With just the mention of Jim O'Rourke, this will sell itself. But for those of you out there who have been taken in by his recent pop aesthetics, we should state the warning that this is not a pop album. Collaborating with powerbook geniuses Christian Fennesz and Pita Rehberg (both from the venerable Mego collective), O'Rourke sheds the pop schtick for a streaming barrage of digital splices which are predominantly needling synthetic tones and random clicks, but sporadically reference a rhythm or a melody before being mutilated into the digital cacophony.
The second production from the Fenn O' Berg laptop trio of Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, and Peter "Pita" Rehberg adds just a bit more structure to the previous collaboration, but falls in line with the increasing number of Max / MSP improvisations that have been coming out as of late. The general feel for the album retains some of the digitally deconstructed dreaminess found on some of the Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers recordings, but with the additional collaged pitter patter of digital squiggles and clicks. Where Fenn O'Berg succeeds is in their sporadic use of fuzzy rhythms, post-acid melodies, and antiquated samples from carnival music and melodramatic film scores. All of these, of course, get the pixel treatment.
Andrew Chalk recorded as Ferial Confine for a few years in the mid '80s. At that time, all of those recordings were cassette only releases, mostly self-released / private editions of just a couple of copies with the exception of the Meiosis cassette put out by Broken Flag. That cassette and the Full Use Of Nothing LP, which Fusetron reissued from one of those private edition tapes, found Chalk embracing an acoustic teethgnashing through metallic noise junk. It was no wonder that The New Blockaders and Organum would seek him out as a future collaborator. But there were only hints on those two recordings of what would later become what Chalk would be best known for: the majestic, sublime, and beautiful drone.
Chalk's 1986 album Crescent, which was released under his own name, has long been viewed as the bridge between the Ferial Confine aesthetic of blistered noise and the softened timbral complexities of later work including that of Mirror. That said, nobody had heard First, Second And Third Drop. Also recorded in 1986, this Ferial Confine album truly is the missing link between the two polarities of the Chalk aesthetic, as the scraping metallic skree is present but often tuned in sympathy to bowed gongs and long-thin wire drones. Blossoming reverberation consumes some of these tracks, which sound even better than the classic Organum sound of that time period. It goes without saying that this album is incredible. Well, Andrew Chalk made it, of course. But the historical nature of this record makes it even all the more interesting. Oh yeah, it's also painfully limited; and already sold out at the label.
This is the long lost recording of Andrew Chalk's 1985 album Meiosis, which was originally issued as a cassette on the seminal UK noise imprint Broken Flag. For those of you (and we know there are many of you out there) who are enamored by the impressionistic pools of dreamtime sound that make up most of Chalk's more well known albums, the Ferial Confine aesthetic is a considerable departure. But for those of you who can also sink your teeth into a delicious chunk of noise (and yes there are plenty of you out there too!), this album will hit that teeth-gnashing sweet spot. In the mid '80s, Chalk was not only involved with the Broken Flag circle, but also with Organum and The New Blockaders; and parts of this albums parallels much of the TNB / Organum strategies for densely aggregated, metal-compacted noise junk. Unlike the power electronics sound of Ramleh / Whitehouse, this shared aesthetic sounds like recordings of sheared metal plates being sped up and having the high-pitched frequencies of those scabrous grinds amplified into frenetic transmissions of aggravated tactility. It's almost a more listenable, more psychedelic, more acoustically based form of the aggro-minimalism of the Harsh Wall Noise format which was proposed a couple years back. While this aforementioned sound is the dominant strategy for the first three tracks on Meiosis (following suit from the first Ferial Confine album The Full Use Of Nothing), the middle tracks predict the more contemplative, dark drones that Chalk would produce on his late '80s albums Crescent and East Of The Sun. Here, deep rumbling electronics ripple through delay patterns alongside the resonant acoustic frequencies of suspended pieces of metal and even some field recordings of bird songs. Certainly not the pastoral impressionism of his current output, but very much looking forward to what he would be doing nowadays through a more industrially minded and jackbooted lens. By the end of the album, the searing feedback-blistered frequencies return, albeit with a weirdly psychedelic series of electronic glissandos buried beneath that's akin to early noise-junk Merzbow jamming with Daphne Oram. Very cool. If anything, Meiosis is a fantastic archive from the British underground; and given the collectability (and bootlegs) of the Broken Flag cassettes, this is necessary reissue. Hand fabricated by Andrew Chalk in a tip-on style sleeve with an obi that sports the title in Japanese.
This marks the second reissue of these recordings from Andrew Chalk's early noise-junk project Ferial Confine. The Full Use Of Nothing was originally a cassette self-released back in 1985 and was most likely one of the recordings that piqued the interest of Broken Flag to eventually release some of Chalk's more gnarled constructions. While the Ferial Confine records are definitely noise albums, there is a thread which ties these into the drone-centric work for which he's best known, in the gradual evolution of the compositions that shift from one set of demolished sounds into another. The process seems to find Chalk beginning with metal-bashed percussion recorded at very slow speeds on a 4-track then bounced to a different track at very high speeds with swarming synth / reverb saturated dronescraping draped beneath the volatile squeaking and dissonant klanking aktionism. One can hear some of the early Merzbow and / or Yeast Culture noise-junk recordings and most certainly the frenzied clamour of The New Blockaders (who had in fact worked with Chalk around this same time period), but it's that phasing, slippery drone miasma suspended as a backdrop to all of the tactile noise that gives this a very Andrew Chalk feel. Even working with noise, Andrew Chalk proved himself much better than many of his contemporaries! The cd reissue of The Full Use Of Nothing is the first in a triology of Ferial Confine recordings which will include the Broken Flag cassette Meiosis (1985) and a second pressing of the First, Second, And Third Drop (1986, unreleased until a cd version came out in 2008).
The debut release on David "Gastr Del Sol" Grubbs' new Drag City-sponsored label is the cd reissue of this rare LP by French musique concrete artist Ferrari. Apparently such an important work that the label states that "any other record that sounds like this is but a pale imitation."
Self-deprecatingly qualified by Ferrari as a "poor man's concrete music," Presque Rien is a brilliant piece of Spartan tape music that Ferrari began in 1967 with four variations on the Presque Rien theme composed over the next three decades. The first version was originally released in 1970 through Deutsche Grammophon, the next found its way through INA-GRM on vinyl in 1980, the third (composed in 1989) ended up on a cd compendium of the first three Presque Rien suites released through INA-GRM in 1995, and now the fouth chapter (completed in 1998) sees the light of day with the other three version thanks to the Editions Mego subsidized Recollection GRM project. Thus, this complete version makes a hell of lot more sense than the previous INA-GRM version which tacked on a densely claustrophobic and politically charged collage track at the beginning of the disc, setting an entirely different context for how Presque Rein was heard. Each of the four suites operates in a very spacious framework with long passages of placid sounds from nature being ruptured by short aggressive bursts of tape noise, proto-industrial machinations, and psychologically charged fragments of sound. Like Robert Ashley's ultra creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon", Ferrari intertwines fragments of various whispered narratives with the steady buzzings of choral cicadas, as if each narration were that of a voyeur spying upon the intimacy of nature. It's easy to hear the influence that Ferrari's masterpiece had on a young Steven Stapleton and a pre-pop Jim O'Rourke, as well as pretty much every field recordist / phonographer that picked up a digital recorder... but Ferrari started this way back in 1967. The new 2lp was cut to perfection by D&M at 45rpm. Normally, we'd be all over playing this at the wrong speed, but this is an album really does sound way better at the correct speed. There, it's brilliant.
