Not sure what exactly required the name to change from Spectre Folk, to the Folk Spectre, but fear not fans of all things folky and droney, fuzzy and drifty, this is still indeed the work of Mr. Pete Nolan, of the Double Leopards, GHQ, Wooden Wand and we're sure a handful more. At first we were tempted to think the name change had to do with a slight shift in sonics, as the first few tracks are totally stripped down lo-fi folk. No noise or drone or buzz to be found. At all. Just skeletal guitar, plaintive vocals, wrapped around sad sad melodies, and allowed to drift in wide open expanses of record crackle and tape hiss. But then the closer on side A finds some squealing feedback entering the fray, and simple Velvets like drumming, distant chanting, the main riff sort of wobbly and warbly, a gorgeous laid back stoned and droned drug jam, that while slightly noisier than the tracks preceding it, still falls well within the groovy hippy bliss we've come to expect from Nolan and his folky Spectre-d outfit.
The B side offers up more of the same, but varied a bit, a few tracks of hushed folkiness, but then a long stretch of high end hissiness draped over the lilting guitar beneath, a track of Middle Eastern style melody, with a distinct raga-like vibe, and the record finishes off with a gorgeous muted muddy slo-mo drone-jam, that sounds a bit like a much more mellow Wooden Shjips played at 16rpm, and a little bit like a folkier Spacemen 3. As usual, killer stuff.
Packaged in hand screened black and white sleeves with photocopied inserts, covered in drawings, lyrics and liner notes.
We've been blessed recently with multiple releases from the mysterious Nordvargr, whose dense dark ambience we can never get enough of. Nordvargr was a core member of legendary black ambient outfit MZ412, and has recorded as Toroidh, Hydra Head 9,Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Nordvargr and of course Folkstorm. It's been far too long since the last Folkstorm record, Folkstorm being the guise Nordvargr takes on to produce his unique brand of tense, isolationist, dark and droning industrial music. Thick swells of minor key chords, hypnotic repetitive tribal drumming, all sorts of found sounds and snippets of speeches, traditional songs and old radio broadcasts, huge jagged distorted pulses (sounding almost like Techno Animal or Curse Of The Golden Vampire at times), haunting disembodied female vocals, radio static and amp buzz and all manner of sonic grit and crackle, pounding subterranean rhythms, warm warbly drones, disturbing minor key ambience, creaking industrial clatter, intense nightmarish melodies, all bathed in a thick swirl of fuzzed out distortion and crumbling machinelike whir. Super ominous and dark, intense and strangely beautiful.
Packaged in a gorgeous red, white and black digipak. And while they last we have the EXTREMELY LIMITED special edition (limited to 300 hand numbered copies) that includes a bonus 3" cd containing two unreleased tracks! Once those are gone, you'll receive the standard single disc version.
Folkstrom is the solo project from MZ.412's Mr. Nordvargr, although it could be some lost leftfield recording from odd black metallers Abruptum or Vondur. It's a weird hyrbid of death industrial / power electronic brutality and Norwegian black metal misanthropy (though it only hints at that sound). Recorded live at Nar Mattaru, "Hurtmusic" is a punishing record loaded with landmine samples, electro-shock blasts of energy, and warbled megaphone shouts. The highlight of the album is a loose reinterpretation of the song "No Place" by notorious Swedish misanthropes the Brainbombs, complete with a slow grinding guitar chug perverted from the classic Stooges sound.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Once again, these two Chilean psych bands, Follakazoid and The Holydrug Couple, each sharing a member with the other, release their records at the same time, giving us a glimpse of two sides of a similar sonic personality. Elsewhere on the list you'll find the latest from The Holydrug Couple, but here, we revisit the psychedelic modern space-kraut sprawl of Follakzoid, whose sound is equal parts classic psych/space rock, and more modern garage psych mesmer. The opening track here definitely had us thinking of Wooden Shjips, the looped and loping low slung bassline, the sonic swirls and laconic vocals, everything drenched in echo and reverb, a hazy, druggy, droned out psychedelic space dirge laced with weird little synth squiggles, and dense clouds of crumbling distortion. Like a darker, more rocking Spacemen 3, which is most definitely not a bad thing. A lot of the rest of the record drifts way more into old school jam band territory, think Hawkwind, Santana, Pink Floyd, just hazy, washed out stretches of hypnotic, rhythmic mesmer, the core sound a bass and drum groove, very propulsive and motorik, the krautrock vibe is huge, then all around that groove, synths, and guitars, and voices, swirl and swoop and drift. It's heady hypnotic stuff, in fact, some tracks, like "99" sound a lot like Circle at time, that same sort of kick ass hypnorock churn, but Follakzoid definitely make that sound their druggy, laid back, tripped out own. And be sure and stick around for 15 minute closer "Pulsar", which is the sort of heart-of-the-sun psych groove bliss out we could listen to forever.
- MPEG stream: 9
- MPEG stream: Rivers
- MPEG stream: 99
The most recent release from these Chilean psychedelic space/kraut rockers gets a couple tracks remixed by some likeminded outfits you might have heard of. Stoned psych rockers Psychic Ills get all Spacemen 3 with their version of "9", not deviating too much from the original, but stripping away a lot of the effects and psychedelic noise, the result much more murky and moody, laced with lots of cool subtle backwards effects, both guitars and rhythms, droned out and trancey and super hypnotic. Be warned, you might already have this remix since it was included on the Todo Muere Vol. 3 special Sacred Bones Record Store Day Release.
Exclusive to this, though, Moon Duo tackle "Trees" - the original was pretty heavy, a spaced out stoner rock groove, but Moon Duo slow things down too, stripping away the excess, leaving just a woozy bass and drum groove, and then wrapping it in spidery tendrils of buzzing guitar melodies, the vocals even more laid back, all drifting atop a sprawl of droning thrum and distant swirling synths. Both reworkings here seem to cast the more rocking originals as zoned out late night versions, total droney, druggy, dreamily dirgey, hypno-rock space-kraut chill out!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The ultra-electronic parasitic duo Fon regurgitates the technological mutilations of wired arrangements of broken televisions, microwaves, metal detectors, etc. within piercing electronic architectural rhythmic packages. Released in conjunction with the Viennese conceptual electronics thinktank Mego, mutant electronics and digital glitch worship abound.
Newly reissued by Superior Viaduct, this is an amazing collaboration between two totally incredible musical explorers, French chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine (with percussionist partner Areski) and avant-jazz greats Art Ensemble of Chicago, recorded during the Art Ensemble's stay in Paris in 1969. Though coming from very different backgrounds, each artist's idiosyncratic approach, commitment to experimentation, disregard for genre boundaries, and keen sense for improvisation and working collaboratively yields an album that pushes each performer to new heights. The blend of Fontaine's vocals, Areski's understated percussion, and the Art Ensemble's horns is really seamless, evoking the mysterious, intriguing sounds of lounge jazz in a dada cafe, or, well, an intellectual French chanteuse melding avant-folk with free jazz, which is exactly what it is. Brigitte Fontaine is becoming more and more cemented as one of our absolute favorite artists ever. So great, so recommended!
