundscapes of skitter and glitch. everything sharp and clipped, the grooves far from funky, at least in the normal sense, but VERY funky in some sort of fucked up futuristic minimal robot dancefloor way. A few of the tracks feature vocals, but they're in German, and spoken quickly and rhythmically, making them less like lyrics and more like another overlaid rhythm (especially when the voice is just reciting numbers).
Imagine a huge white glass cube filled with robots, all hunkered over computers and drum machines, and synthesizers and equalizers, everything totally automated, huge gears turning, machines pulsing, the robots locked into the same motion over and over, a strange assembly line. At the end, a tiny speaker, facing a huge empty grassy field, a blue sky, nothing in the sky but a single white cloud. Perfectly ovoid. Out of the speaker comes this. That's what we imagine when we listen to Unitxt. Stripped down, cool and clinical outer space future robot anti-funk, laced with plenty of sculpted buzz and crackle, and shaped from bits of hiss and crunch.�
Tacked on to the end of the record, are a whole series of fragments and sound sources, each created from transforming an image or information into sound. These are 'Source Code Solos' to be played over the other tracks, or might assume, that with these sounds, and your own giant robot manned glass cube sound factory, you could make your very own Unitxt!
After a multitude of records filled with austere expanses of ultra minimal, cold and clinical beep and click, or warm lush dreamlike ambience, Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, finally seemed to embrace the funk a few years back - which for some of us, would not have been a good thing necessarily, if it weren't Nicolai, cuz Alva Noto funk is something utterly unto itself, a wild super dynamic robotic funk that takes all manner of glitch and whir, hum and click, beep and hiss, and weaves those minimal building blocks into something incredibly and impossibly groovy. This might be the best Alva Noto funk record yet. Weird and minimal enough for the dancefloor hating avant experimental headphone set, but holy shit, we can barely imagine what would happen if some big time DJ just unleashed one of these jams at full volume, besides everyone going apeshit, it seems like everybody's brains and eardrums would just melt, these sounds so pure, the lows so intense and rib cage rattlingly low, the highs piercing sine waves, and in-between, all manner of hum and hiss that we imagine would blow your hair back if you were standing in front of a big pile of speakers. But in headphones, this is total bliss out alien robofunk, that sounds better than anything we can imagine! But this is Alva Noto, so there's lots of other stuff going on, long stretches of glitched out super ominous buzz, over some looped skitter, or some weird swirling lush drones, or some dizzying rapidfire percussive stutter, some full on speaker shredding noise, some gorgeously serene electronic ambience, but it always eventually returns to the funk, or the groove, or whatever you call the thing that makes these weird beeps and clicks take over your body and force it to move along to the music. So goddamn great!
Like most Raster-Noton releases, the latest from Alva Noto begins with plenty of stutter and squelch,�sinewaves and dog whistle tones, subterranean rumble and digital clips, but it's actually kind of misleading, as the rest of the disc exists in a sonic landscape much closer to the Kompakt sounds of Pop Ambient, or the hissy soft focus ambience of Tim Hecker, than the lowercase world of glitch and squeak.�
The first three tracks are strange minimal sonic experiments, plenty of hiss and scrape, static and hum, but it's track four, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)", where suddenly things get downright pretty. Soft distant swells, mysterious slow motion loops, hard to say whether the sounds are synthesizers or tape loops or field recordings, although according to the liner notes all the sounds here are drawn from airports, in flight announcements and telephone hold music, but by 'xeroxing" these sounds over and over, and letting each copy degrade just a little,�Alva Noto takes those degraded sounds and shapes them into lovely blurred dronescapes, eventually wrapping them in soft prickly layers of digital hiss, which only adds to the soft focus romance and dreamlike otherworldliness.�
The tracks are named and grouped thematically. The ultra short "Astoria" tracks seem to act as brief respites, tiny sonic events separating the longer more song based tracks. The focus seems to be on those particular songs, each named "Haliod Xerrox Copy" and numbered or given an extra title in parentheses, these are gorgeous fuzzy, blown out dreamy drifts, all reminiscent of�"Haliod Xerrox Copy 3 (Paris)" but each, with its own distinctive flow, seemingly drawn from the same sonic template and utilizing a similar melodic theme, but softly molded into subtly different shapes. In "Haliod Xerrox Copy 2 (Airfrance)" it's all warm fuzz and muted white noise, a dense buzz, that is more soothing than abrasive. Moments later, in "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy_6" the buzz becomes washed out, pulsing louder and then quieter, while off in the distant, we are able to observe gentle lilting sonic events, as if viewed through a dense fog. Later on, "Haliod Xerrox Copy 1" returns to the billowy bliss of track 4, offering long soft contrails of sound, floating weightless amidst swirls of smeared radio static and and the sound of TV channel snow.
