More druggy space-y kraut drone bliss from Justin Wright and his Expo 70, here expanded to a duo for one track, and a trio for the other, a dizzying drifty blend of minimal guitar rumble and Moog and organ whir, peppered with glistening shards of sonic starlight, buried melodies, blurred into a gorgeous ever expanding expanse of hushed new age drift, not nearly as heavy as some past outings, although the first track, a whopping 30 minute epic, does build to a soft blackened roar, although that roar is muted and dulled into something closer to rib cage rattling thrum. Regardless, it's transcendent and sublime, subtly heavy, and utterly cosmic.
The second track is another nearly half hour exploration of inner sonic space, heavy on the organs this time, thick layered buzz and rumble and whir, flecked with strange little stuttery melodies, a sheet of softly swirling effects draped over slow motion organ melodies, slowly shimmering textures, before the track begins to grow ominous, the sound of a darkening sun, bits of high end glimmer throughout, while the core blackens and expands, the sound shifting into pulses, a strangely surreal sci-fi throb, haunting and harrowing, a caustic cloud that slowly dissipates, leaving vapor trails of soft streaked FX flecked buzz and a stretch of skeletal rhythm, slowly fading out into a horzion of minimal muted high end shimmer.
THE CD-R IS LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! THE TAPE IS PROBABLY MORE LIMITED THAN THAT! Housed in cool red sleeves printed in gold metallic ink!
Another gloriously spaced out missive from one of our favorite purveyors of space-kraut-drone, Expo 70, aka Justin Wright, with occasional help from a small cadre of fellow sonic explorers. This one disappeared in no time, sold out in a flash, limited to 100 copies maybe. The label agreed to whip up another batch just for us, but once these are gone, you're out of luck, so grab one while you can, cuz it's another good'un. Then again, we've yet to experience a bad one from Wright.
Three tracks, three movements, each an extended part of Expo's Galaxy Of Mysticism, the parts named Altar Of Mystic Rites, Entrance To The Outer Circle, and Central Sphere Of The Mystical Galaxy, which should give you an idea of what sort of druggy, spacey, heart of the sun shit we're talking about here. Spiralling strands of guitar reach out into the warm whirling blackness, looped effects pulse and throb, the sound crystalline and delicate, but subtly ominous as well, hypnotic, mesmerizing, and dreamily psychedelic.
The second movement amps up the energy a little, a thick wash of whirring organ is the foundation, for high end squiggles and spidery melodies, the sound growing thicker and thicker, the underlying drone getting more and more dense, finally giving way to the closing movement, a swirling cloud of chordal swells, and layered shimmer, all held together by the simple pound of a drum machine, the track quickly growing more freaked out and psychedelic, lysergic leads stretching out amidst streaks of glitched out and swooping space FX, the guitars finally loosed and offering up heaving walls of crumbling doomic distortion. Heavy and spacey and divine.
Seriously transcendent spaced out kraut psych... and INSANELY LIMITED, these are the last copies ever, cool hand screened splatter sleeves with pasted on logo, and mini printed insert.
It's been harder and harder to know what to write about Expo 70 records lately. Besides being uber prolific, we've pretty much exhausted out psychedelic stoner space rock thesaurus. Thankfully, this new one changes things up enough to give us something new to work with. Mostly the addition of rhythm, which the band have employed in the past, but never to such an extent. Sure they remain spacey, and psychedelic, and new age-y, and drifty and dreamy, and druggy, and washed out, hazy and gauzy and cosmic and kosmiche, and we could go on, but here, they open up their latest record with what might be their most chaotic and sonically dense jam yet. Starting off all stumbly and abstract, with skittery programmed beats, and loosely strummed guitars, some amp buzz and bits of glitch and random crunch, but then those sounds gradually begin to coalesce, the guitars super reverbed, the rhythms looped and mesmeric, the guitars getting more intense, and more driving, multiple loops and melodies layered, eventually some proper riffs entering the equation, churning beneath clouds of those looped melodies, all the while, that rhythm skitters away, the song getting louder and louder, more intense, easily on of the heaviest things we've heard from these guys in a while, bordering on White Hills / Heads territory there for a minute, before fading back into something much more tranced out and meditative.
And while the rest of the record isn't quite so dense or heavy, the songs definitely display both a cool sort of jammy looseness, as well a penchant for something darker and more dense than usual. "Seven Serpents" minus some spidery guitars is a lush undulating expanse of layered synths, and warm whirling dronemusic, definitely cosmic, and spaced out, minimal, and super mesmerizing. "Growing Mushrooms Of Potency" starts off with a sky full of BBC Radiophonic Workshop / sci-fi bleeps and bloops, before another lo-fi skittery rhythm comes in, and then finally some low slung bass, and some shimmery organ, and we're in full on intergalactic drift mode, dodging stray FX and clouds of celestial glimmer, and then at the very end, the sound shifts, and becomes intensely dark and ominous, like some sort of soundtracky Umberto style creepdrone, which fades out WAY to soon. And then finally, "Heartfelt Moon Tripper" finishes things off with what begins as a hazy big of new age-y shimmer, all glistening crystalline clouds and warm whirring chordal drifts, until about half way through, a dark heartbeat like pulse surfaces, and dense little guitar tangles begin to loop and layer, until the hazy opening layers are shed completely, and replaced with a deep ominous thrum, wound around that sinister pulse, all surrounded by streaks of jagged melody and howling echo drenched sheets of guitar swirl, until a brief bit of Zombi / Goblin like cinematic synthscapery ushers the song to its more ethereal conclusion.
Cassette version coming soon too, btw.
What more can we say about these guys that we haven't already. Masters of divine sci-fi spacekraut dronemusic, sprawling epics that drift heavenward, guitars swirl and pulse, bass throbs and rumbles, rhythms don't pound or shuffle as much as pulse, a gloriously cosmic ur-rock that is not about rocking at all, but instead about sitting back and drifting off, letting the music lull you into a state of suspended animation, moving inward before moving outward, expanding like a new universe being born. All of the above imagery is especially apt to describe Mother Universe Has Birthed Her Last Cosmos, a one track, 20 minute space drone kraut jam from our beloved Expo 70. The main guitar part is surprisingly active, as is the bass, there's a definite groove here, the song has propulsion, and moves with purpose, the sound of a timelapse camera capturing the stars blinking out one at a time, viewed through a capsule full of bong smoke. Dreamy druggy and divine.
But it's not all drift here, about 8 or 9 minutes in, an old drum machine rears up and unfurls a looped beat, the guitars lock in, and suddenly this is some sort of transcendent drugged out hypnospace loop, which almost sounds like a skipping Hawkwind record, so completely mesmerizing and AWESOME. Eventually the drums drift off, and leave the throbbing bass and shimmering guitars to complete the journey on their own.
LIMITED TO 111 COPIES! We got 40 of those, and won't be able to get more. So get while the getting's good. And like all Universal Tongue releases, the packaging is super cool, full color inserts in little mini 5" high clear dvd sleeves, each one hand numbered.
