We listed three new tapes from aQ beloved tape label The Tapeworm on the last list, of a batch of four new releases. This one, #4, got left behind by the post man and only just now showed up. Which was a bummer at the time, cuz it might just be our favorite of the bunch, and the reason why can be summed up in one word: EVP! Okay, maybe three words: Electronic Voice Phenomena, which is the sound of the spirit world communicating through radio static, or lost transmissions, little snippet of voices, often just a word here or there, seemingly reaching across from the other side.
This particular set of recordings comes to us from Michael Esposito, an experimental artist and EVP researcher, who over the course of his life has collected thousands of EVP recordings and who has appeared on various television programs and in a number of films and documentaries. According to the label, Fantom Auditory Operations is "an attempt is to take EVP research a step further, developing a body of work researchers and scientists may use in the future to unlock the mysteries of our own mortality", but to these ears, it actually sound more like EVP set to music, strange bits of dark ambience, fields of hiss and whir, tolling bells, rumbles and whirs and various layers and textures, as well as field recordings, wild animal calls, crackling fires, all set amidst a series of fractured melodies and undulating drones.
Apparently the recordings here were captured in a Kentucky cemetery, where in the 1800s a woman and daughter were convicted of witchcraft and burned alive. The daughter was buried in this cemetery, while the mother at another location. There is also apparently spectral figure that has been sighted, perhaps trying to get to the girl (or her spirit), but who is kept at bay by the crucifix decorated fence surrounding her grave.
It almost doesn't matter if you believe any of that or not, cuz ultimately it's all about the sounds, and the sounds here are truly captivating, ominous and otherworldly, woven into a soundscape that's tense and haunting and super cinematic, with snippets of classical music, looped bells, the tape speed constantly fluctuating, everything warped and woozy, the only constant, the crackling sound of the fire, that presumably haunts the girl and her mother to this day.
So cool. And if you love the Ghost Orchid, a long time unanimous aQ fave, you're gonna want this too!
Mike Patton's musical terror squad returns. Or should we say medical terror squad, judging by the graphics: photos taken from Max Aguilera-Hellweg's "The Sacred Heart" book of surgery pictures, images both clinically compelling and quite gory (the likes of "Irrigating Wound Before Closing" and "Organ Donation For Cornea Transplant" are not for the squeamish!). Drs. Patton, Lombardo, Osbourne and Dunn here perform an operation both physical and psychological, as befits those cd graphics. It's dark, grim chamber music for rock instruments and electronics. Some of this is almost-ambient, delicate and beautiful. Other parts are bombastic and spastic as you'd expect. Slayer drummer Lombardo exercises much restraint, but gets to roil and toil at times. Patton of course displays a range of vocals, including some truly sweet singing in fact. This hour-plus composition (expansive yet claustrophically, it's but one long track) almost seems like a DJ set constructed from the darkest, artiest LPs in Patton's collection. Indeed, Fantomas' list of acknowledgements gives some clues as to what this sounds like: Bohren & Der Club of Gore, Matmos, Nitsch, Messiaen, Komeda, stethoscopic heart recordings... We're also definitely reminded of Jonathan Bepler's scores for Matthew Barney's Cremaster films -- there's even a passage with buzzing insect sounds not unlike Lombardo's cut on the Cremaster 2 soundtrack.
Animated, yes. Suspended, no -- except for the listener's disbelief, perhaps. Sheer carnivalesque carnage here, folks, just like you expect from these guys. After the relatively calm, droned-out ambience of their epic Delerium Cordia album from last year, for this release Fantomas now take us back to the Naked City/Melt-Banana inspired short sharp shock style they delivered on their self-titled debut in '99. There's 30 (!!!) tracks here, each one a violently freaked out, spastic collision of metal, electronics, cartoon music and avant-garde composition that likey adds another unexpected sonic ingredient to the mix. Utterly dizzying and complex, executed by pros. Seriously, you couldn't think of four guys more well-suited to the task: Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, Buzz Osbourne and Trevor Dunn (past and present members of such notable noise-makers as Mr. Bungle, Melvins, Slayer, and Faith No More, as we're sure you're aware). I mean, they could have added John Zorn or Eye Yamataka or Brian Chippendale to the line-up but it would hardly be necessary, these four already have this stuff DOWN. And the brief Osbourne/Patton vocal duet in track ten is a special thrill. We're at a loss to provide much more in the way of description, it's something you just need to experience for yourself, if you're up for it. Definitely if you're into the genre of music that is ALL genres rolled into one, the Attention Defecit Disorder frenzies of Suspended Animation will provide utmost entertainment. And for the moment, we have the version of this that, for some reason we don't know but won't question, comes in limited-edition packaging incorporating a spiral-bound April 2004 calendar designed and illustrated by hip Japanese artist Yoshitmo Nara. Pretty cool! Too bad April is just about over. But it's not like you were gonna use it as a dayplanner anyway, just admire it for the art.
This most definitely has to be the shortest cd we've ever reviewed. And also the smallest. A tiny little two inches by two inches, square shaped cd, clocking in at a whopping two minutes and forty three seconds. Pretty ideal actually for this particular two band, two song match up. Mike Patton and his Fantomas group give us a 44 second Melt-Banana-ish, burst of cartoonish, buzzy, chaotic, short attention span cinematic grind, a brief flurry of staccato downtuned guitar chug and blasts of bizarre vocalization. Melt-Banana go all out timewise with almost two whole minutes of that squeaky, grind pop madness that is so immediately and recognizably Melt Banana. A confusional swirl of MB's usual mind melting ultra complex brutality, with a more than usual bit of melody and harmony intertwined with MB's impossibly dense and serpentine song structures, all chirped indecipherable vocals and rapid fire punk splatter. Short but sweet! Comes in a cool little cardboard sleeve with a tiny full color card affixed to each side.
SUPER LIMITED!! We got a handful of these, not entirely sure we can get more, so once these are gone there's a god chance we'll never be able to get more.
S e r g e y [S] is a tireless Russian dronemuzik composer who records under the monikers Exit In Grey and Five Elements Music (amongst many others), and whose back catalog resembles that of Aidan Baker in terms of scale and quality. A while ago, you could randomly grab any given Aidan Baker disc and rest assured that he'd deliver an impeccable album of billowing ambience rippling with emotional impressionism and melodic subtlety. The same can be said for pretty much anything that Sergey [S] touches, with the bulk of his releases short-run albums self-produced in his motherland, with only a few albums seeing European release. We listed a couple of things that Sergey put out through Mystery Sea, that Belgian proprietor of night-ocean drones, both of which were very impressive; and everything we've managed to scrounge up has been amazing.
Dust Storm - a collaborative project with the enigmatic Fanum (who seems to be the work of another Russian character named Ascet) - does not sway our esteemed opinion of Sergey [S]. The three tracks brilliantly embrace the analogy of dense sound amorphousness with the harsh/soft, soothing/terrifying duality from a looming sand storm. The suspended tones from Sergey and Ascet spiral slowly into sad, fugue-like melodies that are cloaked in the slow-motion miasma as if melding the cold, deep-sea waters and the boiling methane spewing thermal vents. The shortwave radio textures of the album's finale bring more of the psychological disruption found on early John Duncan works, but much of Dust Storm recalls the best of Troum / Maeror Tri. Not sure how limited this album is, but stuff from Russia arrives at a snail's pace, so if we run out, it might take us a while to restock...
From the same label that brought us discs by James Blackshaw, the Floating World, Robert Horton, Lamp Of The Universe and Rameses III comes this limited cd-r from Far Black Furlong. Recorded live, outdoors, in the barley fields on the Welsh / English border, Haidd is a half hour of moon lit free folk drones. The sound of pale moonlight washing over the landscape like a soft grey coat of paint. A squirming shuffling, scritchy scratchy crosshatched backdrop, over which slow foghorn like drones drift and hover, horns wheeze out long mournful melodies that float just above the whirling background ambience. Like floating on the ink black sea, slowly drifting, little swells lifting you up and letting you back down, gently and so barely rhythmically. It's the sea, or the forest, or the desert, the sound of space and sky and dark nighttime colors that go on forever and ever.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! Already sold out at the label. We got about 30 copies. Once those are gone, we won't be able to get more.
Far Black Furlong is a Welsh ensemble of mystical folk minstrels, whose work straddles the realms of apocalyptic British folk (i.e. Current 93, Comus, the Wicker Man soundtrack, etc.) and the nocturnal, loosely sewn psychedelia of Fursaxa and the Blithe Sons. Their sound would be expected as Far Black Furlong's Richard Moult has previously collaborated with David Tibet and with their preceding album of narcotic folk tunes landing on the exceptional Barl Fire cd-r imprint. With this album, they've received the nod from Colin Potter, who has released this through his exceptional ICR label alongside the likes of Nurse With Wound, Ora, Monos, Jonathan Coleclough, etc. Here, oboes, flutes, ducilmers, and drifting guitar picking spiral around field recordings of twittering finches and the ominous crash of the ocean. Much of the melodic ambience through instrumental arrangements are the product of Far Black Furlong performing in the Welsh forests and barley fields during the long summer nights. Beautiful, shimmering, atmospheric, and maudlin.
We all agree here at AQ that this is a really amazing disc. We also all agree that it's tough to describe! Which is maybe why we didn't manage to review it right when it first appeared a few months back. But now we'll try, since we like it so much and want you know about it. Simply put (which is impossible), Farmacia from Argentina straddle the line between minimal dance music and rhythmic noise. Crucial Sky In The Land Of Premonitions At Lorenzo's Weekend (there, doesn't that title tell you all you need to know? no? uh, yeah, you're right) is the work of a trio who are making their OWN original music first and foremost, not something we hear everyday. There's an experimental, home-brewed, kit-bashed approach here that possesses some of the charming weirdness of Argentine AQ faves Reynols without sounding like them... much more user-friendly, these guys! It's a sort of playful industrial/electro music, part Throbbing Gristle, part Aphex Twin, part Mouse On Mars, part Ratatat. One track even reminds us of Itavayla, or Trans Am. There's bopping abstract noises, wordless vocals, distortion and drone and disco-friendly beats. Surprisingly beautiful, beautifully surprising. The three members are credited with the use of plenty of analog synths, samplers, computers... an array of ethnic flutes... eggs, noises, and "atmospheric crucial voices"... y'know, the usual stuff. And the results are, as we said, tough to describe. But we figure it's got a wide appeal, to fans of Kraftwerk and Cluster back in the '70s... to fans of Lindstrom yesterday. Totally recommended.