The disc finishes with the lengthy "Haliod_Xerrox_Copy 9", the most dramatic of the bunch. The melody is again similar, there is still plenty of hiss and fuzz and white noise, but the low end is more intense, giving the track more weight and emotion, the peaks and valleys too are more pronounced, a much more dynamic musical journey, a much heavier drone element. This is intense, brooding, beautiful too, but haunting and ominous, a gorgeous minimal sonic smear of M83 fuzz, Tim Hecker-ish sepia toned blur, and Basinski-esque looped dreaminess, all wrapped in Noto's thick fuzzy ambient buzz.�
The cd comes packaged in another striking and strange oversized Raster-Noton package, a multiple panel fold out sleeve, with die cuts holding the disc in place.
Part two of Alva Noto's Xerrox series takes up right where the last one left off, continuing on in a much more buzzy, blissy, droney vein, way more textural and melodic than many of the AN records that have come before. In the review of volume one we mentioned Pop Ambient, and if anything volume 2 is even more washed out and shimmery, right out of the gate, AN offers up a warm wash of muted buzz, and thick gristly whir, softly pulsating, layered and warm, seemingly gone are the harsh tones and glitchy clicks and pops found on most Raster-Noton releases. Could be that Xerrox is just a concept record, but we have to say, as much as we loved the clipped minimalism of other Alva Noto records, the sounds here are quite divine. But this is an Alva Noto record, so even these warm whirls of drifting ambience, are laced with bits of static and hiss, super high end sine waves, but they're woven deftly into the sound, and serve to simply add more texture. There's a brief bit of super minimal beep and rumble, but then it's right back into that gorgeous drifty haze, that could just as soon be a Tim Hecker record.
"Xerrox Meta Phaser" follows suit, at least in the beginning, a soft whirring soundscape, that quickly escalates into an almost Sunn like dirge before exploding into a squall of blown out white noise. And then we're back to the dreamy dronemusic, this time, stretched out strings, smeared into soft summery swells, laced with a patina of gritty hiss, and so it goes, the whole record is a dark swirling expanse of muted minimal melodies, warm textures, mysterious drones, and delicate hazy drifts, the usual glitch and buzz, relegated to accents and filigree, rarely interfering in the rest of the record's blissy sprawl. Any one of these tracks would be right at home on the newest, more Kranky-fied Pop Ambient comp, and thus, this might be the first Raster-Noton record that might just appeal to all the drone and dirge folks as much as the glitch and pop people.
Like all R-N stuff, gorgeously designed and packaged, an oversized diecut, 8 panel sleeve, the cd nestled within the diecuts, the art spare and minimal and striking.
Insen is the exquisite follow-up to Vrioon, which was the first collaborative outing for seminal electronic musicians Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) and Ryuichi Sakamoto that came out in 2003. As on their first album, Insen centers upon the balance between the impressionist piano passages of Sakamoto and the cold yet graceful production of Nicolai. While the differences between the two records are subtle, they are certainly noteworthy as Nicolai slices up Sakamoto's piano into fine slivers of time-stretched fragments, terse rhythms, and blurred ambience. In turn, Nicolai realigns these sounds with Sakamoto's untreated notes, providing a complex interplay between the piano and its fractured electronic mimesis. In structuring all of the pieces on Insen, Nicolai occasionally situates his electronics along a parallel path to Sakamoto's piano, and slowly moves the two paths toward different directions, with Nicolai's rhythms achieving velocity and tension whereas Sakamoto's pointillist notes remain weighless and transient. Yet, Nicolai always teases with losing control over the composition, as he often snaps back into a somber atmosphere of minimalist smears, resorting to a similiar strategy as heard on Eno's epic Thursday Afternoon. Stunning.
