Oily drones be found on Hierophany, an album released on the Russian imprint Monochrome Vision, inspired by the ancient rites of Russian orthodoxy, and produced by a Belgian on a working holiday whilst touring to the east of his homeland. Over the years, Franck has worked with Pietro Piparbelli (aka K11) with the two of them collaborating on a project based on recordings from Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema (yes, K11 has released at least three other albums drawn from Thelemic residues). Theological differences aside (which are obviously massive), Franck's interest in both Crowley and the Russian Orthodox church seems to find common ground in the gnostic mysticism of meditation rituals and their capacity to introduce the process of transcendence. The massively thrumming drones that Franck presents on Hierophany seem to be based on field recordings made within a cathedral during a service, with the bell tones and chants reflecting into a gray wall of steely reverb and delay. Elements of human speech sporadically bounce within his system of acoustic and processed sound, creating something of a feedback loop of particular sonorous frequencies, reinforced and thickened by Franck's sonic sensibilities. The album quickly hits a uniform plateau of saturated environmental and electronic din, slipping rather subtly from one complementary movement to another. Well executed work that conceptually and aesthetically may have more than a few similarities to Current 93's early tape collage days.
BACK IN STOCK!!! Martin Franklin and Michael Northam began communicating in the early '90s, both engrossed with the realm of possibilities extant in the laboratory that was the experimental cassette culture. At the time, Northam was beginning a career of sound-art globetrotting by way of festivals, residencies, and the generosity of others, having emerged from the Austin, Texas sound community that spawned the likes of John Grzinich, Olivia Block, Rick Reed, and Seth Nehil. Martin Franklin had gone on to form the British ambient ensemble Tuu, with releases through Beyond, Hic Sunt Leones, and Amplexus. It seems that Franklin and Martin enjoyed a single three hour session back in 1991, and out of that session came the original set of recordings which made their way on to a cassette, released by Sounds For Consciousness Rape, and later onto cd by SDV Tontrager. As both the cd and the tape have been long out of print, we can't comment on the differences between the original recording and this 'recovered' remix of the original source material.
Franklin and Northam settle organic textures from metal, dirt, and wood clattering against each other and building softened drones amidst the aggregated sounds. It makes perfect sense that Northam would later work with Darren Tate in one of the final Ora recordings, as these sodden ambient passages and quietly gritty noises share plenty of similarities. Northam had also brought to the session a cassette deck rewired to generate feedback systems, and Franklin had a handheld dictaphone with static and white noise broadcasting through the hypercompressed speakers. These elements give the recordings a rough hewn edge which counterpoint Franklin's sinewy ambience and ghostly half-melodies which are evidence of the contemporary remix work. Altogether, this redux has a darkly ritualized feel of isolationist drones divining something tactile out of the void, much like one would expect from the occluded sounds of the recent Drone Records catalog.
To make this album, Los Angeles 'lowercase' artist J Frede tagged along with professional piano tuner David Nereson during one his jobs and recorded part of the session. Frede then took those recordings back to the studio, running them through what appears to be several Max/MSP patches to arrive at a series of digitized sketches. As a polite gesture to Nereson's trade, Unprepared Piano begins with an unprocessed recording of the piano tuning, which sounds exactly like one would expect: a methodical plinking of the clustered notes that gradually come into key, marked by periodic creaks and hammerings upon the piano's inner workings. Quite honestly, these are not all that interesting; but once Frede gets going with all of his effects, the album really takes a turn for the better. Often working from a single sample culled from those recordings, Frede's compositions work best with a modest amount of processing as heard in the ominous plod of "Low Pres Non" with its simple demonstrations of pitchshifting and timestretching, and the thick sonic decay of haunted drones from "Un Pre N." Frede's Unprepared Piano resembles much of the same ideas that Akira Rabelais brought to his exceptional album Eisoptrophobia of digitally aerosolized piano pieces by Satie and Bartok. Where Rabelais sought a surreal version of dreamy romance, Frede imparts a far more sinister shadow upon his recordings.
Handpackaged in a fragile brown envelope and wrapped in string.
The occasionalist project French Radio is the semi-improvised work of Bruce Anderson, Jim Kaiser, and A.C. Way. Anderson, of course, is the stalwart art-punk guitarist from MX-80; Kaiser and Way are two of the more prolific participants in the damaged improv / noise scene in the Bay Area. As all three of these gentlemen of the avant-garde have their fingers in too many pies to count here, French Radio gigs have been few and far between; and Abandonded Children is only the second album from the trio. Fortunately, they are making up for lost time with two discs worth of gloop, din, murk, and turgid abstraction. The instrumentation for French Radio puts Anderson behind a large semi-circle of effects pedals that occasionally do allow for archetypal sounds to come from the guitar that connects them; Kaiser wields his now signature bicycle wheel with contact mic contraption and some reel-to-reel tape decks; and Way has a lo-tech set-up for turntable, cheap samplers, and microphones through which he utters monotone howls bathed in blackened reverb. The trio is at their best when they dive deep into a subterranean noise, nearing the depths of something oozing from Locrian or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, as metallic clanks from Kaiser's wheel lumber against strangely soothing blasts of cold noise; but when Anderson's lonesome guitar strums through the din, French Radio is as compelling as anything that Barn Owl has mustered. Each of the three lengthy tracks were studio recordings, made without any overdubs. A limited cd-r release, mind you!
An album many years in the making, Elements is the debut offering from French Radio, a collaborative effort between Bruce Anderson (MX80), Jim Kaiser (Petit Mal), and Andy Way (Maleficia). The record has finally been released, graced with cover art featuring the ever-eccentric drawings of M.S. Waldron / irr.app.(ext.). In many ways, the album is curiously prescient of our recent fascination with all things on the Lampse label, in particular that Jasper, TX record I'll Be Long Gone Before My Light Reaches You although realized through the context of grizzled improvisation instead of a loosely sutured structuralism. Each of the four tracks on Elements represent the primordial fundamentals: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Through their constructions of guitar, turntable, tapes, and boat-loads of effects, French Radio conjures an interconnected sound between all of their base elements. The flanging tone-float activity of mangled electricity into distant clouds of din, crackle, and spectral dust has the threatening aura of an electrocutioner's chamber buzzing with high-voltage tension. Unrecognizably abstracted vocal collages culled from varispeed tapes and reverse spun turntables spiral in and out of the ominous clouds, topped with squalid layers of thunderous distortion alternating with mournful half-melodies strummed on Anderson's guitar. Limited to 100 copies.
This is the first we've heard from Canadian outfit Fresh Snow (they apparently shared a split with noise rockers Metz), and it's a stunning introduction. We had heard OF them, lots of comparisons to classic krautrock, which is what had us intrigued initially, and indeed that band prove to be experts at crafting tranced out motorik grooves, but where most bands approach their post-krautrock minimally, Fresh Snow's take is supremely maximal. Just check out the opener, a sprawling 14 minute epic that begins as a hushed sort of chamber music, all swirling strings, and melancholic melodies. We were prepared for a slow build, Godspeed style, but instead, the band leap right into it, exploding into a super saturated, dreamily distorted pulsing drum heavy chunk of kraut-influenced post rock mesmer, slithery basslines wrapped around a solid simple drum beat, while all around, the band fill every possible space with grinding guitars, howling streaks of feedback, rumbling synths, tangles of psychedelic shred, sci-fi FX, it's seriously noisy stuff, but all anchored to the woozy krauty groove. Fans of recent space-psych-kraut combos like Hookworms, and the Cardinal Fuzz stuff (Janitors, Cosmic Dead, the Hills), will immediately be smitten, and it's not all full bore psychedelic kraut freakout, the opening track goes through all sorts of equally mesmerizing permutations, a cool stretch where the guitars and synths are woven into a super trippy pulsating tangle of melodies, which leads to a synth driven dirgey but, that gets downright metallic, and is flecked with caustic blasts of twisted production and squalls of white noise, and the guitars, blown out and acid fried. There also seems to be some pizzicato strings, some shrieking electronics, all manner of noise and gnarled effects, but even with all that chaos, the band somehow manages to reign it in, and create ate something impossibly song-like out of what sounds a time like a sonic free for all.