Second of two new releases from Fedora Corpse, and one of THREE new jams from Expo 70, but we're sure as shit not complaining, we can't get enough of Expo's blissed out space rock kraut drone dreaminess.
Lately, it seems like Expo 70 has been leaning toward a heavier, darker sound, dabbling in SUNN-like walls of sound, letting guitars unwind in thick churning blackened swells, but for Night Flights (can't help but think of that bad ass late night video show of the almost same name), the sound is much more blissy and drifty and ambient, at least at first. The two looooong songs that make up side one, are hushed and delicate and crystalline, definitely evoking the sound of outer space, it's not hard to imagine drifting aimlessly and weightlessly through a black expanse of starless sky, the deep black turning almost blue, suffused with the burnished and nearly buried glow of eons old starlight. Tranquil, and contemplative, hypnotic, definitely new age-y, in the best possible sense, a soundtrack for astral projection.
But then the flipside is something completely different, introducing some drum machines, and crafting a swirling chaos of high end glitch and squelch, clouds of bloops and bleeps and swoops, looped and skittery, over spidery minor key guitars and soft warm melodic swells, sounding almost like a Sunroof! jam being slowly drifting into it's constituent parts, some sort of sonic super nova in slow motion. The second track on the B side finds Expo touching once again on the dark and the heavy, the blackened buzz of distorted guitars and thick looped dronescapes, slow burning, slow building, the guitars grow in intensity, until they're locked into a woozy mesmerizing loop, over which, strange atonal guitars tangle and drift, a sort of obtuse bit of lugubrious shredding, before those strangled leads drop out leaving just the initial buzzing swells, now laced with burning hot streaks of high end distorted shimmer. Gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Pressed on thick blue/grey colored vinyl, with cool, super striking one color silk screened sleeves.
What more to say about Justin Wright and his Expo 70 that we haven't already? Every record so far a deep dense slab of drifting droning outer space krautdrone heaviness. And this 22 minute single song ep is no exception.
Taking the glacial downtuned rumble of SUNNO))), and sending it spinning into the outer reaches of the galaxy, Wright crafts another expansive psychedelic, smoldering downtuned dronescape, merging a blissy dreaminess with a seriously caustic heaviness, the two blend and blur into one single epic long form drone, flecked with delicate melodies, constantly shifting textures, overtones surfacing all over the place, the entire track a single heaving organic whole, throbbing and pulsing and whirring and rumbling, if they decided to remake Cosmos (how could you without Carl Sagan?!?!?) updated and modernized, this would be the soundtrack for all of the various and glorious goings on in the universe, exploding supernovas, births of planets, swirling black holes, this is the sound of blackness extending into space, spreading out endlessly, forever and forever.
Gorgeous and breathtaking, Expo 70 is definitely creating some of the most gorgeous dronemusic we've ever heard. And Ostara is yet another fantastic addition to Wright's stunning, and constantly expanding body of work.
LIMITED TO 102 COPIES. Comes in a mini plastic sleeve, with a diecut triangular insert that folds out into a pyramid. Cool!
This ultra limited, double 3"cd-r from one of our favorite space synth kraut drone explorers disappeared before we could get our hands on any copies at all. Thankfully, both the band and the label offered to do another (equally limited) pressing of the cd-r's, just for aQuarius, so we got a bunch of those, and we also got a handful of the cassette tape version, just released on Expo 70's own label, so this is definitely your last chance to grab one of these cd-r sets, odds are the tapes won't be around long either, and by now, you know pretty much everything Expo 70 is worth owning.
And Psychic Funeral is indeed another primo slab of glistening washed out space drone drift. Two 18+ minute missives from the farthest reaches of the solar system, the first, a hushed glistening sprawl, all stretched out tones, and upper register shimmer, minimal melodies wrapped around clouds of chordal whir, deep cavernous drones underpinning constantly shifting streaks, buried pulses, swirly and tangled, almost cinematic sounding stretches of lost soundtrack music, haunting and mysterious and otherworldly, building to a buzzing finale, before slipping into a strange looped outro.
The second disc / side is another wide open starscape of melodic fragments, of prismatic glimmer, a softly blurred expanse of tonal color and softly heaving swells, a Tangerine Dream of kaleidoscopic swirls and layered sonic smears, eventually billowing into some soft focus psychedelia, the guitars unfurling some gorgeously chiming reverb drenched melodic tendrils, before drifting back in the blackness of space. So gorgeous.
Killer packaging too, the cd version features hand screened 3" discs, housed in a folded plastic pouch with a full color insert. Tape has a swank full color sleeve. And again VERY VERY LIMITED.
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What else to say really about Expo 70 that we haven't already? Every new release is another gorgeous, softly psychedelic transmission from soft distant corner of the universe. Stray broadcasts traveling across the expanses of space, a sort of timeless music that sounds more like it just IS, and always WAS, more than it sounds created. Justin Wright who is Expo 70, seems to dismantle his guitar at the molecular level, once cracked open, his now rended axe emits a stream of notes and melodies, opens a portal, unleashing a slow burning black fog of sound and texture, through which one can observe and experience other worlds and alternate dimensions.
Heavy crumbling blackness settles atop hushed drifts of crystalline melodic shimmer, eventually transforming into something much more songy, a super druggy spaced out psych jam of the highest order, sounding a bit like Santana fronting SUNNO))), dense rumbling buzz drenched swells beneath super emotional almost wailing leads.
The flipside is another otherworldly songsuite, this one divided into three parts, slipping from minimal and looped to crushing and doomy to hushed and murky and space-y. The opener is a gorgeous spaced out bit of repetitive, stripped down new age kraut rock, a main pulse throbs beneath swirls of warm keyboards, simple chordal strum and muted electronics, super hypnotic and mesmerizing and quite possibly one of our favorite Expo jams yet.
The second track is a thick roiling swirl of crumbling distorted heaviness, slow sprawling chords overlapping into a doomy textured expanse of tarpit riff fueled ambience, before dissipating into part three, a murmured post industrial soundscape that sounds like a field recording of some derelict space station set to music. Creepy and haunting and also quite lovely.
Killer packaging, thick full color sleeve, with a printed full color Japanese style obi, inside, a 12"x24" silk screened poster! [The first bunch came with a bonus cd-r, featuring a live set, recorded on KFJC back in 2008, but those are gone, this is JUST the lp, but heck, that should be more than enough!]
More epic and dense heart-of-the-sun blissed out heavy space drones from Expo 70. And the thing is, we're running out of superlatives, we can only gush so much before we run out of new things to say, which is especially difficult when every record is as good as if not better than the last. So do forgive us if we're repeating ourselves, but hell, any one into spaced out heaviness, and droneprogbliss, who hasn't heard Expo 70 is missing out on one might just be their favorite band EVER.