In theory, this DVD produced by Austrian electronic experimentalists Farmer's Manual consists of "every locatable live recording and more dating from 1995 until 2003." The press release goes on to describe that these performances were "about algorithms and their artifacts. Clicks and textural discontinuities were rampant. The demeanor of the performers was stoic: that of accountants working a spreadsheet program rather than artists expressing themselves. Despite the apparent detachment of the performers, the musical pace was extremely rapid, both in terms of events per second and the speed of textural change." Despite the claim of a total running time of whopping 03:21:38:03 (d:h:m:s), all that could be extracted from computers-as-DVD-players we rely on here at Aquarius was 17 minutes of footage of 3 guys aimlessly breaking through a cheaply constructed wall. But maybe it's just as well we didn't find three whole days of that! Caveat emptor.
We recently discovered a completely amazing Japanese label called EM Records. Pretty hard to pin down what exactly it is that they specialize in but that's precisely why we're so smitten. From not one, but -several- singing saw records, to acid psych reissues, long lost singer songwriters, early experimental tape music, bizarre robot disco, fifties rock and roll, Australian dub, Isophonic boogie woogie (?) and tons more. We've only begun to dip into the wonderful world of EM, but we're going to start listing them one at a time. This record was initially the release that convinced us to get in touch with EM. Jim Fassett's Symphony Of The Birds is bizarre and beautiful and had AQ written all over it. The liner notes are mostly in Japanese so it's hard to know too many of the details, but Symphony Of The Birds is an amazing example of early tape music, it just so happens that all the tapes used were recordings of songbirds, which Fassett chopped, and cut, spliced and sequenced into a totally unique symphony of bird calls.
The record opens with Fassett's explanatory comments featuring our favorite line: "But keep in mind, as you listen, that nothing has been added. If you think you hear something that sounds like a particular musical instrument, or a human voice, or anything else other than birdcalls, YOU'RE WRONG." The first movement is definitely the best, whistles and chirps, chopped and stretched into dense swirls of psychedelic sound, if you weren't paying close attention, you'd be hard pressed to hear that it was birds making these sounds. Very trippy and spacey and alien sounding, like some crazy analog synthesizer freakout. The second movement involves a lot more itch shifting and changes in tape speed, resulting in sort of clunky purposeful melodies, the same bird call in different pitches to assemble very simple sing songy melodies. The third movement gets back on track, with some of the bird call slowed WAY down so they becomes rumbling drones, while others are sped up and repeated rapidly making impossible trills that almost sound like some blast of Sunroof!-y skree.
The last three tracks feature Fassett narrating an imaginary trip through a meadow, allowing us to study closely the bird song of each different bird isolated from the others, with some deft mixing and stereo panning, and the affect is actually quite stunning, with each bird getting 30 seconds to a minute right up on the mic! Cool!
The whole thing comes packaged in a super tough oversized (to accommodate the massive booklet) jewel case. The booklet contains lots of great photos, liner notes in Japanese, transcriptions of Fassett's spoken word segments on the disc, the album's original liner notes, and strangest of all, a pictorial guide to various and random birdcall records, separated by theme it seems: whistling accompaniment of instruments or big band, field recordings, canary training, instrumental, experimental happening (?) etc. Weird!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Fastest's Theme, a Record Of The Week a few lists back, was a surprise hit around here (not a surprise for everyone though, some of us knew, few would be able to resist the twisted confusional home brewed madness that is Fastest), but we sold them like crazy, and in that review we mentioned Fastest also had a handful of other records, and got a bunch of reponses from folks wanting more.
So here you go, Into The Night, not sure where it falls in the Fastest catalog, which is now up to 8 or 10 releases, but it's another one of our favorites, second only to Theme, and like Theme, the sound here is pretty idiosyncratic and difficult to describe, warbly buzzying synths, stumbling weirdly programmed drums, that seem to explode into impossibly tangled rhythmic flurries, that is when they're not locked into some warped robotic groove, the melodies are twisted as well, moody and melancholy one second, then all sunshiney the next, like the music for the final screen on some old school video game, all 8 bit bleep and bloop, underpinned by weirdly bloopy low slung bass, and those chaotic beats. And did we mention the vocals, sort of sung/spoken, Allan here thinks it sounds like rapping, and likens Fastest to mush mouthed headphone rapper Sensational, but Fastest is much more strident, his vocals urgent and dramatic, often delivered in what sounds like a growled death metal grunt, but just as often whispered or crooned, the vocals locked tight with staccato rhythms, the ominous buzzing synths, the midi guitar melodies, slipping from epic and intense and almost heavy, to fuzzy and bouncy, but more often than not somewhere right in between. In some ways, Into The Night is a bit darker than Theme, and the spastic avalanche like drum programming sounds even more out of control, which is most definitely a good thing. For more on our obsession with Fastest, check out our review of Theme elsewhere on the aQ site, but if you've yet to check out the fractured and fantastically fucked up musical stylings of this one man band, this is as good a place to start as any, and who knows, you might find yourselves needing ALL of them. We did!
Like Theme, the packaging is awesome and over the top and a bit confusional. A custom (not real) barcode right on the front cover, a cool tray card that wraps up and around the edge, the Fastest logo all sharp and heavy metal looking, notes exclaiming "digital audio compact disc" and "state of the art phonorecord", the ASCAP publishing logo/info not less than FOUR times on the back cover, a shoutout to TDK, and of course, like Theme, a production credit for someone/something named Daemaeen Hephaestus Chastical. Oh, and a cool lazer etched discface! Needless to say (but we will anyway) CRAZY RECOMMENDED.
We've noticed a lot of customers going a little Fastest crazy recently. Which doesn't surprise us. In fact, we were so nuts for Fastest, we made his Theme album our Record Of The Week one week. Although considering what Fastest actually sounds like, maybe we are a little surprised. It is, as we've explained in the past, some of the most fantastically twisted, and utterly polarizing music we've heard in ages. Like all the best art, there's no middle ground with Fastest. There are only two responses, the first, a baffled look on the face, and the thought that how could something like that exist and why would people want to listen to it. The second being, a baffled look on the face, and the thought that how could something like that exist and I MUST OWN EVERY SINGLE RECORD!!! And we're not exaggerating. While there may be a few folks out there who have indeed just bought one, maybe two, the majority of folks do indeed go nuts and order them ALL. This one might be designed more for you dabblers out there, as it's a sampler of sorts, featuring a couple tracks from each of the Fastest records, but we have to say, we've sold a bunch so far, and most to folks WHO ALREADY OWN ALL THE RECORDS!! Such is the power of Fastest. If by now, you're wondering what the heck we're on about, and haven't already checked out our Record Of The Week review for Theme, or or review of Into The Night, well, let us tell you all about the many joys of Fastest. This time it starts with the wonderfully redundant album title, MAGICMANCY, which yes, basically means 'magic magic', and this is indeed some magical musical magic. This one man bedroom band from the East Bay, seemingly armed with a guitar synth and a drum machine, creates some of the strangest music we've ever heard, it sometimes gets filed in the metal section, due in part to the very metal looking Fastest logo, but also because the vocals are a mysterious sort of black metal rasp, but the music is about as far from metal as it could get, Allan thinks it sounds like hip hop (no one else does), imagine warped synth melodies, sputtering stumbling rhythms, slipping from dark ominous creep, to sweetly melodic Legend Of Zelda style video game music, and back again, it's twisted, baffling and totally brilliant.
Check out opener "Blame", with it's wild free jazz blackened psych squall opening salvo which quickly gives way to some fuzzy synthy drift, the vocals here definitely almost rapped, the song constantly peppered with reprises of that opening squall, not to mention jagged shifts, from part to part, the sound buzzy and fuzzy, the vocals sounding very Lou Reed-ish here for sure. Then there's "Legend" with its pounded synth organ churn, it's mechanical drumming, dirgey and doomy, a little bit proggy, the grunted vocals all tangled up with the awesomely atonal synth buzz. "Foresee" offers up our favorite side of Fastest, wildly sputtery almost Indian sounding rhythms, haunting minor key melodies, the opening is dark and mysterious, but then it suddenly shifts into a fuzzy groove, again, constantly twisting and shifting, the sounds all over the place, often the song structured like changing channels, abrupt and off kilter. "Jetsound II" is one of our favorites, starting with the simulated rumble of jet sounds before slipping into a dreamy lilting little ditty that sounds like the final screen from some 8-bit video game, transformed into a sort of eighties soft rock ballad. We could go on, but by now you probably know if this is your cup of tea. For more about Fastest, and to feed what we can only imagine will blossom into a full blown obsession like it has in the rest of us, go check out the reviews of Theme and Into The Night elsewhere on the site. And for those who have resisted up until now, this might be the perfect way to ease your way in.