The second track, while half the length, is even more confusional, transforming the noise-kraut of the opener into a weirdly folk flecked bit of Stereolab-ish fuzzpop, rife with strings, and playful melodies, the sound soaring and super melodic, sun dappled and dreamy, but still rough around the edges, with the various sounds always on the verge of psychedelic blowout, infusing even playful poppiness with a sort of intensity that is unexpected but super cool. From there on out, the sound continues to drift into unlikely avenues, from a moody sort of muted electro-pop shimmer, that blossoms into some almost dancefloor-worthy electronic, to a bit of dirgey twang flecked garage rock pop, that is more dreamy and sun dappled than it should be, to some fuzz drenched psychedelic space rock, again heavy on the krautrock vibe, but with all sorts of weird electronics, garbled samples, and some wild blown out noise guitar (and it's named for a sketch from one of our favorite British sketch shows!), to a hushed stretch of reverby dreampop drift, all female vocals and woozy guitar shimmer, before finishing off with another epic, a massive 12 minute closer, that's the sort of bass and buzz heavy psychedelic space-kraut grooviness that should have most aQ-ers flipping their lids.
Easily one of the coolest new discoveries, and a new favorite big time. Available both on vinyl and cassette, and tape nerds, you shall be rewarded, as there's a bonus track that's ONLY on the the cassette!!
Perhaps you're familiar with Zeitkratzer, the classically trained mavericks from Germany who have taken it upon themselves to produce orchestral arrangements of notorious pieces from scabrous noise musicians, notably Whitehouse, John Duncan, Keiji Haino, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. The ensemble has also ventured into arrangements of austere electronica (e.g. Carsten Nicolai and Terre Thaemlitz) and revisiting the classic avant-garde pieces from Alvin Lucier, John Cage, and Xenakis. Zeitkratzer's mastermind is the pianist Reinhold Friedl, who embraces the prepared model for the piano that Cage and company presented more than a half-century ago. In the liner notes here, Friedl offers plenty of examples of techniques developed to produce sound from various objects manipulating the strings inside the piano - e-bows, fishing line, violin bows, rubber balls, and small motors. Through his own exploration of the prepared piano, he really attempts to create a vast orchestra of sounds which can be automated and / or perpepuated through extended passages. Side A is a very dynamic piece with all sorts of sonic activity erupting from within Friedl's piano, described by the man himself as his "full orchestra" with "low vibrations, bottleneck techniques, piping backgrounds, and scratching." It is an intense exploration of dissonant crashes, razor slashed glissandos, and agitated acoustic noise. Side two begins with a rasping acoustic drone slowly building and mutating through multiple strings driven by e-bows and springs. The unholy racket that follows is a variation on the first side with scraped metal and bellowing more in keeping with a Z'ev action of junkyard gamelan follows the drone stasis. All of these demonic howls and squeals answer a whole lot of questions as to how Zeitkratzer was able to render their orchestrations of Metal Machine Music and the Whitehouse pieces in particular! Oh yeah, the album was cut at 45rpm, so you know we played this at 33, where it sounds all the blacker. Thanks, Hronir!
FYI we can also get this on cd, not in stock at the moment though.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Reinhold Friedl and Michael Vorfeld are two stalwarts of the European improvisation scene, who have recorded this album for Bernhard Gunter's Trente Oiseaux label. With the liner notes stating his instrument as "inside piano," Friedl has developed a very interesting technique of playing the strings of a piano itself with wooden mallets, metal rods, and just his hands to coax textural sounds not often associated with a piano. He and cellist Michael Vorfeld coax sustaining timbres from their instruments that range from very spare creakings through the noxious sounds similar to a rusty swingset and up to strikingly complex tonal crescendos. A very different album for Trente Oiseaux that occasionally tips its hand to the stodgy ECM tradition, but for the most part a very interesting listen.
We were immediately blown way by this twisted slab of primsatic psychedelia, all lo-fi rhythms, bagpipe like synth squelch, and spidery snakecharmer melodies. It's crunchy and fuzzy, feedback drenched, droned out and totally hypnotic, like a dizzying mix of the shamanistic mesmer of Dan Higgs, the minimal zoner kraut-psych of Zomes, and the warped rainbow rhythm-ed distorto-hop of Black Moth Super Rainbow (and BMSR offshoot Tobacco too)! And really, this record totally came from out of left field, we had no expectations, in fact at first we had no idea who Dan Friel even was, being mostly unacquainted with his band Parts & Labor, and what little we did know had us thinking maybe we wouldn't really even be all that into P&L anyway. But Total Folklore definitely has us rethinking everything.
The first track alone is worth the price of admission, and even if the record had consisted of nothing but that lumbering, 12+ minute chunk of deliriously distorted, noise drenched, outsider grooviness, we'd still have made it Record Of The Week. After a short squall of tangled buzz and swirling tones, the sounds coalesce into a buzzing raga like melody, draped over a super crunchy, crumbling rhythm, a sort of hip hop / industrial lumber, each beat a burst of staticky buzz, sculpted into a dense, driving, motorik caveman groove, while over the top, those melodies are constantly shifting and swirling, stretching out into layered drones, streaks of feedback doused shimmer, and when the melodies to abate, leaving just the beat, to pound and stutter, when they do swoop back in, the result is a sort of chaotic noise-raga, that manages to be loose and freeform, but simultaneously tranced out and hypnotic. Eventually, the sound slips back into that opening groove, this time, all the synths and buzzing melodies even more distorted and blown out, making for a heady chunk of multi-hued noise industrial drone-pop zoner-psych that will have you setting it on repeat for sure.
The rest of the record is divided into way shorter fragments, none of the remaining tracks clocking in at more than 3:45, with a handful of ultra short 'intermissions', but all of those tracks, intermissions and songs proper, displaying the same sort of blown out psychedelia. "Windmills" sounds like Sunroof! and Our Love Will Destroy The World mashed up and transformed into something a bit more playful and groovy, while "Valedictorian" drapes ethereal shimmer over what sounds like stuttering fuzz pop riffage, a swirling super catchy melody, and it's about as close as this comes to some mutant strain of ultra hook heavy noise pop. It's not hard to imagine this as some warped remix of a classic early era Flaming Lips jam. "Velocipede" is all woozy crumbling distortion, tweaked electronics, in-the-red synth buzz, a noisy blur that somehow ends up sounding more dreamy and psychedelic than chaotic.
The rest of the tracks split the difference between tripped out experimental electronic groovescapes, dense noisy psychedelic swirls, pulsing pulsating komische freakouts and crazy catchy pop in electronic mad scientist's clothing, with each and every variation displaying an impossible knack for dense, heavily layered, ultra distorted productions that are pure headphone blossouts, but also even the most obtuse fractured bit of noisiness is somehow hooky as hell, whether it's the chugging blurred out crunch of "Landslide", or the crumbling feedback drenched electro-kraut churn of "Badlands". AWESOME!
