For some reason, we thought we had posted reviews of Grant Evans' noise project Crippling, but alas we had not. Under that moniker, Evans steered far from the genteel ambient songcraft that he and his wife Rachel produce as Quiet Evenings. Instead, Crippling had something of the accusatory, even maledictory tone akin to Weakling, a bandname that was not self-descriptive but directed outward at the audience in contempt and pity. So, in Crippling, Evans invoked the history of noise projects that threaten and provoke, whereas the new age communes reflect and meditate. Roman Persuasion follows from where Evans left off with Crippling, but this cassette is shifts towards more of a post-noise aesthetic on a similar trajectory as Pedestrian Deposit, with creepy-as-fuck, ash-crusted melodies washed onto the crumbled shores of abject noise compositions. Not to worry, there's still the full-throttled explosions of gnarled distortion and guttural bad vibes. Jittery, crank-twitching circuity is engulfed in flanging washes from Jovian storms, squalid amalgams of pierced sawtooth frequencies engage dental-drill nightmares, and monosynth dirges slump into black-noise oblivion. Released on the suitably mysterious noise imprint Vaald, in an 'unspecified' edition, which probably means it'll be sold out sooner rather than later.
After a spate of tape releases under the moniker Nova Scotian Arms and as Quiet Evenings (with his wife Rachel Evans aka Motion Sickness Of Time Travel), Grant Evans has released this drone-n-murk cassette through his mighty fine tape label Hooker Vision. There's a strong link between the sounds here, and on the NSA album Cult Spectrum released earlier in 2012 on Digitalis. Mossy, subterranean drones shift and wiggle out of the initial burst of a noisy industrial-strength flange that opens the first side of the tape. The soft, malleable surfaces of Evans' dark-minded sources (synth? guitar? processed field recordings?) settle nicely into the murk of the tape itself. Here, the sounds are akin to the occluded dronemuzik of Maeror Tri in one of their more circumspect, dreamtime moods, mixed with the likes of RV Paintings. The flip is equally as murky, although the syrupy tones seem to crawl from a turntable playing a 78 of morse code tutorials at 16 rpm, with aerated, black drones spewing smoke and shadow in the distance and spluttering synth percolations coming into focus. Limited to 100 copies; and unfortunately, already sold out at the source.
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A massive, throbbing, pulsing, heaving, slab of buzzing, filthy, crusty, abject lo-fi drone bliss courtesy of the one man band known as Evenings. Besides running the kick ass Tapeworm label, Mr. Evenings creates epic sprawls of brutal low end soft sludge, layered expanses of crumbling bass drones, of buried crunch and clatter, everything muted and muddy and murky and ominous and creepy as fuck.
It's no surprise John Olson (of the mighty Wolf Eyes among other equally kick ass noise making entities) penned the confusional rambling liner notes, this definitely speaks to the same Wolf Eyes-ian aesthetic, the sort of crumbled sonic ruins, the wasted scorched Earth soundscape, whatever melodies there are, you have to dig for, up to your elbows in a viscous black ooooooooze. Surprisingly, amidst all this grit and grime, the sound of Growing Isolation (fairly apt title we think) does occasionally seem to smooth out into something almost pretty, but even then, their are soul sucking spirits lurking just below that misleadingly lovely top layer, a glimmering glistening crust over a constantly roiling cauldron of bottomless blackness, of grinding, slow motion industrial sprawl, everything smeared and blurred into a lurching, lumbering crawl so slow, it sounds like a field recording of mighty black icebergs, drifting in a pitch black sea, beneath a black hole sky, two sidelong tracks, each a slow burning, slow melting, black crust dirge drone epic. Like Lustmord and Tomas Koner collaborating on a soundscape cobbled together with field recordings made of hell. Awesome!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Pressed on thick maroon colored vinyl, with cool, super striking one color silk screened sleeves.
We'd been hearing about this band for ages. But had no real idea what to expect. This was most definitely not it.
Everlovely Lightningheart are a 3 piece (or 14 piece if you count all the contributors) ensemble, whose debut has somehow found its way to Hydra Head imprint Double H Noise Industries. That distinction is most definitely important in this case, so all you Hydra Head geeks expecting more Isis / Pelican / Old Man Gloom can relax, sit back, throw on the headphones and prepare for a distinctly unheavy, but beautifully fucked up sonic experience.
It's one slow growing 40 minute track, that is all over the map sonically, never getting heavy, in fact there are no RIFFS here, this is abstract free noise, but most of the noise is of the subtle subdued variety. ELLH would most certainly be at home on Kranky, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, PseudoArcana, or any one of a hundred microlabels who have been unfurling gentle abstract soundscapes.
Everlovely cover a lot of ground in 40 minutes, most of the time is spent drifting lazily through slow shifting fields of ethereal sound, ever lovely indeed. A reverb drenched piano plays some sort of dirgey ballad before dissipating into chimes and tinkling bells, which are quickly smoothed out into an abstract lowercase drift. Soon buzzing steel strings and squealing sine waves join the fray, becoming some sort of otherworldly Appalachia. The rest of the record is like strolling through little sonic vignettes, from clattery percussive workouts, to lilting dreamlike melodies, to some fuzzy muted metallic guitar, to soundscapes of keening strings and delicate chimes, it's all quite beautiful, an incredibly compelling listen, but definitely the kind of soundwork that requires the listener to -really- listen to truly appreciate everything that is going on. Sometime it's foolish to list all the instruments used on a record, but with music like this, it's as much about the instruments as it is the players: accordion, various metals, a creosote bush, exhaust pipe, receivers, bass, acoustic guitar, microphone, metal bucket, blood, wood, piano, rivers, springs, sheet metal, distortion pedals, cymbals, hand made harp, drums, skin, jars full of liquid, broken glass, bells, a boot, tin cans, frying pan, record player, broken clarinet, harmonica, megaphone firecrackers, xylophone, as well as objects and IDEAS like a feather, ghosts, gasping for life, jars full of memories, breathing, dragon's blood, bat wing, icicles, monsoons, scars, bullets, thoughts, trains and more. Phew. Recorded in a monastery's barn, the dead end of a tunnel, a train station, various abandoned rooms, hallways and basements and the desert. Sounds like it too!
Packaged in a striking gatefold with a dense animal collage cover, each disc comes with a hand sewn booklet.
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Everything But The Gargoyle is a new project spearheaded by San Francisco's Ferrara Brain Pan and fellow Californian Kyra Pixy. Working under the guise of Forms Of Things Unknown, Ferrara has previously mustered occult atmospheres with plenty of nods to Nurse With Wound, Coil, and even some Ryoji Ikeda through an ever intriguing mixture of bass clarinet, electronics, bowed psaltry, and then some. His uneasy and evocative sound design pairs with the breathy cooing of Kyra Pixy, who's reciting the poetry of one G. James Wyrick. The nature of the lyrics is somewhat obscured by the breathy nature of Pixy's delivery, although a pretty good guess would land this somewhere in the supernatural horror and the oblique gothic. The arrangements are well suited to these themes, with martial overtures of slow motion drums lumbering behind eerie reeds that hold the apocalyptic mysticism that Coil achieved on Horse Rotovator many years ago. On other tracks, a slinky noir approach is taken, with the clarinets matching a smokey Barry Adamson / Angelo Badalamenti vibe, making for a brief 4 track ep that's well done and certainly a teaser for a future full-length recording.
To look at the personnel line-up of Evil Madness, you probably wouldn't know what to expect. There's the melancholy composer Johann Johannsson with a number of acclaimed cinematic records on 4AD. There's the bleak-minded drone specialist BJ Nilsen and his long-time collaborators Stillupsteypa. And there's another Icelander dude named Petur Eyvindsson, who has some oddball releases under the name DJ Musician. Given that, the punchy discotheque grooves of Evil Madness are way out of left-field and totally great. Italo disco, minimal wave / EMB, anthemic Detroit techno circa 1988, John Carpenter's paranoiac synth arpeggiations, lots of analogue synth worship, and pre-fab electronic beats all come together underneath the stoic yet tongue-in-cheek banner of Evil Madness. We suspect that Sigtryggur from Stilluppsteypa has quite a lot to do with this one, given the electro-breaks that would occasionally slap in the face of his seriously minded crackled dronemuzik; no matter who's responsible, both sides of Super Great Love are brilliantly hedonistic mash-ups of vintage synth stabs, stupidly good anthemic electronic melodies, and plenty cybernetic Moroder sequences, spiralling upon techno, disco, and electro rhythms. Super Great Love is actually the fourth record by Evil Madness, with their other releases coming out through the poorly distributed 12 Tonar label and the dada-fetish imprint Ultra Eczema, so this album on Editions Mego should garner a broader audience for Evil Madness (they'll be releasing a cd version eventually too). Fans of Majeure, Umberto, K-X-P, and the Oneohtrix Point Never sideproject Games would be well served to check this out!