Brilliant and baffling. If you want all six of the other records too, just ask...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
It's been a boom in outsider music these last few weeks at AQ, first it was the random rediscovery of Doug Hream Blunt's Gentle Persuasion, a fantastic and fantastically strange disc of breezy lo-fi outsider funk, that was dropped off by the man himself and required quite a bit of reconnoitering to track him down to get more (a continuing saga). And now there's this. A mysterious disc by a one man band known simply as Fastest, a cd-r that just showed up here one day, and none of us can remember how or when. In the mail? Dropped off? Spontaneous generation? It was just here one day, and we were mesmerized from the second we laid eyes on it. The cover is a huge blue owl against a blue background. The band name Fastest is written in big green letters, in a sort of cartoonish metal font, and superimposed right on the cover is a big barcode. The whole thing printed out on a home laser printer. The tray card folds all the way up around the side so there's an extra panel visible through the clear tray that boldly proclaims: "digital audio compact disc - state of the art phonorecord." The tray card features the ASCAP logo (ASCAP is the company that determines musician royalties) no less than three times, the logo is superimposed again on the back in a little white square, and at the top, blue text explains that the record was "Produced by Daemaeen Hephaestus Chastical". We were almost afraid to throw it on, because we were convinced that there was no way the music could live up to the cryptic promise of the packaging. We were wrong.
The title track starts things off, and immediately you know this is like nothing you've ever heard... a flurry of lo-fi distorted programmed beats, that sound like they could have been lifted straight off that Vijaya Anand Dance Raja Dance Bollywood compilation on Luaka Bop from years back, but any resemblance to Bollywood ends there, as some strange atonal midi synth guitars swoop in, along with some woozy warbly bass, the strangely syncopated programmed beats sputtering wildly in the background, the song slipping into a moody drift, the vocals a strange ominously hushed whisper, that even remind us a bit of the slowed down mush mouthed rapping of Sensational, eventually there's a sort of chorus, the midi guitars buzzing, while a strange synth unfurls a twisted melody, and then there's the most brilliantly baffling break, a stop/start flurry of stuttering beats, and some more warped woozy melodies, eventually joined by a sort of midi guitar least, atonal and detuned, the whole thing sounding like it's melting before your ears, before finally returning to the 'chorus'. Holy shit. What just happened? What is this? How had we not heard this before? Very reminiscent in fact of those absurd midi guitar releases we raved about on lists past, all of them work of a single man, released under different names: Shevelreq, Xynfonica, Gluttony, Thursar. If you were as into those as we were, stop reading and buy this now. Everyone else, read on, and sink deeper into the glorious musical madness that is Fastest...
The first song is so perfect, and perfectly demented, we dared not go on. We just kept listening to that one song over and over and over. Heck we wanted it to be OUR theme song. But eventually we knew we had to go on, and somehow, Fastest managed to confuse us again. And again.
After some simulated jet engine sounds, "Jet Sound II" begins, but it's super melodic and all 8 bit sounding, and reminds us of music from The Legend Of Zelda, but those vocals, dark and ominous, weirdly offset the cheerful melodies and loping programmed rhythms. "Televise" begins with sample bells, and immediately returns us to The Legend Of Zelda, until the vocals come in, locked in tight with the main melody, making for some strange electronic lo-fi midi-pop mystery.
"While You're Here" might be our other favorite (if we were forced to pick), with it's haunting melody, over minor key distorted finger picked guitar, tinkling chimes, very cinematic, again like some dramatic moment in a video game, but definitely dark and haunting, but of course, the song slips right back into some Zelda-y minimal 8 bit balladry, replete with those slightly ominous gruff vocals.
"Million Lies" begins with some dramatic syncopated start/stop dynamics, before slipping into some pulsing electronic groove, but this time, the vocals are super distorted, and even more creepy, and the drums erupt into little flurries of rhythmic tangle.
And so it goes, the sound drifting from Bollywood flecked 8 bit video game soundtrack songsmithery, to eighties style midi driven synthwave, and some hard to describe stops in between, culminating in the final three tracks, maybe the darkest and heaviest of the bunch.
"Seasons Change" is all distorted bass, stereo panned so the buzz flits from ear to ear, the drums spastic and skittery, the vocals as grim and ominous as at any point, the melodies creepy and minor key, which leads right into "Alter Fate" all swirling synths and stuttery almost IDM sounding beats, the whole thing blurry and smeary, before slipping back into the dirgey synthy creep of the previous track, a sort of second movement, laced with more strange disembodied high end melodies over the tumbling drum fills and more gruff whispery vox, finally culminating in "The Wind", which begins with appropriately enough, swirling wind, distorted acoustic guitar, a gauzy patina of lo-fi buzz, before finally launching into a tense stretch of buzzing swirling electronic weirdness, the various chunks of low end fuzz and warped melodies, adding some serious pathos, growing ever more distorted and finally finishing in a blaze of super distorted programmed beats, chaotic and noisy and psychedelic, before winding down with more acoustic guitar.
Absolutely baffling and disturbing brilliantly, total genius outsider mystery music, this is the sort of thing groups like Gary War and Ariel Pink are striving for, but just can't ever quite reach. Fantastically idiosyncratic, highly personal, and completely warped and cracked and demented and literally unlike anything you've heard. It's not hard to imagine this finding its way onto one of those incredible strange music comps or one of those Songs In The Key Of Z collection, it's certainly divisive, it's definitely too much for some folks, so be warned, this is strange strange stuff. But folks around here have become a bit obsessed, and can't seem to get enough. Which is good, cuz there are at least THREE other cd-r's. If you decide you need those too, just ask...
Supposedly, past members of long time aQ faves Deerhoof call Fat Worm Of Error home these days, and while you'll be hard pressed to hear any of the sweet poppiness or twisted hookiness that makes Deerhoof so near and dear, you will find magnified and even more twisted versions of everything else, the most damaged and demented parts of the noisier more abstract Deerhoof, here writ large, in huge swaths of confusional whatthefuck lurch and stumble, looped stutter and glitched out ambience, deconstructed antipop and damaged avant noiserock, with most of the rock removed. Each track is a slow building, sprawling sonic ooze, of gnarled strangled atonal guitars, bizarre vocals that swing wildly from murky mumbles to frenzied yelps, stumbling chaotic percussion, squiggly electronics, and clouds of malfunctioning electronics, streaks of skittery drum machine bleep and bloop, buried samples, loads of hiss and hum and whir and rumble and skree, held together by long stretches of mysterious ambience, flecked with chimes and bells, little rhythmic clicks, truncated barely there melodies, warm whirling layered textures, the tracks do occasionally coalesce into almost songs, and when they do, it sort of sounds like a field recording of OOIOO, OvO and Rubber O Cement engaged in some serious sonic warfare, but more often, the record just sort of swirls and drifts and lumbers, occasionally jaggedly, but just as often weirdly soothingly, sounding like Avarus or No Neck Blues Band bad-tripping though some Sid And Marty Kroft style psychedelic noise forest. Weird!
Sometimes some good old fashioned 'rock math' is the best way to start a review... Imagine Rhode Island spazz-rock duo Lightning Bolt, via Japanese hyper-prog heavies Ruins, mix in a little Hella, maybe some Crom-Tech and some Flying Luttenbachers, and then filter it all through the cartoon music of Carl Stalling, but don't stop there, this drums/keyboard duo also lace their sprawling drum-synth duels with stretches of gorgeously creepy Carpenter-ish synth soundtrackery, and bizarre samples, sometimes locking into churning sprawls of krautish hypno-rock, and other times exploding into shards of what almost sounds like Venetian Snares style drill & bass. Thankfully, there's more to Fat32 than pointless ADD mathiness, with the songs displaying a surprising knack for melody and groove, and cleverly hiding proper songs amidst all the genre stutter and controlled chaos. That said, this is still the sort of head spinning, ultra acrobatic musicianship that makes Fat32 sound right at home on Web Of Mimicry, alongside outfits like Secret Chiefs 3, Estradasphere and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, although sonically these guys do tend more toward the metal/punk side of the spectrum. Just check out the sample below for "Hard Drive", which might be the best of the bunch, a dizzying, super hypnotic blast of hyper rhythmic metallic pound, the Lightning Bolt vibe in full effect, but the keyboard gives Fat32 a much more expansive sonic palette, letting the keys somehow supply both the buzzing synth riffage, as well as blasts of 8-bit video game squiggles, all sort of effects and constantly morphing tangled melodies, the sound shifting frenetically from looped metallic mesmer to pounding chugging heaviness and back again. Then there's the epic 17 minute closer, which displays the group's Naked City like mastery of genre hopping, and the same sort of desire to cram it all into one song, and they pull it off, with most of the track pounding mathily, but they pepper it with squalls of psychedelic shimmer, bloopy video game goofiness, Pantera vocal samples (!), lumbering downtuned doominess, cheesy organ grinding polka, wide open stretches of abstract free noise drift, droned out textures and layers, super angular math-punk and plenty more. Fans of any or all of the above mentioned bands will dig for sure...
One of two new tape releases from Root Strata this week, this one from the cryptically monikered Father, who we know absolutely nothing about, but whose sound will no doubt hit the spot for fans of other recent Root Strata cassette jams from Arrow Kleeman, Ekin Fil, Tom Carter and Ben Vida.
Return Of The Father is a hushed blurred shimmer of sounds, a collage of what sounds like tangled melodies, finger picked guitars, deep resonant drones, all smeared into hazy, gauzy, shapeless atmospheres, lush layered clouds of disembodied melody drifting through grey skies, a muted murky bleary eared churn one second, a soft cacophony of chimes and tinkling melodies the next, occasional tiny avalanches of percussion woven into dreamily clattery drift, but the sounds seeming to all slowly gravitate toward a gauzy pop ambient blur, channeling Tim Hecker, Belong, Mountains, Klimek and other similarly minded sonic obfuscationists. So nice.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Everything about Father Beard is far away, which makes sense since it's the project of former Mirza members Brian Lucas and Mark Williams and they live far away -- from us and from each other. Brian lives in Thailand and Mark lives in Spain, but somehow, it seems like they managed to meet in an air cave high above their two countries and record an album of narcotic, whisper-quiet songs. Plodding bass keeps the music from drifting aimlessly in the ether, while street-sound field recordings lend a Sublime Frequency sense of mystery and foreignness. Imagine Spacemen 3 buzzing out of a broken radio in an un-airconditioned cab on a street crowded with tuk-tuks and bovine - but instead of being sweaty, dusty and stressed out, you're high on delay pedals, drifting down the Mekong and off the edge of the earth. Recommended listening for humid afternoons and early morning opium dens.