Chris Knox has already conquered the pop world with his wonderful albums as a solo artist and with Tall Dwarfs. So where's his head nowadays? Deep inside his G4, apparently, and this from a man who I seem to remember once expressed luddite-like glee to me at his not having email yet. Gotta love 'im, sweet Mr Knox. Anyway, armed with ProTools, a grant and lots of time, Knox has made an experimental musique concrete album that's as enjoyable in its (relative to other highbrow concretists) lo-fi humbleness as it is interesting in its methods of construction. On one piece, for example, inspired by experimental pianist Conlon Nancarrow he arranged the 88 piano key notes into visual patterns pleasing to the eye, and only then listened to see if they sounded good. (They do.) Other tracks feature fellow sound artist John Hudak's recordings of insects sped up into whirring mechanisms, stadium field recordings mixed with plastic rakes into tinkling swirls, ancient unearthed '70s tape manipuations re-mucked about with, etc. A fine album, both sonically and in its unintimidating, "friend"-ly approachability. Read about its making yourself here; witty Chris Knox always says it best himself: http://flyingnun.co.nz/viewartist.cfm?artistID=473
MPEG Download: "First Easy Piece" [/audio/friendfirst.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "First Easy Piece" [/audio/friendfirst.m3u]
Newly reissued on vinyl!
What more could be said about these two Fripp & Eno records than we've already written in countless Expo '70, Growing and Aidan Baker reviews? That's because these records are pretty much ground zero for all of the dark dreamy drifty processed guitar / tape / synth drone that we can't ever seem to get enough of. Perhaps there are other earlier influential touchstones such as Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, perhaps Stockhausen and Terry Riley as well, but none seemed to have come so totally out of nowhere from two relatively mainstream players as these two records. Manuel Gottsching, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music all came a little later.
After every other Eno solo album and collaboration (from Cluster to David Byrne) has been reissued,
It's easy to take for granted nowadays the influence of Brian Eno as the "godfather of ambient music", but in 1973 before he had even released his first solo record, Here Come The Warm Jets, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno were mainly known for their previous roles in King Crimson and Roxy Music respectively. Then this mysterious record parenthetically titled (No Pussyfooting) appears with its cryptic cover, a sort of ultra-modernized take on a hermetic alchemical engraving depicting the two artists (Eno at his most androgynous) looking in opposite directions, sitting in a small mirrored room with no doors reading a nudie deck of cards like the tarot on a mirrored table with what sort of looks like a line of coke (?), next to a mirrored guitar in a mirrored case in the corner, a translucent mannequin and an antique silver radiator behind them under glass shelves filled with old books. The back cover showing the same scene with both artists and playing cards missing. With its two side-long awesomely titled tracks "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls", what kind of music would this be? Rock? Prog? Glam? No one probably would realize until they purchased it and brought it home, that it would be this organically cerebral deep listening experience of the highest order. It's kind of a downer that we have such easy access to information nowadays, because when this came out, it was a true mystery object, which added to its esoteric appeal. But it still is to an extent, as numerous listens over the years still never fail to captivate, or confound how exactly the sounds are being made. Apparently,utilizing a system later dubbed, Frippertronics, two reel to reel tape decks were used to allow audio elements to be added onto a continuing tape loop building up dense layers of sound that would slowly decay as it turned around the decks' playback head. On "The Heavenly Music Corporation" layers of deep synth drones are layered in phased washes with Fripp's unique bowed guitar sound ringing ascending solo lines on top that sometimes loop and sometimes don't. Eno wrings out what sounds like synth lines in counterpoint to Fripp's part in similar tones so that at times it gets harder to tell who is making what sound as the piece intensifies. "Swastika Girls" starts with high pitched cascades of processed piano like tones with scraping synth squelches looping in counterpoint, before low rising bass notes and Riley-ish piano repetitions appear. Then Fripp's searing guitar crash-lands into the mix almost disrupting the whole process, but somehow it all works. Much more distorted and dissonant than "The Heavenly Music Corporation", it doesn't take the process for granted that everything will sound harmonious but remains still somehow cohesive, though far from easy listening.
Sooooooooooooo Recommended and Essential!
Accidental was originally commissioned in 1995 by Paul Selwyn Norton for his dance piece "Rogue Tool" which premiered the following year in Tel Aviv, Israel. On 'Accidental' Frith, a multi-instrumentalist if there ever was one, plays all instruments: guitar, violin, organ, an odd assortment of percussion, tapes, radio and voice. The music on 'Accidental' tends towards the dark and severe, with squeals of guitar feedback layered over ominous drones, percussive elements assembled from cut up vocals (either Fred's or taken from radio), but this shouldn't imply that the music on this album is non-melodic. On the contrary, at the music is at times even hauntingly beautiful while parts of 'Accidental' are even reminiscent of Frith's 1988 'Technology of Tears'.
Member of such classic "experimental" outfits as Henry Cow, Art Bears and Massacre, and frequent downtown (Zorn, Laswell) collaborator, Frith has enjoyed increasingly iconic status for the last quarter century (novices, check out 1980's Gravity). Clearing is the avant guitar-hero's first solo guitar record since 1974's seminal Guitar Solos. Very pretty, evocative (and
"Famous as an improviser and a rock guitarist (Henry Cow, Art Bears, Residents, Massacre, Skeleton Crew), Fred Frith is still highly under-rated as a composer. Since relocating to Germany in the early 90s, Frith has composed soundtracks for a number of films and has chosen his finest for his first Tzadik release.
What it says, the great Fred Frith and three other avant-guitarists including Nick Dudovsky of Dr. Nerve and Rene Lussier.
Every town -- no matter how great or small -- has that infamous artist / musician / creator who to some is a Harry Smith-like shaman making the most amazing outsider art, but to rest he is just the village idiot. I would imagine that AQ-regular John Dwyer
Rev. Dwight Frizzell has been a very prolific yet wholly overlooked multi-media artist based in Kansas City. His previously reissued art-damaged album with Anal Magic explored alot of the hallucinatory realms later mined by the likes of The Sun City Girls. "Natural Selection" is an anthology of seven of Frizzell's filmscores documenting expansive film events, performative actions, and dense experimental audio collages for Tesla coils, field recordings, shortwave radio, sax, guitar, and anything else that could possibly be coaxed into making noise. The standout track is the telephone & oscillator piece "First Painting" in which Frizzell calls people up on the phone and asks them to pick a number between 20 and 15,000 then shifts the oscillator frequencies accordingly. Funny and creepy.
We first discovered the oddly monikered Frkse (pronounced 'forks' we think?) via aQ pal Matt, one half of industrial doomdirgedrone duo Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead, who was raving about this lp, and got some from the 'band' to pass on to aQ. It was suggested to us, that anyone who loved the weirdo power electronic abstract industrial weirdness of former Record Of The Week-ers Will Over Matter, would also dig Frkse, which was definitely enough for us, but barely prepared us for what Frkse was really all about. A one man band / mad scientist / audio alchemist, who takes loops and rhythms, weird murky samples, and all manner of noise, hiss and whir and hum, and deftly arranges them into strangely robotic grooves, android symphonies of rhythm and textures, sounding at times like some impossible hybrid of Pierre Bastien, Philip Jeck, Thomas Brinkmann, and Strotter Inst. There's the warped warble of experimental turntablism, the lush hazy washed out textures of that sort of blurred ambience, and the rhythms and grooves all sound very machinelike, as if Frkse simply built an army of machines to do his bidding, that bidding just so happening to be creating these stripped down minimal loopscapes and tripped out abstract constructs.