If we told Hanatarash fans that this new cd WASN'T chock full of totally insane, random, chaotic noise, they'd be disappointed. So -- don't worry, no disappointment! The first release from Boredoms leader Eye Yamantaka's noise project Hanatarash in many moons (10 years?) is finally here, and it's a collaboration with UK noise artist Evil Moisture, aka Andy Bolus, who's based now in France and has quite a few cassettes and cds of extremely difficult listening under his belt. Together (and you can't tell who's doing what) they've produced 35 brief tracks of ear-hole destroying noise, somewhat in the style of Hanatarash 4: Aids-a-delic from 1994. It's a crazy collage of cut-up sounds, some snippets of recognizable "music" sprinkled amidst a heckuva lot of distorted turntable and microphone abuse, whooshing groaning screaming overload that just keeps on keepin' on, an endless barrage with no discernible structure, noises constantly morphing into some new noises but never making any sense. It's a bit like the sounds you might imagine some truly nightmarish Rube Goldberg device might make. And you've gotta love the "song" titles: "Never Mind The Overdosing", "Fingertip Believer", "Atomichy in the LSD", "Bank Punks / Noise Bank"... Also this includes "covers" of songs by both Survivor and The Exploited, supposedly. Limited edition of 500 copies by the way.
To begin with, there's already something special about bands from New Zealand, whether they're making eccentric indie pop or droned-out experimental noise, we like ourselves a lot of NZ music! So this band Evil Ocean, from Auckland, already has that going for them. But then add in the fact that they're flat-out obsessed with music from another of our favorite locales, Finland, specifically what our friends in Circle like to call NWOFHM, and what do you get? A really, really awesome and unclassifiable album indeed. Krauty confusional garagey distorted DIY doom metal new wave soundtrack music? Maybe we can call it NWONZHM??
Apart from several interludes of eerie, abstract weirdness, the disc mostly consists of some fairly blown-out, rockin' songs, which are ALSO weird as all heck though. These tracks are full of thick fuzz guitar, churning riffage riding the rinky-dink ticky-tock of the manic, machine-sounding percussion. Other ingredients include dramatic female vocals and gnarlier, sneering male vox (rising into a falsetto at times), plenty of effects and sci-fi synth sounds everywhere, tons o' fuzz (we mentioned that already), spooky suspenseful bits, metallic gallop, industrial clank, seasick keyboards, and more... There's ritualistic stuff that sounds like Sylvester Anfang, propulsive parts a la Circle, and heads-down Hawkwindy hypno-rock. The mood can get genuinely intense and disturbing, yet Evil Oceans also obviously display a bizarre, even nerdy sense of humor, heck there's a track here called "Rise Of The Administration Daleks", complete with hysterical Dalek voices... but also Spaghetti Western whistling... what does it all mean?? It's art, or arty (several of the members are apparently successful painters) but most importantly it rocks in a quite entertaining WTF? fashion.
Recommended to anyone into so-called NWOFHM stuff (Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, Steel Mammoth, etc.), also White Hills, Brain Donor, and other gritty post-Stooges space rockers and post-punk derelicts. Released on pro-printed cd-r, packaged in a in a full-color ecopak with photos and artwork celebrating both the epic New Zealand landscape, and Charles Darwin.
Probably best known for their legendary mash up fusing the a cappella vocals from a Public Enemy song to a jam by Herb Alpert And The Tijuana Brass, this lawsuit baiting plunderphonic duo return with a new record of twisted samples, mutated mashups, and a sure fire way to fend off lawsuits (which will come in handy, since on this album they fuck up a Beatles track, quite brilliantly, more on that in a moment), but how exactly does the ECC expect to insulate themselves from the teams of entertainment lawyers who will no doubt be knocking down their doors? Simple. By legally and contractually forbidding you, the listener, to listen to their record. What? Yep, it's right there, TWICE in fact, an audio contract stating that by listening to the record, you have broken a binding legal contract, and thus the ECC are absolved of any wrongdoing. Pretty genius, especially considering by listening to the contract, you're already breaking said contract. Who knows it if would actually hold up in court, but pretty dang funny nonetheless, and since we already broke the contract by listening to the record, well, heck, we might as well tell you what it sounds like.
Our favorite might have to be "What Would You Think If I Sang Autotune", which uses the oft abused Autotune program for what it was originally deigned for, to subtly tweak vocals to change their pitch and 'autotune', them, but here, instead of shifting the vocals so they're IN tune, they take a Beatles song, and do nothing but nudge the vocals slightly out of tune, turning a classic into a cringeworthy exercise in terrible karaoke. Then there's "Stairway To Britney" which finds Ms. Spears groaning and crooning over Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven", and it's a surprisingly good fit.
Or maybe "California Dreamings" which seems to take about a million different cover versions of "California Dreaming" cuts em up into little parts and weaves them together into a schizophrenic ADD cover version. Or "Fock It" which melds Herbie Hancock's 'Rockit" and the surprisingly similar sounding "Axel F Theme" from Beverly Hills Cop. And so it goes, a dizzying head spinning mix of samples, and chopped up beats, voices, and sound snippets, each song a plunderphonic mash up of epic proportions, groovy, funky, twisted, stuttery, confusional, baffling and brilliant.
The cd version includes a second computer data disc, with high quality MP3 files of the record as well as album length commentary tracks, outtakes, remixable song versions and more!
Probably best known for their Public Enemy / Herb Alpert mash-up, years before the bootleg/remix craze, Evolution Control Comittee return with a brand new full length of cut and paste, steal and reappropriate madness on Negativland's Seeland label. Nothing totally groundbreaking, quite reminiscent of early Negativland / Tape-beatles but with way more of an emphasis on humor and goofiness, with the musical emphasis being on the hip hop / funk / R+B side of things. But it is fun and funky and really funny. The perfect mix-tape / party record. Childrens records over vintage funky soul breaks, a foul mouthed astronaut over luxurious Beach Boys harmonies, more chopped up Public Enemy and much more!! Everyone who dug the Bran Flakes record from a few lists back will totally love this!!
MPEG Download: "Star Spangled Bologna" [/audio/evolutionarycontrolstarspa.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Star Spangled Bologna" [/audio/evolutionarycontrolstarspa.m3u]
The strangely monickered Evolutionary Jass Band features two ex members of free noise abstract improvisors Jackie-O-Motherfucker, and while that pedigree definitely informs the sound of the EJB, their sound is much more aligned with traditional jazz, a mix of dark New Orleans funeral jazz and skittery post bop, but all sort of laid back and dreamy, dark and dolorous. Horns don't skronk so much as swoon and shimmer. Dark tones shift and slide, drifting thick and rich over dense tribal drumming, and simple slippery bass. There's even some sitar to add some droney buzz. The EJS are a pretty big ensemble, but it doesn't sound cluttery or crowded, each player contributes and deftly interacts with the rest of the group, but also knows when to let someone else step forward.
This will definitely hit the spot for modern jazz-heads, and might even appeal to the more traditionally inclined, but folks who dig the abstract clatter and free form drift of bands like JOMF, No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man and the like, might dig this too. It could be their gateway to a lifelong love of jazz, which is at least partially responsible for informing the new breed of improvised abstraction that is all the rage these days.
Great stuff.
Is it even necessary to point out that Noise nerds and Free Jazz freaks tend to keep the sort of the same company? Probably not, but if it were, then we would just play you this record and say goodnight. Those of you who don't like jazz, don't get scared off! The sensibility coloring this record with that spirit is really just one of genuinely free improvisation, so don't expect Coltrane or anything like that, this is still largely a Noise affair. Ex-Cocaine starts off with a loose instrumental guitar piece, accompanied by various drum sounds. The second track follows a similar trajectory, with the addition of vocals. If Aztec Camera were a lo-fi art rock band, this is what it might sound like. Side two features none other than the prolific -- and soon to be extinct -- Yellow Swans. Yes, it's true, after 7 years or so of trying to destroy both your ears and your speakers, Gabriel Saloman and Pete Swanson are calling it quits. They're not exactly going to disappear though, just saying goodbye to the Swans and starting some new things. If you saw our last list, then you probably noticed Mr. Saloman's collaborative effort with Aja Rose of In Flux. As for Pete Swanson, he's got a new label called Freedom to Spend -- check our review of it's first release, the album "Light Ships" by Axolotl off-shoot Bulbs. Okay, you're all caught up, now: the second side of the record. From mindfuck analog meltdown to blissful psych incantations, YS have certainly changed over the years, and, perhaps for the best, their final days have drifted into a more melodic, psychedelic direction. This track could not possibly better demonstrate that trend. In fact, if you didn't know who this actually was, it would be pretty dang impressive if you could guess. Meandering guitars, buried vocals, and a final showdown that dissolves into beautiful sheets of noise. Recommended!