Like past records, Expo 70 suck the essence out of every Hawkwind record, the soul of every Tangerine Dream record, and filter it through filter of SUNNO))) black hole heaviness, and come up with their own unique psychedelic space rock krautdrone, a sound we just can't get enough of. Expansive and sprawling, dark and meditative, washed out and dreamy, heavy and layered, the opening track on Sonic Messenger is a crushing chunk of low end rumble and pulse, which immediately gives way to some ultra hushed bliss, which smolders and flickers and expands in slow motion like a time lapse film of a planet being birthed. And so it goes, rhythms surface and blink out, guitars groan and whir and weep, synths wheeze and unfurl glimmering sheets of sound, the guitars sometimes coalesce into psychedelic almost-leads, but more often than not fade into clouds of hazy reverb and ethereal delay, the record closes with a 21 minute slow burn that is subtly fierce, a muted ominous swell of sound, wrapped in airy tendrils of fragmented melody, and swaths of gritty texture, a brooding and intense stretch of dreamy darkness.
Once again Expo 70 deliver the divine drugged out sonic space drone bliss.
And while they last (only 150 copies!!), included is a whole extra disc, an actual cd, not a cd-r, 50 more minutes of blissed out krautdrone space psych ambience. Three long long long songs, much more hushed and almost new age sounding that the record proper, except for the first 22 minute jam, that builds to a frenzied psychedelic freak out coda.
Deluxe packaging too, a glossy full color mini hardcover book-like sleeve, while the bonus disc comes in a cardboard sleeve, but there are instructions how to get some bonus stuff for the limited cd via the label's website. Cool!
The only real downside to an Expo 70 single, is that it's ultimately frustrating in its brevity, as the music of Justin Wright, aka Expo 70 (or Expo '70, they seem to have lost the apostrophe on recent releases) is far better served by longer formats, lps, cds, and while both of these songs are indeed fantastic, it's almost criminal to cut them off after only 4 or 5 minutes, these are the sorts of sounds meant to sprawl and ooze and spread and extend for ages and ages. But as far as complaints got, it's a minor (and not entirely negative one), you'll just have to stick close by the turntable so you can lift the needle and set it right back at the beginning again.
No great surprises or strange sonic twists, just more of that thick dark gloriously heavy space kraut drone we've come to expect. The A side is some seriously deep and drone-y outer space exploration, warm languorous tones over a softly grinding and pulsing buzz, sweeping and epic and darkly mysterious, glistening melodies shifting from speaker to speaker, very new age-y for sure, but a sort of dense and blackened new age.
The B side begins all growling buzzing low end thickness, laced with space-y squiggles, long high end streaks and glimmering tones, beneath the blissy drift is a warm whirring and a softly corrosive crumble, all wound up into epic slow building swells of deeeeep deeeeep buzz. So nice.
Gorgeous full color covers, and of course LIMITED, it's already sold out from the label, so these will be the last copies we can get.
Latest (vinyl-only) chunk of kosmische spacekraut exploration from long time aQ faves Expo 70, for this recording expanded to a duo, consisting of Expo 70 main man Justin Wright, along with his occasional collaborator Matt Hill, aka recent Record Of The Week honoree Umberto. Together they conjure four sprawling smoldering tracks of galaxian space drone mesmer spread out over four vinyl sides. While it seemed like on other recent Expo 70 records, that Wright and Co. were slowly moving toward a heavier sound, dipping into occasional SUNNO))) territory, the sounds here are seem more tranquil and blissed out, although the addition of Hill gives some of these songs a distinctly haunting soundtrack vibe...
The opening track offers up some subtle minimal drum machines, more textural than rhythmic, drifting on a warm whirling sea of shimmering sonic swells and hazy soft focus drones, everything gauzy and washed out, the soundtrack to a sky full of solar flares, blurred and indistinct, bleary eyed and blissful The guitars do gain some momentum, wrapped in reverb and sent spinning into the ether, but everything stays grounded, a dreamlike abstract soft sonic drift.
The second track definitely seems to reflect the presence of Umberto mainman Hill, immediately unfurling a thick swatch of buzzing drone, a haunting ominous tense bit of ambience, streaks of minor key melody, all underpinned by squelchy low end synths and warm washes of synthesized strings, the whole thing sounding like Umberto or Zombi filtered through Expo 70. There are some brief stretches where the low end becomes a bit more corrosive, but it dissipates quickly, leaving synth shadows and melodic traces, to gradually fade into the cosmos.
The second record begins again with some thick droning synths, layered into softly pulsing streaks, wheezing and whirring elegantly, and ominously, building a mysterious background, over which the duo lay swoonsome strings and maudlin piano, it's all very cinematic and soundtracky and classical, like the score to some lost Italian giallo, again like some hybrid of Umberto and Expo 70 (which it essentially is), one can almost picture the strange psychedelic colors, and constantly flitting shadows, some crumbling old villa set atop a hill, beneath a burnt black sky, tense and moody and gloriously creepy.
The final track/side begins with a cloud of processed guitars, wreathed in delay and reverb, a warm swirl of buzz and pulse, that gradually grows more lush and full, hazy and druggy, the drum machine from the first track returns, again adding texture (but this time a little propulsion as well), the swirl of guitars smooth out into something much more hypnotic, before everything seems to meltdown in a soft psychedelic squall, streaks of spaced out effects, fragmented melodies, shuffling rhythms buried beneath clouds of hiss and whir and static buzz, a warm whirling stretch of soft chaos, that soon morphs into a muted murky bit of outer space shimmer, that gradually disappears into the vast endless blackness, like a dying star. Epic and fantastic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on super thick virgin vinyl, and housed in a fancy old style tip-on gatefold jackets. Includes a download code as well...
For a while there, Belgian label NOTHingness was one of our favorite sources for grim droning black ambience. Pretty much everything they released was fantastic. Well, NOTHingness sadly is no more, but in it's place, has risen Consouling Sounds, a new label focusing less on dark ambient and dronemusic and more on post rock, space rock and drone rock, with a distinct focus on up and coming unknown artists. The label is split into two distinct entities. They recently released the Bungled & The Botched cd from Nadja (now out of print, sorry) via the 'Soul' imprint, home for established acts, and this, the debut from Spanish metallic post rockers Exxasens is the first release in their 'Con ' series, limited cd-r releases of unknown bands, offering people an inexpensive chance to check out some new sounds.�
As mentioned above, these particular sounds come via Spain, and the weirdly named Exxasens, who while choosing a somewhat overpopulated style, do manage to do their own thing. Their sound while definitely rocking, is more on the math/post side of things than the metal, at their heaviest, they sound like a lighter Isis or maybe more like a slightly more metal Mogwai, and those heavy parts soar more than pummel, but they balance well with the more loping introspective bits. Regardless, math rockers and post rockers will definitely be in heaven, these guys certainly push all the right buttons, the drumming is intricate and mathy with some intense squalls of rapid fire double kick, the guitars ring out, chiming majestically, there also seems to be some sort of keyboard action, or perhaps that's just some extra guitars, either way, it adds all sorts of texture to the proceedings. There are some cool production tape speed tricks, a bunch of samples, but of course no vocals, this is all instrumental, every track rife with slow building elaborate arrangements, epic melodies, and some killer chops, as well as a flair for crafting some subtly catchy tunes.�
Explosions In The Sky, Pelican, Isis, Mogwai, Mono, Irepress, Souvenir's Young America, if that reads like your iTunes library, then, you probably will want to pick this up too...