Each track here seems cobbled together from building block like sonic elements, a loping beat, a strange detuned strum, a disembodied melody, a whirring buzz, all strung together into an ingenious series arrangement that manages to be impossible catchy and mesmerizing, even at its most minimal.
Robotic loops churning through clouds of hiss and buzz, a woozy rhythmic drag, like some strange melted tape 33 rpm jams spinning at 16rpm, the sounds saturated and warm, lush in the way only 4 track tape hiss and old busted analog machinery can be, it's hard not to imagine Frkse's strange underground lair, dusty piles of corroded equipment, nothing grounded or properly shielded, arcs of electricity leaping between various hand built implements, the vast array of buzzes and strains of hiss, carefully cataloged to be used later, and to perhaps be mixed with other separate strains, creating whole new breeds of low fidelity noise. And for all its raw primitivism, each track tends to reveal gorgeous expanses of hissy, buzz drenched minimal mesmer, like a steam punk android Steve Reich, tracks peppered with sudden bursts of almost jungle like drumming, which upon closer examination reveals themselves to be simply endless rhythmic loops piled atop one another, in such a way, that they create glorious cascades of kinetic rhythms.
At times it's like a home brewed, post industrial minimal techno, at others, it's a thick caustic almost shoegazey blacknoise blur, and still others a noise drenched abstract electronica. The sound constantly shifting, a burst of gristled crumbling industrial churn will transform into a stretch of mournful almost Slint like minimalism, gradually expanding into a loping post rock drift, all skitter and stutter, unwinding hypnotically like a super stripped down lo-fi This Heat, everything caked in a dusty patina of chordal hum, a glorious maddeningly mesmerizing collection of robo-rhythms and psych-kraut dirgery, of hazy soft focus loop-grooves and tranced out motorik mesmer. And yeah, fans of Will Over Matter will flip, fans of M Ax Noi Mach too, but even more so, folks into haunting low fidelity experimental loopscapery: Jeck, Strotter, Caretaker, Bastien, Tim Hecker, Belong and the like.
SUPER LIMITED!!! Housed in hand silk screeened / hand stamped covers with a photocopied insert.
From Quagmire performs their avant-folk improvisations with the same restraint and quietness as Tower Recordings, yet produce their recordings with a great deal more clarity. From Quagmire is a trio from Virginia, featuring members of the damaged rock ensemble Rake. Their songs are loosely based around the Jandekian plucks of a nylon-strung acoustic guitar and the hushed vocals
Ben Frost records are scary. And beautiful. They're the stuff of dreams. And nightmares. They're like soundtracks for films that can never be made, the music conjuring up images that can only exist in the imagination. It's musical magic, or sonic alchemy, whatever it is, it's something few have mastered, and even those that have, barely approach the mysterious mastery of Ben Frost, whose previous record, By The Throat, remains one of the most terrifying documents of electronic sound art we have ever heard, weaving the sounds of snarling wolves into thick swells of corrosive bass buzz, and brilliantly bleak, yet impossibly lush sound design, and balancing that sonic grimness, with glimmers of hushed beauty, in a way that makes the sound both mellifluous and malevolent in equal measure.
Aurora is another stunning sonic missive, and one that immediately conjures up yet another lost world, one that lurks in our collective imagination, but that has begun to bleed through, into our every day world. The shadows seem deeper and darker. The grey skies shout through with streaks of blood red, the nights interminable, the days, scorched expanses of endless time. All of this represented by strange sprawls of layered electronic drones, of gristled pulsations, of strange staticky rhythms, and mysterious buried melodies, the sounds this time around brittle and jagged, the loveliness sharp edged and flecked with rust and dried blood, the rhythms that surface are hauntological, reminding us of the dubbed out avant mesmer of groups like Demdike Stare, but here those rhythms seem to gradually splinter and fray, wreathed in thick swirls of soft noise, sculpted into weeping melodies, and darkly decaying textures, all hiding some glowing inner warmth, suffusing these sounds with an organic quality, that transforms a series of sounds into something alive, a crackling energy that is barely contained on the record, one can almost imagine the sound as colored sparks leaping from the speakers, bursting from the headphones, a cascade of brilliant sonic flares, raining down from above.
Lurching robotic percussion is shaped into strange skeletal shapes, lumbering behemoths trading through fields of groaning, creaking chordal thrum, pelted with prismatic streaks of sound, a beastly groove, that builds to a thick swath of soaring epic psychedelic electronic majesty, like a meaner, moodier, more metal M83, a brilliant blacknoise blur, that blots out the stars, painting the sky in shade and shadow, eventually morphing into burnished stretches of grey ambience, laced with dubby skitter, all of which blossom further into a flurry of blissed out electro flares, which fade into crackling seas of gristle and hum, undulating imperceptibly beneath hazy layers of grumblingly distorted shimmer and grinding sheets of druggy thrum. A heaving landscape of tense cinematic atmosphere, smeared fields of tangled melody, wildly colliding synth streaks, and jumbled beats and rhythms, all wound up into a tightly coiled swirl, flurry of frenzied electrons, gradually crumbling into the ether, leaving just a barely there cloud of sonic static discharge, until finally, nothing. And emptiness.
Simply stunning.
We first discovered Ben Frost on, of all places, a dubstep comp. It definitely worked, this long brooding chunk of creeped out electronic dronemusic plopped down right between to stuttery stripped down dubbed out jams. It quickly became our favorite track on that disc, and got us to hunt down his full length, Theory Of Machines, which was just as good as that track. A strange assemblage of mysterious psych jams and minimal techno, drones and glitchy electronica, but all shot through with a mysterious darkness, that seemed to infuse every track with a bit of malevolence.
But if that record was dark and mysterious, then his new one, By The Throat, is downright terrifying. Who knew electronic music could be this harrowing, this epic and intense?! Mixing organic instruments, field recordings (lots of wolf howls and growls) and fucked up glitched out electronics, Frost has conjured up an incredible cinematic electronic dronemusic masterpiece. Sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. This record is amazing, playing out like a soundtrack to some lost-in-the-woods Italian horror film, pianos and strings, dense swells of static, the aforementioned wolves, all wound into tense soundscaped vignettes, each one rife with tension, and emotion, and a sprawling darkness.
The opening track is worth the price of admission alone, a series of slow building sonic swells, each a wall of crumbling distorted hiss, throbbing over a minimal stretch of subtle glitch and muted melody, the tones are jagged and sharp, the melodies are fragmented and minor key, bits of acoustic guitar drift over the squalls, ghostlike, while beneath, thick ominous low end rumbles and whirs. It's like a more electronic, more minimal, and much darker Godspeed.
That track segues right into "The Carpathians", where the wolves make their first appearance, howling over Bernard Hermann like strings, their growls providing seriously scary low end, the baying matched by the mournful melodies, it's easy to imagine being lost in the snow, miles away from civilization, wandering through the dark, the night filled with the howling of wolves.