We liked the other Food discs, but this one's just a bit to wanky fusiony whatever for us, sorry.
These oddly monikered psychedelic electro kraut synth wranglers return, after the super awesome Mango Sunrise record we reviewed a little while back, which was equal parts classic Klaus Schulze, synth-kraut worshippers and aQ faves Bitchin Bajas, and of course John Carpenter and Goblin. But on this new 12"s FP take those sounds and focus more on their dancier side, still weaving lush tapestries of layered synths, and electro skitter, which were definitely all over Mango Sunrise, but here that sort of retro cinematic futurism is given a dancefloor makeover, the end result being a sound closer to, say, Majeure than Zombi, that sort of Italo-disco style soundtrackery, fused to Food Pyramid's undeniable krautrock leanings.
The opener, had the beat been removed, would be a pulsating groover, but with the house-y beat, and the reverb drenched megaphone vox, this sounds like some weirdo dance party, noisy, a little post punky, but most definitely groovy, funky and tranced out. The second track adds a whole mess of murk, positioning the sound more toward the James Ferraro side of the sonic spectrum, a sort of old VHS tape vibe, but then when the thick buzzing synth comes in, it could almost be Daft Punk or something, albeit a much more raw and underground version.
The flipside offers up two similar jams, the first a super driving groove, with super distorted, crumblingly distorted guitars over what almost sounds like a calypso beat fused to a house music pound, again, sans beats, this would be some blissed out ultra distorted guitarnoise psychedelia, so imagine that sort of sound anchored by a churning looped groove. The closer is more sparse and skeletal, cheesy eighties synth pads over blurry synth drifts, the background almost sounding like ABC or Spandau Ballet, but then female vocals drift in, and the song becomes a glimmering late night downtempo driftscape, that sounds like a more post punk 4AD given a modern krautdrone synth wave makeover, the whole thing hazy and gauzy and dreamily druggy.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Housed in a cool, full color DJ style 12" sleeve, and includes a digital download as well.
Ecstasy And Refreshment is the latest from these psychedelic new age kraut worshippers and might just be their weirdest yet. It's sonically all over the map, although you might not immediately realize that from the openng track, all swooshy and washed out, airy vocals drifting over pulsing minimal krautock, sorta like Can crossed with Stereolab, but then the second track immediately mixes things up, a little more cold wave, all icy electronics, and steely female spoken vox over a sort of electro new wave vamp, laced with swirly FX and synth throb, still managing to be sort of shimmery and psychedelic but definitely something we haven't really heard from these guys before. And from there on out, while the record does dip occasionally back into swirly krauty psych, it spends much of it's time way more far out. Like the spaced, slowed down, tribal electro jam that sound like an even more psychedelic Omar Souleyman (!), echo drenched vocals wrapped in tons of FX and swirling swath of thick billowing synths, and then things get even more African sounding, like we're suddenly listening to one of those Saharan Cellphone comps, groovy, and propulsive, before the sonic gears shift again, and suddenly the vibe is almost disco-y, total dancefloor throb, and yet, still peppered with some noisy crunch, and glorious cascades of dubbed out FX.
Finally, the band slip back into more tripped out krautrocking motorik shimmer, but this time with sultry witchy vocals that end up making it sound like it something that would be right at home on the Italians Do It Better label, before getting even more blurry and dreamy, super blissed out and ethereal toward as we near the end of the record, returning to the washed out kraut-age of the opener, but instead of ending like that, they toss in one more sonic curveball, with a closer that gets a bit funky, adding a deep bassline, some more chantlike vocals, that again remind us a little of Omar Souleyman, as well as some trippy FX and some turntable squiggles, all in all a heaping dose of serious slinky grooviness transforming what would otherwise have been a dark dubbed out swirl into a woozy groovy electro-dub slow-jam.
Cool!
We dug the most recent Food Pyramid record, Mango Sunrise, a fantastic collection of psych kraut synth wave weirdness that we couldn't stop listening to. So we were super excited for this, a collaboration with the oddly monikered Roy Orb D.MT., not sure who, or what that is, but he/they make a good match for Food Pyramid, this collaboration even more blissed out and ethereal than the FP record proper. The opener sounds like a warped, lysergic reinterpretation of Vangelis' Chariots Of Fire, with swirling, soaring washed out ethereal melodies, that distinctive 'ch-ch-ch-ch' dubbed out drum skitter, the whole thing laced with eighties style drum fills, squiggly melodies, and crunchy squelchy synth swirls. The follow up is another sprawl of soft shimmery synth swirl, but here wedded to a programmed beat, which grows more and more propulsive as the track progresses, eventually the track transforming completely into an awesomely cheesy chunk of eighties VHS chase scene / credit sequence synthscapery, replete with shredding guitar leads, and pulsing Carpenter like synths.
The rest of the record sonically splits the difference, from the electro pop via psychedelic hypno-rock of "Summit Expedition", to the buzzy, noisy, dubby kosmische skitter of "Sandstorm", to the prismatic planetarium, synth bliss out of "Passage Rites", to the low slung electro-funk pop synth swirl of closer "Corealis".
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Bay Area improv dude and Rastascan label owner Gino Robair (drums, "materials") teams up with AQ-fave Bjoern Eichstaedt (keys, voice) and fellow Germans Pit Schmidt (sax, tapes) and Thomas Maos (guitar, "mts modulation" whatever that is) for this live
The second album from Providence Rhode Island art darlings Forcefield (the band who knits sweaters that they sell in art galleries for thousands of dollars, apparently, and who also performed at the Whitney Biennial!) is the second Bulb release we've noticed after the Mind Flayer album bearing a logo saying "Bulb Underworld" and a crude drawing of a twenty-sided die. Allan's D&D senses are tingling. Thus the following conversation in our office...
Allan: Hey this new Forcefield is a pretty cool, textural electronic noise record! It sounds like angry rats, squeaky balloons and exploding synths. Very listenable though. Wasn't their other album a herky jerky arty rock punk kinda thing though?
Andee: Yeah, I think so.
Allan: Well, I like this album.
Andee: Uh, I think the world's seen enough noise records...
Allan: But this one's called Lord Of The Rings Modulator!!
MPEG Download: "track 2" [/audio/forcefieldlord2.mp3]
Ok, this is a black metal band, but non-metallers into the improv-drone sounds of the Jewelled Antler collective, Richard Youngs/Simon Wickham-Smith and the like should keep reading!