Packaged in a cd sized dvd style plastic sleeve, with a full color insert. LIMITED TO 170 COPIES in two editions, both already sold out, so these are the very last copies.
We won't go into too much detail with these as we only got a tiny handful of each. Latest batch of ultra limited lathe cuts from New Zealand label CMR. Each one packaged in a super striking, simple cardstock jacket, most with printed inner sleeves, Limited to 60 copies, of which we got the remaining stock. Once these are gone, they are gone forever.
We had never heard Eye before, but they seem to be the new outfit of NZ underground luminary Peter Stapleton (Flies Inside The Sun, Sleep, A Handful Of Dust) and no surprise, fans of any of his past work will for sure dig this.
The 7" is a crumbling soundscape of shortwave interference, wavering tones, constantly shifting drones, all very sea sick and dizzy sounding, bits of whispery static, all swaddled in a thick buzz, with lots of strange effects, and what sounds like the hiss and whisper of an army of ghosts that builds and builds to a fever pitch.
The flipside is more of an old school NZ freerock jam, all tribal rhythms under a swirling sea of fuzz and distortion and bits of skree. Layer after layer of constantly shifting grit and grime, propulsive and blown out, but still sort of shimmery and almost ambient.
This lathe cut comes with a cd-r, which contains a single 38 minute track, more glorious abstract soundscaping, bits of rhythms here and there, lots of buzz and hiss, strange disembodied melodies, lo-fi and constantly shifting and drifting, eventually building into a seriously heavy fuzzed out jam, complete with strange horns and bursts of random musical snippets. Cool.
We figure that since AQ pal Loren Chasse is so obsessed with Martyn Bates and Eyeless In Gaza, we figured we oughta just let him review this new one:
In the endless stream of comps, there's got to be something pretty special to get this listener to take notice.� For most listeners, when an anthology by a favorite band comes out there's the feverish question, "Are there any unreleased tracks� rarities�demos?!"�and� "What about the packaging -- any unseen art from some original pressing?" The new Eyeless in Gaza compilation Plague of Years: Songs and Instrumentals 1980-2006 released by Sub Rosa offers only token fulfillment of the first obsession by including a track from a yet unreleased Eyeless record, Summer Salt and Subway Sun (supposedly due out in 2006...guess not?).�The rest of the songs and instrumentals are all from full length records in the Eyeless catalog, but for three semi-rare songs from an old Sub Rosa Myths compilation from the early Eighties. So what's left for someone who's already 'in the know' about this legendary Cherry Red Records band? Not much but for a sensitively-mixed document of the musical prowess of Martyn Bates and Peter Becker, including some of their best songs -- "Fever Pitch" and "Bite" (is that a typo on this release, labeling it "Ever Pitch"...?), and "One by One" -- mixed among examples of their more mysterious and beautiful instrumental pieces. For a potential initiate to Eyeless In Gaza -- that is, someone who's perhaps all over the New Weird Now folk freakout and who might also have a soft spot for the drone and clang of such artists as Organum, Andrew Chalk or :zoviet*france: -- this comp would indeed be the perfect introduction. And if that potential initiate harbors a taste for beautifully fruity vocals (used only in adoration and reverence, Martyn!), then this could be a heavenly match, especially on those nights alone, rain pounding the window, black candles throwing moody shadows. If things worked out, of course, this comp might very well end up getting checked into the used bin on one's way to�consuming the entire Eyeless in Gaza catalog.�So� while offering little to the fan other than reassurance that Eyeless in Gaza is still awesome 26 years after its first record, Plague of Years succeeds as a flare for alerting new ears!
We first heard from Eyes Like Saucers back in 2007, when we reviewed the record Still Living In The Desert, which found ELS, aka Jeff Knoch, fomerly of hypnotic psych folkers Urdog, abandon his band, and his friends, ditch all the usual rock band instrumentation, and head off for places unknown, with nothing but a VW van, a handful of acoustic instruments, most importantly, an Indian harmonium, and his faithful canine sidekick. That record, was a fantastic bit of hypnotic dronemusic, a wheezing, druggy droniness, whirring and shimmery and meditative, steeped in the traditions of Indian ragas and modern minimalist drone music more than the psychedelic sounds of his former outfit.
Parmalee is the follow up, and is dedicated to his canine companion, as the subtitle suggests: "Tribute To A Dog". Hopefully this is just an expression of love for his dog, and they are still wandering the wilds together. Our first assumption was that perhaps Parmalee had died, and this was a musical eulogy, the sounds are definitely dark and moody and contemplative enough to be some sort of sad send off, but either way, these are some fantastic psychedelic space drone ragas, all wheezing organs, warm whirling chords, the sound thick and lush, but definitely ragged around the edges, urgent and intimate, captivating and totally mesmerizing. It's impossible to not fall immediately under their spell. Once again, we're reminded of nineties NZ dronerockers Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos, but this is much more ritualistic, much more home spun drone folk. The rest of the record introduces strange percussion, electronic synths, chimes and bells, slipping from alien folk ritual, to spare almost Appalachian sounding strum, to sea shanty like ballad, all culminating in the gorgeous woozy three part 23 minute epic Warrigal, a lush harmonium workout, the chords and notes wheezing lazily, all sun dappled and drone drenched, the sounds so organic and hypnotic, laced with bits of percussion and tinkling chimes, so haunting and hazy, meditative and dreamy.
Urdog was one of our favorite groups, a primitive psych folk ensemble, hypnotic and heavy and surprisingly prog, with a bit of space rock and a whole lot of drone. What was not to love?! The band called it a day a while back, but then a year or two later this little gem surfaced, a solo record from Eyes Like Saucers, which just so happens to be ex Urdog-er Jeff Knoch. But For ELS, Knoch has abandoned all the trappings of a proper rock band (ie drums, bass, guitar, etc), and he and his faithful canine companion took off in a VW van for the desert, armed only with an Indian harmonium, a toy piano, a glockenspiel, an oscillator, a Farfisa minicompact organ, a ukulele and presumably some sort of recording device.
The results are much how you might imagine from the instrumentation, long warm, warbly whirring dronescapes, the organ(s) pulsing, and wheezing, the chords shifting subtly, dense and layered, and drifting slowly, contemplative and dreamlike. Super obscure reference: reminds us a bit of NZ outfit Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos, but blurred into something much more static and meditative.