More warped otherworldly sound collage murky warble from one half of the late great Skaters. And like everything else we've heard from Ferraro post-Skaters, the sounds on Citrac, a two lp collection of mostly previously released material (but most so limited you probably never heard 'em anyway), are a blurred jumble of fantastically twisted time machine lo-fi anti-pop. Ferraro along with his ex-bandmate have been credited with spearheading the so called 'hypnogogic pop' movement, but pop seems to have very little to do with this. Pop CULTURE maybe. Visually, the jacket and inner sleeve are adorned with all manner of eighties cheesiness, which thankfully isn't necessarily reflected in the music. Instead, Ferraro takes his arsenal of music making devices, busted effects and falling apart 4-track, as well as a handful of samples from cop shows and after school specials and late night made for TV movies, and goes about, snipping and pasting and looping and smearing those various sounds into some totally tripped out krautdrone, psych-synth, buzz-loop weirdness.
All of the sounds here are murky and muddy and sound like they were recorded on an old VHS tape and then duped over and over and over and over. The percussion is clattery but buried in the mix, tons of reverb and delay, much of the first disc sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack spinning lazily on a fucked up turntable while someone holds their thumb down on the vinyl, causing the record to slip and slow down, the whole thing peppered with strange howled vocals (or what sound like vocals). The end of side two features a sonic event that seems to pop up all over these two records, an awesome lurching synth-psych loop, that could have gone on FOREVER, but ends way too soon. Also, as far as we can tell, the first record is meant to play at 45, it definitely sounds like Ferraro at 45, but it sounds really cool at 33 too, even more industrial and woozy and washed out.
The second disc though, sounds like 33 is the correct speed, 45 makes it a bit manic, but still pretty intense and psychedelic, but at 33, it's way more aggressive than the first record, more industrial too, like a doom metal Wolf Eyes or something, albeit way more fucked up and fractured, loads of low end, metallic percussion, and some sick inhuman barks wreathed in effects, at 33 it's creepy, at 45 it becomes some sped up soundtrack video game alien techno. Weirdly twisted and almost proggy. Rad stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!
It's been a while since we've listed anything Skaters related, and not for lack of action on their part, they have an avalanche of new cd-r's, that we'll try to get to eventually, but for now, let's tackle this, the latest lp from half of the Skaters, James Ferraro. Pretty sure this is an lp reissue of some out of print tapes or something, but it hardly matters, cuz wherever it came from it's pretty damn cool. The sticker calls the sounds within "tropical drones". But if we had to describe it, NEW AGE seems way more accurate. And we don't meant that in a bad way at all. We love new age, as long as it's like this, gorgeous blissed out crystalline shimmer, long slow moving tones, delicate melodies, everything glistening and glimmering, reflective and prismatic and hypnotic, but then about halfway through the song shifts and things get freaky, in come the muted crunchy eighties sounding guitars and the muffled buried rhythms, the original tones get a little fuzzier as the song evolves into an imaginary eighties new wave cop show theme song. Which is awesome.
The flipside definitely sounds tropical, with squiggly fake flute melodies, the chirp of dolphin calls buried in the ooze and warble of the shimmery underwater warble, the sound gorgeously warped and washed out, trippy and almost otherworldly, it's a bit like the sound you hear when you wake up on the couch in the middle of the night, all groggy and half asleep and you left the TV on and some bizarre nature program or softcore porn is playing, but all you can hear is the sound, and then you suddenly open your eyes and all you can see are clouds and pyramids and your living room seems to have sunken into the deep blue, it sort of sounds like that. Awesome.
Comes with a download card too, so you can get your self another digital chunk of underwater tropical new age-y bliss.
Don't be confused, it may look the same, but in fact, it's the second of two lp reissues from James Ferraro, one half of floor core legends the Skaters. We reviewed his Clear lp on our last list, this time it's Discovery, almost the exact same cover, the alien pyramids floating in some strange sea, only the name of the record is different (and don't trust the sticker, on about half of the lps we got the stickers were all switched up), although really it barely matters, as the sounds on Discovery, sound very much like the ones on Clear, which make sense as they are archival recordings from about the same time period.
Two side long jams, exploring that alien new age only those Skaters guys seem capable of, this one sounds like two parts of the same jam, equal parts new age swoosh, staticky old AM radio and alien soap opera theme music, all blurred and smeared into a weirdly organic warped and warbly drift. Bleary and blown out, glistening and glimmery, a buried krautrock groove, that seems to fade out and return at random, all imbued with a cool psychedelic eighties B-movie Goblin vibe.
The flipside is more of the same, only a bit more rocking, more feedback and distortion, but just barely, the guitars a tad more noodly and spidery, but all the sounds still washed out and sun dappled and hypnotic. Like Clear before it, Discovery is a fantastic chunk of blissed out Baywatch new age, and here's hoping Holy Mountain keeps digging up and reissuing these tripped out artifacts.
Comes with a download card too, so you can get iPod-able versions of these tracks as well!!
When beloved noise duo The Skaters broke up, the two partners went in drastically different directions sonically, with Spencer Clark taking his Monopoly Child Searchers in a more hazy, tribal, washed out direction, which wasn't really all that removed from the Skaters' sound, at its loveliest, at least. And James Ferraro going off the musical deep end, transforming into some sort of bizarro avant pop songsmith, his last record Night Dolls With Hairspray, exactly what the title might have you expecting, a tripped out, lysergic collection of tweaked lo-fi glam rock weirdness, which managed to be totally baffling, but pretty much totally irresistible at the same time. And while we were expecting more of the same on Farsidevirtual, Ferraro once again has mixed things up and managed to come up with something even MORE ridiculous, and again, a glorious car crash of a record, channeling the cheesiest parts of eighties music, sure he was sort of doing that before, but now it's like new age mixed with the sort of upbeat music that would accompany one of those workplace educational films, all swirly synths, programmed rhythms, weirdly funky grooves, all rendered in shades of super shiny, super well produced, gleaming ultra produced electro rock. Or something.
The opener "Linden Dollars" sounds like Shadowfax covering the theme from Peanuts, but given a little 21st century new age makeover. Then there's "Global Lunch" which just baffles all the way through, super cheesy synths, a woman asking if you want something or other beamed directly to your "I-Tablet", with faux strings, tinkling chimes, a melody played using those weird voice presets on synthesizers, then a solo played on a fake sitar, or the sitar setting on a synth, while male vox are clipped and sent stuttering off into the distance, and then finally the song builds to a crazy climax with a wild sax solo, and some fuzzy electronic bass, it's literally some of the craziest shit we've ever heard. The whole record sounds like library music from 1985, composed and recorded for infomercials, straight to video rom-coms, and third tier sporting events, and if that seems like we're bagging on it, we're totally not, we're just baffled by how someone could even conceive of making music like this in the 21st century, how they would make these sounds, and why the hell we can't stop listening to it.
Packaged in the usual garishly futuristic sleeve, with thick printed cardstock insert and a download coupon too!
More 'hypnogogic pop' from ex-Skaters soundscaper James Ferraro, whose latest album remains rooted in the off kilter whatthefuck (heavy on the lost late night eighties vibe), visually, with a bizarre Best Buy / pick up truck / parking lot / alien robot / Fox Sports graphic collaged cover art, and a lyric sheet / manifesto packed with references to Judge Judy, Costco, Beverly Hills, energy drinks, lost highways, tongue rings, gladiators, batteries, 'no fear', etc, as well as sonically, continuing to mine a fantastically bastardized John Carpenter soundtrack / late night cable sort of warped dronepop melodicism.
The A side here is definitely and immediately recognizable as Ferraro, but unlike past jams which occasionally tended toward the dense and layered, this sidelong track is stripped way down and laid way back, a simple pulsing rhythm, skeletal and minimal, laid out under a glimmery smear of sun dappled synth, over which, still more synths add haunting melodies, would around warm guitar figures, all hazy and washed out and lysergic, the loops warped but subtly so, woven into the perfect fusion of new age shimmer, and retro futurist kosmiche drift, and hell it still sounds like it could have been lifted straight from some lost Argento or Carpenter flick, which is in no way a bad thing.