For the last several years Excepter have been creating super fucked up, seriously pleasurable waves on outsider dancefloors everywhere, with an onslaught of ep's, 12"s, and split releases. Now it's finally time for their debut full length, and it does not disappoint! Herky-jerky rhythms, beat up electronics, drugged out rumblings, late night salvation. The album really does work like a full record should. The first half has some almost catchy pop moments (this is all relative of course) including quite possibly their most infectious song to date "Rock Stepper", while the second half of the album features longer tracks that melt and burst with the unique flavor we've come to love from these guys. They seem to be taking some of the more melodic moments of Throbbing Gristle's legacy (a friend even suggested one might throw one of these songs on a mix right next to TG's "Hot On The Heels Of Love!") Excepter makes sounds that are the perfect conglomeration of the now and hip with a eyes toward the future and a knowing nod to the past. And while their music sounds nothing like Ariel Pink, we can totally imagine the sort of craziness that might result if those wonderfully warped melody makers got together. Since they both approach music making from a damaged and drugged out, Technicolor drenched angle unlike almost any other bands we've heard. Until then, we'll just be content to soak up this super kick ass full length.
Haunted and humorous, Excepter's Debt Dept. opens with a Sabbath like riff, looped and fuzzed to create the platform for the vocals of not 1, nor 2, but 3 vocalists' unhinged ramblings.
Excepter's cast flood the track with faithless and caustically delivered lyrics, half sung, half spoken. The effect is oddly chilling, considering the tone is ultimately that of Excepter's tried and true mix of futurist-dub, narcotic fuzz and drone, and mellow yet schizophrenic vocals; a pastiche sometimes too dynamic, ridiculous, or slapdash to take "seriously." Nonetheless, on Debt Dept., Excepter's sardonic wit and notedly more focused approach gives them a winning hand. Their most recent efforts have been less oriented towards vocals and lyrics, but the addition of two new vocalists, Clare Amory and Lala Harrison, has changed that. The vocals by committee approach is made a dominant fixture through the diverse array of effects their digressions are filtered through. The rhythmic collision course is more spacious than previous efforts giving time for grooves to develop, and even a few hooks to set in. Beyond the half-sung/postpunk/almost-rap like vocal delivery, there are also spectral vocal interludes, resulting in blanketed and billowing textures that soften the harsh and incisive beats and guttural, expulsive, and erotic moaning.
Those who love Excepter will find themselves well satisfied with Dept Debt., as it embellishes and improves upon their developing style of droney, dubby eclecticism. On this, their full length Paw Tracks debut, the band offers a near staggering swirl of most of the styles and sounds the label already offers, with heavy ladle-fulls of Black Dice, Rings, and Ariel Pink added to the already potent brew. Lest this hint at a lack originality, it must be stressed that the way in which the band incorporates and stirs these qualities is wholly original. Rhythmically, the album is a little tighter and more committed than previous efforts, with a greater apprenticeship to hip hop and dub, and some wacked notion of post-industrial dance. It could work well as the soundtrack to some alchemists in a satellite factory processing dark matter into... well... dark pop. Or perhaps like watching a disco ball shatter in slow motion, its shards reflecting a disparate collection of cultural references as they fly past you. Whichever the more operative metaphor, the band has invited you lovingly to their fucked-up, post-everything party, and if we were you, we'd be joining them in the festivities.
Really? Carter Tutti and Foetus remixing Excepter? Yup, that's what you'll get on this 12" from the newly birthed Frkwys imprint (read Freakways as a play on Folkways). Carter Tutti (the re-named duo for Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, then and now of Throbbing Gristle fame) have tightened up the jammy industrial wanderings of Excepter's "Shors Ring" (from the Debt Dept. album) within their own rhythmicist precision that recalls some of the best work they've ever produced over the past 30 years (e.g. Heartbeat, Synaesthesia, The Space Between, etc.). Mr. Foetus twists Excepter's "Stretch" (also from Debt Dept.) into one of his manic marches of bombastic drum corps rhythms and huge melodic crescendos certainly not dissimilar from his twisted anthems of old. It's hard to hear much of the Excepter sounds within either track, but the productions from both remixing agents are so strong that it really doesn't matter.
Another No Neck Blues Band offshoot, this time spearheaded by ex-NNBB yokel John Fell Ryan, and this time, gone are those clattery, free-folk hippy drum circle jams, and in their place, throbbing, haunting, gothic soundscapes of sequenced drones and haunting vocals, muted pulsing grooves, like Can jamming at the bottom of a pool, noisy programmed beats under fuzzed out static and bleeping synths, and dreamy ethereal soundscapes. Unexpected and really nice!
Both Excepter 12"s finally on cd. Excepter is yet another No Neck Blues Band offshoot, this time spearheaded by ex-NNBB yokel John Fell Ryan, and this time, gone are those clattery, free-folk hippy drum circle jams, and in their place is some bizarre reverb drenched space dub, complete with throbbing, gothic soundscapes, sequenced drones, muted pulsing grooves, dubbed out drums, noisy programmed beats under fuzzed out static and bleeping synths, dreamy ethereal atmospheres and ghostly moaning vocals. Sort of like Can jamming at the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool recorded onto beat up cassettes that have been in the glovebox of your car for years, or maybe King Tubby manning the desk for a VERY STONED Sunburned Hand jam session. This is a gorgeously muddy, beautifully murky head on collision between krautrock propulsion, druggy dream dub, and damaged experimetal weirdness. Pretty fucking great.
According to the band, "this is a house record". If it is, then raves must be way more scary and fucked up than I ever imagined. We've been digging Excepter's freeform avant space dub weirdness for a while now, and as much as the band would like to claim that this is a dance record, it's just as damaged and out there sounding as their last two full lengths. Throbbing synths, haunting reverbed vocals, warm warbly bass lines, creepy ghostly ambience, squiggly synths and all manner of bleeps and bloops. Muted mumbling vocalisations drift through pusling dronescapes until toward the end of the record, skittery drum machines spew spastic rhythms, pushing Self Destruction about as far dance-ward as it's gonna get, and even then, it's way to druggy and psychedelic to be dance music for anything but a wasted and stumbling, blood soaked, moonlit, satanic sacrifice, pagan ritual dance party. Which when you put it that way...
According to the band, "this is a house record". If it is, then raves must be way more scary and fucked up than I ever imagined. We've been digging Excepter's freeform avant space dub weirdness for a while now, and as much as the band would like to claim that this is a dance record, it's just as damaged and out there sounding as their last two full lengths. Throbbing synths, haunting reverbed vocals, warm warbly bass lines, creepy ghostly ambience, squiggly synths and all manner of bleeps and bloops. Muted mumbling vocalisations drift through pusling dronescapes until toward the end of the record, skittery drum machines spew spastic rhythms, pushing Self Destruction about as far dance-ward as it's gonna get, and even then, it's way to druggy and psychedelic to be dance music for anything but a wasted and stumbling, blood soaked, moonlit, satanic sacrifice, pagan ritual dance party. Which when you put it that way...
Apparently recorded in one hour on a hot summer's day this new Excepter ep finds them with a slightly different lineup and in fine fucked up form. Sun soaked and dripping with melting casios, warped vocals and all sorts of effects they got hidden up their tricky sleeves. The last ep found them channeling the ghost of Third Eye Foundation while this time out it's a little less twisted dark dub and a little more twisted kaleidoscope of sounds. There's the inclusion of vocals on a few tracks that we're not sure how we feel about, but when the vocals fade away on tracks like "Dawn Patrol" it's fucked up and blissed out electronic tinged noise at its best. Excepter have this way of walking a fine line between half assed and totally off the cuff (they say they recorded this in one hour) and totally brilliant but when they hit their mark they hit is soooo hard that we keep coming back for more and more.
Second full length from these NY abstract free-rock, free-folk, free-whatever weirdos. Featuring ex No Neck Blues Bander John Fell Ryan, Excepter take the abstractions of the NNBB even further out. Way more abstract, way more blissed out, way more dreamy and ethereal. No clattery drum circle rhythms or pagan ritual folk, no this is drifting and deliriously unmoored. Female vocals hover ghost like over slowly rolling waves of electronic sound. Drones that pulse and weave and slither but mostly just drift. Outer space swooshes and simple percussive splashes demarcate the wide open expanses of each song. Like Hawkwind's space rock with all the rock removed, and in its place, even MORE space, as well as hushed and whispered vocals, shuffling electronic skitters, woozy distant melodies and lots of rumbling weirdness and whooshing swirl. Like the spirit of Can or Faust, a ghostly shimmer of krautrock, rhythmic and propulsive but with all the flesh pulled off, so the sounds are gauzy and barely there, a flicker of rhythmic urgency, now just a gorgeously ghostly amble.
The Mystery Sea label specializes in "Night-Ocean Drones" which as you can imagine definitely appealed to the AQ sensibility. And their series of ultra limited, gorgeously hand assembled, elaborate cd-r's has included releases from Aidan Baker, Ultrasound, Moljebka Pvlse, Troum, mnortham, Paul Bradley, Coelacanth and others, you can understand why we're just as excited to check out Mystery Sea releases by bands we've never heard before. This is only the second Mystery Sea release we've been able to get enough of to review and list (the first being the amazing Emerge cd-r) and it's absolutely fantastic.