The record begins with a twinkling field of bells and chimes (the toy piano we're guessing) a playful high end field of plinks and plonks, melodies like sunlight through icicles, but then quickly the record gets slower and lower, transforming into a glorious shamanic drone record. Some of the tracks are rich and melodic, almost playful, jaunty, a bit like sea shanties (or desert shanties in this case), while others are lugubrious slow crawls, all whirring shimmer and blurred slow motion slither, some are peppered with the chiming toy piano percussion, or laced with Knoch's buried in the mix monotone vocals, others are left unadorned, just the notes and the melodies, the timbre and the tone, tangled into soft smears, drifting like a warm evening fog over the wide open sands of the desert.
So great. And there's even a Robert Wyatt cover! Quite recommended.
F-Space is the brainchild of Scot Jenerik and Ethan Port, two veterans of the West Coast noise / punk community. In many ways, Jenerik fully embodies the Burning Man ethos (or at least the way Burning Man presented itself about a decade ago), still proclaiming that the apocalypse is coming and when it does, he'll be out in the desert celebrating the destruction of society along with a bunch of other Mad Max renegades with their recycled art cars and homebuilt flamethrowers. His solo performances and installations find Jenerik in a literal circle of fire while hammering out post-Neubauten jack-hammer rhythms on abused pieces of metal. This visual appeal for immolation infiltrates the stage presence of F-Space, while the musical side shows much greater ties to his creative roots harkening back to his days in Savage Republic and Death Ride 69. Sprawling blasts of dueling monochord guitars drive the F-Space sound which marches through pounding tribal drums (compliments of Aleph Kali of Chrome) and slow-burning gritty walls of guitar sound which situate themselves somewhere between the early Skullflower albums and a slightly less psychedelic Acid Mother's Temple. On occasion, the Arabic motifs which haunted the later Savage Republic recordings emerge on F-Space as well. If DIY destruction is your bag, then boy do we have a record for you!
F/i have been somewhat of a buried treasure since the early eighties, spewing a rich brew of buzzy psychedelia, sludgy stoner doom, and extended space jams over the course of numerous lps and cassettes, but never really reaching out beyond the space rock underground. That's a shame as there has been a recent plenitude of reissues, making available again some of F/i's most seminal recordings, on cd for the first time, reminding us what a psych/space rock powerhouse these guys were. And still are! These guys never really stopped kicking out the jams. A Question For The Somnambulist finds the band back to its original lineup with the return of founding member Richard Franecki, and while one might hope this would mean a fiery, triumphant comeback of amp melting, spine crushing intensity, you also have to consider that it's been 20+ years since the launch of F/i, and these guys are getting older, and wiser, and mellower. So while there are moments where the whole thing threatens to combust and leave your stereo a charred husk, most of AQFTS is more on the dreamy, hypnotic, Krautrock side, reminding us quite a bit of Finnish drone rockers Circle or local psych rock tribe Subarachnoid Space, with warm fuzzy riffs, swirls of squiggly Moogs, propulsive infinitive rhythms, and the occasional squall of freakout guitar.
Since the beginning of the eighties, the strangely monickered F/i have been turning their amps up to 11, firing up the bongs, filling their space ship with all manner of effects and illicit mind altering substances and setting the controls for the heart of the sun. Here we are more than two decades later and F/i are still drifting in a dreamy and drug addled Hawkwind meets Loop meets Acid Mothers Temple meets Spacemen 3 meets way too many drugs sonic stupor and it still sounds so good. Music to take drugs to make music to take drugs by for sure! Huge streaks of reverb drenched distorted guitar, swirls of synthesizer swoop and sizzle, electronic beeps and bloops and burbles, throbbing, rumbling basslines, Hendrixian psych guitar freakouts and simple krautrock rhythms keeping the whole thing from floating off into the atmosphere. From full on Stooges-y psych stomp, to blissed out shimmering space trance, to smeary echoey ambience to almost Stereolab / Neu! style synth heavy krautrock, F/i manage to take whatever sonic course they're laid and make sure it also involves flying way too close to a black hole and thus being doused by white hot radioactive guitars or dense clouds of thick fuzzy synths or being bombarded by blown out cymbal sizzle, and burning up in a gloriously dreamy and druggy white hot space rock ball of flame!
Final blast from the past in this F/i reissue blitz of late and it's a doozy. The first half is a reissue of the Blue Star lp, three lengthy tracks of spaced out fucked up Hawkwind meets Gore meets Acid Mothers Temple outer-space-psych. Sludgy riffs are pounded into oblivion, splintering into shards of psychedelic swoosh and druggy shimmer. Endlessly and gorgeously hypnotic. The second half is the F/i half of their split with Vocokesh, and is way more electronic. Same vibe and feel as the first half, but with the riffs becoming weird modulated tones, and the propulsive drumming turning into mechanical throbs and pulses. Imagine a krautrock Wolf Eyes or Factrix covering Sabbath. This is some awesome shit. As recommended as the rest of the recent F/i reissues!
Maybe the most anxiously awaited release in Lexicon Devil's comprehensive series of F/i reissues. Paradise Out Here, originally released in 1989, might just be the heaviest, most freaked out, most spaced out of all the F/i records. All it takes is about one minute of opener "From Poppy With Love", an acid fried, ultra freaked out, swirling psychrock blowout to understand why. A chugging scuzzy garage rock riff scratches out a relentless spacey stomp beneath a massive roiling cloud of FX that make Acid Mothers Temple's arsenal look like a broken down collection of Casio distortion boxes and Fisher-Price keyboards. So heavy and so spacey. Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, AMT, Colour Haze, UFOmammut, White Hills, Comets On Fire, the Heads, the Telescopes, Atomic Bitchwax, Loop. If those are the kind of bands that get your blood boiling and your bong bubbling then this record is definitely for you. Extended excursions into the outer reaches of deep deep deep space, where the stars blink and twinkle in dizzyingly psychedelic colors, everywhere you look guitars are all twisted and distorted, thick slabs of rumbling bass plow through reverbed swirls of shimmer, melodies explode and splinter into jagged bits in gloriously incendiary bursts, everything is blurry and swathed in a thick drug rock haze, and everywhere you look huge slabs of blown out wah guitar drift past, like fluffy prismatic clouds, underneath it all, drums pound a never ending rhythm, while being endlessly pelted with synth squiggles and a veritable hail storm of bleeps and bloops and beeps. Woah. This record is so relentless and about as tripped out and psychedelic as a record can get without completely collapsing in on itself.
If there was ever a record that made us want to get super high, turn off all the lights, rock the fuck out and drift WAY WAY WAY OUT.... it's this one.