Not to be confused with the other Forest we've raved about (the psychedelic British folk band from thirty years ago), *this* Forest is a Russian black metal outfit, and a pretty good one belonging to the raw, primitive, corpse-painted end of the genre. The first four tracks on here consist of blasting, frozen Darkthrone worship, keeping alive the cult spirit that so few bands today still possess -- maybe because those tracks were actually recorded in 1996. Malevolent, majestic pagan metal full of Burzumic mayhem. Fans of this vein of true, trancey black metal darkness will be pleased. And if that was all that was on this disc we'd think it was cool. But then comes the fifth and final track, a surprise twenty-minute opus called "Winter Howl" taken from a 1994 rehearsal tape. Suddenly Forest isn't so obviously black metal at all, they've entered a psych-drone realm that's more akin to the aforementioned Jewelled Antler stuff (Thuja, The Birdtree, etc) or Taj Mahal Travellers or Reynols or Amon Duul's krautrock jams, still as forest-y and primitive as the preceding metal songs though. A wavering whispy wordless vocal winds over a bed of lost, primal percussion and haunting washes of mild feedback. Simple melody lines on guitar wander through the increasing haze, with deeper vocals providing additional layers of drone. If you really heard this in a forest you'd be mesmerized and scared, but it's really nice and pretty (in a damaged way) when heard at home...pretty to us anyway, dunno if Kaldrad and Dagorath meant it to be so! The vocals, until they get a little more metal-ly, totally remind us of the bliss-out singing by British folk experimentalist Richard Youngs or Jewelled Antler's pop soul Jason Honea. If Finnish avant-forest-folk folks like Avarus and Kemialliset Ystavat or the Jewelled Antler collective decided to make black metal, this is what's we'd imagine it would sound like! (Actually, there IS an upcoming black metal-inspired release from Jewelled Antler, a 3" cd-r by a group they call Tomes, but Tomes takes an even more subtle approach than "Winter Howl"...look for that here at AQ soon!) Meanwhile, on the black metal side, fans of Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Caacrinolas, Potentiam, and other weird ones should dig this track, along with Forest's other more typical black metal sounds. Recommended.
Apparently, this UK duo, Ben Moon and Richard Sides, aka Forest Creature, have dabbled in all manner of noisemaking in their brief existence, creating huge crushing walls of speaker shredding brutality, or super glitched out psychedelic beat heavy crunch, or howling, live, drum driven psychnoise freakouts, and while traces of those sounds are still present, we have to say, we're pretty partial to the twisted noise captured here, a seeming distillation of those disparate sounds, into something much more refined and focused, perhaps equally varied sonically, but somehow still strangely cohesive, and epic 'song' suite, due in no small part to the editing and sequencing as the actual music making itself.
The label drops names like Black Dice, Fuck Buttons, Animal Collective, Autechre, and those all do pretty much apply, but to our ears, there seems to be much more to Forest Creature than just aping their influences, we hear the ominous cinematic synthiness of Goblin, the intense late night noir buzz of recent aQ faves D.A., the murky swirl and shimmery out-of-time new age-y drift of the recent crop of pop hypnogogists, but here, those influences, as well as a handful of purloined sounds, are all reimagined, reinterpreted and all tangled up into constantly squirming and unraveling soundscapes, that skitter from almost kraut-like mesmer, to nineties style IDM, to looped woozy minimal synth wave, to gorgeous haunting murky heroin house, but no matter what the sound, or where the songs seem to be headed, Forest Creature mold all those elements into something truly original, lush, and deep, and dark, sometime super chaotic and hyper rhythmic, other times hushed and ominous. "Edit 4" begins as a foreboding minimal slow burning drone, but eventually builds to a warped synth loop, that gets more and more crunchy and buzz, the low end billowing out like a black cloud, the effects eating away at the original loop, super intense and totally mesmerizing. "Edit 5" is all rumbling low end whir, a distant beat, buried way down in the murk, looped and skittery, hovers below a black ambience that seems to swirl and shimmer in slow motion. "Edit 3" might be the prettiest of the bunch, beginning with a skeletal high end looped rhythm, which is soon joined by some warm warbly synths way off in the distance, the rhythm remains steady, but that low end grows thicker, and buzzier, creating thick warm slabs of chordal hum, playing out a gorgeous melancholy slowcore melody, a haunting depressive slow pop crawl, run through with that skeletal skitter, until both the buzz and the beat, begin to crumble, and intensify, until the song is transformed into a noise drenched psychedelic swirl.
So awesome. And a little bit surprising coming from Blackest Rainbow, whose past releases have tended more toward groups like Jazzfinger, Barn Owl, Bong, Starving Weirdos and the like. Frustrated Analogue is some fantastically twisted, blissed out, synth heavy electronic psychedelia, repetitive, hypnotic, spaced out, warped and glitchy, drone-y and rhythmic, moody and mysterious, a dizzying melding of This Heat, Goblin, John Carpenter, old Warp Records 12"s, early Chain Reaction, modern synthdrone, early analogue synth music, and the groups we mentioned up top (Fuck Buttons, Black Dice, Animal Collective, etc.). Way way recommended. Easily one of our new favorites...
It was only a matter of time. If Forest Swords hadn't done it, someone definitely would have, but hard to imagine it could have sounded as good as this. DRONESTEP. That's what they call it. A fusion of dark post-rock ambient drone music and skittery spaced out dubstep. Warm languid guitars, brooding atmospheres, and laid back downtempo grooves. In the wrong hands it definitely could have been lame, but Forest Swords nailed it, the result so organic and warm and mesmerizing, odds are the last thing you'll be thinking about is what to call it. Instead you can just sit back, and let these lush droned out grooves carry you off.
Had this not been on Olde English Spelling Bee, it certainly wouldn't have been out of place on some upstart dubstep 12" label, it definitely has the same sort of lugubrious soporific feel as Burial or Kode9, murky, washed out, muted, muddy and bass heavy, but instead of being sample based, guitars unwind, spidery melodies all tangled up in clouds of hazy reverb, vocals drift in and out all spectral and ethereal, in fact if anything, it's like some awesome, nineties slowcore jam, Codeine, or Seam, or someone like that, remixed by Portishead, transformed into a different kind of slowcore, a bleak, moonlit, forest dancefloor slowcore, everything bathed in dark blues and soft blacks, smokey and gauzy, the beats skeletal and minimal, the guitars chiming, glistening and glimmering, the bass, rumbling and throbbing, a rib cage rattling hum, samples woven into the mix, but doused in effects, so vocals becomes little swirling clouds of truncated melody, and melodies drift heavenward like wisps of grey smoke. Every track here is a smoldering late night blur, a bleary ear-ed slither and skitter through some soft focus soundscape, dreamlike and hypnotic.
Gorgeously dark, otherworldly, warmly mysterious, and darn close to being our favorite new record this year...
Comes with a download coupon as well...
Forma are a Brooklyn synth-trio, fabricated from the same mold that gave us Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, and Stellar Om Source. Their Kraut-inspired electronics revolve around brightly rendered step sequencing, squelchy percolations, soft streaming melodies and quasi-ambient pads set upon drum machines. It's the rhythms that set Forma apart from many of their contemporaries, looking back to the Connie Plank productions in the early '80s (especially those Moebius & Beerbohm records) and without any indication that Forma has ever heard a techno or disco record, well maybe they've heard Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, but that would be the most recently forward-thinking production that Forma would be referencing. Everything else is firmly planted at the Kosmische center of Cluster and Harmonia. Released on the suitably retrogarde Spectrum Spools imprint curated by Emeralds' John Elliott and funded by Editions Mego.