Two lengthy epics from this Russian duo, each a massive slow motion trawl through some dark and dimly lit undersea world. Drifting and floating, huge swaths of low end resonate and reverberate... It's the sound of glaciers drifting across black seas, old abandoned ships forever floating on huge slow shifting swells, a musical bathysphere drifting along the ocean floor, this IS night-ocean music. Dreamy and shimmery, dark and dense, mysterious and haunting, but the music of Exit In Grey is not simple, not just one dimensional drone, these tracks are thick and layered, deep and rich, with all manner of overtones getting all tangled up, strange sonic subtleties, various shades of sound, slowly changing hue, twisting and distorting to form other shapes. Nameless Droplet most definitely benefits from deep listening, although like most drone records, it's perfectly okay to just float on the surface, but dive deep and there are wonders to behold.
STRICTLY LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! We got 30. Once they are gone, they are gone FOREVER! Gorgeously packaged with full color artwork, each copy numbered. So nice!
Exit In Grey's impressionist driftscaping continues to broadcast darkly beautiful, animistic apparitions from the taiga of Mother Russia. As we've mentioned before, Exit In Grey is the work of one Sergey [S] Suhkov who sometimes works under this moniker with an enigmatic character granted with the name (S), though it seems that (S) has parted ways with [S] for reasons unknown. The mystery to the authorship of Exit In Grey is by design as their may be many forces, elements, dimensions, psychic energies, and parapsycological reverberations that are communing with Exit In Grey to achieve the emotionally resonant dronemuzik found in their ongoing body of work. Perception slowly unfolds over two lengthy tracks, each clocking in around 27 minutes flush with ghostly loops, harmonic wash and analogue drone girding the ebb and flow of various cycles from guitar chords delicately generating melancholy melodies all bathed in reverb, tangles of forest-born sound objects which might as well hail from the overgrown ruins at Chernobyl, oceanic field recordings of ominous tidal churn, and shortwave receptions of hiss, electric hum, crackle, and disembodied voice. The slow pacing of Exit In Grey's poetic electronics reminds us of that Motion Sickness Of Time Travel series of Moon Ballades. Yeah, beautiful stuff.
The second album in as many weeks from the Russian industrial-impressionist Exit In Grey. At this album's core is a duality of gloomy exasperation and despair on one hand and a universal, meditative sense of calm on the other. Both of these emotional states co-habitate in a slow crawl of suspended drone construction and dappled shortwave radio reception from detuned military transmissions as well as the ethereal crackle of a VLF receiver. The initial gasps from Shadows Of Stillness spill from a claustrophobic synth tone, whose desolate, chemical transmission is accentuated with low-frequency rumblings and bone-creaking textures that wouldn't be out of place on a Sleep Research Facility or Lustmord recording. About halfway through "Speaking With Silence" the nocturnal mood lifts with a golden set of melodic ambient phrases akin to Popul Vuh's classic psychedelic instrumentals and a chipper satellite beacon signaling back to earth that all is well up in the heavens and we need not worry so much about our plight down here on this rock. The album's finale reprises this radiant shimmer as if all of the sounds were the sunblinding reflections of a midnight sun cast upon the placid waters of the Arctic Ocean north of St. Petersberg. Cold yet beautiful.
Expansion Bay is the (more) spaced out ambient side project of Sandoz Lab Technician Nathan Thompson, who has also done time in Sleep, EYE and a handful of others like minded outfits.
Utilizing field recordings, laptop, an arsenal of heavily processed instruments as well as samples from his previous bands, Thompson has put together a gorgeously expansive ambient drone world that is rife with sonic action. None of that static drift, no pushing a button or pressing a pedal and letting things take their course, no, these three lengthy tracks are dense, and heavily layered, sounds atop sounds atop sounds, different sonic fragments bleeding into other bits and shards, melodies getting all tangled up with other melodies, droney and ambient certainly, but alive and constantly moving and expanding.
The opener is a nine minute stretch of glistening high end buzz and gleaming sonar shimmers, like a less soothing Oval, sort of underwater sounding, static on the surface, but just below, sounds are constantly shifting and vibrating and changing shape and texture. Bits of melody float by like strange microscopic creatures in a musical petri dish, beneath it all, various whirs and rumbles cause different parts and sounds to shift and birth other sounds.
The title track, is a 16+ minute drift through inner space, beginning with a high end whir, slowly shedding the upper registers, gradually slowing down to a dronelike crawl, the whole thing peppered with glistening glimmering sonic sparkles, like stars in some volatile solar system.
The final twenty minute is the most lush of the bunch, sounding at first like wheezing organs, but as the sounds separate and the fuzz clears away like clouds after a rainstorm, the sounds reveal themselves to be bells, or what certainly sounds like bells, a gorgeously dense cacophony of ringing and clanging, huge thick clouds of overtones, the timbre and tonal colors always changing, so gorgeous and nearly overwhelming, finally fading out in a muted minimal stretch of glitchy low end buzz...
There are two ways to look at the work of V/Vm and their croneys: 1. that they actually are the ultimate post-modern pranksters offering aural jokes so complex as to confound even the most astute cultral analyst, or 2. that they have convinced themselves that they are the ultimate post-modern pranksters, but have gotten so wrapped up in their self-consecration within the realm of
It's amazing how quickly Expo '70 went from being a group we had never heard of, whose cd-r we got randomly sent to us in the mail, to a dronerock juggernaut, releasing disc after disc of amazing ambient kraut-flecked drift, what is beginning to seem remarkably like a monthly installment of outerspace sonic exploration. But heck, we'd much rather get a new 'issue' of far out Expo '70 dronebliss every month than say, Star Magazine (well, actually, okay, maybe Star was a bad example, but definitely more than say Spin or Rolling Stone or pretty much any other monthly installment sort of thing, anyway...).
Animism just so happens to be Expo '70's first actual cd as well, the first release that's not a limited edition cd-r, which is one of the reasons we decided to make it record of the week. 'Cuz to be totally honest, every single one of the Expo '70 releases could have been, and heck, maybe should have been Records of the Week. Certainly if we based it on how much they get played in the store, and the reaction of the folks hearing it, and the fact that the cds have been impossible to keep in stock. But that's only one of the reasons. The other, is that Animism, in it's own subtly space-y and psychedelic way, is quite possibly the 'heaviest' Expo '70 release yet.
The record begins much in the same way as most of the others. A huge drifting rumbling soundscape. Spare and wide open. Across this warm expanse drift disembodied guitar squiggles, reverbed scrapes, bits of fragmented melodies, post rock snippets, tinkling percussive shimmer,
all drifting over soft swells of undulating low end. There are tons of FX, but it's not Acid Mothers style freakout, instead, these sonic aktions are muted and smeared into dreamy streaks. Never has a music sounded so much like what it must feel like to drift weightless through space. Cloaked in inky blackness, but with the sparkle of a million stars illuminating the seemingly endless emptiness. And so it goes on, each track, a slow lugubrious crawl through the galaxies, strange shapes drift by, colored lights, every bit of melody like some barely visible shooting star, soft billow clouds of FX enveloping you before dissipating and leaving you to once again drift wide-eyed into infinity.
Track three, though, is where things start to get a little scary. In come the guitars, and this time it's not the little glimmers and twinkles, these are thick sheets of crumbling rumbling distorted buzz. Relentlessly trudging beast like across the same barren soundscapes, but leaving a trail of blown speakers in its wake. The effects here are much more blown out, melodies slip and slither amidst the coruscating heaviness, sounding almost like someone transported SUNNO))) back to the seventies, where they ended up jamming with Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel. Granted the Expo '70 cd-r Center Of The Earth, was also pretty heavy, but on Animism, the heaviness seems to be more deftly integrated with the lovelier psych-drone-drift parts, an organic space kraut doom, as dark and dense as it is dreamy and effervescent. The record effortlessly drifts back and forth, from black drone to space-y drift, as if one couldn't possibly exist in this universe without the other.
There are some subtle sonic surprises too, like the way-up-in-the-mix, tripped out harmonized guitars on "Entering The Night On A Highway Of Astral Projection", the folky acoustic strum on "Missing Sun", and the swirling SUNNO)))-y murk of "Shape-Shifting Mountain Mover", sounding a bit like the Angelic Process with the treble turned all the way down and the bass all the way up! Blissy and muddy, an epic blown out glistening dirge, suffocated under layer after layer of FX drenched detritus.
If there was ever an ultimate soundtrack for blowing the hatch and floating free, doomed to a languorous eternity of drug fueled drift and buzzing rumbling psychedelic space rock torpor, this is most certainly it.
So recommended.