The whole record really does play out like a soundtrack, each track evoking a certain mood, "O God Protect Me" is all clipped abstract rhythms and muted crystalline melody, soft glitches and distant beeps, pretty and melancholy and subtly ominous, while "Hibakusja", which starts out with a simple guitar melody and what sounds like the moan of horns, becomes the scariest track on the record, the wolves growling processed into fucked up glitched low end stutters, that original opening guitar remains, but beneath those fucked up grinding glitchy growls, totally intense, before becoming more and more staticky and abstract.
If there's not a movie, someone needs to make it NOW. The rest of the record evokes still more strange territory, skipped Jeck-like loopscapes, all glitchy and tense, the skipping records offering up snippets that on their own would be fairly haunting and mysterious, but recontextualized become something even more, thick swells of buzzing cellos and harmonized voices transformed into massive crumbling walls of sound, various melodies and elements resurfacing throughout, especially a main theme that seems to define the record, and sounds like a simple melody, but here is infused with the terror and fear of the surrounding sounds, long stretches of layered high end shimmer, more glitched out electronic minimalism, again, all rife with tension, with a cinematic weight, that makes this record sound like so much more than just a collection of songs and sounds.
Gorgeous cover art too, all reflective inks on a matte background, all images of snow and wolves and empty landscapes, the spare frostbitten white wasteland, where the seemingly imaginary events described by the sounds on By The Throat could have taken place. Intense and amazing.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Ben Frost was a total unknown to us until just a few months ago, when we heard his track on the recent Mary Anne Hobbs Evangeline mix cd, which was soooooo good, a huge surprise, a totally left field electronic drone jam stuck in the middle of a dubstep mix. Some of us were definitely thinking jam of the year, even though the record it was taken from had come out the year before, but holy crap, it totally stole the show, and we knew we had to hear more. So we tracked down the full length, but then, to be honest, became a little nervous before digging in, worried that we might discover that THAT track, the one we were already obsessed with and already had, might be the only good one on the record. Thankfully nothing could be further from the truth. And in fact, a few of the other tracks are now vying to knock that one out of the top spot.�
Theory Of Machines is a tough one to describe. It's electronic, but rife with strange glitches, with deep buzzing drones, blown out psych jams, mysterious murky minimal techno, all somehow woven into something totally cohesive, ultra dark and ominous, and so fucking kick ass. The record begins with the title track, the one from the Hobbs mix, but for those of you who might have missed that one, here's how we described it:
An extended slab of slow burning blurred dronemusic, that over the course of its 9 minutes builds from soft shimmer to dense crumbling Tim Hecker style smeared gauzy beauty, to thick caustic blown out soft noise, to an super distorted almost-trip-hop. The sound is immense and epic, and so gorgeous, wreathed in crackle and underpinned by buzzing downtuned lowend, streaked with soaring synths, the track's climax, all skittery beats beneath clouds of hiss and whir and crackle and fuzz is totally intense and gorgeous.�
Indeed! If lots of folks didn't already own the Hobbs mix, we would be declaring this worth owning for that track alone. But the follow up, "Stomp" is just as good. A shimmery minimal glitchscape, tons of space, swells of hissy buzz, and off kilter fractured beats, drifting in and then out, leaving long expanses of whispery hush, a blown out electric guitar, super processed, is smothered and muted into a stuttered decayed riff, struggling to let loose, the drums begin to pound, the guitar grinds out a noisy crunch, before retreating again, leaving just that soft almost techno skitter finally culminating in a super fuzz drenched industrial pound, a looped rhythm beneath that same damaged riff filtered through all sorts of static and short wave interference. It's so intense and weirdly ominous and sort of exhausting to listen to. So cinematic and fraught with tension. When the song ends you almost feel like you just crawled up from the sewers after being chased over rooftops, having the shit kicked out of you, leaping from a helicopter, saving the damsel in distress, and discovering that the city before you lay in ruins. So evocative and dramatic.�
The next track, while still dark and haunting, is a bit of a respite, a moody trawl through a glitched out low end drift, peppered with a mysterious sonar like single note high end pulse, a subtle shuffling beat hovering just below the surface, the hiss and static swirling and crunching while a distant melody floats in an expanse of soft shimmer. A quick two minute arrangement of big beats, grinding electric guitar, whirling ambient buzz offers up the record's most 'rock' moment before slipping into the final jam, which is not so much a jam as it is an extended drift, deep resonant tones, ring out, decaying ever so slowly, the various sonic ripples blending into one another, creating soft, shimmery minor key melodies, underpinned by deep pulsing bass, that you almost feel more than you hear, very tranquil and serene, eventually jazzy drums come in, melodies coalesce into something much more tight and arranged, becoming a sort of dreamy jazzy slowcore, softly dramatic, with what sounds like swoonsome strings and warm organ warble, a surprisingly dreamy and sun dappled finish to a record that is otherwise pretty caustic and dark. Which is precisely why it's so good. Totally unpredictable, a jarring mash up of rock elements all fucked up and processed, glitched out electronics, of dark brooding drone and cinematic ambience, all woven into a creepy, menacing, beautiful batch of sound.
Yet another entry in God Is Myth's ongoing series of 3"cd-r homages to horror author H.P. Lovecraft, who is obviously one of the main sources for metal band names, song titles and lyrical themes. Get rid of Lovecraft and Tolkien and suddenly metal bands would have names like Sunshine and Tigerlilly and would sing songs about picnics and rowboats. But fear not, until some mischievous soul with a time machine gets some crazy ideas, all is well in metal.
Past installments have come from a pretty disparate selection of black metal and black ambient outfits: Caina, Harvist, LVTHN, Sapthuran, Smohalla, and now Frostmoon Eclipse.
Although we've only ever listed one Frostmoon record, we've long been big fans, their blend of classic Norwegian style black metal, a la Mayhem, Emperor with dark moody rock, a brooding gothic groove, the result is a strangely catchy, but still fiercely heavy blackened metallic rock. With long stretches of acoustic guitar, simple drumming and almost flamenco style melodies, they definitely remind us of Opeth as well. But FE manage to take their influences and distill something distinctly their own. The strange thing is, we almost prefer the band when they are all acoustic, which much of this ep ends up being, evoking all sorts of melancholic emotions, with just steel strings and a hushed whispered vocal. That said, these guys can crush, and the blasts of heaviness are indeed intense and blackened, blending perfectly with the folky flutter and dark ambient drift surrounding it.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES. Already sold out and out of print. We got nearly a quarter of those, but like past installments these will no doubt disappear quick. Packaged in a normal slimline cd case, with black and white covers and a sepia printed cardstock insert with a photo and a brief biography of Lovecraft.
The first Fuck Buttons record, Street Horrrsing, was a bright colorful explosion of sound, we described it as "massive super distorted heavy electronic drone fuzz pop" and "energetically exotic and hypnotically repetitive and just chock full of sheer noise fuzz bliss, bulldozering over buried melodies, tribal weirdness, and equally distorted screaming vocals". Basically it was a noisy fucked up head spinning chunk of noise rock bliss pop infused with all manner of electronics.
On Tarot Sport, the equation has been flipped, if anything this is an electronic record, heck, a techno record, that just so happens to be filtered through some twisted noise rock, lo-fi punk rock lens. Like Daft Punk for the noise rock set, these extended jams sound like some unholy collision between the Boredoms, Gang Gang Dance, Black Dice and the Basement Jaxx, the synths are throbbing and thick and buzzy, the beats bounce and pound and skitter and slip from lurching stutter to house-y pound to groovy lope, while all around these various sounds is wrapped a warm gauzy layer of M83 like fuzz, giving the whole record a super dreamlike almost eighties feel. "Space Mountain" sounds like M83 gone techno and then nabbed for a crucial scene in a remake of Sixteen Candles, "Flight Of The Feathered Serpent" is another one that has futuristic eighties jam written all over it, hazy and druggy, washed out and shimmery, the beats big and block rockin', with a gorgeously almost Jesu sounding second half, albeit way poppier.