The flipside is another warbly dreamjam, new age-y and soft focus, gentle tangles of melody tumble frame by frame over a motorik synth pulse, wreathed in hiss, and glistening streaks of reverb and delay, notes ring out, chiming, synths soar and sing, total sun dappled free energy divine sonic bliss for sure. Halfway through, the track shifts gears, and suddenly it's a full on raga, with warped sitar buzz, loping tarpit synth basslines, and lots and lots of space, a sound like looking at the sun, through some glowing alien crystalline structure, reflective and prismatic, with strange bursts of organ warble, swirling clouds of barely there tape hiss, all blurred and smeared into a meditative drift, that gradually gains momentum, transforming into a weirdly propulsive, but still totally laid back new age groove, peppered with cool/weird drop outs, and skipping samples, which only add to the track's mysterious home brewed charm.
Another gorgeous inner space excursion from Ferraro, comes with a download code, and is most likely very limited.
We sometimes think lysergic free noise floorcore duo the Skaters might as well have never broken up. Sure both James Ferraro and Spencer Clark (aka Monopoly Child Star Searchers) have carved their own sonic path, but they seem perpetually linked. On the same label, releasing records at the same time, often playing on each other's records (which makes it the Skaters sort of anyway, right?), sounds that while different, definitely share many similarities, and most notably, both possess a visual aesthetic so appalling and seemingly purposefully eye gouging, it's almost as if they're trying to get people not to listen to their records. Which is a shame, cuz another thing these guys have in common, is almost without exception, their records are fantastic. Tripped out and woozy and warped and psychedelic, each in his own twisted way.
Ferraro has mixed up his sound quite a bit, trading the confusional murky loopscapes for what sounds like a lo-fi eighties after school special soundtrack version of Ariel Pink. Which is not a bad thing, just fucking awesomely bizarre. Like eighties FM radio rock mixed with seventies glam rock run through the warped lysergic lo-fi warped retro pop of NOW. Hard to tell if the music is actually played, it sounds so genuinely old, it seems like it must be sampled, but either way, Ferraro straps on his best falsetto and lets loose, sounding one second like Russell Mael from Sparks, the next like Prince, and the next like some hair metal howler, the music similarly flits from sound to sound, one minute sounding like eighties MTV cheese, the next spandex-ed glam metal, the next dizzying warped collages, and the next like some Saturday morning commercial for some gloopy messy toy.
It takes a lot these days to confuse and confound, but this stuff is wacked, and weird, and pretty twistedly wonderful. Not sure exactly who the audience for this stuff is, us it seems, cuz for all of its what-the-fuck-ness, we can't seem to stop listening to this, which either says something about the record, about us, or most likely both.
Originally released as a super limited cd-r back in 2009, James Ferraro (formerly of drone-noise duo The Skaters, and now rechristened 'JIM' if the cover art is to be believed), unveils his twisted alien radio pop masterpiece in vinyl. And while we were perhaps a bit confused by the all out what-the-fuck-ness of Night Dolls With Hairspray, we were prepared for On Air, which if anything is even weirder.
Sure the first two tracks are misleadingly dreamy, all synthed out shimmer, and futuristic sci-fi ambience, warm and whirring and washed out, like it was dubbed from some old VHS tape, but then BAM, the title track drops, and we're hurled into some alternate eighties commercial pop MTV universe where Ferraro is a purveyor of radio pop jingles, which sound like Ariel Pink doing a commercial for Applebee's, recorded on a boombox with dying batteries, the sound warped and warbly, but even beyond the sound quality, there's honky tonk piano, female background vocals, pretty sure we said this about Night Dolls With Hairspray, but we're kind of confounded how Ferraro makes this music. It really sounds like he's just singing over purloined music from old TV broadcasts, but apparently this is all original, and if anything, that WTF has been cranked even further, and we have to say, once we were prepared, we're kind of getting WAY into this stuff.
It's like Ariel Pink and Gary War and all those guys but taken too far, so far that this stops being ironic retro lysergic pop and becomes downright avant garde, and beyond that, these warped pop songs, and yeah, they're about as warped as can be, are catchy as fuck, warped confusional pop songs surrounded on all sides by strange malfunctioning effects, the vocals sped up chipmunk fast one second slowed down to a rumbly crawl the next, there are heavy distorted guitars all over the place, more John Parr than actual metal, but in keeping with that Eighties radio vibe for sure, there are all manner of synths, and strange programmed rhythms, the sound is so all over the map and twisted tweaked and utterly demented that it's nearly impossible to describe.
Ferraro's sound is about as far removed from the Skaters as is possible, and while his old bandmate continues to create sonically similar murky lysegry via Monopoly Child Star Searcher, Ferraro is happy as can be in his glammy alien outsider radio pop universe, and we kind of are too.
One of two new releases from local art-label Time Released Sound, the other, the second release from mysterious modern classical soundscaper Strie is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this, the latest release from a South Korean soundscaper/dronescaper who calls himself Fescal, and this single 50 minute tracks is a beauty, all tinkling melodies and gauzy staticky haze, warm softly billowing drones, and distant smoldering atmospheres, the production gives it the feel of some antiquated recording recently unearthed, the music too is timeless in its own way, the sound shifting dramatically throughout, from hushed black ambient thrum, to warm almost chamber music, and from washed out soft focus psychedelic drift, to barely there blurred atmospheric shimmer, and all the indistinct stops in between. Fans of Machinefabriek and Jasper TX, of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck, this is definitely for you.
Like with all TRL releases, the packaging is fantastic and extravagant, LIMITED TO JUST 100 COPIES, the cd is housed in a hand worked black digipak, housed in a see-through anti-static bag, stickered on the front, with a pressed metal tag affixed to the bag with wire, inside there's a screw topped pyrex test tube containing metal and glass shavings, and inside the digipak are all manner of litmus strips, found artifacts, chemical notations as well as liner notes.
ALREADY SOLD OUT AT THE LABEL AND OUT OF PRINT. We have 5 or 6 copies, and then these are gone for good!
We first discovered Fescal, via his Alchemical Wanderings release on Time Released Sound, and not soon after we reviewed it, Fescal got in touch and offered us the remaining copies of his super limited Moods & Views cd-r on Twice Removed, so of course we got all the copies we could, and besides some INSANELY deluxe packaging (more on that in a bit), the music is just as lovely and haunting as Alchemical Wanderings.
Separated into two nearly half hour 'movements', Fescal weaves a gorgeous sprawl of minimal electronic dronemusic, that right off the bat had us in the mind of Oval, but where Oval was all liquid swirl and skipped cds blurred into lush lustrous dreaminess, Fescal is a bit more home brewed, the sounds a little more raw and less polished, the first piece here, a deep sonorous thrum, pulsing gently, as if it was caught in a slow moving current, or drifting in a gentle breeze, the sound itself though is dark and ominous, a distorted drone, that seems to shift subtly with each pulsation, and is wreathed in a gauze-y haze, everything wrapped in a cloud of crackle, that sounds a bit like either a sputtering campfire, or an old scratchy record spinning lazily on an antique turntable. There's little variation, or what variation there is, is subtle enough that it's almost imperceptible, instead, the piece sucks you in, and holds you in thrall for its full 28 minutes. Super gorgeous dreamy dark minimalism for sure.