For a while there it was practically raining Expo 70 cd-r's around here, and we of course couldn't get enough, we were shirtless, soaking wet, jumping around, splashing madly in the sonic downpour. Expo 70 are masters of a sound that so perfectly pushes all of our buttons, a dark spaced out dronemusic, that manages to infuse the typical minimal drone, with the organic pulse of krautrock, the subtle propulsion of prog, the blissed out sonic effulgence of FX drenched space rock, all boiled down to their very essence, a throbbing pulsing organic world of sound, organs whirring, guitars rumbling, buzzing electronics, Moogs spinning out soft spacey shapes, bits of guitar strum, fragments of melody, all drifting in an expansive abyss of shimmering low end.
Dark and melodious, but blurred and smeared into expansive sonic sprawls, a black stream flowing heavenward, carrying us along with it, ambient music, but not wooshy or wussy, fierce and dense, dark and layered, keening sheets of feedback, crumbling chunks of distortion, breaking off like chunks of ice and floating weightless in a sea of hiss and buzz. Heavy enough to block out the SUNNO))), but serene enough to wrap around you like a warm blanket and sink into the soft feathery depths.
These two discs collect unused, unfinished and alternate tracks recorded over the last two years. Both are fantastic, gorgeous, minimal, intense, heavy, dreamy, 001 is packaged in a retro looking paper sleeve, while 002 is in a plain black sleeve with a sticker, and a black on black printed insert. Both are essential, whether you own all the other Expo 70 cds or none of them, and both are crazy cheap, the two together are still less than most single cds, you'd be foolish to buy just one...
For a while there it was practically raining Expo 70 cd-r's around here, and we of course couldn't get enough, we were shirtless, soaking wet, jumping around, splashing madly in the sonic downpour. Expo 70 are masters of a sound that so perfectly pushes all of our buttons, a dark spaced out dronemusic, that manages to infuse the typical minimal drone, with the organic pulse of krautrock, the subtle propulsion of prog, the blissed out sonic effulgence of FX drenched space rock, all boiled down to their very essence, a throbbing pulsing organic world of sound, organs whirring, guitars rumbling, buzzing electronics, Moogs spinning out soft spacey shapes, bits of guitar strum, fragments of melody, all drifting in an expansive abyss of shimmering low end.
Dark and melodious, but blurred and smeared into expansive sonic sprawls, a black stream flowing heavenward, carrying us along with it, ambient music, but not wooshy or wussy, fierce and dense, dark and layered, keening sheets of feedback, crumbling chunks of distortion, breaking off like chunks of ice and floating weightless in a sea of hiss and buzz. Heavy enough to block out the SUNNO))), but serene enough to wrap around you like a warm blanket and sink into the soft feathery depths.
These two discs collect unused, unfinished and alternate tracks recorded over the last two years. Both are fantastic, gorgeous, minimal, intense, heavy, dreamy, 001 is packaged in a retro looking paper sleeve, while 002 is in a plain black sleeve with a sticker, and a black on black printed insert. Both are essential, whether you own all the other Expo 70 cds or none of them, and both are crazy cheap, the two together are still less than most single cds, you'd be foolish to buy just one...
Volume 3 in the ongoing Audio Archive series from our favorite droney, krautrock inspired combo, Expo '70, whose recent Black Ohms record we made Record Of The Week. And heck we really could have (and maybe should have) made all of Expo '70's Records Of The Week. They all seem to be part of some epic swirling black sonic universe, each cd-r a satellite of sound circling a mysterious sonic black hole, every release another stage, another leap forward into the abyss, an ever expanding sea of deep black drones, of rumbling whirring drift, guitars and synths woven into vast expanses of starry sky shimmer, and underwater moonlight drift.
Volume 3 takes up right where number two left off, taking the glacial crush of SUNNO)), and the blissed out ambience of Popol Vuh, and fusing them into a thick undulating mass, an organic world of sound, painted in shades of grey and black, mesmerizing, hypnotic, lulling us into a black trance, carrying us off on a sluggish stream of downtuned blur and smeared soft focus melodies, these are lullabyes for dark stormy nights, this is meditation music for channeling the dark side.
At once heavy, and mysterious, thick, and buzzing, warm, and dark and expansive, almost metallic, blackened and blissful, ominous and intense, this is some seriously uneasy listening, dark music for dead souls, each track a step further into a dying black sun, into a bottomless black pit, a living sound that entrances, enthralls, ensorcels... we are unable to resist, we give in, we let go, we slowly sink into the inky blackness, letting the drones and rumbles and whirs, fill our ears, our lungs, wrapping us in a gauzy hazy swirl of low end, releasing our spirit from its earthly bonds, letting us pass over into a glorious and haunting otherworld of sound.
Another dark, heavy, blackened missive from these krautdrone innerspace explorers. And like the others, recommended.
Simple packaging, silver and black ink on cardstock, with printed insert. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
As regular readers of the aQ list can no doubt attest to, we sure do love droning guitars. Whether downtuned and mostly motionless, or frenzied and buzzing, or blown out and shimmery, there's just something about the sound of those steel strings vibrating projected through massive walls of amplification. There's the primal primeval sound itself, the actual drone, a sound found everywhere in nature, then there's the power, the amplification, this transformed sound. The drone is most certainly linked to the machinations of life and the universe, we can only imagine, the Big Bang resulted in an aeons-long drone that hung over the nascent Earth, the sound of insects, the growls of beasts, the rumble of thunder, the white noise of the surf, all harnessed and sculpted into a more modern, more human experience of sound, into actual music. But the best drone music, with the most resonance, is the music that conflates the two. That creates a listening experience, wherein we find ourselves drifting off, sometimes to some man made universe, of songs and sounds and music, sometimes to someplace wholly other, where the music looses itself from the strictures of composition and arrangement, and is allowed to float freely, to drift. It's then, that the music maker becomes more than a musician, more than a rock band, almost more like and esoteric, ethereal wrangler of sound. The magic is creating music, that sounds like it wasn't 'created' at all, but instead, was discovered, unearthed, or if created, not from guitars and 4-tracks and drums, but from some strange energy, or some alternate universe, the sounds become glimpses into other worlds, or peeks into the music maker's soul. In creating these sorts of sounds, the listener is inexorably drawn in, and pulled quite willingly into a whole new dimension, where unlike the creator, who may have meticulously assembled the various elements, they are allowed to wander, and wonder, to float and drift and get lost, to allow the sounds to unleash emotions, to open up their mind, their hear, maybe in some cases even their soul.
As you might imagine, and we've mentioned it before, the drone is a mercurial beast, and one not wrangled easily. There are plenty of comers, who feel like once you've conjured the drone, it does the work for you, but such is not the case, as is proven time and time again, by sonic alchemists like Expo '70, whose take on the drone is less monochromatic, less one dimensional, whose dronemusic is infused with elements of krautrock, spacerock, postrock, but all woven into vast black expanses of sound.
Even more than past Expo '70 releases, Black Ohms manages to create some impossible world of sound, that is at once dark and sinister and foreboding, yet somehow dreamlike and serene, a collection of tracks woven into a seemingly continuous sonic drift, beginning with a deep, almost corrosive buzz, pulsing and undulating, shot through with streaks of melody, layered and textured, looped and hypnotic, heavy and dense and in its own minimal way, quite brutal, before giving way to something much more tranquil, a sea of glimmering, harmonics, and deep drifting tones, here the guitar is revealed as just that, a guitar, its abstract chords and minimal riffage, clipped and effected, draped in reverb and delay, and allowed to unfurl into softly propulsive rhythms, and spider web-like textures, again, infused with subtle melody, and blurred, burnished shadings.
The record wanders through miniature otherworlds of atonal melody, of machine like click and chitter, fifties computer bleeps and bloops, soft chiming jammy summer sun guitars, before returning to the deep, dark drone for a nearly 35 minute two part finale. The first part, a fifteen minute return to the sound of the album opener, the guitar again distorted and dark, not so much riffing as buzzing, a Niblockian soundscape of overtones and harmonics, a warm blackened bed for the ethereal melodic drift above, streaks of glimmering melody, soft stretches of wispy ambience, laced with an almost buried, looped guitar figure, all subtly rhythmic, a distant throb, like the pulse of some buried giant, muted and mysterious, but supporting the whole delicate structure.
The second, a 20 minute slow burn, a crystalline assemblage of barely there rhythms, deep layers of shimmering drone, this is the sound of a million dronemusic cd-r's fully realized, a smoldering chunk of minimal propulsion, rife with strange, tape speeds shift, but instead of jarring, it only manages to make the sound woozy, slightly alien, underwater, glimmering melodies, sparkling like black diamonds, fields of soft static like clouds of tiny insects, deep soft swells like the ebb and flow of some otherworldy tide.