When the dollars-to-minutes ratio eeks close to 1:1, we tend to get a little uncomfortable. Really, what's the big deal about David "Organum" Jackman doubling or even tripling up the sounds on his $15.00 singles that clock in at a couple of minutes? There's also been talk of this marketing psychology from this mathematical ratio due to a pending Boris LP, which is not going to be cheap (not surprising), but also isn't one of their monstrously long drone-doom pieces either... well it's just sorta long. So the question always comes down to the quality of the merchandise, is Boris worth the price of admission? The same question should be asked of the third collaboration between Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryuichi Sakamoto, which clocks in a little under 20 minutes. Again, the division of labor puts Sakamoto at the piano and Nicolai at the laptop, with Sakamoto providing a series of impressionist clusters of piano notes and elegant repetitions, and Nicolai smudging those sounds through his pixel crunching software. Harmonically crisp and deftly performed, the three pieces on Revep offer a nice variation on the theme set by the first two collaborations Vrioon and Insen. Sakamoto fans will delight that he's offered a new arrangement for his classic piece "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," which Nicolai aerosolizes into a fine mist of digital ephemera and pin-pricked ambience. Certainly as lovely as the first two!
Let me just mention the crucial facts up front. It has been said that "Vrioon" is all out of print and Raster-Noton is not going to be repressing this record any time soon. Thus we will not be able to get any more than what limited stock we have at the moment. Don't say we didn't warn you.
"Vrioon" is a collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto (of Yellow Magic Orchestra) in which Sakamoto provided source material of impressionistic piano pieces to Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), who blurred many of the edges into a beautiful ambience and added clusters of slow-moving rhythms. It's very simple and very effective and very beautiful... and soon, very out of print. If we could have got more, this would have likely been a 'record of the week' pick -- it's the kind of thing we instantly sell whenever it's playing on the store stereo.
"Opto Files" is the surprising combination of the Pole-esque neo-dub work of Denmark's Opiate and the clinically clicked rhythms of Noto (here calling himself Alva Noto, although there hasn't been any discernable difference between the Noto and Alva Noto projects). While Noto has supplied his trademarked glitchs, it is Opiate who offers a wide spectrum of color to Noto's typically
Latest offering from long time collaborators Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Their work together really exemplifies the pinnacle and potential of true collaboration, each party bringing in a different aspect and aesthetic while simultaneously balancing each other and creating something neither would be able to achieve on their own.
While Sakamoto's work can be drenched in warmth and heavy emotion, Alva Noto is known for his ice cold precision and together they really are able to strike an awesome balance of sound that takes from each of their very different approaches to create a unique chilling warmth. With Sakamoto's impeccable piano playing, and Alva Noto's skilled hands processing and chopping us that playing, Summvs might just be their finest work together yet. The most sublime moment coming in their cover of Brian Eno's "By This River", which we really wouldn't want anyone else to touch, but these two are able to bring out its melancholy in such a breathtaking manner.
This is the rare album you want to play from start to finish, ideally in a clean and silent room where you can just drift and dream in its presence. So beautiful!
This limited edition cd ep was released by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times". Carsten Nicolai (Noto) and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) did a three-hour set as part of the opening of the
Both the digipak design and the sounds on the cd lean towards the Raster-Noton aesthetic -- minimal clicks and cuts style, starting with a pleasant insectoid buzz and gradually adding layers of crackle and drone (and what sounds like crickets chirping or frogs croaking!). As the piece progresses, these "synthetic late summer night" sounds are augmented by high, wavering electronic tones. Really a gorgeous listen! This disc is apparently only available at the SFMOMA store, as well as locations in Berlin, London and Tokyo -- and here at Aquarius, which was nice of the SFMOMA people. Get it while you can...
This is basically the Raster-Noton allstars: Alva Noto, Byetone, Komet, and Signal (which is a collaboration of the aforementioned three artists) recording for Staalplaat's acclaimed "Mort Aux Vaches" series. Alva Noto's piece is a live documentation of the material found on his debut, with its terse electron pinpricks evolving amidst very slowly developing pure-tone, post-techno structures. Nicolai's performance of "Prototypes" clearly incorporates the same sounds found on his studio album, but the arrangement is one very long track and is completely different than the original. Byetone (aka Olaf Bender) is the least prolific of the Raster-Noton founders, with only a couple of releases. His 30 minutes for the Raster "Mort Aux Vaches" is a solid replication of Mika Vainio's crystalline "Metri" album for Sahko, as a surgical presentation of acid house bleeping grooves. Komet, who has recently simply been recording under his given name Frank Bretschneider, is the most effects-happy amongst the Raster-Noton family, warbling his pure tones through ring modulation and ample delay patterns to give the whispered clickery and alarm call bleeps a Frippertronic feel. The Signal recordings may be the weakest amongst the group, Pan Sonic / Goem throwaway tracks with electronic loops are set up and left unchanged, as if nobody amongst the group wanted to change anybody else's sounds. It is the slippages between melody and rhythm that make the Raster-Noton sound so appealing. While the rest of this double set is well worth checking out, Raster-Noton's collaborative efforts prove they are perhaps better as solo artists.