The second piece is a whole 'nother beast entirely. Gone is the woozy washed out shimmer, and in its place a heaving sprawl of distorted low end, but muted and blurred into hazy ghostlike shapes, buried in the mix, moaning tones, and mysterious low end melodies, the sound thick, and softly caustic, a bit more industrial, and a bit more sinister. Soft noise sprawls into blackened ethereal thrum, shot through with keening streaks of high end, and what sounds like strange industrial field recordings, everything still wreathed in that warm comfortable crackle.
The packaging is just as stunning as the music, a textured paper outersleeve, wrapped in twine, with a fabric flower affixed to the front, the whole thing wrapped in rough twine. Inside, a printed insert, with liner notes and credits, as well as a beautiful fold out poster, printed on gold metallic paper, bundled with another insert, also on textured paper. Each cd-r also includes a tiny personalized note from Fescal, and these are LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Already sold out and long out of print. These are the last copies we'll be able to get.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is the third release we've reviewed from Fescal, the first was on local label Time Released Sound, which should give you an idea of Fescal's sound, and sadly this one too, like both before it, is INSANELY limited, we have ten copies of a total run of 100 and won't be able to get more once we sell out.
Fescal delivers two long tracks of softly psychedelic, pastoral drone music, long layered tones, softly undulating beneath a sky full of fractured melody and ethereal shimmer, all smeared into heaving swells of deep chordal thrum. Buried within seem to be voices, a distant angelic singing, which imbues the sound with a melodic warmth that keeps this from being simply dronemusic. The sounds too are imperfect, bits of sound crumble here, distort there, sounds drop out, others waver, still others surface, it's dreamy and druggy and divine, the first track here is a heady stretch of lush, lustrous drones, and deep listening mesmer, a sound which wouldn't have been out of place on Root Strata or yeah, Time Released Sound. But unlike much of this music that sounds passive, this music is powerful, the sounds alive, and active, beneath the surface is a roiling world of complex structures and continually shifting melodies, this first track glows with a mysterious inner warmth, and exudes and a cosmic energy that seems to bathe the listener in an otherworldly golden light.
The second track is much more contemplative, cut from the same song cloth, but where the first seemed to smolder with some mysterious energy, the second sound more entropic, casting off all that energy, the sound of melting snow, of fading light, of waning life, still pastoral and dreamlike, but a bit more melancholy, the end not the beginning, a haunting, and lovely rumination on what has been, and what can never be again, faded memories and future dreams of the past. So lovely.
Fantastic packaging too. A small textured box, with printed art affixed to the front. inside a small plastic bag containing some sort of dried plant, on a nest like bed of blue confetti, a printed, numbered full color insert, and a gorgeously printed, textured paper, vellum songbook, containing the titular poems, as well as the liner notes.
Our friend Adam who runs the super cool Crucial Blast label, has, for over 6 years now, been quietly (and not so quietly) putting out some of the coolest shit around. From crusty Finnish metal to droning electronica to sparse folk to brutal power electronics. This new series of cd-r's, limited to 100 copies and nicely packaged in oversized DVD cases will only be available via Aquarius records (unless you get them directly from Crucial Blast). So don't blow it...
Feverdreams is dark and mysterious. A rumbling and shimmering miasma of soothing low end, staticky buzz, and occasional clatter and skree. Gorgeous slow building sound scapes with subtle non-repeating rhythms and with layers and layers of drone, whir, throb, and clang. This would be nightmare music if it wasn't so damn pretty.
- RealAudio clip: One
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- RealAudio clip: Four
This is the first we've heard from local songstress/soundscaper Feverwitch, and with that band name, the strange song titles, the unorthodox characters/spelling, you might be thinking Witch House, a genre we all loved but which seemed to have been a bit of a flash in the pan - and to a degree you'd be right, from the very first few second of the first track FW unfurls some seriously haunting slomo mesmer, ritualistic and cinematic, whirling organs, slowed down male vocals drone beneath FW's dramatic croon, what sound like strings swoop and soar, darkly mysterious and almost liturgical, like a lo-fi 4 track Arvo Part, spectral and shimmery, murky and moody, the perfect late night chill out bliss out, with a slightly witchy/demonic edge to it.
And really, that's how the whole tape plays out, vibes of Twin Peaks, hints of Grouper, definitely plenty of Witch House residue, gothy and gloomy, some of the tracks are like otherworldly ballads, FW's distinctive vocals nestled in fields of processed vocals, delicate tinkling piano, crystalline expanses of hushed thrum, others build to strident singer/songwriter drama, albeit steeped in thick clouds of reverb and delay, and when the drums come in (which is seldom), they had some heft, some rhythmic gravitas that gives the song a ghostly propulsion. Swirls of cosmic synths drift in, adding a sort of new age / sci-fi vibe, everything blurred into a washed out lysergic sonic haze, that's darkly and dreamily divine.
Then there's the final track, where FW really gives her voice a workout, letting loose with the sort of voice that gives you chills, dramatic operatic, somewhere between Kate Bush and Diamanda Galas, wild trills, soaring impossible melodies, all over sweeping faux strings and brooding atmospheric swirl. Wow.
Really nice, fans of Grouper, Zola Jesus, Chelsea Wolfe should check this out for sure!
Perhaps also titled: "The Oscillating 'Will' And The Flickering 'Self'", this is the first live album from the duo of Japanese turntable experimentalist Otomo Yoshihide and sampler technician Sachiko M. Filament was formed, we're told, "as a persistent
"People listening to this CD for the first time may have trouble accepting the fact that this was a live performance before a large audience, so powerfully stoic is Filament's music. To the constant sound of subtly strengthening and weakening sine waves are added the intermittent miniscule sound of circuitry, and a dull mechanical hum (too soft for us to recognize its origin). From beginning to end hardly anything happens here, but at the same time an amazing number of events occur. If one were to give a name to this 'onkyo' of just under 30 minutes, the words composition, improvisation, and performance would probably all be too extreme. But all of these are included in this quiet phenomenon. When producing sound, even if one reduces as much as possible what is called 'self-consciousness', one can never completely eliminate it. This is because the 'I' that produces, decides to produce, and thinks about producing sound the 'I' that listens to, decides to listen to, and thinks about listening to sounds are always there. The minimal 'I' performing minimal 'listening' and 'sound production,' possessing a minimal 'will'...." Ok, lost me there. Still, I think you'll know if you want this!
As much as we always loved Godflesh and Techno Animal and most everything else Justin Broadrick was involved in, by the end there, a few years back, a lot of that stuff began to sound just a little bit tired and dated and sometimes even just plain not good. But now! Holy shit! Not sure what it was, but -something- happened during those few years in between. First there was Jesu, a total revelation, everything we loved about Godflesh, but swathed in thick swirls of My Bloody Valentine guitars and warm fuzzy M83-isms. A gloriously blissed out, but still impossibly heavy, sunkissed drone drenched chunk of dreamlike heaviness. And now we have the long overdue resurrection of Broadrick's ambient project Final. And something strange has happened to the music of Final as well. What was once bleak, dark, barren and clinical isolationism, has grown into something warm and alive, a series of blurry and buzzy and blissy miniature soundscapes. Warm and warped and warbly, very much like the sonic worlds created by Tim Hecker. Final now explore a musical world gauzy and sepia toned, dreamlike melodies obfuscated by warm rich layers of crackle and hum, chimes ring out, drifting delicately on a sea of sonic swirl, bits of glitch and grit surface occasionally, as does the occasional almost-rhythms, the whole record like a dusty old scrapbook of small faded snaphots capturing some lost time or some forgotten place. An abstruse drone music, viewed through a window dense with rain coursing down it's surface, giving everything a soft focus, a warped otherworldliness. The mood can occasionally still be ominous and creepy, even sort of menacing at times, but even then, it's diffused, washed out and grey, or blown out and dappled with winter sunlight, or smeared into an indistinct blur of pale moonlight, dreamy and droney and so beautiful.