Imagine the most minimal krautrock record you own, dubbed over and over and over onto the shittiest tapes possible, left in the sun, then played back on a car stereo, with only one woofer, but then render that in ear popping hi fi. The sound may seem murky and muted, but it is most definitely by design, there is nothing low fidelity about the sound of Expo '70, because within the meticulously and deftly obscured sound world, lurk all manner of sonic mysteries, each suspended in an impossibly beautiful blurred constellation of sound, which in turn is left to drift across a vast expanse of Black Ohms.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Third missive from our new favorite modern ambient space rock / krautrocky outfit. As if there were even any other contenders. These guys (or this guy rather) came out of nowhere and just blew our fucking minds. Expo '70, aka Justin Wright, has, over the last few months. given us two full lengths of gloriously dreamy kraut infused dronemusic, looped cyclical guitars, thick waves of smeared riffs and muted murky FX. A heavier, dronier take on Eno, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel. This latest transmission from the deepest reaches of the Expo '70's universe, is by far the heaviest and most aggressive sounding yet, as if they decided to give the boys in SUNNO))) and Earth a run for their money. But this is not just some massive slab of caveman sludge, instead this is an ominous soundworld of thick coruscating waves of grinding low end guitar fuzz, roiling and churning, but with a propulsive inner pulse, like some lost Ash Ra jam dipped in tar, and launched into the ether. Or if the other two Expo '70 records were the sounds of drifting weightlessly through space, the stars a distant shimmer, everything muted and slowly shifting, like some huge black expanse of water, Center Of The Earth is the sound of the sky buckling, the galaxy fracturing, of being sucked into some mysterious other universe, a subterranean world beneath our visible existence, murky and turbulent, a darkness impenetrable except for a few swirling swaths of grey light, quickly tangled up in the dark, the endless drift into a black hole, the sound a reverberating whir, a massive resonant hum that thickens and intensifies, until you can feel the drone in your bones, every cell in your body vibrating sympathetically, until you slip into glorious blackness. The final track is like the aftermath, your ship a ruined wreckage, floating through the sky, just another piece of debris in a sky full of memories and regrets and ruin, a drifting blissed out space rock riff beneath abstract streaks of psychedelia, wrapped in a gauzy film, the rays of some alien sun lighting up the sky and wrapping you in warm shadows. So gorgeous.
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We were sent a whole batch of cd-r's from this mysterious group Expo '70, and all the various cd-r covers were designed to look like old seventies krautrock or free jazz records. Which definitely grabbed our attention. Plus they're called Expo '70, so while we weren't exactly sure what to expect, we were definitely thinking it was bound to be good. And boy were we right. This is good. Great in fact. But that wasn't all, the faux vintage covers and the band name ended up being seriously indicative of the sounds within. Gorgeous drifting ethereal krautrocky ambience is what Expo '70 is all about, and eyes closed, you'd be hard pressed to not think this was some Ash Ra Tempel disc or some long lost A.R. and The Machines lp. Crafted entirely from guitars, sitar and Moog, each track here is some sort of lengthy, mesmerizingingly blissed out minimal drone jam. Guitar figures are looped into hypnotic cycles, over shimmery whirls of fuzzy sound and distant drones, the looped riffs slowly shifting and gently changing shape. It's almost like some sort of new age space rock Steve Reich. Swirling FX surround warm deep guitar tones floating weightless in a glistening expanse of muted color and twinkling sonic sparkles. So completely blissful and dreamlike and captivating. One of our favorite new discoveries.
Fans of far out krautrock, deep dark drone, and outerspace guitar exploration will be in absolute heaven, or at the very least in some darkened room, in a trance, drifting off to some druggy dreamy other dimension...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've sort of been inundated with dreamy new sounds from this one man drugblissdrone krautrock revivalist outfit. We're definitely not complaining though. We absolutely can NOT get enough of Expo 70's drawn out guitarscapes, extended spaced out kraut raga drones, churning and pulsing and throbbing, spacey synths and thick rumbling guitars all tangled into haunting sonic transmissions. We're just sort of scrambling to get them all reviewed. So we figured we'd start with this one, the latest, a two track missive that is so dense and layered it might as well be two HUNDRED tracks. Especially since we find ourselves setting the cd player to repeat and just drifting off...
The two tracks here are further examples of Expo 70's washed out space rock SUNNO))) sound, both tracks begin as soft swirls of synth and FX, tripped out and abstract, keening high end, rumbling low end, guitars wiggle and squiggle, all very chaotic but still drone-y and meditative, the first track doesn't deviate too much, the guitars are warm throbs, underpinned by a thick wash of buzzing synth, eventually sloughing off all the FX, leaving just a gorgeous Niblock like minimal drone. But the second track, is quickly subsumed by huge walls of crumbling fuzzed out slow motion riffage, super processed though, so instead of sounding downtuned or even heavy, it just sounds even MORE spacey, and thick and warm and druggy, a single riff, pulled apart and looped over and over and over, super mesmerizing, droning and drifting along through a field of distant fuzz and buzz and warm swaths of subtle synth, eventually fading out leaving nothing but tolling bells... So great.
Packaged in thick textured blue paper mini 3" sleeves, with a printed (band name, label info, liner notes) Japanese style obi.
And as always, these are of course SUPER LIMITED -- just a mere 100 copies, of which we got a majority share! -- and will most likely fly out of here...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another gorgeous slab of spaced out krautrocky ambience from Expo' 70, this one a live, completely improvised performance back in 2004, with the band expanded to a trio. And if folks' reaction to the first three Expo 70's releases is anything to go by, then these will be flying out of here in no time as well.
For those yet to discover the sublime joys of Expo '70, these guys (usually just one guy, Justin Wright) traffic in glistening dreamlike kosmiche drift. A krautrock that is less about propulsion and rhythm and more about texture and ambience, think Ash Ra Tempel, AR & The Machines, Tangerine Dream, Eno, Popol Vuh. Guitars aren't strummed and picked, they are sort of allowed to unwind, long glistening strands of reverberating buzz unfurl and float into the hazy ether. Synthesizers unleash a similarly disembodied sonic vibe, soft clouds of fuzzy whir and distant chordal warmth. Very much the sonic equivalent to drifting down a warm summer stream, on your back, watching the clouds drift by, the trees on the shore shimmer and sway. Or maybe more accurately, floating in the vacuum of space, everything weightless, untethered and drifting lazily through the inky blackness. The light of stars and suns bends and twists, slowly cycling through the visible spectrum, disobeying all laws of physics, wrapping you in a thick swirl of sonic brilliance. This music has to be the work of some immortal group of dronelords, sitting in their multidimensional fortress, atop some mysterious lost mountain, who in their infinite wisdom, allow their dreamlike drones and angelic ambience to fall from the sky and settle over us like a light dusting of snow...
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We LOVE Expo '70. They're playing in SF this week, two shows that will be over by the time you read this. And we might not even get to go, 'cause we're too busy writing reviews, like this one... oh the bitter irony. But even if we miss them live (which would be a shame) we're still in Expo '70 heaven 'cause they've brought us two brand new cd-rs!! (And, there's also a new release on a real cd too, Animism, which we'll list next time!) Wow. That's a lot of Expo '70, but their krautrock inspired instrumental ambience is an expansive sound, that can easily sprawl across the full length of a cd or cd-r in just a track or two...and therefore can also spread beyond, occupying several near-simultaneous releases with no diminishment to our enjoyment. We're happy to hear it go on, and on, and on eternally. Expo overload, no, too much is never enough.
So, this one... Mystical Amplification. With song titles making reference to such things as "Mountainous Caverns Of Black Arts" and Konstantin Raudive's research into EVP (a la the Ghost Orchid) it's easy enough to say things like this music is haunting and mystical... mystical amplification, heck that's the title. The Expo '70 guys are doing all our work for us. The four long tracks (we like how the songs are split into a "side 1" and "side 2" when listed on the sleeve, even though it's of course all on one side of this cd-r) are all one-take improvs, with mainman Justin Wright on electric guitar ("with plenty of effects", all right) and his current Expo associate McKinley Jones playing a Moog synth. Spaced out and psychedelic trips much more on the "kosmische" tip than their Kansas City origin would suggest... this is all buzzing droning bliss, no drums or vocals to reign it in to human scale, just cosmic textures galore, often soothing, and a little bit ominous. There are moments that vaguely sound like Robert Fripp or Eddie Hazel jamming with Klaus Schulze, both of 'em dreamy and drowsy from drugs. Or imagine a mellower SUNNO))), teamed up with Space Machine, perhaps, getting all yogic on us with some abstract instrumental, electronic om-chants. Sleepy, slowly swirling, hissing and purring over quietly churning low-end depths...
By the way, this is slightly (a buck) more expensive than all the other Expo '70 cd-rs 'cause of the attractive vinyl-style gatefold packaging.
We were sent a whole bunch of cd-r's by the mysterious Expo '70 a few months back, each one with a strange cool cover, one was some seventies styled naked females making out, another (this one in fact) was an homage to one of those seventies Actuel jazz record label album sleeves. We were already kind of sold, but then we threw them on, and WOAH!! Not at all what we expected. We were imagining some sort of droney free noise whatever, but instead, we got an earful of some timeless cosmic space music, some lost ambient krautrock. So spaced out and lovely. We listed Exquisite Lust on the last list and everyone went nuts for it, so we decided to list another one, and it's just as good. A bit heavier on the guitar, but still completely and utterly droney and dreamlike.