The first half of the record though, starting with the single "Surf Solar" is more on the Daft Punk side of things, still fuzzy and noisy and blissed out but way more techno. "Rough Steez" might be the weirdest of the bunch, with its super buzzy jagged fuzz bass, stuttery clipped rhythms, and squealing glitchy electronics, although there's plenty of fuzzy dreaminess creeping in already.
This is one of those rare records that pretty much everybody here loves, it's groovy, noisy, fuzzy, druggy, the beats are bad ass, the atmosphere is hazy and eighties, and it's all wrapped up into one practically perfect set of future summer retro noise rock techno electronic jams. This is quickly turning into one of our new favorites...
The SF indie label Kimosciotic run by Le Flange Du Mal's Chris Rolls is a hard one to pin down. In the last five years he's offered up the soul'n'hip hop of DJ Unagi, the electro-disco-bizarro of Crack We Are Rock, the atmospheric electronics of Not Breathing and the scuzz murk art rawk of Ezeetiger. One of the few common links we've been able to sleuth out is that many of the artists seem to have a penchant for costumes, disguises and devil-may-care attitude. Now get a load of Fuckwolf, Kimosciotic's latest release. They fit right in! From the looks of the photos in the insert, medical masks, wigs, coveralls, a lemon tree, sunglasses, a reel-to-reel, drums, electric guitar and bass all came into play during the recording of this cd. Some degree of propulsiveness lurks within and seeps out occasionally, but the overall results are a molten sludge filth stew that draws equal influence from the industrial and no-wave music of the '70s and '80s.
Berlin-based electronica experimentalist Jan Jelinek, whom we've grown ever more enamored of thanks to his star turn in the role of Ursula Bogner (documented on a previous release via Jelinek's Faitiche label, purporting to be a collection of pioneering Radiophonic Workshop style electronic pieces by an obscure female composer from the sixties who it seems never actually existed except in Jelinek's imagination) here teams up with one Masayoshi Fujita, who plays a prepared vibraphone (and how many prepared vibraphone records do you have??), for a lovely, lovely disc of ambient droneworks.
It begins with "Undercurrent", a track of wavering shimmering meditative hum, softly crackling around the edges, some gentle melody glowing within. The idea of nature-sounds suggested by the disc's title are not dispelled by this music, however electronic (and vibraphonic) it may be. Track 2, "Workshop For Modernity", is composed of whirring and tinkling, again gentle, as if the sounds were conjured from the breeze. The next, "I'll Change Your Life", is even quieter, more "lowercase" in presence. We don't know much about Fujita (assuming he's real) but would guess if he's Japanese, he has some familiarity with Japan's "onkyo" school of soundmaking. The following tracks continue this disc's patient and pleasant trajectory, with much shuffling glitch and soft focus digital stutter, alongside/overtop/underneath the melodious but abstracted vibraphone. It's only on album closer "IA_AI" that the duo eventually build up a thick wall of drone-distortion, louder and louder, a dramatic crescendo that ends with a sudden silence. Quite nice, as we like to say, quite nice!! Sometimes experimental electronic stuff can be too clinical and abstract, academic exercises y'know, but this manages to maintain a human feel, an exquisite emotional resonance, by existing in real space with the sounds of real instruments. Yes, quite nice.
Merzbow, Merzbow, Merzbow. We love the ultra-prolific king of Japanese noise as much as the next person - maybe even more, since several of us here own the 50-cd Merzbox! But, it's almost impossible to keep up - and also, when you've already got at least 50 cds of Merzbow's noise, do you really need any more? However, we do still get intrigued whenever Merzbow goes and collaborates with (or remixes) some other artist, like a rock or metal band. Maybe 'cause we like our Merzbow rhythmic, as in, with drumming. Also a little bit of, uh, music, in the mix tends to make the noise parts even MORE effective and interesting in our opinion. So this new release on Profound Lore caught our ears - East Coast metalcore band Full Of Hell teaming up with Masami "Merzbow" Akita for not one but two cd's worth of intense destructo mayhem. The blasting drum battery, filthy riffage and throat-shredded vokills are all par for the course with Full Of Hell, but the presence of Merzbow's mad noise skillz tips the scales further into the extreme and avantgarde! More "power electronics" feedback, more hellish drone and distortion, more abstract abjection. It sounds as if the pit is feasting upon itself, as FoH's fierce metal core breaks loose from its moorings and plunges into the abyss, accompanied by what sounds like 1,000 vacuum cleaners in a windtunnel, that sort of thing. Of the two discs, there's one that's presented as the "main course" with printed lyrics in the digipack, that one seems more like Full Of Hell doin' their usual thing, with a (powerful) side of Merzbow - and also, some free jazz style horns on a few of the tracks!! The other disc, entitled Sister Fawn, seems intended as a bonus, and finds FoH and Merzbow more fully enmeshed, blurring the lines a bit more, the noise to the fore with beats and demented vocals in the background. Noisefreaks can go straight to that one, the metalheads should start with the first disc...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Another amazing archival find from the Sanity Muffin label of unreleased interviews from one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
R. Buckminister "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth" and "synergetic". He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, including the widely known geodesic dome and Dymaxion car.
What's fascinating about hearing him speak is how direct and plainspoken he is, speaking about high-minded concepts in ways that make them easily accessible and question our very understanding of how the world is perceived. For example, he opens the first interview with an anecdote about speaking at a conference of scientists. He asks them how many of them had ever seen the sun come up and was flabbergasted at how many hands were raised. Here we have outstanding members of the scientific community and most still only understand the world largely in constructs that we have placed upon it, not operating in the real world where concepts like "up" and "down" do not actually exist. From there on we were hanging on every word!
This limited cassette version has 4 panels of embossed artwork and insert. Highly Recommended!
Minimalist composer Ellen Fullman speaks of her instrument quite lovingly. Considering the immense amount of time and energy that it takes to set up her long-stringed instrument, her attachment is understandable. When she recently moved to the Bay Area after many years in the Pacific Northwest, she had to radically change the architecture of her apartment by building an addition beyond the porch just to fit the multi-stringed device in the building. It's not enough for Fullman just to stretch long wires in any architectural space, for her pieces involve a complex mathematical foundation which enable Fullman an incredible amount of control when composing her extended drones and minimalist mantras.
Indebted to '60s minimalists like LaMonte Young, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Phil Niblock, Fullman's best work -- as found on Staggered Stasis -- suspends microtonal shifts amidst thick rasping drones rich with resonant overtones and complex harmonics. Fullman herself describes the work quite accurately, that "there is a flatness in this drama, what I imagine it must be like in the middle of an ocean, continually moving yet appearing the same." The end result is a much more contemplative and restrained aesthetic than the dynamic dronescapes of Organum and Andrew Chalk. This is a lovely and thororughly engaging work.
Full length number three from this turntable / baritone guitar duo, whose last two records have been huge favorites around here, and this one looks to follow suit.
With a sound that's equal parts doomy abstract drift, and gauzy atmospheric ambience, washed out textures of hum and hiss and crackle and whir wrapped around lush melodic figures and effects heavy psychedelic shimmer, these two craft gorgeous mini epics, slow building soundscapes that brood and drift and soar, haunting and hushed, layered and lush.