Brand new full length album from Justin Broadrick's (Jesu, Godflesh, etc.) Final project, which in the past was a sort of solo guitar thing, or so we thought. On Afar, the eight numbered tracks are arrangements of processed loops, with nary a guitar in site. Which becomes harder to believe the further we get into the record.
The sound here is dark and mesmerizing, each track a slow cycling soundscape, rife with shifting textures and pulsing almost-rhythms, the sounds super varied, but all woven together into one cohesive songsuite. Fans of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck will dig bigtime, as well as guitar drone aficionados into stuff like Fear Falls Burning.
Layers of crunch and buzz are locked into swelling, swaying hypnotic rhythms, the textures and timbre shifting gradually, the looped aspect not always immediately noticeable. Deep rumbles beneath softly processed whirs are woven into stretches of haunting cinematic shimmer, fading into swooping backwards melodies peppered with bits of glitch and crackle. Elsewhere slow burning 'guitar' sounds buzz explosively into epic and majestic sheets of buzzing woozy blur, before being scattered by dense tangles of reverberating metallic hum and rumbling low end way off in the distance. A few tracks definitely dip into Jeck territory with stuttery looped vocals and clipped samples and muted skitter, before finishing off with a hushed bit of whispery murmur.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. We get these direct from Broadrick's Avalanche label in the UK, so when we run out it might take a couple weeks to get more, assuming there are still some left. Nice thick picture disc in a thick PVC plastic sleeve.
It's been ages since we've heard from Justin Broadrick as Final, his solo ambient project. Most of the last few years has been spent crafting blissed out shoegazey metalscapes with his outfit Jesu. Maybe you've heard of them. But before Jesu began, Broadrick spent his downtime away from Godflesh creating a series of fantastic solo records, overflowing with brooding dark ambience, creepy guitar based drones, and murky abstract minimalism.
It's been almost three years since the last Final record, a double cd on Neurot, and even though, since then, Broadrick has been heading in a way poppier direction with Jesu, this Final might be the heaviest and harshest yet.
Opener "Slow Air" sets the stage with an impossible heavy crush of super distorted bass rumbles below a tangle of high end skree and feedback. The whole track grinds and churns, peppered with bent guitar melodies, and mechanical percussion, building to a truly cacophonous finale. "Caved" follows suit with a corrosive slab of digital noise, that gets wound up into a wall of static airplane-taking-off rooooaaaar, of course laced with all sorts of glitch and buzz and shimmer.
track three, "Fearless Systems" is the first track to offer up any serious melody, and in doing so can't seem to help but to reference Jesu, sort of shimmery and washed out, a gauzy drift under grinding machinery and damaged tape buzz and hiss finishing off in a soft cloud of glimmering high end. The disc changes gears quite a bit after that, offering up some lurching looped grooves, some proto-industrial crunch, some whispered dark ambience smeared with distorted dubstep bass and distant wailing siren like tones, gorgeous slowcore crawls, peppered with shards of crash and clang, glistening digital drones shrouded in damaged space-y FX, buzzing almost minimal almost black metal that gives way to deep listening new age drift, finally finishing off with the track 'Dead Air", a warm blurred stretch of disembodied soft focus tones, muted buzz, lilting distorted melodies, all deftly woven into a haunting gauzy coda. So nice.
A brand new record from Mr. Justin Broadrick, formerly of Godflesh, presently of Jesu, as well the sole member of this, his long running project Final. Originally an experimental solo guitar project, and actually maybe STILL an experimental solo guitar project, Final has definitely changed over the years, lately sharing more in common with Jesu than anything, the same sort of blissy drift, washed out drone drenched shimmer, but in Final, those elements are blurred into something more ambient and less propulsive, more soundscape-y and less post metal.
Four long tracks, each slow building and slow burning, the first all soft ethereal melodies over a grinding crunching minimal drone, those two elements all tangled up, with the melodies eventually blossoming into epic atonal harmonies, sheets of sound like a symphony of car horns, smoothed into something much more listenable but no less clamorous and chaotic, definitely reminds us of Sunroof! near the end.
The second track starts out all SUNN-y, a crumbling distorted downtuned dirge, although within that dirge lurks some surprising melody, and this track too builds to a blissed out high end shimmer, overlapping tones, washes of synthy warmth, bits of buzz and glitch, lovely, but still softly abrasive.
The flipside begins with some sort of abstract doom, thick, jagged chords, ringing out, and allowed to nearly fade out completely, before the next one comes crashing down, lots and lots of space, in the background a strangely active swirl of skree, streaks of feedback, shards of feedback, sine waves and upper register whir, roiling and churning beneath the lumbering riffage.
And finally, the record finishes off with something altogether different. Something pretty and strummy and yes, shoegaze-y, but weirdly looped and hypnotic sounding, as if they took a chunk from a Jesu track, a pretty undistorted bit, then doused it in effects and set it on repeat, allowing it to slowly shift, but to lock into a mantra like loop, so gorgeous, could have used a whole 'nother side of this stuff for sure.
VINYL ONLY (At least for now, cd coming someday)! LIMITED TO 1500 COPIES!!!
We're surprised it took this long for these two avant guitarists to join forces, Final, aka Justin Broadrick, aka the man behind Godflesh, Jesu, Grey Machine, Techno Animal etc, and Fear Falls Burning, aka Dirk Serries. In some ways both have a similar approach to the guitar, both able to sculpt sprawling expanses of layered drone music, transforming six strings into something much more, a sound generator capable of conjuring heaving, roiling dronescapes as well as hushed ambient drifts.
The opening track seems more influenced by later period Broadrick, as it sounds a lot like a washed out, minimalized Jesu track, a slow, warm, lugubrious riff, looped over and over, poppy and melodic, but slowed down enough that it becomes trancelike, with Serries (we assume) adding a sky full of tangled and layered high end contrails, adding a dark tension, and a mysterious beauty to the melancholic main riff, the whole thing wreathed in a gauzy dreamlike production.
The second track is more static, less riff based, and more wide open, a blackened landscape of rumbling low end string buzz, and singing high end skree, the skree muted so instead of being piercing, it's more smoldering, a glowing buzz, that pulses and throbs, the guitars constantly shifting, the layers overlapping and intertwining, gorgeous but still tense and dramatic, easily could have been extended to fill up a whole record and we definitely would not have complained.
The flipside begins with a smokey bit of folk flecked darkness, that definitely reminds us of groups like Earth or Barn Owl, a tiny bit of twang, a subtle choral vibe, warm and washed out, melancholy and minor key, the guitar unfurling skeletal melodies that blossom lazily, and then seem to fade into the background, just in time for more to take their place, a subtly active twangscape of muted buzz and almost country sounding drones, again, drifting ghostlike through a sepia toned haze.
The record closes with a gorgeous, thick bit of dronemusic, the background a sitar like buzz gives the track a definite raga like vibe, while in the foreground, another guitar moans, unleashing warped low end melodic tangles, delivered in slow motion, mimicking the sound of a horn almost, a muted bleat, but pulled into strange alien melodies, mirrored by the ever shifting, and highly melodic background buzz. This one definitely could have been stretched out forever, absolutely mesmerizing, the sort of drone you never ever want to end.
Gorgeous packaging, a black on black sleeve, with a very subtle die cut, revealing yet more black from the sleeve within. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.