A second release from the mysterious Formatt, aka Belgian sound sculptor Peter Smeekins, we relisted a back-room find elsewhere on this list, a cd-r originally reviewed 2 years ago, that we dug big time, and in discovering extra copies of that release, we also found a little stash of these 3"cd-rs, released on Antony Milton's Pseudo Arcana label, a single 17 minute track featuring another brief glimpse into Smeekins' dreamy mad scientist sound world.
Much like the other disc, the root of Smeekins' sound is soft hushed shimmers and ethereal drones, a sky full of glimmering sonic stars, all smoothed out into gorgeously languid long-form slow motion drifts, which on their won would be plenty pretty, and would definitely hit the spot for deep ambient late night drift off music, but the sounds here are not so tranquil, over the top of these glacial low end murmurs, Smeekins drapes all sorts of other sounds, that manage to add all sorts of depth and color and activity, somehow without taking away from the track's soporific stasis. Showers of crystalline sparkle, swirling soft focus clouds of grit and static, bis of hiss and pop, more layers of thrum and rumble...
At low volume, Minor Curations exists simply as a gorgeous slice of minimal electronic ambience, but strap on some headphones and it's like that ride at Disneyland where you go through the microscope into a world of atoms and molecules, Formatt takes us on a similar ride, moving slowly through layer after layer after layer emerging finally in a strange microscopic world of inner sound.
SUPER LIMITED, ALREADY OUT OF PRINT, these are the last copies ever...
Newest release from Belgian sound manipulator Peter Smeekins aka Formatt. A dense mix of soft droney shimmer and all manner of glitch and crunch. Imagine hearing Low or some other slow motion band through a concrete wall so thick that just the bare essence makes it through, a sort of ghostly outline, a dreamy, barely audible hum, then stretch it into a gauzy soft sound blanket and spread it out over the whole record. This soft, shimmery bed is the foundation for all of Re:Take_Repeat. Over the top of this Formatt fiddles and fidgets, like some tinkering mad scientist, glitches and crackle, bursts of shortwave interference, white noise, industrial machinery, haunting EVP like transmissions, pops and creaks, amp buzz and distant feedback, it's like some giant mysterious soundmaker upended his rusty old tool box full of sounds and dumped all of those strange sharp metallic shapes, all over the thick velvety background, like stars sparkling chaotically in the black night sky.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. We managed to get the last 20 so once these are gone they are gone for good!
Regarding the title and the cover art here, Ferrara Brain Pan - the lone pilot of San Francisco's obscurant project Forms Of Things Unknown - is taking the piss out of the perennial flirtations of Nazi culture found in experimental and post-punk musics over the past 30 or 40 years. It's an odd form of humor, but one that stops at the cover art, never to be brought up within these eccentric and disparate tracks that harken back to the early days of United Daires. Whimsical collages, complete with bongo-boy rhythms and cut-up vocal samples (which really could be an extract from Nurse With Wound's Funeral Music For Perez Prado), are juxtaposed against icy cold electronic tone workouts that draw from the precisely constructed, psychoacoustic experiments of Ryoji Ikeda or John Duncan. Ferrara also interjects his favorite instrument, the bass clarinet, on a few somber pieces that warp the brassy notes of a maudlin funereal passage into air raid sirens. As beautiful as some of these pieces can be, Ferrara's deft use of electronics and the digital razor blade is all the better. All of these tracks are demos, outtakes, or compilation rarities, including the Forms Of Things Unknown contribution to the Nurse With Wound remix album of Two Shaves And A Shine. While there is a disjointed quality to the album, this is a well needed investigation into this music of this seldom heard musician.
"Cross Purposes" is an half-hour of weird, spooky music from longtime AQ patron and obscure music-maker Ferrara Brain Pan. Yes, that's his name -- but here he goes by the Forms Of Things Unknown moniker, a suitably vague and creepy name for this disc of Gothic dark ambient experimentation, that seems to be vying for retroactive inclusion on the famed "Nurse With Wound list". Indeed, NWW's Stephen "Babs Santini" Stapleton makes a guest appearance somewhere on here (see if you can find it)!
The first track, evocatively named "Black Candles & Pentagrams 'n Shit", is sixteen minutes of sinister drone and wind instrument dolefulness. On this album, Ferrara plays bass clarinet, flutes, recorders, saxophones, along with various other mostly archaic and/or ethnic instruments -- and electronics too of course. Perhaps to illustrate that FoTU's influences are eclectic and extend back further than the goth/industrial heyday, "Black Candles..." is followed by an anonymous 14th century composition in both instrumental and vocal versions -- the vocal by lovely soprano Shannon Wolfe, not Ferrara. It's somewhat sombre, but not scary like the first piece. Rather beautiful. Then, again shifting gears and displaying esoteric influence, this disc's final cut turns out to be a moody cover of "Stupid Blood", a song from the Beast Box album by Howard Devoto's post-Buzzcocks band Luxuria. With one Bob Ayres handling the portentous baritone vox, and Ferrara's horns and flutes, this track could just as easily be taken as a tribute to Peter Hammill's Van Der Graaf Generator!
The return of Donna Summer! Er. well, not that Donna Summer, the disco diva. We're talking about the WFMU disc jockey / electronic musician who went by the name Donna Summer and who we can only assume no longer does due to legal issues with the -actual- Donna Summer. Whatever. Just wanted to clear up any confusion, since we initially didn't make that Forrest-Summer connection. But since so many of us dug the last Donna Summer record, This Needs To Be Your Style (unfortunately now out of print) we wouldn't want anyone to miss out on this one due to some confusing name change. So what Donna Summer, I mean Jason Forrest, specializes in, is making some serious glitched out spastic plunderphonia with lots of ultra-recognizable pop, from Zeppelin to the Who to all sorts of top 40 schlock. He cuts them up, rearranges them, distorts and disguises them, and creates entirely new songs and new melodies. This mashup shit is getting a bit tiresome we'll admit, as anyone with a computer and a decent record collection can make their own record, but Forrest is really talented, and has a great ear for recontextualising pop ephemera into something much harder and weirder and sometimes even dancable. This record is a lot less abrasive and over the top than the last Donna Summer record, which is actually a good thing as the arrangements and subtleties this time around don't get obfuscated and obliterated by super distorted wooaaarrrggggghh! At least not all the time. Worth it alone for the amazing final track, a reworking of the Who's "Who Are You?" complete with re-done drum solo!
Probably better known as the guitar player in weirdo / outsider avant-jazz free-rock outfit Peeesseye, Forsyth ventures out on his own here, and while we were originally expecting something more like his previous PSI mothership, Kenzo Deluxe is something else entirely, more like a modern warped take on classic Appalachia, the label refers to it as cosmic Americana, which isn't that far off, long form compositions, simple and spare, softly doused with effects, but relying more on the melodic structure, and the subtle rhythms of the pieces.