We get sent a ton of stuff to check out. And it's awesome, truly, So much amazing music to discover, but at the same time it's so overwhelming. But every once in a while a record pops up that makes it all worth while. Such is the case with this disc from these Italian weirdos Father Murphy. What makes it even cooler is that this record, and this band, are SO hard to describe.
It's a bit like folk, a little bit like post punk math rock, a little avant noise, but stripped way down into something skeletal, they definitely sound a little bit like one of the new breed of freak folk psych folk cd-r outfits, but at the same time, they sound like NOTHING you've ever heard. Detuned guitar plod, spaced out rhythmic thump, lots of deep shimmery ambience and FX drenched drifts, wavery falsetto crooning, warbly organs, and the occasional bursts of feral yowling, wow. Unhinged, fractured, freaky, passionate, super intense and awesome.
In discussing Father Murphy, other reviewers have mentioned Robert Wyatt, This Heat, Samla Mamas Manna, we also hear plenty of Marc Ribot in the guitars, all angular and off kilter, there's also some mysterious female vocals that surface here and there, field recordings, crickets, birds, all beneath weepy mournful Morricone-ish twang, a sound both woozy and ominous, dreamy and dense, a glorious deathlike dirge, part Dirty Three, part fluttery forest folk, a little wheezy organ dirge pop, some slooooooowed down Blonde Redhead, like we said this is super hard to describe. but what we do know is we love it. And you will do, if your tastes run toward the dark, the dolorous, the mysterious, the haunting, the dirgey and the deathlike.
Incredible packaging. The cd housed in a die cut multi layered fold over sleeve, that housed in a thick outer vellum jacket so the images on the inner sleeve are just visible through the blurred finish of the outer sleeve.
VERY LIMITED!
Croce is the newest collection of distorted, dark psychedelic, industrial cabaret from this Italian boy/girl duo, who, after a series of ever darkening releases, have arrived at this, a concept record about the cross, and yeah, it's THAT cross (Croce in Italian), with one side of the record sonically representing the suffering and sacrifice, the flipside reflecting what comes after, the end of said suffering, resurrection, or perhaps oblivion.
The sounds are shadowy, the atmospheres muddy and murky, from which spring unexpected blurts of impossibly catchy noise pop, approaching at times something almost operatic, like some twisted psychedelic musical detailing the trials and tribulation of the crucifixion, with male and female vox intertwined over distorted blasts of guitar crunch, anchored by stuttering homebuilt percussion, a sound both textural and nuanced, but also noisy and chaotic, that chaos carefully sculpted into jagged shards of fragmented pop, and that pop oven into a dramatic, almost theatrical songsuite.
At points, the songs can seem to gradually lose cohesion, the lumbering and loping angular grooves (d)evolving into wild psychedelic squalls, or alternately stripped down to just the skeletal essence of the song, while the duo proceed to add layer upon layer, rhythm upon rhythm, working their way up to another blast of glorious cacophony. That percussion is a driving force throughout, whether it's swirling billows or rubberband twang and big booted thump, or sinewy pulses, wound up into tense, and intense low slung swaggers, all beneath cascades of wild junkyard crumble and soaring devotional vox, sung/spoken intonations over bell-like clang and the almost tuned sounding metallic sproings of reverberating springs.
The first side finishes up with "In Solitude", an appropriately dour slab of murky miserablism that sounds like a slow sonic death, the hazy, nocturnal sound gradually fading, retreating further into the shadows, loping, lumbering creeps, soft chordal swirls beneath strange metallic rhythms, too slow to be motorik, but a similarly hypnotic vibe, albeit more sort of druggy and slo-mo, a haunting moody dirge that dissolves into that ineffable space that exists between the record's second side, the netherworld, the afterlife, Purgatory even, an endless expanse of nothingness, from which few return. But Father Murphy erupt from this Stygian blackness, with the second half of Croce, meant to be the light, to the A side's dark, and yet the opener is still somehow strangely doomy, a field of metallic shimmer, and more junkyard percussion, strung together into a spare framework, over which dramatic male vocals soar, the female vocals responding like some demonic Greek chorus, but true to the theme, the vibe grows strangely warm, an otherworldly glow, nearly sundappled in places, you can almost hear the rays of light breaking through the grey cloud filled skies.
But really, these two have a strange idea of 'light', with "All The People Yelling Fire" seemingly still cloaked in shadow, a lumbering cacophony of rhythmic crashes and metallic pounds, not to mention some elephant like bleats, moaning horns suspended in a field of distant drones, very ominous and sinister, but before you know it, it's right back to the clatter and clang, leading directly into the penultimate "We Walk By Faith", a harrowing hymn, both droney and almost liturgical, with throat singing like vocalizations, wound around long, softly undulating tones, modern minimalism by way of some ancient ritual, the music evoking flickering firelight, dancing shadows, primitive worship to the cosmos, driven by muted thumps and buried beats, another one of those rickety rhythms surfacing from beneath the murk, a swampy, apocalyptic psychedelia, melted down into a viscous sonic crawl.
The finale, "They Won't Hurt You", is all majestic pipe organ, a stirring and stately court music, lush and lovely and epic, the sound of rebirth, redemptive and ultimately restorative, a return from the beyond, arisen from the grave, ascended into the heavens, the sounds drifting upwards, beyond the galaxy, the universe, into the unknowable infinity.
A while back we went kind of nuts for these Italians, selling tons of their And He Told Us album. We've been hankering for more, and here we do indeed have more, sadly, we managed to get just TEN copies of this, a super limited live release, limited in fact to a mere 50 copies. Needless to say, this is already sold out at the label and out of print. But we figured folks who dug the full length might want to grab one of these, or folks who somehow missed out completely, might find this inexpensive live set a good introduction. Either way, we only have 10 copies, so act fast.
They're pro silver cassettes, and they're housed in cool hand stamped recycled sleeves.
So what's the deal with Father Murphy, let's revisit out review of And He Told us, and our description of FM's sound:
It's a bit like folk, a little bit like post punk math rock, a little avant noise, but stripped way down into something skeletal, they definitely sound a little bit like one of the new breed of freak folk psych folk cd-r outfits, but at the same time, they sound like NOTHING you've ever heard. Detuned guitar plod, spaced out rhythmic thump, lots of deep shimmery ambience and FX drenched drifts, wavery falsetto crooning, warbly organs, and the occasional bursts of feral yowling, wow. Unhinged, fractured, freaky, passionate, super intense and awesome.
Comparisons have been made to Robert Wyatt, This Heat, Samla Mamas Manna, we also hear plenty of Marc Ribot in the guitars, all angular and off kilter, there's also some mysterious female vocals, all beneath weepy mournful Morricone-ish twang, a sound both woozy and ominous, dreamy and dense, a glorious deathlike dirge, part Dirty Three, part fluttery forest folk, a little wheezy organ dirge pop, some slooooooowed down Blonde Redhead, like we said this is super hard to describe, but what we do know is we love it.
First time on cd (outside of the God and Hair box set, that is) for this, the 2nd album from the Ya Ho Wha collective... we of course strongly urge the purchase of that whole set, but if you want to get this one separately, now you can. And it does include new liner notes from "family" members written for this reissue. Contraction dates from 1974 (like most of the Yod LPs, including their ultimate masterpieces Penetration and I'm Gonna Take You Home), and of course originals are hopelessly rare.
So...does groovy loungey hippy jams, doing the choo-choo train build up, but never really totally freaking out, with flutes and organ and guitar, and most significantly the wacked-out weird wisdom of Father Yod rappin' o'er top, sound good to you? Half-spoken, half sung, kinda drunken sounding. Here's a transcript of a portion of one of his raps here, to give you a bit of the flavor: "Let it all out and take it all back. But take it all back with consciousness. Desire, man. Desire's a trick. That's the trick. That'll bring old Saint Nick. Here he comes, see him there. All those goodies on his back. And he ain't got no prayer. He just wants to give to you, energy. The greatest gift of all, you'll soon see. That's it. Give it with a beat. Come on. Give it..." Hmm. The Father Yod-Santa Claus connection made explicit by the man himself!
One 24 minute, 41 second track. But you know what, that's quite a dose...
Forget for a second that this is a Faust album. What if it was just some unknown new band, some cd-r we got in the mail, some limited edition cassette release? Heck we've tried that thought experiment, and we'd be all over it! Telling you that it's a mysteriously murky, throbbing psychedelic freak-scene, fraught with krautrocky rhythms and tense textures. Sorta reminds us of a mix of Blues Control and Wooden Shjips... or White Hills and Expo 70... there's a druggy '60s garage vibe, industrial electronic atmosphere, blissful moodiness, and clockwork Circle-like propulsivity, all crammed into one crazy counter-intuitive whole, raw and live! Everything in the way of organ drones, harmonica blurt, echoing voices, shuffling drums, and serious dosage of searing psych-rock geetar found here were all taken from various European performances in 2006, later mixed and edited at fauststudio. We'd assume most of the tracks are pretty much unique to this disc...
Yeah, we'd be pretty into it if it was some new group! Does the fact it's a new disc by krautrock legends Faust, released by Circle's Ektro label, make it any cooler? It doesn't need to. Though if that's what it takes to get you to check it out, that's ok. Conversely, if you were like, oh just another umpteenth Faust reunion album, don't be like that. First off, Faust rule. Even today. Sure, this isn't the original line up. In fact, it's not even the ONLY current line up! Apparently, in the grand tradition of, uh, Saxon and others, there's now more than one version of Faust, each featuring different original band members, going around touring under the name. Weird. Not sure if this fractured factioning is an agreed-upon thing (to cover more ground?) or if they're in competition. Hopefully the former! It would be sad to hear that there's litigation pending.