Surfaces is a non-stop journey through inner space, an abstract world of drifting guitars, stretched out into whispy drifts of shimmery ambience, strummed steel strings reverberate over muted propulsive thrum, huge glistening expanses of thick flowing whir oozes from rumbling amplifiers, grinding low end fuzz slithers in and around wandering bass burble, bits of guitar melody break into fragments and float downstream, over a rippling undercurrent of spaced out FX. Totally mesmerizing and ethereal, but strangely rhythmic. Channeling the sprit of Eno, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, A.R. And The Machines and other kosmik travellers, Expo '70 weave guitars, Moogs, sitars, and loads of effects into an expansive ambient shimmer, allowing sonic ripples to slowly spread out into the ether. So good. Anyone who bought the first one will probably need this one too. And all you spaced out interdimensional Kosmiche drone explorers could hardly do better than Expo '70 as the soundtrack to your late night, outer space, journeys into the unknown...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is one of those releases that we would normally get maybe 100 copies of, maybe more, but this baby was strictly limited to 200, of which we got about a quarter of the pressing, but hell this is Expo '70, one of, if not our very favorite purveyor of heavy blissed out droney space kraut doom drift, AND this particular release, cassette only, is a sort of addendum to the Black Ohms cd (featuring outtakes from the Black Ohms sessions) which we made Record Of The Week a while back. And of which we sold crazy amounts. So apologies for the folks who don't manage to snag one of these. We always try to get as many copies of things as we can, but it seems that no matter how many we get, it's never enough, and often labels don't want to give so much of the pressing to just one place. But we do try, every time, to get enough for everybody, so again apologies for the fact that these will probably be gone in a heartbeat.
BUT, for the 25 of you who do managed to snag one of these, you will be in total kraut drone space out bliss rock heaven. From rumbling sludgey doom drift, to looped psych shimmer, to pulsing slow burning swells, to smoldering slabs of white hot buzz, more of what we freaked out about on the Black Ohms disc. Dark, dolorous, heavy, hypnotic, even the outtakes are mindblowing.
Beautifully packaged too, full color printed sleeves, the tape and sleeve wrapped in a printed vellum obi INSIDE the case, each one hand numbered. And LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! We have 25.
Sorry.
Latest from aQ faves Expo '70, masters of modern krautdrone, every record another chapter in their expanding sonic history of the universe, a tale in sound, of suns and planets, of drifting in space, of galaxies expanding, of stars dying, of black holes, and endless expanses, of timelessness and infinity.
Two tracks, each a slow building epic, the first rife with deep chordal swells, simple strummed acoustic guitars, crumbling distorted leads, mournful melancholy melodies, distant streaks of feedback, abstract whir and deep minimal rumble, a gorgeous slab of outer space drone folk, like a more spaced out kraut version of Kiss The Anus, or like a new weird America Santana fused with Hawkwind at their most acoustic and blissed out. The second track is a much dronier affair, a spaced out soundscape of rumbling, buzzing, shimmering synths, layered and textured, rhythmic and hypnotic. Like Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh, but much darker and buzzier, but just as blissy and space-y. The sound building and building into a heaving wall of synths and guitars, various whirs and rumbles and tangled up minimal melodies, all wavering textures and timbres, eventually joined by strange outer space FX, and more pronounced funereal melodies. Some truly gorgeous spacey shit for sure.
For this cd-r, Expo '70 have teamed up with Italian drone rockers Be Invisible Now, who have a similar sound, but definitely manages to make it their own. Beginning like some Goblin Argento soundtrack, all creepy synths and swells of black ambience, delicate little spacey melodies and swooshing FX, that swirl and build, the track begins to distort and crumble, the effects becoming more agitated and intense, the whole track thickening, until drums come in, offering up a tribal framework, around which the sea of synths swirls and shimmers, a mysterious rhythmic space rock ritual, which quickly fades out, leaving the various layers of synths to slow down, to slip away, to darken and crumble, leaving just a soft, fading buzz.
The second BIN! track begins all heavy and distorted, almost like some spacier Wolf Eyes, wrapped in swirling effects, anchored by simple pounding percussion, the synths getting more intense and more buzzy, thick and blown out, the programmed rhythms growing skittery and chaotic, everything louder and more dense, more distorted, FX everywhere, the track erupting into some strange noise drenched new wave, like the soundtrack to some French new wave horror film, or some New Order remix rejected for being to noisy and fucked up and scary. Awesome.
A pretty good intercontinental space rock, krautdrone matchup for sure. Packaged in a full color eco-wallet digipak style sleeve, and of course LIMITED.
Another gorgeous chunk of spacey tripped out downtuned space kraut doom from aQ faves Expo '70. This time they're sharing a 7" with another favorite of ours, the droney, drifty I Am Seamonster.
Expo '70's track begins super minimal and SUNNO))) like, a slow motion riff, the guitar thick and heavy and distorted, riding a single chord, while all around effects whirl and swirl and streak, very mantra like and hypnotic, spaced out and druggy, part way through a second guitar offers some melodic counterpoint, some woozy spidery lysergic minor key leads that sound sun baked even as they drift through the inky blackness, the sound managing to somehow sound both desert and space-y simultaneously.
We hadn't heard anything from I Am Seamonster since their (sadly) now out of print Nebulum cd-r. The track here seems to expand on the IAS sound on Nebulum, crafting a gorgeous landscape of deep guitar swells, each one wreathed in different effects, crumbly and buzzy, blown out and blurred, the sound at its peak is white hot, but occasionally drift back to something cooler and washed out. Layers of high end settle atop the undulating rumbles and whirs, deep percussive guitars chime and ring out, everything bathed in a blurry shoegazey haze, the guitars slipping and shimmering, the result almost orchestral. So so nice.
Beautiful packaging too, silk screened, metallic blue and silver on black, the back side die cut to reveal the record and sleeve.
Expo '70 just keep getting heavier and heavier. Beginning as a spaced out drone-heavy krautrock-worshipping band, with swirling synths and drifting FX laden guitars, the band has gradually been altering their sound, guitars getting heavier and more distorted, the spaciness swallowed up by huge slow moving black walls of rumble and buzz, the low end slowly but surely taking over, their music drifting ever closer to some sort of SUNNO)))-baked crawl. This new record, a split with SF based Rahdunes, finds the band moving still further into their own dark sonic galaxy of black heaviness.
Cursory listens will reveal just that, a grinding roiling whirl of distorted guitars and throbbing bass rumble, but this is Expo '70, so even when they're channeling their inner doomsludge demons, they can't seem to help infusing their lugubrious crawl with streaks of outer space shimmer, buried melodies, subtly shifting textures, sure this is intense and heavy and loooooooow, but it's also blissed out, and fuzzy and dreamy and in its own weird way still sort of space-y and krautrocky.
Rahdunes take the high road, literally. It's almost like the two bands decided to split the frequency range right down the middle, with Expo '70 taking the low, and Rahdunes taking the high. Their tracks counter Expo's Earth-y throb, with some glistening druggy folky space drift. A swirling expanse of druggy ambience, guitars wreathed in effects drift by. vocals moan and wail, through thick curtains of fuzz and buzz and delay and reverb, percussion shuffles way off in the background. Imagine the Manson Family, and the Beach Boys, high as fuck, sitting in the grass, by the ocean, their faces lit by flickering firelight, as they chant and jam and conjure up some primal space drone energy, and you'd basically be tapped into whatever lifeforce feeds Rahdunes. The rest of the disc gets a little more rhythmic, reminding us of No Neck and Sunburned Hand, but never losing that bleary eyed druggy wonder, looped guitar, stumbling rhythms, more ethereal chanting, finishing off with a fuzzed out murky dreamscape of muted melodies, soft focus tones, buzzing synths, sputtering percussion, mumbled vocalizing and shimmery feedback, somehow perfectly complimenting Expo '70's doomic crawl on the flipside.
Gorgeous silver and black matte covers. And first time on vinyl for anything Expo '70!!!
Finally! A new record from one of our favorite purveyors of kosmische kraut-psych and spaced out synthscapery, Expo '70! AND it's on one of our favorite labels, Essence (along with a new one from Japanese psych crew Up-Tight, elsewhere on this week's list). And while we'll have the standard version of this new Expo '70, this is in fact a PRE-ORDER for the super deluxe, super fancy, handmade BOX SET version, which comes not only with a bonus disc, but also housed in a crazy pyramid shaped box. It's limited to 99 copies and that's IT. We might be able to get 20, but we're only getting as many as we get pre-orders for, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box now, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item). And if you're already a fan, you're definitely gonna want one of these, the pyramid box is super striking, psychedelic inks and textures, in a carefully constructed 'handmade cosmic pyramidal boxset', that unfolds revealing still more artwork, and along with the new record proper, it also includes an exclusive bonus album, a cd-r called All Hues From Beneath A Velvet Cloud, and is ONLY available in this box. So needless to say, Expo nerds grab one before they are gone.