Originally released on vinyl in 2005 on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label, Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset was at the time the first Alvarius B release in 7 years, a project of Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, accompanied by long time SCG accomplice Eyvind Kang as well as Randall Dunn, Tim Young and Andrew McGinnis.
Alvarius B is some sort of weirdo psychedelic cabaret folk music, somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and show tunes (?). The opener is a swampy bit of country folk, all slithery acoustic guitars, junk yard percussion, weird voices, Bishop's snarly vox, lots of buzz and tense atmospheric shimmer, and the lyrics, an over the top tale of miserable miscreants, while the second track is even more Tom Waits-ish, a piano ballad, haunting and melancholy, distorted and creepy, over a chorus of nighttime crickets, as if Bishop was set up on the porch of some old house on the edge of a black swamp. From there on, the sound slips into a strange lilting doom folk, Kang's viola, moaning over some atonal strum, and Bishop ranting like a madman. Deep chanted vocals draped over jagged acoustic guitar, a distant choir competes with some strange grunting, jaw harp, moody hushed vocals drift over a latticework of spidery steel string buzz, super dramatic and over the top, helps that that one is actually a cover, a piece by Italian horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi, lyrics of course courtesy of Bishop. Which is what turns it into something much sicker and more hauntingly demented than even Frizzi could have ever imagined.
They also tackle a Morricone track, and a traditional, but it hardly matters, Bishop and company make the songs their own, transforming them into oozing, misanthropic swamp folk dirges, creepy, and funny, and fucked up, exactly what you'd expect from one of the Sun City Girls, an aural roadtrip through the hellish mind of a madman, a lost world of run down houses, bleak swampland, of destitution and despondency, but viewed through a serious cracked lens, that makes even the most dismal and brutal and miserable situations and characters seem endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Awesome stuff, essential for Sun City Girls obsessives of course, but maybe a bit TOO out there for the general population, which is precisely what makes this so awesome.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
No need to go into much detail about this one, as the latest Alvarius B album is already sold out at the source, with no future for a repressing. We have less than a half-dozen left, going going going...
Alvarius B is the nom de plume for Alan Bishop, the former Sun City Girl. Where his brother Richard strives for the technical mastery of his pastiche of middle eastern ragas, Takoma pluckery, and flamenco swagger, Alan prefers a roughhewn, dissonant approach to the guitar instrumental. Nope, no singing found here; but he does show off his songwriting chops with plenty of angular riffs that still express the sneer of a scoundrel. Limited to just 400 copies.
Fucked up minstrel-tunes, misogynistic murder ballads, and world-weary blues played by a man who's too smart and too talented to play everything straight. Yup, it's Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls in his singer-songwriter guise of Alvarius B. Alan's poetics of cruelty and black humor are highlighted most egregiously on this eponymous album (not to be confused with another self-titled record from 1994), and if anyone is expecting the puckish tunes from Bishop's acclaimed 2011 album Baroque Primitiva with its Morricone, John Barry, and Beach Boys covers will be shocked by all of the dead whores and vulgar epithets that come a mile a minute from Bishop's venomous mouth. Bishop's arrangements typically find the man scraping and rapping his bloody knuckles across his steel-strung acoustic guitar with a violent aggression that splutters out of stolen blues progressions, always punctuating his deranged lyrics. As was the case with the Sun City Girls, Bishop's solo work teases with moments of musical ecstasy thanks to some downright brilliant songwriting that get all twisted and fucked up with those gnashed acoustic chords or subverted by a peyote visions (e.g. "he sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia") or downright mean spirited lyrics (e.g. "Fucking maggot, you're in the way!")