So anyway, THIS Faust consists of Jan Wolbrandt on drums, Michael Stoll on bass (and flute), Lars Paukstat on percussion and vocals, Steven Wray Lobdell on guitar, and Hans Joachim Irmler on organ, keyboards and vocals. That's a good line up all right, they've got Lobdell in the band after all! Hence the dosage of searing psych-rock geetar previously mentioned...
Recommended, as one of the two very different and very cool live albums newly issued by Ektro that we're reviewing this list (the other one is by '80s strong-man metaller Thor, believe it or not!). Hmmm. Faust + Thor, does that sort of = Circle??
(And note, there's another new live Faust 2cd that we have in stock and hope to review soon, Od Serca Do Duszy, that's the work of the OTHER active Faust unit, featuring Jean-Herve Peron, Zappi Diermaier, and Amaury Cambuzat.)
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Wow, two new Faust titles, both in handsome cardboard sleeves...Nosferatu is a soundtrack of sorts to the classic silent film, Live documents the explosive (literally) Faust performance at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The "pop" aspects of Faust past may have been abandoned by the reunited band, but the psych-guitar and industrial smasheroo quotient is way up. Both discs are fine nightmare soundscapes.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
More so than Aphex Twin's score to a Bank of America commercial or Oval's contribution to one for Calvin Klein, Faust's appearance on a commercial for Nike has clearly been the oddest commodification of experimental music. Fortunately, the "success" of the venture has not gone to Faust's collective head... Their highly-anticipated new album Ravvivando succeeds where previous '90s ventures You Know Faust and Rien (which could be argued was more of a Jim O'Rourke album) perhaps did not. On this album, the hypnosis induced by the constant churning of percussive blasts and springy basslines is complemented by washed out drones dissolving to reveal their construction from swells of organ and guitar.
It should be noted that the resurrection of Faust about five years ago did bring a drastic change to their Krautrock mutations of pop, noise, carnival music, jazz, and general experimentation which characterized their seminal '70s records such as Faust IV or So Far. One cannot expect that a musical hibernation of 20 years would not affect the artistic process. But rather than making contextual comparisons to Faust's work from the '70s, we proclaim that Ravvivando is their best record of the '90s. So there. The new Faust is a great band, on their own merits.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Need we say any more than to announce that this is finally available?! Well, okay, here's the obi blurb: "These are the first studio recordings from German group Faust in over 20 years. An aggressive collision of electronic pastiche musique concret, power tools and group improvisation results in an extraordinary return by one of the seminal experimental ensembles of all time."
A 5cd box set devoted to krautrock legends Faust? We were salivating from the moment we heard about it! The output of the band from 1970-73 is truly remarkable, and their work can hardly be compared to any of their contemporaries. They transcend both psych and prog, they influenced countless acts and anticipated many musical trends, from This Heat to Nurse With Wound, New Wave and No Wave, Industrial and "Post-Rock", the Boredoms old stuff to the Boredoms new stuff. Seminal musical genius that everyone should hear. And this is both a good place to start for newcomers (I envy anyone hearing Faust for the first time!) and a necessary collection for fans.
The nitty gritty details, for those who wanna know it all: Wumme refers to the schoolhouse-turned-studio that Faust producer Uwe Nettelbeck rented out at Polydor's expense (he also managed to get Polydor to buy the band all the recording gear they needed and pay for a 24-hour a day, live-in engineer.) It was under these ideal conditions that Faust recorded almost all of the material on this box set, which includes (get ready!): Faust's self-titled debut, their second album "So Far" (both of those terribly hard to find on cd, with the Japanese edition of "So Far" having been out of print for years now), the ever-popular "The Faust Tapes" (now with a track listing and indexing!) and "71 Minutes of Faust" (collecting both the "The Last LP" and "Munic and Elsewhere" LPs). And, also included in this set is an amazing disc of unreleased material, some recorded live at the BBC in 1973, plus some recently discovered & never before listened to tapes as well as the track "We Are the Hallo Men" which was originally on "Munic & Elsewhere" (though curiously credited here as having been on "The Last LP"), but previously left off of ReR's previous version of "71 Minutes of Faust". For this disc alone the set is worth the money to Faust aficionados! Then add in the 40 page booklet, illustrated with rare color photos (of them playing darts outdoors in the nude! THE NUDE!) and Super 8 stills, that features essays/memories from Faust friends/fans Chris Cutler and Peter Blegvad, and interviews with several band members as well as with their producer (the reclusive Nettelbeck) and, for the first time ever, with sound engineer Kurt Graupner!
Of course, the individual discs may be issued separately at some time (or not? all we've heard is that the BBC sessions will come out individually) but then again with those first two Faust cds being so hard to come by, and so essential, there's got to be lots of you out there you not only will want this whole box, but NEED this box. Nicely presented, clearly a labor of love, with the cds in not-fancy-but-serviceable individual digipacks (and don't worry, the paintings from "So Far" are included in a color booklet with that disc).
The quintessential Krautrock projects -- Faust, Can, Guru Guru, Amon Duul, and all things vaguely associated with Conny Plank -- had been huge influences on Nurse With Wound's catalogue. So it goes without saying that when Steven Stapleton got the call that Faust wanted him to produce a record of theirs, he enthusiastically leapt at the chance. What he didn't expect was that Faust only passed on a series of sloppy studio improvisations to Stapleton with the instructions to make a Faust album out of them. We can imagine that Jim O'Rourke had been given a similarly loose framework when he was granted the opportunity to produce Rein back in 1995. Just as O'Rourke took those sounds and sculpted an album which was remarkable in its similarity to classic '70s era Faust (e.g. Faust Tapes, Faust IV, So Far, etc.), Stapleton with his trustworthy cohort Colin Potter at his side has crafted an excellent pastiche of that obtuse Faust sound of mutant psychedelia which guided the more experimental proponents of prog rock, industrial, post-punk, and post-rock. Disconnected is filled with dynamic tumbling percussive riffs, rolling acoustic guitar nestled into clouds of vibrating distortion, unsettled sweeping driftwork, and stoned basslines. In other words, Disconnected sounds like a fucking great Faust album.
Unfortunately, this has been very difficult for us to get a hold of; so don't expect it to stick around for very long. We should also let you know that this is the regular edition of Disconnected. The special edition (which we didn't get) does feature two 'bonus' tracks, the first of which is called "Silence" and features just silence (some bonus!); and the second is a live track without the presence of Nurse With Wound. Nope, those ain't here; but honestly we really don't think purchasers of this regular version are missing too much.
Incredible reissue of this totally cracked, acid fried slab of downer synth pop outsider genius. Originally released in the early eighties, Tom Fazzini was carving out a sound that must have freaked people the fuck out back then. Even by today's standards, this stuff is out there: minimal, lo-fi, dark and druggy, psychedelic and a little bit new wave. Keyboards warble and wheeze, drum machines skitter and thump, and Fazzini's vocals, howl and croon and mewl, occasionally grunting, squealing, growling, dripping with reverb, often a volatile angry counterpoint to the warm new wave-y drift of the music underneath.
Much of Neck To Neck gets all industrial and doomy, lots of space, the synth and mechanical drums meting out a spare, abstract pound, that would almost sound right at home on a Wolf Eyes record, or even some unreleased Suicide jam. The record slips into some truly creepy dark ambience, the vocals occasionally erupt into squalls of howling-in-tongues, FX overload madness, but for the most part, Neck to Neck is dark and mysterious, a bit damaged and lysergic.
The B-side especially spends much of its time creeping and crawling, lots of buzzing low end synth, the vocals paranoid and frantic, bloopy basslines, lots of hushed shimmer, and abstract drift, that is until the record explodes into a twisted sing songy jingle, bouncy and bizarre, with what sounds like kazoos, sixties housewife background vocals, almost growly scary singing, over a monotonous rhythm, everything evolving into what sounds like a fucked up Neanderthal birthday party gone wrong, before slipping back into that incessant jazz jingle looped weirdness, only to finish the record with some gorgeous, stripped down elegiac minor key guitarscapery, depressive and downer-y, laced with slow motion circus calliope melodies and warm swells of chordal whirr.
Schizophrenic, otherworldly, damaged, demented and so goddamn great. Sounds like Ariel Pink's creepy drugged out older brother. If Fazzini was a twenty something making music today, with a bunch of limited cd-r releases under his belt, he would be the toast of the current lo-fi / warped pop / cold wave underground, as it is, all those whippersnappers mining the past best bow down, considering that the stuff they're doing now, already existed 25 years ago, and was way weirder!
We all love the Cure, their music informs so many of the sounds we love these days, from gloom pop to doom metal, the music of the Cure is so evocative, so dark and textured and epic, while remaining incredibly catchy and poppy. Elsewhere on this list you'll find a 2cd tribute to the Cure, which is worth buying ONLY for the Jesu track, but if you're looking for some serious Cure love and obsession, not to mention some killer covers, then the latest issue of Fear Drop will definitely hit the spot.
A whole magazine dedicated to the Cure's Pornography, a short study of the music, the band, the songs, the sound. Extensive and well researched, in both English and French, but even if you're not crazy obsessed with the Cure, you still might be pretty excited by the accompanying cd, all the songs from Pornography, covered by groups like Nadja, Troum, Dirge, Savage Republic, Year Of No Light, Contagious Orgasm, Kill The Thrill and Wild Shores. The Nadja version of "One Hundred Years" is awesome, a loping fuzz drenched dirge, weary vocals, thick crumbling guitars, sweeping and epic. Troum tackle "Cold" and create a thick sprawling smear of warm ambient dronemusic, thick and layered, the vocals an ominous whisper, cinematic, creepy, and hauntingly beautiful. Probably worth it for the mag and those two track, but thankfully, the rest of the tracks are pretty excellent as well, ranging from Neurosis-y metallic doom dirge (Dirge doing "A Short Term Effect"), to blissed out shoe gazey new wavey blur (Kill The Thrill doing "A Strange Day"), to buzzing brooding industrial folk, rife with militaristic drums, dramatic strings, squiggly radio interference, and moaning melodies (Contagious Orgasm doing "Pornography"), to sweeping washed out post rock swirl (Year Of No Light doing "The Figurehead") and on and on. Essential for obsessive Cure fans, but the disc is rife with dark, gloomy, buzz drenched heaviness, that would no doubt make the Cure proud.