As for Virtually From The Unknown, it's another gorgeously sprawling cosmic sonic missive, the opening track clocking in at 31 minutes, a smoldering slow burning epic, all swirling synths, cascading keyboard textures, minimum motorik drumming, layers and drones, the sound eventually building to a dark dolorous psych-kraut drift, and then exploding into some seriously muscular space rock, all deep rumbling drones, powerful drumming, thick almost SUNNO))) like riffage, eventually launching into a full on navy psych blowout, all wild drum damage and thick squalls of freakout guitar, tethered to a furious galloping groove. Worth it for that track alone for sure, but there's of course more. The stonery psych of "Closet Full Of Candles" is a loping space doom juggernaut, with some wild distort leads, and some sick, thick bass buzz, sorta like Kyuss via Hawkwind, slowly working its way up to another in-the-red crescendo. Finally, there's the 17 + minute closer, awesomely titled "Planet Ego, The Astral Return To Yourself", which lays down distant guitar rumbles, beneath swirls of alien FX and squiggly laser blast blort, the background guitar buzz gradually gaining momentum, a thick slow moving swell, eventually overtaking the sound effects, and finishing off as a blurred, downtuned space-drone, before gradually drifting off, and leaving shimmery contrails of fast fading FX. So good, of course. And as we mentioned above, we'll be able to get about 20 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know that too, and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is specifically for folks who want to nab one of the boxes before they're gone for good.
Normally we would spread out multiple releases by the same band over several lists and several weeks, but since these are so limited and folks are always so excited about new Expo 70 stuff, we figured fuck it, let's just do it, THREE new Expo 70 releases, all different formats, and surprisingly different sound.
This tape is limited to 70 copies. We got exactly HALF, it's already sold out at the label, so these are THE last copies anywhere. And it's awesome. Less heavy than some of the other Expo's, Awakening, features some super stripped down drumming (or drum machine, hard to tell), locked into an endless groove, pulsing over a swirling spacescape of smeared riffs and fragmented melodies, it sounds a bit like Goblin, very soundtracky and otherworldly, space-y and mysterious, and not at all cheesy, more sort of classic new age / krautrock, think Klaus Schultze, scoring some super abstract French sci-fi flick from the sixties, and you'll sort of get the vibe.
Like all Expo 70 stuff, dark and dreamy, warm and warbly, drone-y and hypnotic, but the addition of drums really adds a new dimension, and the soundscapes swirling around the groove seem to be endlessly shifting and transforming. Awesome stuff as always. Total blissed out new age spacey krautiness, as only Expo 70 can do it. WAY recommended. And it's also recommended that if you want one of these you don't dawdle, as we mentioned before, this is LIMITED TO ONLY 70 COPIES! AND WE GOT HALF!! Already sold out and out of print, so you get one shot at these. Nicely packaged in a hand colored psychedelic fold out sleeve.
This latest cosmic missive of astral axe exploration and celestial synth trippery finds Expo 70 once again in one man band mode (after a handful of releases as a duo). For this improvised sonic excursion, it's once again just Expo 70 mainman Justin Wright, manning the controls (which in this case, means guitar, analog drum machine and synthesizers), and weaving thick droned out heaviness alongside more abstract shimmer. The opening track "mark Of The Rising Mantis", begins with a swirl of bleeps and bloops, a constant cascade of glittering electronics, hazy and spacey, when all of a sudden, the guitar comes swooping in, distorted and crumbling, the vibe thick and SUNN-like, we were prepared for some serious epic dirgery, but instead, it fades out after a few cycles, only to drift directly into "Luminous Traveler", which much more serene and meditative, a muted starfield of percolating melodies, a slow build to something much more seventies new age krautrock sounding, spidery guitars wound around thick cinematic synth swirls, a gauzy droned out alien raga that builds and builds before fading back into the ether, the sound thick and heavily layered (the tracks here created from multiple improvs), dense and dark and ominously dreamy, like other Expo jams, the soundtrack to drifting into the blackness of space.
After a brief bit of washed out abstract outer space ambience, chugging guitars floating in a field of flute like melodies and woozy electronic pulsars, a deepening drone, growing ever more dense, the record shifts gears a bit, with "Backmasking Deeper Than Darkness", which starts out as another bleary bit of guitarsynth drift, only to quickly gain momentum, the sound coalescing into an old school style soundtracky synth soundtracky synthscape, pulsing melodies suddenly bolstered by the appearance of the drum machine, a murky throb, that gives the track a sinister motorik momentum, that plays out like the score to some chase through the stars. Those drum machines move to the fore on the final track, the evocatively titled "Pulsing Rings Of Ice", which like the previous tracks, definitely have us imagining some strange alien world, in this case, an abandoned ice planet, where the listener is stranded alone, or ALMOST alone. Ominous and brooding, the skeletal almost-rhythm anchoring the billowing clouds of warm chordal thrum in the first few minutes, builds to a tranced out krautdrone pulse, a skittery stripped down beat that drives this sprawl of future-synth tension, super cinematic, the final chase through the icy caves beneath the surface, flickering shadows, and a terrifyingly unknowable future.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!! These are very likely the only copies we'll be able to get. Pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl, and includes a download code!!
It's been a little while since we've heard anything new from Justin Wright and his interplanetary sonic soundship Expo 70, and technically this isn't a proper new record, instead this is two live sets captured on tour in 2009, when Expo 70 were in New York, two 30+ minute sets of hazy, swirly, ambient kosmische drift.
The first set, from Ithaca, begins with a wild squall of lead guitar, and sod crowd sounds, before the duo (featuring Matt Hill of Umberto!) get down to business, unfurling a hazy sprawl of tangled melodies, and softly pulsing guitar, a lush backdrop for some seriously soaring psychedelic leads, all washed out and lysergic, like some classic Santana jam stretched way out and hurled into space, the whole thing gradually getting more and more intense and distorted and aggressive, the bass throbbing, the guitar howling, a churning heavy crescendo that quickly dissipates into a super ethereal stretch of ambient shimmer, warm clouds of muted effects and softly swirling electronics, gradually fading into nothingness.
The Manhattan show begins with some hazy crystalline drift, soft clouds of warm guitar drifting over the top, laced with little curlicues of effects, and slow drifting slabs of melodic whir, this track is way more sci-fi, edging into Umberto territory, getting all soundtracky and cinematic, lots of swooping electronic bleeps and bloops, all over some super minimal dubbed out percussion, the second half of the set way more low slung and slithery, deep cavernous bass, distant rumbles, soft streaks of synth, lots of softly swirling layers, slipping through clouds of spaced out electronics, and then a long stretch of almost choral liturgical sounding organs, all droned out and meditative, growing ever more hazy and indistinct. So nice.
We're definitely dying for a proper new full length, but these two chunks of primo sci-fi psychedelic kraut drone drift will definitely hold us over for now!
Super nice packaging, a glossy six panel digipaks with various images from the 2009 tour, from whence these recordings came.
Now available on vinyl!!
Third missive from our new favorite modern ambient space rock / krautrocky outfit. As if there were even any other contenders. These guys (or this guy rather) came out of nowhere and just blew our fucking minds. Expo '70, aka Justin Wright, has, over the last few months. given us two full lengths of gloriously dreamy kraut infused dronemusic, looped cyclical guitars, thick waves of smeared riffs and muted murky FX. A heavier, dronier take on Eno, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel. This latest transmission from the deepest reaches of the Expo '70's universe, is by far the heaviest and most aggressive sounding yet, as if they decided to give the boys in SUNNO))) and Earth a run for their money. But this is not just some massive slab of caveman sludge, instead this is an ominous soundworld of thick coruscating waves of grinding low end guitar fuzz, roiling and churning, but with a propulsive inner pulse, like some lost Ash Ra jam dipped in tar, and launched into the ether. Or if the other two Expo '70 records were the sounds of drifting weightlessly through space, the stars a distant shimmer, everything muted and slowly shifting, like some huge black expanse of water, Center Of The Earth is the sound of the sky buckling, the galaxy fracturing, of being sucked into some mysterious other universe, a subterranean world beneath our visible existence, murky and turbulent, a darkness impenetrable except for a few swirling swaths of grey light, quickly tangled up in the dark, the endless drift into a black hole, the sound a reverberating whir, a massive resonant hum that thickens and intensifies, until you can feel the drone in your bones, every cell in your body vibrating sympathetically, until you slip into glorious blackness. The final track is like the aftermath, your ship a ruined wreckage, floating through the sky, just another piece of debris in a sky full of memories and regrets and ruin, a drifting blissed out space rock riff beneath abstract streaks of psychedelia, wrapped in a gauzy film, the rays of some alien sun lighting up the sky and wrapping you in warm shadows. So gorgeous.
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