"First 10 Minutes Of Cocksucker Blues", is a mesmerizing bit of slo-mo abstract blues, a woozy loop gives way to some awesomely emotive melodies draped over the top, a tranced out sprawl of psych-blues minimalism, that finds some slippery slide guitar sneaking into the woozy, hazy drift. "Downs & Ups" is more contemplative, the sounds muted and lovely, sounding almost liturgical, or like some lost piece of arcane holiday music, the melodies lilting, the overlapping guitar lines creating beautiful subtle harmonies, a gentle bit of pastoral guitarmusic.
From there on out, the sound drifts into different directions, lush billows of guitar strum are drenched in distorted crumble, soaring melodies become almost raga like buzz, the sound gloriously distorted, while elsewhere super spare folk builds into dense stretches of lush guitar soundscapery, and still elsewhere, the sound is totally delicate and crystalline, notes ringing out, the melody heart wrenching and dreamily minor key, the melodies unfurling lazily, and drifting into the grey sky above.
What a title! Don't know what the heck it means, but we love the sounds contained inside. Released on Jozef Van Wissem's Incunabulum imprint, this is a beautiful solo 12-string record by Chris Forsyth, Brooklynite multi-instrumentalist and founding member of Peeesseye (PSI). But this has a different approach to the solo guitar genre than we've heard before. Focusing on a restless back-porch style minimalism, Forsyth layers overlapping and slow repetitive cascades of mandala-like rhythms and patterns with subtly shifting melodic changes. Often undercut with organ drones, cymbal washes, and minimal percussion, the sounds unfold like intricate patterns of Oriental tapestry or Tibetan sand-paintings, captivating and mesmerizing us into circling and swirling trance-like states. Quite lovely and very limited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The final installment in the recent batch of tapes from Land Of Decay, this one a three way collaboration between Terence Hanuum, he being one half of aQ faves Locrian, and two other groups we had never heard before, The Fortieth Day and Shee Retina Stimulants, and like the rest of the tapes in this batch (Number None, Ithi, Andre Foisy, Wraiths) this is another slab of grim, low end minimal blackness, a sort of post industrial thrum, all looped layers and blurred rumble and crunch, but LIKE those others, this is way more than just noise, the sound here is lush and haunting, the loops add a subtle rhythmic element, much of the time spent creeping and drifting and woozily shimmering, but the proceedings pocked with bursts of static, blasts of tangled psychedelic noise, the framework provided by sonar like beeps, and softly stuttering clipped loops that become actual rhythms, occasionally sounding like some murky sprawl of heroin house, while at other times like some sort of abstract doom pulse, a heady plunderphonic songsuite of blacknoise, post industrial drift, and blissed out psychedelic minimalism, that manages to be surprisingly hypnotic.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
The mysterious Norwegian outfit Fosen provides little to no context for us to describe their music, leaving it much harder to position this set of dronescapes against the next batch. It appears that Fosen's source material is acoustic in nature, possibly being flutes and bells; the group then renders each sound dronological with considerable care via basic loopings, sonar depth reverb, and vast pitchshifting manipulations. The first track entertains a looping passage from a breathy flute stretched into a wonderfully hypnogogic drone that favorably compares with Biosphere's more minimal ambience or the Hafler Trio's fluttering drones. Other tracks flicker with feedback oscillations and attack-modified bell tones, some pitter and clank like some mutant tape construction derived from water dripping in a cavernous warehouse. Altogether, Fosen offers a very evocative if equally mysterious album.
We first heard of the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project on :zoviet*france:'s fantastic podcast A Duck In Tree, and we were certainly baffled to discover that this enigmatic project from the outskirts of Chicago has been in existence since the early '80s. A cassette here or there might have materialized throughout the years, but it seems that the bulk of the output was just secreted away until some of this stuff started showing up on their website, revealing a dreamy, narcotic ethos of post-industrial tape-loopery. Think Phillip Jeck. Think Terry Riley. And most of all, think :zoviet*france:! The etymology behind the name Fossil Aerosol Mining Project harkens to the act of rummaging through abandoned warehouses, whose crumbled surfaces were dappled with graffiti. The remnant waste from all that graffiti was the never-ending supply of crushed and spent spraypaint aerosol cans. So, the punk-scavenger miscreants who would find themselves sifting through the rubbish of those abandoned warehouses in search of a motherlode of 16mm film or reel-to-reel tape machines would undoubtably come across countless, discarded cans. Quite a poetic allusion for this tape-heavy Mining Project.
The quotations of bird song and the pleasant ambient wash of the initial 30 seconds snap into something quite foreign with a series of radio communication bursts and snippets of slow-motion monologues from Ronald Reagan, whose soothing, patronizing declarations would raise the hackles of many critical thinkers and agit-prop artists during his presidency. Nowadays, it's something of a distant, sonorous ghost, something that we're supposed to dread but can't quite figure out why. The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project cycles through a myriad of sympathetic loops, each of which harbors its own patter of delay, lending to a complex web of crumbling sound furthered along by backward tapes of textural scrabblings and iridescent drones. This network of eerie, diaphanous sounds and hypnotizingly soft-focus rhythms which may have their origins in a thoroughly forgotten fragment of a song, whose content was wholly lost to the magnetic erasures, dubbing-upon-dubbing-upon-dubbing, and / or the bacterial decay which flecked away the ferric oxide leaving behind an entirely different set of chemical stains. What's left is just a shadow of whatever emotion might have been imprinted onto the tape. It's a beautiful coagulation of sound, the musical equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box... either that or the recapitulation of the classic :zoviet*france: albums (e.g. Look Into Me, Assault & Mirrage, Just An Illusion, etc.). One of the best albums of 2014.
The first in an occasional series from Graham Lamkin's Kye Records of split releases by like-minded noiseniks. Fossils are an outfit from Ontario, Canada, mostly content to release editions of 5-10 cassettes to their friends, amassing a discography that rivals that of Phil Blankenship or Aaron Dilloway. It's a horrific blackened noise that Fossils muster, with something that might resemble a band trying to break through the 10,000 year old tarpit of tape hiss that everything is buried in. It's either that or a tin can getting kicked around an alley. As those gritty noises settle onto the horizon, Fossils articulate an undulating sinewave that ramps up and down at a slow-motion cycle. This is smashed up in a noise-junk assault with some atonal blurts and alarm sirens screeching behind a smoldering aktionist pipe-fight. The Canadians finish things off with a desolate chorale of bowed metals, smashed radiators, and thumming engine noise, that all pitches into a grim stupor.