We try to carry everything we can from Time Released Sound, and we generally do, but some releases sell to quick, or are too limited, some are just too expensive, but well worth it, as those of you who've purchased one of TRS's over the top, extravagantly packaged deluxe editions can attest to. So this new one from Benjamin Finger, we almost weren't gonna carry for all those reasons, it's crazy expensive, and the label nearly sold out already, but there are a handful of aQ list readers who are pretty dang obsessive about TRS, so we managed to finagle a tiny handful of these, so at least a few aQ customers will be able to get their hands on one of these. Cuz holy cow are these incredible, easily the most fantastic packaging we've seen from TRS, which is saying a lot, since they pretty much pull out all the stops every time, but they've outdone themselves with this one for sure. The whole thing is housed in an extensively modified chocolate box, collaged inside and out, with century old educational musical strips, it's stamped and hand painted, the boxes feet made from brass piano capstans, inside the box is a bird marionette, a sculptural/skeletal creature made from the parts of an antique piano, that bird marionette is laid atop a nest of random piano parts, nestled in little sections, separated by antique and hand printed inserts. The mythical bird, the marionette in the box, is then described in extreme detail on the inserts, its history, and the story of its eventual extinction. Yowza, you sort of have to see it to believe it, and it's totally worth the price, just imagining how much time and work went into making every one of these sort of boggles the mind. And it's limited to just 70 COPIES, of which we have 3 or 4, and can NOT get more.
But enough about the packaging, it is a musical release after all, and a lovely one at that, Finger weaving hypnotic landscapes of looped piano, Reich and Riley like figures, wreathed in echo and delay, and laid over a soft swirling background of barely there thrum, the shimmery piano augmented by strange ethereal, processed voices, melancholy and wistful, some tracks shot through with a shadowy, slightly sinister vibe, but others purely pastoral, sun dappled and dreamy, the production is strangely lo-fi, giving the sound an immediacy, often sounding like you're right there in the room, but other times, the sound smearing and blurring into something more ephemeral, shadowy and softly psychedelic, those voices surfacing throughout, and giving the whole record a strange haunted faded photograph feel. Definitely cinematic, a little bit old timey, and definitely darkly dreamy.
The latest blast of free-noise-out-rock from Campbell Kneale's always reliable Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label comes courtesy of The Fingers, a duo that takes free jazz and dips it in a boilng, churning vat of 100 proof Fushitsusha and then wraps it in some Harry Pussy. Wild and wooly guitar freakouts, drenched in reverb, careen wildly amidst some splattery, chaotic and very loose free drumming, that crashes and pounds relentlessly, only occasionally tighting things up into almost-straight-ahead-rhythms, before crumbling back into the thick and gorgeous mess of this drum/guitar battle. But the guitar is definitely in control, laying a thick, viscous layer of six string skronk and atonal no-wave clatter over EVERYTHING. Noisy and nice. Fans of Japanese psychedelic noise freakouts, and all things chaotic and free will dig this like crazy.
There's nothing we love quite as much as discovering a new weird band we had never heard of, and then discovering that the band in question is in fact a side project of yet -another- weird band we hadn't heard of either.
Such is the case with The First Cosmosis Artchestra On Vlubaland (quite a mouthful!) who happen to be an offshoot of the much more simply monickered Vluba.
Not sure what Vluba are all about but we are definitely digging the strange sounds of TFCAOV. The first track ("Cok") is a super abstract soundscape, a sort of free noise drift, lots of high end, feedback, cymbal sizzle, strange whistles and distant squeals, but underpinned by strange simple insistent rhythms, peppered with muted thumps and random blasts of crunch and shimmer. Like a more unhinged, less static Sunroof! or Hototogisu. Or like if someone took a super dense Dead C track and pulled it a part and stretched it out until it was almost transparent.
The second track ("Mok") is an ultra minimal soundscape of mostly percussion. Rattles and shakers, bits of clanging metal, little squalls of manic hand drumming, what sounds like various objects being rolled along other objects, very chaotic but subtle and with a certain elegance, a kitchen sink percussion jam transformed into a strangely meditative rhythmscape. Really cool.
Packaged in a very cryptic color sleeve, with a printed insert, a gorgeous transparent leaf and sealed with a bit of green string tied in a knot.
LIMITED TO 77 COPIES!!!
- MPEG stream: Cok
- MPEG stream: Mok
Don't be fooled by the promotional DJ sticker, this is in fact a proper full length from weirdo witch house / ghost drag outfit First Flesh, the dead eyed seventies zombie hottie on the cover your first clue as to what lurks inside Zombie Rave, and actually, the jams here sound less Zombie Rave, and more warped new wave chopped and screwed eighties house pop, which is not a bad thing at all. Imagine some Rick Astley style cheesy eighties pop vox slowed way down, to a ghostly, almost Antony sounding dramatic baritone, then lay those vocals over some woozy slo-mo house music, some HI-NRG grooves, sapped of most of their energy, and recast as a sort of symphonic gloom house, woozy and warped and pretty fuckin' cool. The second track takes those same vocals and wraps them around pulsing synths and ominous tolling bells, the whole thing rife with a 'wrong speed' vibe, a dark drowsy drag, a ghostly house music pop ballad that sounds like it could be the music from some cheesy montage in a seventies zombie arthouse flick.
The flipside starts out with another slab of ghostly draggy gloom pop, the vocals sounding auto-tuned, but instead of tuned up, tuned WAY down. The final track is more pounding and industrial, but mixes in a crazy poppy chorus, a sped up Kesha style radio pop chorus, which sounds so weird with the otherwise gloomy pound, but somehow sounds so cool at the same time! Fans of weirdo witch house will dig for sure, and folks who like the warped pop of Ariel Pink, John Maus and the like, might also find themselves getting into FF quite a bit...
Yet another installment in the Mystery Sea label's ongoing series of "night-ocean drones", and none maybe more appropriate then this disc from Russian drone outfit Five Elements Music. Based on the Vedic concept of five elements air, fire, water earth and of course ether. Yup. However, here we're mostly concerned with water, as it seems that most, if not all the sounds on VarunaGhat are sourced from recordings of water.
It's hard to tell at first, as the sounds is just a whispered glimmer, a shimmering high end glint way off in the distance, hovering like fireflies over a vast expanse of hushed ambience, long drawn out barely audible tones, ultra minimal but quite lovely. Eventually, the tones grow louder and more pronounced, melodies surface, and the sound of water solidifies, and suddenly the drones are drifting along side a burbling stream, or the lapping of water on the shore of a lake, slightly percussive, hissing and gently frothing, adding a whole other layer of sound to the already carefully arranged soundscape. Each track here follows a similar pattern, from barely there, to a tangible exploration of some water based soundworld. The second track begins with a microscopic rumble, but soon, we're wandering through a rain forest, the sound of rustling branches, rain on leaves, streams and gently running water, all suspended in a strange glacial swirl of near static shimmer and soft blurred drones.
The final track is much more active, much more percussive, with the sounds processed into almost rhythms, dark and ominous, eventually building to what sounds like it could be the sound from some movie, leaves crunching underfoot, rain falling, foot steps, leaves and branches in the wind, all manner of water, splashing and dripping, again, all wrapped within a haunting smear of muted harmonics and deep rumbling whirs...
Definitely one of the nicest in the series, and certainly the most evocative, perfect late night drifting off music, the sound of rain combined with deep dark shimmering drones, pretty impossible to resist.
Like all Mystery Sea releases, strictly LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc numbered on the tray card, and gorgeously packaged with striking full color artwork.