We only got TEN copies of this, and even that was a stroke of luck as these are already out of print. This is not brand new, but we missed it when it first came out, and Mr. Fear Falls Burning himself graciously let us have his remaining copies.
Another absolutely gorgeous collection of abstract guitar experimentation, but that makes it sound too clinical, these are experimental, but they are also warm and melodic, thick and textured, like all the FFB releases, the sounds hover somewhere between the corrosive slow motion sludge of bands like SUNNO))) and Boris, and the glistening abstract shimmer of folks like Jonathan Coleclough or Andrew Chalk, the difference being that this is ALL guitar.
The copies we got are the super limited tour edition, so not only do they have the lp, but also a bonus tour cd. The lp is three long track, the first a swirl of thick humid clouds of guitar whir, rich streaks of buzz and throb, that warp around each other, creating subtle melodies and delicate overtones. The second track sounds almost like a harpsichord, the guitars unfurling lustrous metallic reverberations, a strange symphony of sympathetic vibrations and singing metals. The final track is dark and meditative, drifting melancholy melodies over a slow shifting sea of low end rumbles and distant pulses, finishing off with a dreamy delicate soft guitar coda.
The bonus disc is much more chordal and riff based, not nearly as abstract, but just as lovely. The songs drift from Spacemen 3 like mesmer, to Galaxie 500 like soft focus drift, to epic orchestra-tuning swells, to dreamy minimal blurs, to shimmery subtle swells to Loren Connors like reverbed strum. All subtle and dark and so lovely.
Gorgeously packaged as always. Thick black cardboard innersleeve wrapped in a textured paper outer sleeve, with a red wax seal on the front, inside, the cd is affixed to a nub on the sleeve, and inside also is a vellum envelope, containing the liner notes, black ink on thick textured black paper. So nice.
Drums are maybe the last thing you might expect to hear on a Fear Falls Burning record, which makes the opening of the new FFB, Frenzy Of The Absolute, all the more fascinating, since it opens with JUST drums, a huge crash, a doomy drum plod all spread out, spacious and spare. But eventually guitars enter the mix, and slowly take over.
Fear Falls Burning is the one man guitardrone project of axeman Dirk Serries, and over the last year has released numerous cds and lps, each filled with his unique take on the otherwise played out doomdronedirge sound. Fear Falls Burning is a much more musical take, no less thick or corrosive or caustic or heavy, but Serries makes his walls of downtuned drone, and whirring buzz, glisten and shimmer, shot through with melody and unlikely texture, about as poppy as a music this un-poppy can get. And it's no different here. Well minus the HUGE difference of having a drummer. Or should we say drummerS! Serries is joined by a series of guests on Frenzy, most notable the drummers from Swedish post-metallers Switchblade and Cult Of Luna.
At first we were worried that adding drums would just turn FFB's ethereal doomic drift into something much more generic and run of the mill, but just the opposite is true. Serries and his guests subtly transform the sound of FFB into something wholly different, the opening track says it all. That sprawling simple, spread out drumming, continues on throughout the first three quarters of the track, pounding away, not pummeling, but pounding, almost delicately if that were even possible, while Serries introduces soft shimmery delicate melodies, that drift dreamily in the background, the whole thing underpinned by a thick, gradually building Niblock like static guitar drone. But that little lullaby like melody, keeps the track from becoming pure dirge. There's way too much space. It's almost like a seriously metallicized and doomed up slowcore band. This is Low covering SUNNO))), a dreamy droney soporific downtuned dreamlike creep.
The guitars thicken, the ambience grows ever more woozy and buzzy, the various swells of distorted buzz, wash in and out, various melodies surface and then drift off, the song slowly transforming into something much blackened and sinister. Until with about 5 minutes left, the track switches gears and becomes a roiling blur of washed out industrial buzz, muted picked apart riffage, processed percussion, the drums slowly surfacing from below, creeping into earshot, like some black beast clawing its way up from the abyss, creating a dirgey sort of Godflesh / Jesu jam, but way more muddy and murky blown out, blurred and soft focused, and somehow still weirdly pretty.
The second track is way more in line with past FFB recordings, huge heaving slabs of buzzing low end, a vast expanse of fluttering, reverberating guitar growl, slow motion swells of whir, peppered with clouds of cymbal shimmer, shooting star streaks of high end, all blearily blurred into one fluid, constantly shifting dronescape. This track too grows in intensity, becoming more cacophonous, more ominous and atonal, a deep black hole of swirling black melody and thick textured guitarscapery. Like a dreamier, blissier Wolf Eyes.
The final track begins like some super charged Spacemen 3 jam, a crumbling distorted space rock riff, doused in delay, the last note allowed to pulse and skitter off into the ether, before the riff re-engages. Over the top, in swoop more layers of guitar buzz, synth sounding whir and warble, all very trancelike and mesmerizing, the drums don't even kick in until near the end, and even then, they just offer up a huge pulse like pound, a skeletal framework for the swirling buzzing blissy blackness above, the drums finally exploding into an actual rhythm with about 2 minutes to go, the guitars soaring into a serious frenzy, suddenly it sounds like the climax of an Explosions In The Sky song AND the finale of a Godspeed song all woven together into one explosive blown out finish.
As much as we love pretty much everything Fear Falls Burning, this record has us hoping this drum thing is not just a one off, but even if it is, we'll dig it while we can.
Fear Falls Burning is quickly becoming one of our favorites artists in the suddenly way-too-crowded scene/genre/movement of guitar-doom-drone-sludge-whatever. A lot of it has to do with that while yes, FFB is one man, a very large amp, and a whole mess of effects pedals, he is much more concerned with mood and texture, structure and timbre, than just mass or heaviness. And somehow, as is often the case, the music that strives the least to sound heavy, is the music that ends up actually sounding the heaviest. Although heavy in its own peculiar way.
I'm One Of Those Monsters Numb With Grace (great title!) consists of two side long epics, the first, begins as a crumbling rock riff, looped into oblivion, repeating and repeating as it gets less and less distinct, beneath a sky filled with gauzy high end streaks of soft melodic shimmer. The track builds and builds, but not into the seemingly requisite huge explosively sludgy 'chorus', more of a glistening thick drone, a dense assemblage of layer upon layer of guitar, multiple melodies all tangled up, everything churning and squirming and growing in density and intensity more than volume.
The second side opens up with a soft minimal shimmer, tranquil and so dreamy, eventually working itself up into a completely (and impossibly) catchy hiccuping stutter, a sort of Spacemen 3 style minimal psych rock jam, but with a main riff that could almost be nothing more than a skipping cd player. It actually sounds like our favorite part of our favorite Teenage Filmstars song ("Teenage Graffiti") with it's fucked up skipping backwards production stretched out into a whole song. So amazing!!!
This is a super limited vinyl only release, LIMITED TO 399 COPIES! Packaged in a breathtakingly designed, super heavy gatefold jacket, printed with a super close up image of the bridge of a guitar, housed in a printed inner sleeve, and pressed on ultra heavy 180 gram vinyl.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Fear Falls Burning is the work of one Dirk Serries, who is probably better know for his work as VidnaObmana. FFB was started a little over a year ago to allow Serries to explore the world of post rock and lo-fi drone music. This dvd-audio disc contains over 4 1/2 hours of recordings from a series of live shows in Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium and are all lengthy slow burn improvisations for thick, slithering distorted drone guitar.
If you can imagine a way less metal SUNNO))) or maybe a super distorted big amped version of Loren Mazzacane Connors you might get an idea of FFB's sound. It's spare and spacious, but thick and textured, the guitar more like some droning noisemaker than an actual guitar, letting wispy tendrils of warm shimmery fuzz unfurl, and twist and drift, often becoming more and more tangled into thick dirge like walls of slow motion riffing. Ghostly abstract melodies rendered in downtuned chiaroscuro, grinding string scrape smeared into layered swirls of buzz, twinkling harmonics drift like little clouds of glitter, the throb and pulse create abstract rumbling rhythms while in the distance all sorts of soft focus colors fade and blur.
Perfect late night, spaced out, free drift, dreampsych guitar drone bliss. Fans of Growing, Main, Spacemen 3, SUNNO))), Chalk, Coleclough and all practitioners of the droney drift will be in absolute heaven.
Amazing oversized 6 panel textured and stained thick woodgrain paper sleeve manufactured exclusively for this release by Shantilal & Sons of Bombay, India, a built in pocket, three oversized postcards printed with cool blurry live shots, and an elaborate folded set of liner notes printed in metallic gold ink on beautiful paper embedded with bits of glitter and tiny little colored cloth fragments. Around the outside is wrapped an obi printed in the same ink on the same lovely paper. One of the nicest packages we've seen!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
This one has been a long time coming. Especially for us. The long rumored, even longer in the works 5lp Fear Falls Burning collaborative remix collection came out a while back, but when our box arrived from overseas, the box was smashed, and while the lps were all in perfect condition, the outer sleeves were not, so we had to wait patiently for them to make more sleeves, specifically for us, and then pray that the box of new sleeves showed up without also being crushed by the Postal Service.
Well, finally, the box arrived and the new sleeves were as close to perfect as we could hope. And thus we can finally list this ambient guitar drone masterpiece. One of our favorite purveyors of blissed out guitar doomdirgedrone, remixed, reworked and reinterpreted by a bunch of bands that couldn't be more kick ass if we had picked them ourselves!!! And gorgeously packaged to boot!
Let's start with the music. Five lps, twenty minutes a side, over three hours, one band to a side, the source material for each side original recordings by Fear Falls Burning, each artist, adding, removing, remixing, or reimagining the sounds given to them by FFB, the results uniformly gorgeous.