Tom Darksmith hails from San Francisco and has one fine piece of obliterated tape-music released on Hanson. He follows the tradition set by a generation of California nihilists (Joe Colley, Scott Arford, John Wiese, etc.) of creating the antithesis to fun-in-the-summer vibes. His hand-off, neurotic-ray-gun synth crawl is one taken right from the Maurizio Bianchi playbook with looping sandpaper textural scraping and EVP-like thumps in the night. This seance of dark electronics snaps to a hiss-laden recording of various rustlings, metallic scrapes, and strange emanations of vibrating ectoplasm. A halo of midrange feedback slowly blossoms across the activities, which collapse into the final episode of slumped activity that could be some nocturnal loop caught from failed demagnetization of tapes run through a 4-track a couple million times. Here lies the negation of sound. Dig it.
Oh man. If you are a faithful Aquarius list reader and lover of musical oddities, just stop right here, and push the buy button because you need this record. Judson Fountain was born in 1952 and was obsessed with radio dramas since he was old enough to talk. In fact as soon as he was able to talk he began doing impressions of cackling hags, wicked witches and all sorts of animals. All of which would come to play a big part in these radio dramas right here. Recorded between the ages of 17 and 22, these eight dramas are only a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of radio plays Judson wrote and performed. All of them primitive and simple, but amazingly creative and entertaining, and all featuring Judson's unique vocalisations along with his partner/foil Sandor Weisberger. But there's no way to describe them, you just have to hear them. Judson has a crazy East Coast accent, and he talks like a hyper school boy who thinks faster than he can get the words out, which you can hear in a handful of interviews preceding some of the radio dramas. Using crude sound effects and sometimes painfully deliberate plot exposition, these dramas all rely on Judson and Sandor's crazy array of voices, from Irish Brogue, to old Thai man, to teenage gangster to tuneless singing grandma, to British detective to various witches and demonic women, all with distinctly hysterical and completely bizarre cackles. The plots are all very simple, good vs. Evil, haunted houses and witches and stuff. But they are all done so sort-of-professionally and so earnestly that they're just completely irresistable. Listen to "Garbage Can From Thailand" and you'll immediately know what we mean. Judson is just so cute. And so is Sandor who introduces each drama (which he pronounces drahmmer) and also reads the credits afterwards. I've had a Judson Fountain cassette for years now thanks to AQ pal Jay Lesser so you can imagine how excited we were that some of this stuff was actually finally getting released. Our only complaint is why did Innova make it a cd-r??! It's got a professionally printed booklet and everything, so how hard would it have been to press up real cds?! It costs as much as a real cd after all. Cd-r or not, this is so good, and so funny, and so cute, and so weirdly brilliant, that it definitely needs to be in your collection!
Latest release from former Skater Spencer Clark, whose partner in the Skaters, James Ferraro, was recently awarded record of the year honors by UK music mag The Wire, but as much as we dig Ferraro's stuff, we have to say, we often find ourselves more partial to Clark's outings, especially his project Monopoly Child Star Searchers, especially those early cd-r's, twisted murky soundscapes woven from woozy looped rhythms and blurred samples, dense and dizzying and druggy and dreamy, so we're always excited when we discover a new record from Clark. Fourth World Magazine is in fact Clark's new project, and in some ways it finds his sound drifting toward that of his former bandmate, this high concept record based on something called the Spectacle Of Light, which happens in Salt Lake City and concerns UFO's, as does most of Clark's recordings we seem to remember, hard to tell if it's a put on, or if all this spiritual stuff is real (or at least real to Clark), but ultimately it hardly matters, cuz musically it's real, and whatever the twisted concept, it gets woven into Clark's sonic flights of fancy, this one in particular opening up with swirling new agey synths, what sound remarkably like the music from one of those late night star chart segments on cable access, and thus like much of Ferraro's recent work, but from there on out, Clark definitely mixes it up, beginning with garbled voices, weird tape manipulation, and more hazy synth shimmer, peppered with weird bird call like squawks, before transitioning into a collage of warped looped melodies, playful and sunshiney, almost like a snipped of fifties film music as envisioned (or reworked) by the Caretaker. Soon those new agey synths return, but now with murky muted rhythms, which somehow transform the sound into something more raga like, then adding more of the garbled vocals until we finally reach the final track, and epic nearly sidelong jam, that might be our favorite stuff here, definitely harkening back to the aforementioned Monopoly Child Star Searchers cd-r's, all lo-fi Casio melodies, chaotic looped rhythms, skittery tangles over woozy collaged layers, everything muddy and smeared and gloriously washed out, a fantastic chunk of outsider psychedelic rhythmic drift.
This is the first release on Clark's Pacific City Sound Visions label, and comes in a full color 12 page 12" x 12" jacket/book, with fuzzy photos, and plenty of text explaining (sort of) the Spectacle Of Light, of which this music is dedicated to.
Not to be confused with the legendary krautrock band (notice the spelling, and the punctuation), Foust! is in fact Scott Foust, member of experimental soundmaking combo Idea Fire Company, who share a label and an aesthetic to a certain degree with the Shadow Ring.
For Foust's first solo record, he's conjured up a nearly 80 minute soundscape of lo-fi loped rhythms and drones. The first 35+ minutes are slowly shifting, barely changing bit of stutter and thump, wreathed in hiss and set atop a soft bed of static, super mesmerizing and hypnotic, while the rhythm remains virtually unchanged, the sounds around it, softly and slowly shift, growing more and more murky, the tone and timbre gradually transforming until finally the rhythms drops out, leaving long shimmering tones, stretched out over what sounds like field recordings, the various tones are layered into almost-harmonies, the low tones thick and undulating in slow motion way up in the mix, higher tones way off in the distance, a soft tangle of warm languid dronemusic, until with about twenty minutes left, the drones fade out leaving mostly just ambient sounds, birdcalls, rainfall, running water, the crackle of leaves and branches, while way off in the distance, remnants of the first half of the record hang on until they too finally disappear, the sound building to a hiss until the track ends with the storm disappearing in a little swirl of effects.
So nice. An awesome combination of soundscaping, dronemusic and field recordings, definitely for fans of all three!
The third and final installment in a series of short-form but jewel-like eps from this ethereal and esoteric collective project. Centered by Clodagh Simond's (Mellow Candle, Current 93) magisterial vocals and featuring a superstar roster of players, which this time around includes Robert Fripp, John Contreras, Steven Wilson, Michael Begg, and Percy Jones with overall production overseen by Colin Potter. Subtitled "Allure" (the first was "Bloom", the second "Huge"), the arrangements are still haunting and cathedral-like but at the start tethered in more traditional structures with harmonium, zither and strings setting up the mood before dissipating into the gossamer of treated guitars, tonal harmonics and ambient drones. The appearance of Robert Fripp's beguiling guitar theatrics on "Long Distance" nicely underscores Simond's climactic vocal incantations and treated bohdran percussive rhythms before settling into the third and final act, a beautifully charged and vocal-less epiphany of melancholy and fragility that like its title is neither spoken nor silent, but exists in that rarified space of being satisfyingly unsolved.