The Australian label Lexicon Devil has certainly picked an unusual scene to ressurrect from the mires of terminal obscurity, as they've been reissuing a handful of records from the mid-'80s psych-electronic-noise rock scene of Milwaukee. It's probably a stretch to qualify this as a 'scene,' since the bands in question had only a handful of rotating members in a couple of guises, specifically F/i, Boy Dirt Car, and Vocokesh. F/i began as a trio with Richard Franecki, Greg Kurczewski, and Brian Wensing, although Franecki parted ways in 1990 to form Vocokesh and record solo albums, leaving Wensing in charge of F/i, which theoretically is still operational. Despite its subtitle as being rare and unreleased, "The Past Darkly / The Future Lightly" was originally issued as a 3LP set on RRRecords with a tiny pressing of 300 copies in 1989, and makes for a pretty good overview of F/i's diverse history that runs from gritty electronic passages to dusted psych rock explosions. The earlier electronic pieces are clearly the best work in F/i's catalogue coming across as droning fields of sound not unlike Conrad Schnitzler or MB. The move to distorted and wah-wah heavy hypno-space-rock never quite rises above bearing a passing resemblance to Hawkwind, Blue Cheer, or the early Skullflower rock explosions. Pretty great stuff though.
Yet another grimy blast of drugged out psychedelia from unheralded underground psych gods F/i. This is the third or fourth F/i reissue in the last several months (and definitely Andee's favorite), finally restoring their epic and long out of print back catalog. Why Not Now?...Alan! was originally released on lp way back in 1987 on RRR and suffered sonically from poor mastering, as well as cohesively from the fact that several of the tracks were chopped to fit on a single lp. This cd reissue finds the chopped songs restored to their original extended versions, and the sound remastered and beefed up significantly! F/i around this period were a noisy, abstract, psychedelic juggernaut, equal parts Hawkwind, Lustmord, Skullflower, Amon Duul and a healthy dose of free noise gleeearghhh like some of their RRR labelmates. Glitchy, sputtering, malfunctioning instruments, amp buzz, and crackly bursts of short wave radio whirl chaotically into a sonic supernova, until a propulsive rhythm struggles and emerges from the chaos, a krautrock behemoth, lumbering through a landscape of swirling wah guitars, squalls of shrieking, space-y bleeping swoosh, clattery 'pipe fights', rumbling subsonic drones, super distorted drum / car horn industrial crunch and all manner of drugged out grit, but throughout it all, the hypnotic riff powers on, head down, chugging into oblivion. Think a massively damaged Neu! Or maybe Hawkwind on a really, really bad trip, or Circle, drugged and forced at gunpoint to do their best Agitation Free until their fingers bleed, or Amon Duul II, if instead of German hippies, their commune consisted mostly of American noise rockers from the eighties. As the record progresses, some of the extraneous noise is shed in favor of a more sleek psych/kraut rock, relentless and hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerising, but even streamlined, it still sounds seriously damaged and dangerous. Fucking awesome.
Fabric is the work of Chicago's Matthew Mullane, who could be seen as a one-man doppleganger of Emeralds. Not only does Mullane have an album of acoustic solo guitar work on Vin Du Select Qualitite, following Emerald's guitarist Mark McGuire in such an honor; he's released this stunning piece of liquid electronica that could fool even the most die-hard Emeralds fan. To further matters, A Sort Of Radiance had caught the attention of Emerald's John Elliott, who released the album through his Spectrum Spools imprint manufactured by Editions Mego. Present throughout A Sort Of Radiance are the percolating cosmic synths with the same classical overtures to Cluster, Fripp & Eno, and Schulze that Hauschildt and Elliott would adopt on those brilliant Emeralds records (especially What Happened and Does It Look Like I'm Here?). Even with very similar synth programing through step sequencing and hypnotic iterations of electronics, Mullane also seems to tap into the same bittersweet expressivity found on those Emeralds album. The same rounded notes which brought Emeralds' What Happened to a conclusion are reprised on Fabric's "Light Float" (an apt name for this levitational track with all of its fizzing lines of patterned electronic static), and even the harpsichord sounding electronics which girded Emeralds' near poptune "Candy Shoppe." The similarities can be unnerving; but when you forget about this and just listen to the wonderful music within... A Sort Of Radiance is a thing of beauty.
After months of digging, we were finally able to track some of these down. For those of you not in the know, Factrix just happen to be AQ faves Wolf Eyes favorite band, so much so that not only do they try to sound like them, but to this day they continue to send their industrial-doom heroes letters of gratitutde and worship! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 20+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Reseach Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and -- Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on trangressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records. In their short lifespan from 1978 - 1982, Factrix developed a language that clearly rivalled that of their European comrades; but in many ways, Factrix owed their sound to their San Francisco roots, as they inverted the paisley pretenses of psychedelia into a grim seance of sound in which free love became sexual taboos, universal peace became soul-crushing dread, and transcendence became morbidity. This inversion of psychedelia used many of the same tools of Haight-Ashbury in composing through non-structured improvisations as well as through a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms; but the sound came out all wrong. Factrix devolved '70s pop banalities into dissonant slabs of noise with squiggling guitar feedback and all-encompassing dirges from over-distorted basslines, with a continuous, tinny pulse from an abused drum machine. The process of free association carried over in the vocal duties, which were typically shared amongst the chief protagonists Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph Jacobs, although industrial culture celeb Monte Cazzaza was also known to offer his demented lisp to Factrix.
While not presented as a 'best-of' collection, "Artifact" features the best material that Factrix had produced, including all of the tracks from their seminal "Schentot" LP on Adolescent Records and a ton of live material, which has been digitally salvaged so as to sound great. "Artifact" is an essential artifact, in fact and a great surprise!
About ten years ago, we championed the San Francisco industrial prodigies Factrix via their Artifact 2cd anthology released on Storm, in fact, we made it a Record Of The Week. That went out of print quickly; so we are now quite grateful to Superior Viaduct for at last reissuing two of this band's seminal recordings! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 30+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Research Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and - Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on transgressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records. In their short lifespan from 1978 - 1982, Factrix developed a language that clearly rivalled that of their European comrades; but in many ways, Factrix owed their sound to their San Francisco roots, as they inverted the paisley pretenses of psychedelia into a grim seance of sound in which free love became sexual taboos, universal peace became soul-crushing dread, and transcendence became morbidity. This inversion of psychedelia used many of the same tools of Haight-Ashbury in composing through non-structured improvisations as well as through a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms; but the sound came out all wrong. Factrix devolved '70s pop banalities into dissonant slabs of noise with squiggling guitar feedback and all-encompassing dirges from over-distorted basslines, with a continuous, tinny pulse from an abused drum machine. The process of free association carried over in the vocal duties, which were typically shared amongst the chief protagonists Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph Jacobs.
Scheintot was the only studio album from Factrix, originally released on Adolescent Records in 1981. Its dark lysergic murk and obsessive decomposition crawls through scabrous guitars, clanking metal, distorted electronics, shadow-cast vocals and atmospheric doom, certainly paralleling the death-factory churn of TG's Second Annual Report and SPK's Leichenshrei. It must be stated that all of the tracks here (including the cd's two bonus tracks!) were present on the aforementioned Artifact 2cd; but with that long out of print, this becomes a recommended purchase!