The first side is Bass Communion, who turn FFB's droning guitars into chiming choral blissy bell like tones, which eventually build into thick buzzing Spacemen 3 like drones, but which near the end slip back into whirling soft focus ambient drift. The flip side features Final, the solo guitar project of Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, etc.). Broadrick takes his FFB material and stretches it out into a moody meandering soundscape of layered distorted strum and thick crumbling swells, a lovely slowcore guitar drone, peppered with bits of melancholy melody and subtle harmonies.
The second disc starts off with Freiband, aka Frans De Waard, the most minimal of the bunch, a glistening dark ambience, a slow trawl through fields of ephemeral sonic sparkle and soft drones rumbling way off in the distance. The B side of disc 2 is Harvestman, the solo project of Neurosis' Steve Von Till, and his take on FFB is a haunting dark psychedelia, thick slabs of reverbed guitar allowed to drift through the ether, chunks of almost metallic riffing surface throughout, but are suffused with muted shimmer and soft whispered whirring.
The A side of disc 3 is Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel, and his FFB source material is transformed into a glorious keening ur-drone, all upper register buzz over a wash of shifting overtones and blurred chordal resonance, like drifting on some ominous black sonic sea, haunting and subtly ominous. The flipside is Byla, featuring one of the guys from Behold The Arctopus, but don't be expecting any weirdo tech metal, nope, the do Fear Falls Burning proud with a wall of grinding feedback that is smeared into a weirdly soothing high end drone, while downtuned guitars warble and pulse, shimmer and drift, abstract melodies floating atop the rumbling low end, like some disembodied Appalachia.
Disc 4's A side is occupied by perennial AQ fave Aidan Baker (Nadja), one of the only collaborators here who added nothing, no extra instruments, used only the original tracks given to him, but the results are just as unique, a mysterious landscape of ghostly echoes and whispered guitars, long stretches of blisssy drift and dark washes of distorted hiss. The B Side is occupied by Johannes Persson, whose track is a sea of big billowy downtuned riffs, reverberating and fading out above buzzy angular riffs, everything washed out and blurred beneath layers of fuzzy rumble, a strangely active ambience, with a bit of twang ala more modern Earth, eventually building to a gorgeous Godspeed like crescendo.
The A side of the final disc features another long time AQ fave, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma of local space drone alchemists Tarentel, who creates a dark murky dronescape rife with subtle glitches, and grinding distorted guitar smeared into smooth swells, a constant droning buzz running throughout, everything effulgent and haloed in glistening otherworldly glimmers, weirdly enough the darkest and most ominous of the bunch. And finally, finishing things off, is 3/4hadbeeneliminated's Stefano Pilia, who unfurls a warm folky drift, with occasional distorted drones surfacing here and there, all washed out sun dappled and so serene, finally building to an epic and intense soft shimmery crescendo.
Needless to say, if you're a fan of Fear Falls Burning, any of the collaborators, or experimental guitar ambience and dark droning drift, this is totally essential.
The packaging is pretty dang deluxe too. Each lp is pressed on ultra thick 180 gram crystal clear vinyl, the liner notes printed on the lp labels, each lp housed in it's own printed PVC sleeve, blue metallic ink, allowing the clear lp to be visible through the blurry blue images and text, all housed in a library / analogue tape style cardboard outer sleeve, printed in full color. So gorgeous.
A note to vinyl obsessives. These are not sealed in plastic. The design is such that the outer sleeve bends and gets damaged easily, so we removed the outer plastic wrap, and inserted a 12" cardboard flat inside the box alongside the lp sleeves, which protect the lps, and keep the outer sleeve from being damaged. And when shipped these will be extra carefully packaged for their arduous journey to your doorstep.
Already sold out and out of print. We have a bunch, but as always, these probably won't be around for long...
We've had some Fear Falls Burning cd-r's in the past, but this is the first proper release we've been able to get enough of to list, and it is quite simply amazing. Utilizing several guitars as well as an ensemble of Crate, Bahringer, Peavey, Laney and of course Marshall amplifiers, FFB have captured their own take on the glacial dirge. And it's quite unlike the majority of practitioners, in that it is strangely melodic and dreamlike. Very reminiscent of past record of the week Hjarnidaudi, in its ability to drip sunlight and warmth on a sound both dark and dreary. But unlike the band arrangements of Hjarnidaudi, FFB is nothing but guitars, amps, and effects, all deftly woven into a washed out deep ambient whole. Imagine Earth 2 or Sunn 0))) but lighter, and dreamier, less caustic and more soft and billowy. A soft bed of crumbling distortion, a swirl of grit and grrrr, but over the top lie sweet swoons of glistening feedback and thick swells of melody. It sounds almost like one guitarist playing soft and sweet through the biggest loudest most distorted amp ever, while another guitarist plays harsh buzzing drone, but through the tiniest, lowest wattage amp ever. the two mixed together create the perfect dreamlike heaviness. From huge walls of sound to soft humming shimmery buzz, My Bloody Valentine-ish blown out bliss to raga like buzz, this is absolutely gorgeous. A truly unique and surprisingly melodic take on doom and drone.
Amazingly packaged on gorgeous thick sparkly blue sleeve, with an actual photo of one of the amps used to make the record affixed to the front. Pressed on 180 gram white vinyl.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE THEY ARE GONE FOREVER!
Another gorgeous installment in Dirk Serries' exploration of the electric guitar, the amplifier, and just how far both can be taken with as little interference from human hands. As we've mentioned before, a quick listen might have you lumping Serries and his Fear Falls Burning in with his sludgier compatriots, Earth, SUNNO))), etc... but FFB is not about sludge and pummel, it's about drift and shimmer, finding much more in common with outfits like Nadja or the Angelic Process or Hjarnidaudi. But unlike those groups, FFB is just guitar and amp, allowed to feed off each other and slowly unfurl, huge sonic tapestries, lush with subtle overtones and muted melodies, a massive massive minimalism, that continues to rub us exactly the right way.
These two tracks, recorded live, demonstrate again the breadth of Serries' delicate mastery of the amplified guitar. Soft sonic shimmers slowly fluctuate, sounding more like Niblock than anything, overtones shifting and intertwining, steel strings reverberating and stirring up microscopic whirs which all smear together into one living breathing sonic drift. The overtones become more pronounced, taking on melodic shapes, and sounding almost choral, little angelic events, subtly reminding us of Arvo Part. So lovely.
Side two seems to continue on from the very same point side one left off, a delicate serene shimmer, that slowly transforms into an undulating low end crumble, but far from sounding sludgey or even doomy, this is some sort of mystical glistening and sparkling Ur-drone, taking the thuggish caveman throb of the more well know sludgelords, and transforming it into absolute beauty, powerful, physical and surprisingly musical. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each copy hand numbered.
Another amazing sonic document from the one man guitar outfit known as Fear Falls Burning, and much like the 7" reviewed elsewhere on this list, Fear Falls Burning, aka Dirk Serries is proving himself to be a modern master of metallic minimalism, not so much SUNNO))) or Earth as maybe Morton Feldman. His compositions display a similar emotional warmth while retaining quite a bit of musical restraint. Less is more, resulting in way way more.
This 10" begins sounding like Earth 2 on 45, a buzzing alien low end melody, tangled and slowly unfurling amidst an expansive backdrop of oozing low end rumble and layer after layer of buzz and whir. The whole of side A ends up sounding like some sort of string section, albeit with strings that just so happen to be downtuned and distorted. Side B jettisons side A's melody almost completely, leaving in its place a ghostly afterimage, transparent swirls of abstract glimmer, guitars that sparkle, dreamy and sun dappled, melodies exist, but they are barely visible traces and streaks in an already blindingly effervescent soundscape, like a super mellowed out Sunroof!, so nice.
A gorgeous picture disc on nice thick vinyl, both sides close up images of the bridge of an electric guitar, packaged in a thick plastic sleeve with a printed color sticker (complete with liner notes) sealing the sleeve shut.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
It was definitely tempting to toss Fear Falls Burning into the pit with all the other guy-with-a-guitar amp-on-ten-slow-sludge-drone outfits that have been popping up like crazy in the wake of the SUNNO))) / Earth dirgedronedoom explosion. But the more we hear, the more we realize the music of Fear Falls Burning, while sharing some sonic similarities with his downtuned dirge brethren is actually exploring completely different territory. This is not just amp against the amp feedback, or heavy metal riffs played as slow as humanly possible, instead this is an exploration of the electric guitar, of the amplifier, of distortion and feedback as tools of modern minimalism. So much so, that much of the time, Fear Falls Burning almost sounds like Morton Feldman composed for electric guitar.
On the two tracks on this 7", recorded live in 2006, FFB crafts two chunks of modern minimalism, from thick sheets of guitar, and a rumbling low end, managing to deftly arrange each into whispers and shimmers more than any sort of metallic crunch and pummel. Side A is delicate and abstract, glistening peals of high end, warm swells that expand like some slow motion super nova, underpinned by the thick rumble of controlled amp buzz, a dense and thick whir spread out beneath a sky of shooting stars. Side B, is similar, but much more lyrical, haunting melodies, played out amidst and within huge swirls of abstract guitar texture and slow, floating steel string abstractions. So gorgeous.
Packaged in beautiful, textured paper sleeves, printed in a barely visible gloss ink, and pressed on thick clear vinyl!
And of course, super limited, only 500 COPIES!
Here's another matchup that had to happen eventually. And it's the rare one of those that actually sounds as good as one might hope. Like all great collaborations, it's not just so much jamming together, as it is getting each contributor to not only give their all but to push the other collaborator to do the same. It's not a competition, but the spirit is similar, with both parties trying to get into the head of their counterpart, a push and pull, that can sometimes result in the players going places they don't normally on their own.