This latest installment opens with a lustrous bit of guitar loopage, locked into a web of soft spun delay, repetitive and mesmerizing, the turntable nothing but crackle at first, but gradually growing into something much more substantial, adding texture, little shards of melody, the sound getting more and more hazy, and blurred, and softly noisy, the guitar receding behind undulating sheets of swirling static, eventually the various sounds smearing into a single shimmering sound. That track flows directly into the next, another slow drift, this one driven by a simple percussive crash, surrounded by soft swirls of recorded sound, and washed out streaks of dreamlike guitar blur, this track growing more and more hushed and minimal, before segueing directly into another gorgeous field of electronically charged crackle, warm whirling melodies surfacing in lush gauzy billows, eventually parting to reveal a simple, moody riff, the melody gently driving the sound, the turntable wrapping ethereal swaths of buzz around the riff, and introducing some disembodied percussion.
The rest of the record unfurls in some sonic dreamstate, the guitars and turntables hard to distinguish from one another, each offering up snippets of melody, percussive thumps, gauzy shimmer, and easily slipping into a supporting role when one or the other takes charge. The middle portion of the record plays out like a single epic multipart piece, all the tracks bleeding into one another, ambient and atmospheric, rhythms surfacing and then dissipating, melodies doing the same, all about texture and mood, the various layers shifting and drifting creating all manner of subtle tonal color.
The final two tracks are the culmination of the record's overall slow build sonic arc, with "Get Out Of The Obese Crowd" unveiling a lazy buzzy guitar figure, wreathed in hushed hazy wheezes, that build to dense static charges, the sound growing more brittle and electronic, the buzzes swirling and whirling, a dizzying glitchscape, that leads into the ominously fuzzy final 6+ minutes that make up "Precious Persecution Complex", a sort of WAY more minimal SUNNO))), a glacial low end creep, that slowly gives way to a staticky sun dappled drift, and then slips right back into the smoldering caustic crunch that transforms the song into a minimal moody chunk of Nadja style doomdriftdrone, but one writ in shades of grey and streaks of static, a thick charged stretch of dense crackling sonic energy, threatening to explode, but that unrealized threat simply becomes a lush hazy tension, that infuses the track with a strange otherworldly pathos, and thus creating a powerful and hauntingly lovely coda, to an already hauntingly lovely record.
Band names come in strange zeitgeists, don't they? We've had waves of "The Something", "Wolf Something" and "Black Something" bands, now it seems it is "Year" time. So far we've noted Capitol Years, The Early Years, Year Future, and The New Year. Now The Fun Years come drifting into view. It does seem to be a bit of a misnomer though. Indeed, this group's name as well as their album and song titles all strike us as being very incongruous with the sounds they make. We sort of expecting some doleful pop music or something, but nothing would have prepared us for the murky muted beauty of Life-Sized Psychoses. Every track a washed out minimal landscape of record crackle, bits of hiss and pop, a dense washed out backdrop for the guitar to sort of drift and shimmer.
The record commences with "Powerball Annie", unobtrusive feathery shimmers of static that wash across lapping cycles of three-note sequences plucked out on baritone guitar. Strange reverby bits of percussion drift in and out. The whole thing very languorous and dreamlike. The second track weaves a similar spell, a crackle crusted loop, disembodied and haunting, repeats over and over, eventually joined by a laid back guitar line that gives the track's very Philip Jeck like turntablescape sound a distinctly post rock vibe.
At times the Fun Years almost sound like some avant turntablist spinning super scratched up old math rock and slowcore records, all loping rhythms and muted minor key melodies, but draped in thick swaths of buzz and fuzz and hum and hiss. Some tracks are mere whispers, others glow and sound sun dappled, smeary blurry burnished soundscapes, all wreathed in those analog recording inconsistencies we can never seem to get enough of. Every track here is a subtle sprawl, and shifts and shimmers ever so gradually. No quick moves or hard edges. Just blurry, bleary eyed drift. So very nice!
Definitely for fans of Jeck, Basinski, Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek, Jasper TX and the like...
The return of our favorite (and perhaps the only?) baritone guitar / turntable duo The Fun Years, and another record of warm warbly mystery. Wonderfully warped turntablescapes, looped and crackly and fuzzy, the baritone guitar unfurling spidery melodies while the turntables weave lush gauzy backdrops of sepia sound.
Like past Fun Years records, this one is dreamy and otherworldly, ghostly and sweetly melancholic, the guitar manages to sometimes sound just as crackly and fuzzy as the vinyl on the turntables, the two elements so perfectly intertwined. The Fun Years side builds to a lush crescendo, a warm layered, soaring ur-drone, before slipping back into a slow shimmery outro.
.Cut Featuring Giblet are new to us, a guitar and laptop duo, who are a perfect match for the Fun Years, their sound a haunting elegy, the laptop is super subtle, adding texture and color more than glitch or bleep, gorgeous, creepy, warm and lovely, a slow building gauzy swirl over ghostly drifting guitar figures, eventually reaching a sort of soft cacophony, but even then still floating dreamily from the speakers.
Super limited, only 489 copies, each one hand numbered, and unfortunately super price-y as well, not sure why, but both bands offer up sounds pretty enough that for some folks, it'll definitely be worth it.
We were really excited about this match up, Hospital Productions head honcho Dominic Fernow's gothic industrial techno project Vatican Shadow, teamed up with David Sumner of Sandwell District's ominous minimal techno alter ego Function. We could only imagine what sorts of fantastically grim and murky sounds would emerge from this unholy union, would it be monolithic slabs of heartless black techno, or swirling rhythmic sprawls of pulsing murk? Our imaginations sort of ran wild, and yet somehow, we never imagined THIS.
The sound is definitely still plenty moody and dark, but instead of being harrowingly abject, or bleak and brutalist, it's actually sort of blissed out, and pretty dreamy much of the time, the vibe more hazy and soft focus, lots of atmospheric drift and Pop Ambient style swirl. There are beats too, but they're not so much beats as pulsations, often buried and barely there, almost always skeletal and ultra minimal, drifting amidst gauzy stretches of woozy, washed out nocturnal murk, soft focus atmospheres, and blurred dream-state ambience, the vibe ethereal and airy, almost like a blackened new age, but one that often drifts into fields of dark, swirling, chordal thrum, and softly tangled sheets of smeared melody, glistening and glimmering and prismatic. There are hints of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas, the Caretaker, the whole Pop Ambient series, Emeralds, lots of drift and shimmer for sure, but a few spots that get downright sinister and soundtracky, like on the "nemesis Flower", an ultra minimal John Carpenter style sprawl of murky throb, rumbling synth blurts, and distant melodic shimmer. It's not until the second to last track, "Red Opium" that we get any actual techno, and even then, it's a sort of laid back, blissed out mid-tempo house music groover, the tempo loping and hypnotic, the beat surrounded by soft billows of resonant overtones and blurred melody, which leads directly into the closer, "Bejewelled Body", which is about as close to a 'banger' as any track here, a churning, four-on-the-floor throb, wreathed in electronic squelches, keening fragmented melodies, and underpinned by some seriously droned out kosmische raga-like shimmer.