Originally released as a double lp 1997 on Abduction, the album went out of print quickly only to fetch small ransoms on eBay. The double cd sports six bonus tracks including the Sun City Girls classic "CCC" from 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. It's pretty fucking recommended, but only if you don't mind getting sonically slapped in the face every other song.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
People had been really excited for this collaboration, and on first listen it was a little difficult to see why. The first handful of tracks come courtesy of Alvarius B, otherwise known as Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, and sad to say, sound really tossed off and pointless. Sounding alternately like a guitar lesson with two people arguing in the background, someone blowing through a crazy straw, and a guitar with squirrels climbing on it, those tracks had us pretty much ready to give up. Thankfully, we stuck it out until Dylan Nyoukis' 12 minute closing track on side one, a relentless barrage of muted thumb pianos and rubber band/kleenex box guitars that overlap and intersect and eventually become a loping, skipping, Philip Jeck-ian soundscape, warm and sepia toned. Side two fares just as well with Nyoukis and Bishop teaming up for a super abstract half hour of song snippets, transient noise bursts, bizarre sonic disturbances, eastern ragas, rumbling drones, spastic freakouts and subtle melodies. Sounds like the Sun City Girls' recent Sublime Frequencies series of world music recordings, only from some other world entirely.
One of the remnants from Record Store Day 2014. Each of the Bishop brothers from the Sun City Girls gets a side of vinyl to bloody their knuckles on the guitar. While the cover sports a sunken portrait of Alan Bishop (aka Alvarius B) at the microphone with cigarette in hand, he doesn't turn up in his Uncle Jim guise. In fact, he doesn't even sing at all. His spluttering acoustic guitar instrumentals are full of piss and vinegar, taking up the violent folk-punk strum that was one of many focal points for the Sun City Girls as well as much of his Alvarius B output. Richard Bishop offers a set of his cocksure flamenco-meets-Egyptian acoustic guitar solos of effortless esotericism and beguiling mastery of his instrument. Just a few left.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A semi-legendary fixture of the late eighties cassette underground, Alvars Orkester was a noise/drone duo obsessed with "the mysteries of psychic sickness, mental institutions, the industrial music culture and the power of sound". They took their influence from the likely industrial candidates, Test Dept. SPK, Throbbing Gristle and the like, but their sound soon developed into a more minimalist approach to sound, focusing more on the drone. The band split in the nineties only to reunite last year to record this 4 track exploration of paranoia and discord, fear and mortality, sickness and death.
The first track is a ten minute near static drone, dense and layered a high end sine wave hovering above a low end buzz, the two slowly shifting and subtly interacting. Sublime and in its own way quite gorgeous. Track two is much more harsh, an assemblage of digital feed back, harsh slabs of noise, chopped and sequenced into ear piercing rhythmic blocks of sound. Track three "Reality Distortion Field" is a shimmering soundfield of chimes and sinewaves, pulsing instrument hum and far away feedback, a murky backdrop for disembodied voices and strange tape manipulation. Truly creepy stuff. the final near 20 minute "Field Grey" is a super minimal expanse of barely there dark ambience. Low warm tones, ebb and flow, their shifts barely noticeable until near the end of the record when processed percussion swells up beneath the drones, and ultra subtle melodies drift ghost like from the murk. So haunting and lovely. Definitely for the dark drone obsessed, Organum, Lustmord, Chalk, Coleclough and the like.
And as with most releases on Ash International, gorgeously understated and quite striking packaging.
Not sure how we managed to not review/list this amazing record, we just stumbled onto a little cache of these beauties, each disc housed in a gorgeous wood box, with a slide out top panel revealing the disc inside, and the name of the band burnt/embossed into the wood of the box. So nice! In fact, so nice, you might want to buy one regardless of the music inside, lucky for us (and you), the sounds of Alvars Orkester are most definitely worthy of the over the top packaging.
The AO duo were a staple of the late eighties cassette underground, and it wasn't until much later, that one half of the Orkester would re-emerge as half of another duo we dig, The Skull Defekts. And similar to how the Defekts sculpt rhythms, Alvars Orkester sculpted textures and atmospheres, creating gorgeously lush abstract soft noise dronescapes and slow shifting heavily textured ambience.
The bulk of the record is drawn from long out of print cassettes, and is made up of long sprawling, smoldering, slow developing drones, layered and looped, the sounds are tangled into long streaks of pulsing sound, that often blur into gorgeously indistinct crystalline shimmers, but just as often blossom into corrosive squalls of distorted crunch. The tracks drift from abrasive electronic squelch, to hazy sun dappled drift, keening FX-warped skree to stumbling blown out krauty chaos, finally culminating in the 3 part final suite of short form electronic workouts, all squiggly and glitchy and spacey, sounding like some Radiophonic Workshop psych jam, lots of buzz and distortion wrapped around the swooping bloops and bleeps.
LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES, long out of print we'd imagine, we have just 3 copies, so act fast if you want one.
Depending on your tastes this is either the most insane and enjoyable record you're gonna hear all year or the record that will drive you utterly and completely crazy. Sounds like a perfect record for AQ no doubt. Always is an a cappella outfit from Australia who loop their vocals to create some super strange and mesmerizingly repetitive sounds. Somehow the human voices become blurred and it begins to sound like you're being swarmed by wild buzzing flies. If each of those flies was whispering the same thing in your ear. Hmmm... In some ways we hear the influence of Steve Reich's early tape pieces but here they end up broken down into shorter tracks that still test the limits of endurance and your tolerance for maddening repetition. Whenever we play this in the store at least a few people end up driven away, yet just as many freak out and need to know what's playing so they can buy it. Listen to the sound samples and figure out which camp you belong in. Just a matter of time before folks like Irwin Chusid and the Incredibly Strange Music brigade freak out to the totally insane sounds of Always.
It used to be, not a New Arrivals list would go by without some wonderful, weird new music from aQ pal Antony Milton, but lately, those release have been fewer and further between, so we've begun to treasure each one just a little bit more, not knowing how long it'll be 'til the next. We've long been fans of Milton's mercurial soundmaking, whether it be abstract ambience under his own name, or in any number of outfits making dark, psychedelic heaviness. So we weren't sure what to expect this time around, but Dragonfly ends up being a good fit for the Trensmat label, and their shift toward electronic music, albeit, of the noisier and more abstract/avant variety. Much like countryman Campbell Kneale (Our Love Will Destroy The World, Birchville Cat Motel), Milton has added beats to his sonic palette, creating a strange hybrid of NZ noise, and twisted techno, or warped house music? It doesn't mater what you call it really, and it's much different than Kneale's more electronic noise, the sound here still seems to be rooted in guitar, and has a distinctly krautrock feel, while the opener is all gristly high end, and loping rhythm, a sort of noisy kosmische space noise, it's on the title track where things seem to coalesce, the sound like some weird Sublime Frequencies style desert blues, that sort of looped buzzy riffage, wreathed in billowing clouds of FX heavy electric noise, soaring gouts of raga-like skree, and psych shred tangles, we're hearing hints of Gunter Schickert for sure, and as we say all the time, we would have been perfectly happy if the 5 minute title track was stretched out to full up the whole record. Total kraut-noise space-raga bliss out.
But fear not, there's plenty more where that came from. "Glassworld" is all dubby and abstract, a buried rhythm pulses beneath looped layers, and soft focus shimmers, muted sonic squalls, blurred into gauzy chordal washes, heady and hypnotic. "Helioscope" ditches the beats almost entirely, transforming the sound into something closer to Pop Ambience, hazy swells, over distant pulsations, dreamy, drifty and druggily drowsy. The final proper track is a grinding field of low end buzz and crunchy sci-fi lazer-pulses, all wrapped in fields of Geiger counter crackle, briefly ditching all the skree and leaving just muted minimal bass thrum, only to have the sound erupt again in a flurry of swirled FX and blurred buzzy noise. The final track is live, and stretches out over 13 minutes, and returns to the kraut-psych sound of the title track, the synths gristly and granular, peppered with swirls of smoother shimmer, all draped over a heartbeat like pulse, dreamily cosmic, before a mid song/set shift transforms the sound into something much darker, and noisier, a gritty minimal noise-techno that explodes into one final burst of white noise howl.
Includes a download code!!!
This is Antony Milton's first completely computer based recording, using the sounds of Tibetan instruments that just happened to be laying about. Things start off with what sounds like someone taking a powersaw to a bell, UGLY, but with gorgeous shimmering overtones. As the record progresses we hear lots of wild tribal percussion over a thudding pulse and some low end rumble, banjos chopped up into a digital soup that sounds a bit like a more uneven, more jagged Oval, and syrupy bass melodies and fluttery static over a dreamy, hypnotic dirge with rich swells and seasick melodies. This is a really nice mix of organic and non-organic sounds, computer manipulated into a collection of rich soundscapes, gorgeous ambience and some downright melodic, almost-pop-songs.