Fovea Hex is the brainchild of Clodagh Simonds, the Irish singer whose work in the early '70s with Mellow Candle earned her a solid reputation amongst avid fans of British folk music. Her recent work as Fovea Hex has found her collaborating with some serious heavyhitters in the electronic composition world including Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Andrew M. McKenzie (aka The Hafler Trio) as well as film composer Carter Burwell. Simonds' voice is at the center of this shortened program, with many of her contributing cast singing spectral chorales around her emotionally charged siren songs which emerge as Irish folk hybrids of Marble Index period Nico. These are haunted, ancient sounding songs, with almost all of their arrangements stripped away, leaving behind spare fragments of desaturated piano, bass, and harmonium. It's no surprise that in very small type in the liner notes, there's a text that reads "all material lit from within by A.M. McKenzie," as the music itself has McKenzie's fingerprints all over it. Even the fact that this is this first part of trilogy and is an expensive short form ep of about 17 minutes is evidence of McKenzie's meddling. Nevertheless, Simonds remains steadfast in her control over the project, not allowing McKenzie to interfere with the beauty of her own voice.
The Second chapter of Clodagh Simonds experimental voice project trilogy continues to explore the tenuous boundaries of traditional songforms while collaborating with some heavyweight electronic composers such as Brian Eno, Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio) and Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound). Simonds is best known for her early '70s work with British Folk outfit Mellow Candle (she also appears on Current 93's new record), and her voice here remains tethered as pulsating sounds of harmonium and glass instruments, trumpets, and electronics float like ghosts through the ether-like arrangements. Like the previous chapter, it's very short, clocking in about 19 minutes, which may call into question the expense. But this project is not about casual listening. Like reading an Emily Dickinson poem (as the sticker on the front compares this to), you are meant to ponder and drink in every nuance, turn of phrase and weight of breath. Put your player on repeat, and you will not hear the same song twice.
Total slice and dice, chop and loop, skitter and stutter, bleep and bloop, head spinning, dancefloor destroying, 8-bit, video game. electro pop sonic mayhem, not that you'd be able to tell from the first couple tracks, a gently swirling bit of dreamy shimmer, with muted buried rhythms, slowly building to a poppy playful bit of processed skitter, that almost sounds like a Hello Kitty version of Venetian Snares. The same sort of rhythmic drill and bass, but way cuter and poppier, lots of video game sounds, little snippets of voices, bits of glitch and crunch, for all it's density and complexity, it's also pretty dang hooky, reminding us a lot of Aphex Twin's classic "Girl / Boy".
The rest of the record is a non stop barrage of hyperspeed jungle beats, buzzing synths, woozy warped melodies, twisted samples, big beats, pounding techno rhythms, bits of throbbing dubstep, tangled electronic squiggles, all wound into super fun, and funky, booty shaking, rib cage rattling, high energy electro spazz groove. The record finishes the way it began, all washed out and dreamy, electronic ambient pop drift and shimmer, but between those two tranquil bookends, is a nonstop Technicolor explosion of tangled and twisted freaked out sounds and spastic beats!!
We listed another record by this French one man band a few lists back, sold out of them in a flash, so when we restocked, we managed to get the remaining copies of this second release, Towards The Surface, we got less than a dozen though, and once they're gone they are GONE for good, as it's out of print.
We mentioned in that other review that Fragment. (the period IS part of the name) was mining a sound not all that removed from Jesu and Nadja, but listening to this now, it's really driving home just how much this stuff sounds EXACTLY like Jesu, it's almost criminal actually, but hell, if you're hankering for some heavy blissed out dreamy chugging shoegazey post metal, and can't wait for the next Jesu record, then heck, grab one of these.
The sound is of course fantastic, epic and majestic and bleary eyed, a little bit more mellow and laid back than Jesu proper, but quite similar in most other respects, the industrial pound, the layered warm guitar shimmer, the muted metallic chug, the mumbled sad boy vocals, all woven into a gorgeously blown out drone drenched epic dream metal drift. Listening to it again right now, and it sounds so fantastic, it just also happens to sound so fantastically like Jesu.
Cool packaging too, a cd sized dvd case with the full color artwork on a narrow strip along the center of the case, leaving the rest of the case transparent and the disc revealed.
Killer debut from this French one man post rock outfit, whose sound definitely leans toward Jesu and Nadja and that sort of fuzz drenched dirginess. From the first few second of the opening track, the 'band' launches into a blissed out hazy drift, programmed drums pound out a hypnotic beat, the guitars swirl, wreathed in thick crumbling fuzz, and then the vocals, holy cow, they sort of seal the deal as far as Jesu-ness is concerned, a dead ringer for Justin Broadrick's reverb drenched soft croon.
If anything, imagine a more laid back, driftier dreamier Jesu, which sounds like a very good thing, and it is. The songs to get chunky and riffy launching into stretches of muscled metallic pound, and just as often the sound slips into super minimal drones, whether it's synths or guitars, it's difficult to tell, but the end result is the same, warm fuzzy rumbles and blissed out murky whir. Then the drums kick in, then the vocals, and the sound is squarely back in Jesu / Nadja territory.
Folks looking for something totally original, that they've never ever heard before, might fight Fragment a little frustrating, but for anyone who loves THAT sound, the blissed out shoegazey metallic post rock shimmer of Jesu, or the distorted drenched dream doom of Nadja, and wants more more more, and might even like that sound even more if it were softer and prettier, well then Fragment will definitely hit the spot.
A perfect collection of late night drifting-off soft metallic drift. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Probably the last copies we'll be able to get...
We've been hearing about this release for some time now. It was supposed to be out last November, but somehow it took forever for our suppliers to carry it. Nils Frahm is a modern German pianist and composer who has been releasing piano and synth-based ambient music since 2005. But we hear it's his live performances that are truly compelling as he showcases an incredible sense of control and restraint while at the same time opening up to all kinds of musical experimentation through building of passages and filtering and electronic processing. Spaces is the result of such experiments combining two years of live recordings and weaving them into each other, building up from organically plaintive melodies into full range ambient fields of sound and back to cascading watery piano passages. Gorgeous stuff!
A friend of ours was telling us all about Frail, and the way he described it, we knew it was something we had to hear. Imagine a band that sounded exactly like the Cure, but with harsh black metal vokills!! Listening to it now he wasn't that far off the mark. This is some seriously strange stuff. Not heavy at all really, jangly, poppy, a little gothy and depressive, minor key, the drums simple and solid, soaring synths, guitar and bass locked into moody grooves, a little bit eighties new wave, all the while the vocalist howls his harsh demonic screech over the top, which turns it into something completely, well, fucked up really. But kind of genius. The music at times reminds us of Alcest or Amesoeurs but with all the metal removed, pretty and lilting and melancholy, drifting and jangling beneath those hellish howls. Not sure what else to say, if you're anything like us, you already added this to your cart, and it's going to fast become one of your favorite new records. Definitely an acquired taste, but then all the best tastes are...
Absolutely one of Andee's new favorite black metal recordings!!