Three drone-centric artists from three different parts of the world... Five Elements Music is a Russian isolationist / ambient project spawned by one of the members of the similarly minded Exit In Grey; Andrea Marutti is an Italian dark ambient practitioner with a number of occultish recordings under the moniker Amon; and Jim Haynes is a Bay Area artist who "rusts things" and also happens to work here at aQuarius. Both Marutti's and Haynes' compositions are responses to the piece made by Five Elements Music. A massive tectonic rumble emerges from the onset of the Russian track, as if the resonant echo from a meteor striking the heart of Siberia were captured through the felling of a million trees. Out of these frequencies, Five Elements Music evolves this sound into a growling dissonance more dialed into those rasping drones that Oren Ambarchi or Birchville Cat Motel might broadcast from time to time. Over the 23 minutes, this track becomes steadily more placid and inviting, eschewing the desolate horror at the beginning for something beautifully introspective. Marutti builds from the bleak horror where Five Elements Music began, producing cavernous hues of black and grey on amorphous clouds of mist and fog. Marutti's work parallels those blackened static movements of Yen Pox and Inade. For Haynes' part, the theatrical cloak and dagger of Thomas Koner's isolationism comes to mind in his response to the Five Elements Music track, albeit constructed from his distressed textures and fluttering shortwave radio manipulation. Easily the most dynamic piece of this triptych, Haynes deftly transitions pools of nocturnal drones into snarling crescendos of volatile motors, turbines, and Kevin Drumm-esque guitar dissonance which morph into an evocative movement of super-slow-motion heartbeat rhythm and radio frequencies detuned into sweeping, ghostly sinewaves, captured from within one of those WWII era bunkers that dot the California coast. Haynes presented a version of this at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in a collaborative, expanded cinema piece involving a massive diorama, lots of old scientific gear, a couple of surveillance cameras, and a toy train. Alas, there's little video documentation of that performance, but the audio here works amazingly well on its own.
Limited to 400 copies (although some websites claim this to be limited to 300)...
Miasmah debut (after a couple previous releases on the similar label Lampse) from this young Swedish composer, whose affecting, abstract cinematic soundscapes are part modern classical, part electro-acoustic ambience, hallucinatory and haunting. Reference has been made to Angelo Badalamenti and John Cage, Autechre and Jerry Goldsmith. If you're already a fan of Miasmah's marvelous, moody, murky output (Jacaszek, Elegi, FNS...) you should be eager to hear this. Likewise if you enjoy the likes of Leland Kirby and Indignant Senility.
The eleven tracks here are rife with subtle electronic pulsations, Jeckian surface crackle, gentle chimes and shivering drones... all with sad, pretty melodies buried beneath. It's mysterious, quite lovely music. Fjellstrom's sounds conjure images of surf wracked, rain swept shores at dusk, ancient pianos and grandfather clocks crumbling slowly (and somehow rhythmically) into dust, and the sleeping forms quietly dreaming such things. Indeed, anyone making a dreamlike and slightly sinister film would be wise to consider Fjellstrom for the soundtrack (as some have already done, tracks 6-9 here, forming the "House Without A Door" suite, having originally being commissioned for a film of the same name).
Freshly reissued as part of the Dynamophone Folio series! Fjordne's The Last 3 Days Of Time album was previously released as part of the label's special Parcel series - each volume came packaged in a round metal tin. The Folio series comes in a full color single-fold cardboard sleeve. Just as lovely the second time around!
Here's what we said about the release back in 2008...
Wonderful! As is reflected in the icy blue cover art, this is a wintry album - contemplative and shimmering soundscapes populated by acoustic guitars, piano, fleeting vocal gasps and seemingly microscopic electronics. Imagine a not so distant Japanese cousin of the Diskont album by Germany's Oval. Yes, it's that good! Winding and unwinding like the delicate clockwork mechanics revealed amid the feathers of the diminutive birds on the cover, these ten tracks are simply gorgeous from start to finish... as has been pretty much everything released to date by this fine, young SF independent label. Needless to say, very recommended! A perfect fit for those who've also been enjoying the soothing immersion into the releases on labels such as A Room Forever and Mystery Sea.
Not sure what it is, but a lot of the new wave of post-hardcore improvised jazz leaves us really cold. Naysayers and squares have always described free jazz as just a bunch of noise, a bunch of honking skronking non-music. And as much as we fancy ourselves lovers of free jazz AND diggers of all manner of noise, we have occasionally lamentedly found ourselves playing that role, you know, the grumpy and bitter old music man, reflecting on the glory of the good ol' days, admonishing the younguns "That's nothing but noise, give that dangnabbit rackit a rest!" Or something appropriately crotchety like that.
But every once in a while, for whatever reason, one of those records sneaks through and kicks our ass. This is one of those records.
It helps that Corsano and Flaherty have been honing their improvisational mind melds for years now. Their interplay is fluid and fierce, a free jazz freakout as sublime as it is pummeling. Corsano (who also does time in free folk weirdos Sunburned Hand Of The Man) and Flaherty (a legend amongst free jazz fiends) spar and weave, Flaherty's sax spewing thick gushes of corrosive sound, a downright Borbetomagusian cascade of shreiks and groans, sputters and wheezes, but it's Corsano who holds it all together, an incredible gush of dense and delirious drumming, from impossibly subtle shuffle and skitter to an avalanche of percussion pummel unrivalled. Holy shit! So massive and emotionally charged, freaked out and wild and free. But Corsano and Flaherty manage to imbue each white hot burst with strangely soothing atonal melodies and rhythms that manage to be downright catchy, so much so that on repeated listens we find ourselves almost humming along to Corsano's solo stretches. Amazing stuff!
"Warning: This is a unique recording. These 8 compositions are to be played using as many as four compact disc players, and have synchronized start times. This recording also contains frequencies not normally heard on commercial recordings and on rare occasion has caused the listener to become disoriented."
That's right, four cds meant to be played simultaneously, that nonetheless sound engrossing and interesting one by one. That Warner Bros saw fit to release this wonderful experiment in sonic collage is amazing. Then it went out of print for a while, so what's even MORE amazing is that Warner Bros. decided to repress it, again!!
Buy this and conduct your own "boombox experiment"...
Finally one of the legendary lost This Heat related recordings gets its first proper release! Originally released as a tape in 1985, recorded by This Heat's Gareth Williams and Mary Currie and friends, shortly after Williams left This Heat, Flaming Tunes is a gorgeous, quirky collection of lo-fi experimental moody textural avant pop, originally conceived as something totally removed from the much more abrasive and rhythmic music he made in This Heat. Unavailable ever since its original cassette release, minus a bootleg which included the tape in its entirety but described it as This Heat's final demo recordings, Flaming Tunes in some ways reminds us of Charles Hayward's Camberwell Now project, in that some of the sounds are familiar and still somewhat This Heat sounding, but the record is much more vocal based, and song oriented, resulting in a sound, that while appealing to This Heat obsessives, offered a whole new window into Williams' approach to sound and songwriting, and in that, a once removed glimpse of some of the elements that helped make This Heat what it was.
The record opens with a looped piano wrapped in sizzling electronic buzz, peppered with strange bursts of sonic crunch, stuttery fragmented rhythms, not hard to see why folks believed this could be a blueprint for new This Heat material. But the second song is more of what Flaming Tunes is all about. Tunes. Sing songy weary vocals over plonked piano, squeaking horns, skittery percussion, lots of drones, plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz, definitely lo-fi, some cool synth melodies, the sound definitely reminiscent of the first two Brian Eno records or that classic Flying Nun sound, bands like the Tall Dwarfs or the Pin Group or This Kind Of Punishment or The Children's Hour or even the Dead C at their most poppy. And that's the sound that makes up most of Flaming Tunes, a hazy, gauzy, low fidelity (but strangely lush) bedroom pop, lots of piano, wreathed in reverb, warm warbly bass, occasional strings, programmed rhythms, detuned tangles of minor key guitar, plenty of jangle and chime, with intermittent forays into cool abstract experimentation, but even then, those tracks still sound a little song-y and don't at all disrupt the flow of the record. "Raindrops From Heaven", with a field recording of rainfall, insects, beneath some clattery, muted parlor skitter, or the brooding muddy piano drone of "It's Madness" with its disembodied vox and haunting creepy creaking Victorian vibe, with sampled strings and mysterious textures, before the record closes with a surprisingly Beatles-esque ballad called "Generous Moon", that sort of classic pop, rendered a little bit warped and woozy, the guitars twangy, and the background melodies a sea of whirring keyboards, locking into a looped dreamlike dirge before finally fading out.