About ten years ago, we championed the San Francisco industrial prodigies Factrix via their Artifact 2cd anthology released on Storm, in fact, we made it a Record Of The Week. That went out of print quickly; so we are now quite grateful to Superior Viaduct for at last reissuing two of this band's seminal recordings! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 30+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Research Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and - Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on transgressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records, even as Factrix teamed up with fellow San Franciscan provocateur Monte Cazazza for this Spartan yet very caustic live recording. California Babylon was originally released by Subterranean Records back in 1982. There are songs lurking throughout the scalding guitar noise, announced through repetitive, lurching basslines that sound like Flipper tunes played at super slow-motion. Growling slabs of toxic noise, grim electronic murk, tape collages (including some rather diabolical rants from somebody who sounds a lot like Jim Jones), and plenty of guttural No Wave deconstruction spew out from underneath those bass throbs, with Monte Cazazza occasionally spitting his own transgressive venom with his unmistakable, devilish lisp. There's even an appearance from Z'ev on a couple tracks clanking on found metal objects!
The bonus tracks on California Babylon are pretty amazing, we have to say; and all of these were in fact featured on that aforementioned Artifact compilation. On these tracks, the trio was certainly honing their songwriting craft, but they had not eschewed the noise, the murk, nor the bad vibes. "Silver River" is an awesome slab of downer, drone-rock orchestration that could very easily be mistaken for some New Zealand / Expressway gem by Gate or Alastair Galbraith, where "No Trees" reprises Factrix' searing guitar noise with staccato punk vocals and deconstructed post-punk basslines.
The accompanying dvd (which comes only with the cd edition, not the vinyl) features "Night Of The Succubus", the video that was shot at the same California Babylon live recordings. Like Scheintot, California Babylon is an essential document of San Francisco's industrial culture!
BACK IN STOCK!!
Badlands is the debut from this New York duo who traffic in wild, blown out, free form, noisy avant psychedelia, a relentless blistering sonic freakout spread over three tracks and thirty minutes. It might help (or maybe it won't, but it's still cool) to list the instruments used to conjure up this skree: one guy handles: "Machete Harmonic, Octave Shaking, Psycho Slide and Echo Disaster Lead Guitars, Feedback Vox, Tape Manipulation", the other is in charge of "Feral Wah, Astral Echo, and Feedback Lead Guitars, Amp Manipulation, Drums", which in a way says it all. After a brief bit of droniness, the sound splinters, and explodes into a five minute onslaught of frenzied guitar abuse, spluttery drum damage, all wreathed in thick swirling clouds of twisted FX and layered noise, but this is not straight up noise (although there's plenty of that), there are lots of dynamics going on, with stretches of scrabbly guitar, tranced out hypno-rock churn, tangled swirls of guitar psych, dense walls of crumbling, grinding, in-the-red, feedback doused dirgery, extended sprawls of effects heavy drift, and twisted droney ambience, but for all that, the sound is most definitely rooted in face melting psych-noise freakouts, which most definitely dominates the proceedings. But stick around for the 15 minute closer, the sound slowed down to a droney crawl, all grinding guitars, skittery drums, dense swirls of feedback and noise, the sound almost more psychedelic space rock than anything, but WAY on the noisiest side of that spectrum, imagine multiple Hawkwinds playing at once, each one trying to play louder and heavier than the other, the result some sort of ultra heavy, noise psych dirge, that is equal parts doom, spacey, tripped out and heavy as fuck. Where have these guys been all our lives. Fans of freaky noisy psych, line starts here. Fans of Fushitsusha, Mainliner, Burnt Hills, Heavy Winged, etc. check this shit out. NOW.
Super deluxe handmade packaging, maniacally ADD line drawing cover art (a la Nick Blinko), with a heavy cardboard insert, hand taped, with more line drawings, a picture taped to one side, housed in a stickered plastic sleeve, hand numbered, LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
Ultra limited, one sided clear vinyl 12" from the late John Fahey. Recorded live in 1996 at Table Of The Elements' Yttrium Festival, these four tracks harken back to his pre-electric period, a gorgeously melancholy, dreamily casual, wandering, and melodic appalachia that only Fahey could produce. Spare and unhurried, this four part suite unfurls lazily, melodies blossoming shyly, with each part ending quite abrubtly, as if Fahey just decided to stop when he felt like it, reminding us how intimate and playful Fahey could be live. Beautifully silkscreened woodcut image in mauve ink on clear vinyl in a clear sleeve. Striking. Oh, and did we mention...LIMITED!
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Fahey's first studio album since "Womblife" so many moons ago finds the guitarist/theologian/ ethnomusicologist fingerpicking his way through an assortment of folk, blues, and garage numbers played with all of his lovely tonality.
The press release claims that this is the first album since 1964 that "John has produced and recorded entirely unfettered from 'correction' by commercial interest." Is this a happy John Fahey? What has the world come to?!
About ten minutes into this I came to the conclusion that I had to buy one. This is awesome. Any Fahey fan will freak out watching this dvd. The 1996 material by itself is great -- a concert at Berkeley's Freight and Salvage that maybe some of you reading this were lucky enough to attend, plus backstage interview footage wherein ol' John Fahey reveals both some of his history, and his humor. But it was the 1969 portion of this I watched first, which consists of a much more youthful, clean-shaven John Fahey guesting on some sort of guitar-oriented TV talk show, hosted by a woman who is clearly both a big fan of Fahey's playing and also somewhat bemused/confused by his musical eccentricities. She even almost scolds him for doing something that she tells her own guitar students not to do, though they determine that he had a good reason for it... Fahey proves himself to be quite a charming character, smoking a cigarette as he answers the host's questions and demonstrates his techniques, playing quite a few lovely lovely songs. It's amazing viewing for anyone already under the spell of the man's music and persona. Fans, get this!
If this was truly John Fahey returning from the dead, we'd be afraid that he had not moved on to a better place. Taken from a rare out of print double 7" release from 1997, The Mill Pond has got to be one of Fahey's doomiest outings. Recorded with the help of Jeff Allman who adds some electronic elements, it features Fahey on vocals (!), delivering some ghostly shamanistic moans over washes of intense treated, distorted guitar. Titles like "The Mill Pond Drowns Hope" and "You Can't Cool Off In The Mill Pond, You Can Only Die" up the creep factor into an antithesis of baptismal redemption.
Fahey fans will be fascinated, especially those who looking for a Fahey release in a more (or most) experimental vein -- this is it. Or if you're not so sure about Fahey's usual acoustic mode, if you need your music to have a more malevolent edge, check this out! We think fans of the doomdirge likes of Nadja might even dig this. Also, his vocals bring to mind the most out-there trips of '70s psych-cult Yahowha 13.
Comes with an extensive booklet featuring Fahey's paintings, drawings and collages that offer a unique glimpse into Fahey's eccentric peculiarities. Recommended!