The long drawn out guitarscapes of Fear Falls Burning are the perfect foil to the more incendiary ambience of Campbell Kneale and his Birchville Cat Motel. Both are capable of face melting heaviness, but both are also quite comfortable crafting intimate worlds of soft sound and distant shimmer. This 49 minute single piece tends to fall more toward the latter at least in the beginning, with the incipient heaviness relegated to smoldering in the distance, while the foreground is a deliriously drifting set of abstract strums, folky fragments allowed to ring out and float freely amidst an almost Wolf Eyesian backdrop of keening feedback, grinding black whirs, and huge resonant swells. The sound is intense, humid, and very cinematic. Eventually the sounds build, layers upon layers, erupting into a blinding heart-of-the-sun nearly static raga, what sounds like a million guitars all left to drone endlessly amidst a cloud of tinkling glimmering sparkles.
The last twenty minutes or so, finds all the high end swallowed by the low, the guitars begin to grind and rumble, pulse and throb, until the sound becomes a dark viscous river of crumbling distortion, growing less and less distorted, until finally, all that's left is a warm, minimal whir, that gently shifts and drifts until it fades out completely.
Most folks (like us) see FFB and BCM and already know this is a must buy, but this is indeed pretty fantastic, even amidst the seemingly neverending (let's hope!) avalanche of amazing releases by both of these prolific noisemakers.
As a music obsessive, it's inevitable that you spend some time fantasizing about the perfect musical match ups. Most of them could never happen, or maybe should never happen, others wouldn't sound as good as one might hope, but some have in fact taken place (SUNNO))) and Boris) and far surpassed our expectations. Which brings us to this, a collaboration between Canadian dream doom duo Nadja, and Dutch one man guitarmy Dirk Serries. These two powerhouses have met up once before, as part of that super limited Conspiracy Records anniversary series, and the sound here is quite similar, hovering somewhere between the colossal crush we know both are capable of, and a surprisingly dreamy drift.
Four lengthy tracks, each more sound than song, but that's exactly as it should be. The opener takes the blown out vacuum cleaner buzz of Total or Skullflower and smears it into soft edged swells, an almost static, barely undulating wall of whirring warmth, which quickly dissipates, leaving just a muted minimal shimmer. The second track is more of the same, a massive pulsing rumble smeared with wispy swaths of fuzzy distortion, but with a bit of percussion added, an industrial clang and thump buried way down in the mix, while above the roiling guitars are draped spidery streaks of coruscating feedback, a sort of Skullflower / SUNNO))) style mashup. Blissful and blown out, but at the same time dark and strangely ominous.
Track three is the anomaly here, the 'quiet' number, a sort of spacious drift, with tons of room sound, simple drumming way down in the mix all Dead C style, some ghostly melodies, and haunting snippets of clean guitar surfacing here and there and what sounds like seasick organs warbly and wavering. So haunting and pretty.
And finally, the closer, which begins with some slightly atonal Nitsch style drones, a wash of what sounds like moaning horns but must be guitars, tense and intense, drawn out for what seems like forever, when suddenly a wall of crumbling distorted guitars drop from the sky like it's raining anvils, a plodding drum beat underpinning the now suddenly caustic riffage, a gorgeously blown out slab of impossibly heavy, and simultaneously strangely lovely, ultra dooooooooom.
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The Russian noise-artist Nikita Evsuk has adopted the apt moniker Fear Konstruktor; and at least for the couple of cassettes we've heard from him, he lives up to the name. Ball Metall, released through the impressive Black Horizons imprint, is an appropriately grim offering of abject ambience and post-industrial bleakness. It's a very murky sound that Evsuk generates, with the desolate melodies from what might be a synth, might be a guitar, might be a voice, all treated with FX to sound as if dripping with tar, soot, and moldering soil. He stitches in burbling electronics and creaking loops of disarming textures that could be the sounds of stretched ligaments and disembodied sinews. Bowed metals and bashed steel resonance also litter the soundscape, giving everything a very cold, post-Neubauten feel. All of the tones and drones which ooze from the cassette crumble and fall apart into a morass of gray production murkiness. As a whole, it seems that the Russian industrialists (Fear Konstuktror included) seem to fully embody an existential bleakness that their German counterparts certainly achieved, but never sustained. More swanky packaging from Black Horizons with sparkly card-stock, marbled art-mini booklet, and gold offset printing. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Much black metal has been coming out of Cascadia lately, Wolves In The Throne Room, Fauna, Echtra, but not all is grim and frosty and cold and buzzy and black in the Pacific Northwest. Fearthainne is the work of the two players who make up Fauna, whose Rain record we raved about a while back. But in Fearthainne, all of the buzz and lbuster have been replaced by delicate crystalline guitar, gruff emotive vocals, deep ominous drones, all woven into a slow, drifting, meditative mountain folk.
On the same label that in the past has brought us mysterious sounds from At The Head Of The Woods, The Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Alethese and Beneath The Lake, Fearthainne sound right at home, blending dense whirring minimal soundscapes, with gentle meditative folk rituals. Long long tracks that slowly blossom, smoldering, clouded in warm browns and cool greys, strings weep and moan, effects gently cradle the various elements, adding texture more than changing the sound. Mesmerizing, trancelike ruminations on nature, on death, on the beyond. Simple percussion demarcates sprawling folk strum and fields of lilting shimmer and and delicate flutter. The vocals are a strange contrast, almost atonal, moaned more than sung, reminding us of solo records by either of the Neurosis frontmen, giving the proceedings a much more ominous vibe, ritualistic and hauntingly spiritual.
Gorgeous in its simplicity, mysterious in its minimalism, Fearthainne is the soundtrack to a land outside of time, of trees towering over a world unspoilt, clouds drifting across empty skies, night turning into day, the cycle of life continuing on, the world and the universe around it gradually moving into a new, more magical existence. Beautifully sublime.
Incredible packaging, full color 6 panel oversized sleeve, amazing images of ancient forests, late night rituals, and the band gathered beneath a mighty tree, cradling a baby, dressed like witches, and looking like a band of bearded forest dwellers (which they may very well be!).
Dust-To-Digital are known for their excellent reissue work, unearthing and preserving music from scratchy old shellac 78 rpm recordings and the like. Bringing us vintage blues, gospel, Tuvan throat singing, and more, all with elaborate packaging and incredible attention to detail. They've been responsible for a host of fine cds, boxsets, and books, among 'em Victrola Favorites, Opika Pende, Steve Roden's I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces, and Goodbye, Babylon.
But THIS handsome book + cd set may be their most remarkable release yet, at least in terms of radical sound-conservation technique. It's certainly their most unusual. For example: one of the tracks here is an excerpt of an after-dinner speech given by late-19th century American orator and politician Chauncy M. Depew. You can listen to it on the cd, and distinctly make out the speaker's words, voice, and phrasing, amid a thick patina of hiss, hum, and distortion. Sounds like a poorly-preserved old gramophone disc. But, that sound isn't coming from the disc itself being played (and re-recorded for release on the cd). It's actually derived from a PICTURE of that disc, reduced by 2/3rds original size, that appeared in a 1898 magazine advertisement. The spiraling grooves on the record were pictured clearly enough that with creative use of off-the-shelf computer software, author Patrick Feaster was able to "play" a fairly accurate semblance of the sounds originally encoded on the gramophone record being advertised!!! Ok, that's pretty cool! Talk about DUST-to-Digital. And it's but one example of the MANY different, quite intriguing excercises and investigations in "playing back" sound from such antique and/or unusual "recordings" that Feaster and his colleagues at the First Sounds initiative have come up with, presented in fascinating detail in this fancy (gold gilt edges!), hardback 144-page book and accompanying 28-track compact disc.
Of course, one can argue, just what IS a "sound recording" anyway? In large part, that's what this is about; in fact, Feaster's introduction is devoted to that very question, which turns out to be both a philosophical one, as well as a technical one. Even in Feaster's expansive notion of the term, the idea that "sound recordings" exist from as far back as the year 980AD is perhaps a fanciful one, as he will admit, but still fruitful to consider.
Because, what this book is also about, more generally, is how human beings have sought to understand sound phenomena (from nature, voice, and music), through the ages, how sound has been "captured" and put on paper in graphical form to be perceived and studied visually. These visual representations of sound, are essentially all in the form of graphs of frequency, or amplitude, over time: sound spectrograms, sound oscillograms, phonoautograms, melographic inscriptions, manometric flame sketches, and many more. Various techniques, applied to various subjects. Found in these chapters and tracks, there's FBI voice-recognition studies from the '70s, phonophotographs of Negro spirituals from the '20s, and examples of Athansius Kircher's "Magia Phonotatica" circa 1650 (works which bring to mind Conlon Nancarrow's Studies For Player Piano), among others.
So, this is all very historically & scientifically interesting. Also, completely compelling just for the beauty of these images alone, which may or may not directly reflect the beauty of the sounds they represent - this is a lavishly illustrated book, with full-color reproductions of these various "sound recordings" to accompany the insightful text explaining it all. And the magic really happens, when you experience the book and cd in tandem, as each track on the cd, even the briefest, has an entire several-page chapter in the book devoted to it, and it really helps to read about and look at the visual sound source, while listening. Some tracks sound like antique recordings we're used to from wax cylinders and 78s, complete with the surface static we love so much; others like strange field recordings or ghostly experimental drones or balloons being rubbed together; still others like music boxes or similar devices�
This is the sort of unusual sound document to file with such aQ faves as the mysterious Ghost Orchid EVP recordings, the VLF recordings of Stephen McGreevy, or even the famed Conet Project (soon to be available again, with a bonus 5th disc!). In fact, one of the exhibits here, an 1890 phonoautogram by Emile Berliner, kind of reminds us of a Conet "numbers station" track, being a spoken series of numbers and letters recorded at varying speeds.
All in all, an astonishing, thought-provoking, and simply gorgeous book and cd, recommended to anyone interested in sound, science, OR art; meaning, probably everybody reading this!