So nice. This Heat fanatics will flip for sure, and no doubt some have tapes or bootlegs of this already, but it sounds so much better now, and comes in a super deluxe digipak, with tons of photos, artwork and liner notes. And even if you've never heard This Heat (what the hell is wrong with you?), this will still appeal to folks into twisted dark lo-fi pop.
Holy smokin' haz-mat howdoyoudo's! This is the debut release from SF art-noise project Le Flange Du Mal... and quite an introduction it is. Despite their moniker, as far as we can tell none of the participants are French. A quick'n'dirty translation of their name is The Flange Of The Evil, but that's not quite as poetic, is it? Doesn't really slip as gracefully off the tongue. Anyways, the leader of Le Flange pack is Mr. Chris Rolls. He's the head honcho of the very varied SF indie label Kimosciotic Records (home to art-noisies Ezee Tiger and Crack W.A.R., electronic experimentalists Not Breathing, and hip hop lone wolf Unagi), and he's also been in the ranks of SF shit-disturbers Ziegenbock Kopf and Earwicker. He's joined by Chris Cones (also of Earwicker and Subarachnoid Space), Crack We Are Rock's Jason Stamberger and MurderMurder's Liz Allbee, and they make music that runs the gamut just as much as the artists whom he releases on his label. With their multi-barrelled toxic industrial-bootybass-sludge assault, they come careening right at you with their foot nowhere near the brakes, swerving woozily to avoid other vehicles in their path, cruising through the no wave and art rock zones, and through a musty gothy batcave (check out the track "Nightcrawler") too.
We made the most recent record by Grouper record of the week a while back. A dizzying mix of Paart, Feldman, Skullflower, all rendered in washed out fuzz and indistinct shades of shimmer and whir.
Here we have a new group called Flash Lights, which features Liz Harris aka Grouper along with sound sculptor Jorge Behringer. Harris offers up her angelic ghostlike vocals, ethereal and gauzy, sometimes so barely there, they just sound like instrument hum, while Behringer contributes the music, a heady swirl of found sounds, field recordings, dreamlike guitar, processed viola and all manner of electronics. The sound is dark and moody and glacial. Harris' vocals definitely act more as another layer in the overall soundfield, often just a steady reverberating hum, or a slowly modulating warble, drenched in reverb so the whole sound is like being lost in a dense musical fog. The final half hour track is a massive dronescape of fuzz and hiss and whir and rumble, like drifting on some alien sea, about halfway through a series of clattery creaking sonic happenings are introduced, almost like the rigging of the ship stretching and settling, very reminiscent of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. So haunting and creepy and captivatingingly lovely. Anyone who dug that grouper ABSOLUTELY needs this.
Limited to 200 copies. Featuring cover art by Liz Harris.
Another UNblack gem, this from one of the mainstays of the scene, Flaskavsae. Celestial, originally recorded in 2005, and finally released in 2007, then out of print, only now getting reissued (albeit in another way too limited run).
But holy crap, another disc of totally wacked, bizarrely produced unblack madness. Grim and buzzing and primitive, the drumming super straight ahead, not blasting as much as a sort of relentless Dbeat pound, but the guitars, they sound ghostly and alien, and whatever effect they're running through, renders them all blurred and pixilated and makes them sort of stutter in this super hypnotic blissed out way. This predates the whole new-gaze craze by years, but somehow, however it happened, this record is total dreamlike noise drenched UNblack metalgaze. At first the sound was so blown out and buzzy that it has us thinking of Canadian black metal weirdos WOLD, but as the record progressed, the sounds seemed to soften and blur, the guitar parts crazy catchy and weirdly melodic, the vocals a strange rumbling gurgle, that really do sound like just another layer of buzz.
That effect infuses every bit of the record, the whole thing seems to shimmer and shuffle and vibrate, almost like the sonic version of a strobe light, sending strange vibrations from the speaker into your bones. A few tracks are doomy crawls, with that impossible fucked up guitar beautifully damaged, unfurling in gorgeously stuttery loops, the bass thick and even more melodic than the guitar, pulsing beneath the swirls and whirls of FX and guitar fuzz.
But the final track is the ultimate, a furious black blast, so densely effected that the whole track seems to pulse in time with the drumming, it has some crazy effect on your ears as you listen, and your body as you feel the vibrations, like a black metal dream machine, the vocals a hissing insectoid whisper, the drums chaotic and stumbling, but it's that effect, we can't explain it, but it just freaks us out, in a really good way, it turns Flaskavsae's grim buzz into something totally and inexplicably transcendent.
Super raw, lo-fi black metal
brutal, buzzing US un-BM....
We've heard a lot of strange black metal related discs, but this is among the strangest...On this album, metal is only one (important but small) component of the whole, which also involves free jazz and trip hop...Released on the same label that brought us the infamous Benighted Leams, and you can see how this truly fucked-up "so bad it's weird and so weird it's bad and so weird and bad that it's kind of amazing" band would appeal to the same minds that thought the Leams were genius. Formerly a medieval 'forest-is-my-throne' epic black metal band a la Ulver (and we think still sharing some members with that Norwegian Ulver/Ved Buens Ende/Dodheimsgard axis), now these guys are wearing suits, carrying automatic weapons, and programming beats. But they've gone beyond the Mr. Bungle tendencies of say, an Arcturus (who seem "ordinary" in comparison!), and created something that even we at AQ can't quite understand, or judge. Every time we put this on, our reactions vary from being blown away at how bizarre and great it is to being appalled at the (same!) dismally bad and wrong moments. Great packaging, with the lyrics in the form of a miniature intelligence "dossier". Essential for those compelled to always increase the utter weirdness quotient of their cd collections, and very definitely for fans of Arcturus, Solefald, and recent Dodheimsgard.
Longtime readers of the aQ list should be familiar with Ben Fleury-Steiner even if they don't realize it. There's been three discs of freaked out avant drone drenched rhythmic psychedelia as Light Of Shipwreck, which is in fact, Ben Fleury-Steiner, tons of releases on the Gears Of Sand label, which BFS just so happens to run, but this is the first proper solo record under his own name, and it's gorgeous.
Unlike Light Of Shipwreck, which was typically a dizzying assemblage of repeated rhythms, layered and collaged samples, careening chaotic drum damage and dubbed out industrial weirdness, on Keep A Weather Eye Open, Fleury-Steiner traffics in something much more tranquil, a series of dark and dolorous dronescapes, some thick and textured, corrosive and chordal, others hushed and minimal smooth and crystalline, a sound that veers from dense cavernous black ambient rumbles to shimmering shoegazey drift, from Troum to Lovesliescrushing. "Tender Is The Opaque Morning" is delicate yet ominous, long streaks of distant high end sound underpin reverbed plinks, and moaning strings, a smoldering lightly blackened haze, while "Purple As The Dawn" is a wispy smear of hushed new age etherea, "Feedback Of Day" sounds like it was recorded in the hull of a rusty old ship, "Blue Sonar" is a blue sky full of sun dappled clouds, the sound of light dancing on leaves. The cool thing about all these songs is the distinction is not all that distinct. The pretty delicate numbers bleed right into the more haunting mysterious tracks, and both are infused with elements of the other. A sound not so much perfectly balanced between light and dark, but one that is both simultaneously, depending on the track, on the context, a hidden battle beneath the surface, the result, a strangely otherworldly collection of ever evolving, totally mesmerizing, and strangely mysterious dronemusic, dark enough to require active listening, but blissed out and tranquil enough to be the soundtrack to late nights and slow drifts into oblivion.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