Failing Lights is the solo project of Mike Connelly, who's better known for the cacophony he produces in the Hair Police and Wolf Eyes. The lo-fi soundsculpting embraced by both of those aforementioned projects is present here as well, but the capacity for ultra-violence and raw explosiveness is replaced by an unsettling atmosphere of dread. The album opens with a somber metallic klang repeating over a building rumble of controlled low-end feedback, and electronic bleeps all set off in various delay patterns. It's a very primitive, but very evocative form of cold industrially-minded musique concrete, coming pretty damn close to what Premature Ejaculation had done in the '80s. This band itself was something of an obtuse performance-art cross-pollination of LAFMS wild-eyed experimentation and Los Angeles goth chic (after all Rozz Williams of Christian Death was in Premature Ejaculation.) Anyway, Connelly is one to leave lots of space between his episodes of grim rumblings, lazer shot electronics, tape machinations, and sporadic bursts of power electronics overdose. By the middle of the record, Connelly uses these empty spaces to push forward an unstable, Jandekishly strummed guitar through a murk of tape decay. This can be hardly qualified as a song; it's more of conscious disintegration of a song, slumping into a stupor right before crumbling out of existence. The finale of the album comes by way of a crusty chord organ, that expands from a reedy whine into a scruffy powerdrone that's equal parts Charlemagne Palestine and Gate. Disquieting to say the least!
This was an unexpected surprise. We ordered a bunch of these just on the strength of it being a new release on Supernal, the label that brought us the mighty Benighted Leams, as well as Meads Of Asphodel, Drudkh, Dark Ages, Hate Forest, we could go on. So we threw this on expecting some sort of demented damaged grim black metal, but instead discovered that this was in fact a colossal slab of hellishly heavy deathdoomdronedirge!
It takes a lot for us to get SUPER excited about another doom dirge record, it's a lot more than just tuning your guitar down and letting it go, and in fact this is not so much the sonic analogue of groups like Sunn 0))) or Noisegate or Earth, instead, FOTGWO takes the same elements and turns them into something much more fierce, much more aggressive, and somehow much heavier.
Three songs, one hour, of crumbling super distorted dronescapes, a suffocating avalanche of slow motion sound, waves of impossibly distorted guitar spread out like a viscous black sea, while huge simple pounding beats drop through the murk occasionally, like empty steel containers being dropped from a crane onto concrete. A dark sort of industrial droneworld, ominous and foreboding. The centerpiece of the record though is the 40+ minute title track, in which the crumbling crush of the opening salvo is pushed to the background, a distant din of swirl and churn, a rough sea of vicious distorted guitar and roiling low end, while in the foreground, abstract melodies are played out by soft swells of clean guitar and what sounds like chimes or bells. So strangely dark and lovely, so beautiful yet pants shittingly frightening. The track wavers between delicate ambient drone and a twisting tangle of low end guitar that sounds like the revving of a million motorcycles slowed waaaaaay down. The final track is a ravaged wasteland of industrial pummel, ominous tolling bells and creepy haunting drifts of mournful melody beneath some of the meanest grinding buzz and reverberating crunch we've ever heard.
Fall Of The Grey Winged One have definitely pushed the whole doomic dirge sound to a completely new level, existing in a dark and dangerous, skull splittingly brutal sonic world, where no others dare to tread.
Strange purple and black, 3-D geometric artwork, that barely hints at the gorgeous malevolence inside.
Spectrum Spools has been killing it lately with a string of amazing unearthed cosmic electronic artifacts. We raved about the recent Robert Turman Flux reissue from 1981 and now they dig deeper back to 1975 for this little known work of Italian kosmiche from Franco Falsini. We know of Falsini through the amazing seventies space prog synth outfit, Sensations' Fix (please someone reissue their records!!!), but this solo outing originally recorded as a soundtrack for an obscure film was completely unknown to us.
Made through a strange bio-electronic process that had us thinking of Masaki Batoh's recent Brain Pulse Music Machine record, Falsini recorded this album while having his brain activity monitored by a mechanism from the Bio-Electronic Meditation Society. Whenever his brain would produce Alpha/Theta waves, he would commit his music to tape. Alpha waves are generally created when defocusing one's attention, creating an alert relaxation found with meditation. Theta waves are produced with deeper meditation and often in periods of REM dream sleep. Composed in three suites, Cold Nose is a spiralling composition of EMS and Moog washes and floating guitar lines that remind us of krautrock legends Michael Rother and Manuel Gottsching, but with a distinct spaced-out Italian prog feel, especially when Falsini breaks out into stratospheric guitar leads over the organically pulsating synth treatments. Gorgeously cinematic, with constantly shifting and shimmering progressions. Beautifully remastered, anyone into the long form take on vintage psychedelic new age music should snag this while they can. If you dug the spacier psych moments of Italian progsters, Picchio Dal Pozzo, then this will be right up your alley!
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
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Warehouse find! Dug up just three copies of this sprawling psychedelic epic, formerly a tour only cd-r from these tripped our psych rocking Danes, it was expanded with 30 minutes of extra material, and pressed on two slabs of vinyl, a 4 sided psychedelic free for all, murky, swirly, lysergic. blurred and druggy and wildly amorphous, heaving slabs of smoldering sound oozing into clouds of tinkling percussion, the sound ritualistic and primitive, loose and free, chanted wordless vocals, deep low end thrum, smears of feedback, squalls of soft cacophony, occasional dreamy bits of ethereal drift, the whole thing woozy and washed out and gloriously abstract and spaced out, hits of Avarus and Sylvester Anfang abound, but these guys take those sounds and melt them down into something much more gooey and viscous and potent. Rad stuff for sure. Packaged in a super deluxe full color gatefold sleeve. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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This fifth entry (it says here sixth but we think they skipped one) in the so-far-totally-great Jewelled Antler Library series of cute lil' 3" cd-r eps is something a bit different, yet familar too to Jewelled Antler aficionados. It features the Blithe Sons (Glenn Donaldson and Loren Chasse, both also of Thuja and much else besides) joined by Eleanor Harwood on vocals. This trio's music is totally inspired by '70s art rock ensemble Slapp Happy, it's actually an intentional tribute of sorts. Eleanor is the heart of this, and we must say that for an untrained vocalist in an improvised setting, she's very impressive! Singing lyrics taken from a book of Kenneth Patchen poetry that was near to hand, "The Famous Boating Party", she totally inhabits the Dagmar Krause role, her vocals all wonderfully warbly and birdlike and lovely. She reminds us of Bjork at times too, no bad thing! Backing her up/leading her on, Glenn strums melodically on his 6 & 12 string guitars and adds comforting keyboard coloration, while Loren's "percussion & noises" both provide a steady beat and contribute the usual detailed, natural Jewelled Antler ambiance. It's very hazy and folky and fairytale like, a summer's afternoon encapsulated in a magical music box. Maybe not to everyone's taste (Slapp Happy certainly isn't either) but for some this will be a highlight in the Library series.
MPEG Download: "White Butterfly" [/audio/famousboatwhitebutter.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "White Butterfly" [/audio/famousboatwhitebutter.m3u]