Sound artists like Matt Shoemaker, Loren Chasse, and Steve Roden are some of the very few who are successful in turning found objects and field recordings into thoroughly engaging compositions that don't rely upon the flashiness of techniques to make their work successful. Add New Zealand's Richard Francis to that gaggle as well. It's been a while since any solo work has been available from Francis, who has previously recorded under the moniker Eso Steel; and more recently, he's been entertaining many a collaboration with his fellow NZ noiseniks such as Campbell Kneale and Michael Morley.
On Together Alone, Together Apart, Francis turns to the miniscule events of daily life whose peculiar sounds capture his imagination. It could be a crackle from rain falling or the distant surf of the Pacific Ocean or a creaking electric radiator or the hissing static from television snow. It's these small sounds which Francis has recorded and stretched into relatively longer compositions. These rattling, crackling streams of softened white noise move in a synchronous fashion, much like the way that a huge flock of starlings can gracefully circle in the sky without bumping into each other, all moving organically in three dimensions. Think Loren Chasse, as if he were reworking any of Bernhard Gunter's compositions, making them rougher, in line with Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves disc. Headphones are certainly recommended for this album, as the last track is awfully quiet... at least, it is when there's a record store full of people. Very well done!
The Franciscan Hobbies are one of the more anarchistic manifestations of the Jewelled Antler 'collective', The Hobbies themselves being a free-form, free-wheeling group of variable membership that turns idyllic nature excursions into documents of magical, improv folk psych. At The World's End comes by way of New Zealand cd-r label PseudoArcana, and this time around The Hobbies include 3 of the 4 members of Thuja, plus a bunch of their friends, including Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards), Greg Bianchini (The Muons), and Cole Palme (Factrix). However, whoever's present on this recording isn't all that important, as they meld into a very relaxed communal music-making clan. Furthermore, discussion of instruments and techniques would seemingly convey less of a sense of what the Hobbies sound like than more poetic allusions to damp moss and dry leaves. Imagine napping in the undergrowth of a forest, dreaming drones and fractured melodies. Theirs is a drifting, indirect music, more hints and haunts than songs per se. And, we ask, how can you not love a record with a track entitled "The Unicorn Murders"??
Ah, the Jewelled Antler collective! The Franciscan Hobbies is yet another facet of the same opiated psych-improv collective that has evolved into a number of projects including Thuja, The Blithe Sons, The Birdtree, The Skygreen Leopards, The Child Readers, The Knit Separates, etc. Usual suspects Glenn Donaldson, Rob Reger, Loren Chasse, and Jason Honea all appear on this -- perhaps the largest and loosest of the Jewelled Antler projects -- alongside relative newcomers to the collective: Greg Bianchini (of SF folksters The Muons), Kerry McLaughlin, Buffy Vice Sick, Dylan Brock, Christine Boepple, and Aquarius' own Dungeon Master Jeremiah Allan Horrocks (singing into an electronic toy while lying on his back somewhere in Golden Gate Park one sunny day, he tells us, but bets you won't be able to pick that out while listening to this). In working with such a large citizenship, The Franciscan Hobbies wisely eschews structure, favoring the psych-improv equivalent of front porch noodling that ends up sounding like a more sedate version of Birchville Cat Motel, the Vibracathedral Orchestra, or the hillbilly minimalism of Henry Flynt. Yet the druggy, murky atmosphere that dominates so much of Thuja's recordings takes a backstage to the quiet sound of semi-strummed, semi-plucked banjos, ouds, guitars, and occasional Tom Waits-esque tossin' junk in the kitchen sink percussion. Beautiful and mysterious, "Caterpillars Of The Oak Beauty" makes for another very nice cd-r release from Jewelled Antler!
Courtesy of new Florida-based label Soft Abuse, "Masks And Meanings" is the first full-length "real" cd from San Francisco's wonderfully dreamy improvisors The Franciscan Hobbies, following the "Caterpillars Of The Oak Beauty" cd-r on their own Jewelled Antler label. Featuring members of Thuja (Loren Chasse, Glenn Donaldson, Rob Reger) and others, including Greg Bianchini from SF folk troubadours The Muons, you can perhaps guess what this sounds like. Somewhere between the psychedelic forest drones of Thuja and the folkiness of Glenn and Loren's Blithe Sons project. Abstract, droney, relaxing. Gently plucked guitar strings, rattling and rustling noises of indeterminate origin, very organic and natural sounding. Field recordings and non-instrument sound making fill sonic spaces alongside what might be mellow kraut/hippy jams on guitars and percussion, if they weren't so damaged and sparse and loosely structured. It's music, like sunlight, filtering down through the leafy branches of the forest canopy, into a grassy nest the Hobbies have burrowed out and furnished with antiques. Afternoon light, and shadowed darkness and dust. Indeed, like most of the J.A. projects, The Hobbies often record out-of-doors, in meadows in Golden Gate Park for instance. They came up with their name, actually, from a piece of wood they randomly found on the site of one of their recording sessions, upon which the words "Franciscan Hobbies" were printed. Their music's mysterious yet oddly whimsical vibe is carried through the collage artwork and song titles ("Wasp Embodiment", "Plough Drawn By Toads"). Very nice. That some tracks end with abrupt edits would be about our only complaint... Definitely for fans of Tower Recordings, Kemialliset Ystavat, the whole Jewelled Antler "collective" and suchlike. You know who you are/what this is.
MPEG Download: "A Preordained Sequence" [/audio/franciscanpreordained.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "A Preordained Sequence" [/audio/franciscanpreordained.m3u]
Jewelled Antler picnic-party The Franciscan Hobbies are certainly the biggest and vaguest, most free-form collective in the "collective". The Hobbies' albums are where Thujans and Muons and Blithe Sons and Skygreen Leopards and Child Readers and Buried Civilizations and all of 'em go to let it hang loose...or looser than usual. Even moreso than the other "bands" found under the umbrella of the San Francisco experimental-improv-folk-psych Jewelled Antler family, The Franciscan Hobbies have a indeterminate, open-ended membership, and make suitably organic, sprawling, abstract music... much of it quite as lovely as anything in the Jewelled Antler canon: dark and dreamy, with noise-textures and fragmented melodies played on acoustic and electric instruments both drifting in and out of these pieces like nature-sounds in the forest, in a manner perhaps akin to their Finnish brethren and sistren (?) Kemialliset Ystavat and Avarus and Uton. This new Hobbies cd, their fourth disc, was recorded over the past three years in various places with various persons participating -- among those persons, members of all the aforementioned groups. And AQ's own Allan even shows up singing on "Goat With The Dolphin Face", recorded in a wooden teepee on a beach up in Point Reyes. (Not that you can tell that it's him...or in a teepee.) And that's also got nothing to do with why we're going to tell you that this is highly recommended, particularily to those of you for whom the more abstract edges of the Jewelled Antler thing appeal. Intimate, hushed and full of quiet clankings and fragile drones...meandering, mesmerizing guitar-plucked lullabies...bowed strings and rustling sticks...indistinct vocalizations...all carefully edited and mixed by Glenn Donaldson (the track "Satan Crystals" by Loren Chasse). So nice.