Fragments From The Aethyr is the latest blast of caustic cinematic black ambience from this Vancouver based audio alchemist, although it's the first FC record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is strange, since this is the sort of dense black mesmer that many of you can't get enough of. With a sound that lurks somewhere betwixt Gnaw Their Tongues, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Tenhornedbeast, MZ412 and Wolf Eyes, this band weave gristly sprawls of feedback drenched buzz, and keening high end squalls of swirling black psychedelia, the sound driven by what sounds like a violin, but a violin possessed, wreathed in effects and sent spiraling into the ether, a weird sort of droned out black folk drift, that manages to be lilting and lovely, even while being face meltingly brutal. The sound slips into a long stretch of haunting hushed shimmer, laced with chiming minor key harmonics, and lush rumbling drones, and oozes through clouds of blackened sonic murk, growing quite minimal, and almost modern classical sounding, the violin to the fore, soaring above the abyss, a harrowing bit of minimal modernism that broods ominously, and blossoms blackly into a gorgeous blackdrone cinematic epic, that ends up being far too short, even at nearly twenty minutes, before finishing off with a dense sprawl of echo drenched ritualism, processed vox and heavily layered tones, dubbed out and smeared into hazy blurs and almost liturgical sounding chants, seriously sinister and gorgeously grim.
Fans of abject minimal blackness and any of the above mentioned purveyors of sick sonic miserablism, heed the call.
First we've heard from these Seattle trippers, who may or may not have some connection to some aQ metal faves from the same region, but digging metal is most definitely not a prerequisite for getting lost in Fungal Abyss' freaky soundworld, and freaky it is. These guys couldn't really be more perfectly named. The sounds of these four epic tracks, sound exactly like the sort of brain melting abyss, one might fall into after inhaling a lungful of spores from some mysterious alien fungus found deep in the forest. Sprawling kosmische psychedelic drifts, the shortest song clocking in at 10:20, the longest 24:06 (!), all doused in FX, fields of crackle, strange samples, skeletal percussion, woozy looped guitars, skies full of tripped out squiggles, it's like an even more abstract, druggy strain of the sort of space and psych rock folks have been flipping out over the last little while. Total slo-mo Hawkwind drift, or like The Heads and White Hills, stewed to the gills on cough syrup. Woozy and droney and darkly psychedelic, epic, endless, smoldering drug-jams that seem like they could and should go on forever. But the band do ramp it up, launching into full on motorik style kraut-psych, check out the opener "Arc Of The Covenant", about halfway through, the band sounding like they should be on Cardinal Fuzz, fans of the Janitors and Hills and all the rest will be in heaven. Swirling, and tripped out, propulsive and hypnotic, the slower parts sounding a bit like a less free No Neck Blues Band, but when they get rocking, total heavy psych space rock bliss. Obviously WAY recommended!!
Fungal Hex is doom-lord Stephen O'Malley (of Khanate, Burning Witch, Lotus Eaters) doing music for an art installation by Brooklyn artists which showed in the Czech Republic last year. His graphic design and guitar playing talents are both evident on and in this cd release, an "installation document with audio supplement". Musically, it's a 40-minute session of eerie drone and scrape, rather quiet and unsettling stuff, similar in spirit if not sound to the much heavier and more metallic output of O'Malley's band projects. The gallery in Prague printed only 500 of these discs to accompany the exhibit, and they're all gone now -- we've got just *four* copies, so act fast if you think you're gonna want one. (In other words, use the phone.)
We raved about the first Furisubi cd-r a while back, a huge, punishing, stumbling Black Sabbath homage/tribute/cover, with thunderous guitars and retarded drumming. So I was mildly surprised by how mellow 'Limb Of Copernicus' was. Just guitar and organ, playing gently against each other in a world of drone and reverb. Steadily, gently strummed guitars over glacial and unwavering organ drones, that only occasionally shift subtly. Like Fahey jamming with Birchville Cat Motel or Troum. Quite gorgeous actually. Fans of Windy And Carl, Landing and space/drone rock in general will dig this a lot!
Furisubi is the experimental guitar drone/psych/noise project of Kris Lapke, on this release a one-man band playing guitar and (sometimes) drums. The two tracks found on this hour-long cd-r basically sound like Japanese distorto-psych rockers High Rise or Mainliner covering Black Sabbath. Actually, track two actually *is* a Black Sabbath cover -- maybe we should say 'interpretation' -- a nearly half-hour version of Vol. 4's "Snowblind"! Well, actually, perhaps inspired by Sabbath's own in-concert jams/medleys, he works "Snowblind" over for about 15 minutes, and then deviates into some other symptoms of the Sabs' universe, like "Paranoid" and what sounds like a super-sped up version of "Smoke On The Water" which isn't even a Sabbath song (though Sabbath HAS performed it) before returning to finish-up the world's most stretched-out version of "Snowblind".
That's all after the preceeding 30 minutes of the disc's first track, which borrows no Black Sabbath riffs but certainly could have! So, whether covering Sabbath or not, Lapke's modus operandi here is pretty much utter distorto guitar drone demolition, motorpsycho guitar in the Makoto Kawabata zone, but heavier, darker, dronier... yes!! Our kind of guitar hero. But he's obviously not a drummer, though, as his timekeeping skills are, shall we say, poor...but the fucked-up drumming gives this a bit more of a damaged charm anyway...and he bothers to drum only about half the time as well (so it's better than a live Electric Wizard show, who's drummer is notoriously drunk and incompetent). Lapke also allows the occasional ragged vocal to (barely) surface amid the howl of guitar and feedback, helping to place one in the flow of Sabbath tuneage. This is what "stoner rock" *should* sound like... There are other, more 'experimental' Furisubi releases, but we liked this 'rockier' one the best and so decided to feature it. Plus, who can argue with extended Sabbath-inspired jamming? We're glad of whatever possessed him to record this, in all its wonderfully blown-out and messed-up glory.
We've long been entranced by the mystical world of Philadelphia's Fursaxa. With her latest offering she dives even deeper into her mesmerizing world of vibrating tones and otherworldly vocals, which sometimes remind us of Nico performing a seance in her secret garden. While recent outings by the likes of Grouper and Valet have been making waves around these parts with their dreamlike swirls of vocal delay and reverb magic, it's so nice to hear new music from someone who helped spawn this recent movement of hazy psychedelic drone-folk. But what makes Fursaxa always stand out is that it's not just her voice and effects which demand your attention but the entrancing instrumentation as well, that pulls you into her irresistible spell.
Over the past couple of years, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has entrenched herself as a mystical queen for the free-folk crowd, channelling the disaffected sorrow of Nico as well as the transcendent visions of 12th Century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. On her previous recordings, Burke sewed together her albums from short vignettes of narcoleptic folk songs, typically in the form of monotone lullabies in which her resonant voice radiated through stoned-and-droned acoustic guitar strum and / or farfisa arrangements. So it's very rare to finds a Fursaxa song that clocks in at anything longer than 3 minutes, which curiously is ample time for her to hypnotise her audience with her utterly compelling songs. Amulet, thus, is a bit of a detour from the collections of shortened songs as she offers four extended pieces of sprawling drones built out of delay-pedal loops. On the first couple of tracks, it's Burke's voice that takes center stage, spiralling into a hypnotic set of oscillating patterns, mossy psychedelic chants harkening back to the dark ages. She accentuates these tracks with occasional interludes for flutes and hand bells. On one of the final tracks on Amulet, Burke sets forth on a slow-motion acoustic guitar renditition of a Glenn Branca symphony, aiming for nothing more than transcendent hypnotic monotone. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!
