While I (Jim) have normally attempted to write reviews for Aquarius that are noticeably different from the reviews I've written for other outlets, I now state my failing in crafting some new syntax for this Fursaxa record, which I think is fantastic. So without further ado, here's what I wrote in The Wire #222.
"Tara Burke has earned major endorsement from Makoto Kawabata and Thurston Moore, who have been so impressed by the Philadelphian psych-out maven as to release a couple of recordings of her Fursaxa project on their respective labels. Following the 'Mandrake' CD-R on Kawabata's tiny imprint, this self-titled album published by Moore's Ecstatic Peace is an exceptional set of narcoleptic post-VU semi-rock haze. Working with a couple of her former comrades form the underappreciated Siltbreeze group Un, Burke has scored 19 sketches for monochord acoustic guitars, pedal treated Lowry organ and Farfisa loaded with a grainy texture of raw tape hiss and a general disregard for production cleanliness. She channels these stories like a Wiccan earth mother, with sounds emanating like disaffected recollections of various memories and previously hidden histories. She's not so much interested in telling us specific stories as evoking a psychic connectivity towards those past visions, which are beautifully nostalgic yet vaguely haunting. This album is as good as anything from the Jewelled Antler collective, No Neck Blues Band, and Jackie-O Motherfucker."
Through the 3 lengthy recordings of his live performances, Tetsuo Furudate (who had previously released an exceptional collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski which we also stock) situates lengthy passages of near silence next to eruptions of dissonance; chunks of noise, militant metallic percussion, incendiary guitar feedback (a la KK Null), and slow motion bass drones. It's like listening to a one-man band performing a Hermann Nitsch orchestration through pure strength of will.
Tetsuo Furudate and Zbigniew Karkowski have released their second collaboration under the banner of "World As Will" as an homage to the 19th century thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical principles had been spelled out most thoroughly within a four
The Furudate / Karkowski collaborations (an album on Staalplaat and this record published by 23Five) have certainly followed Schopenhauer's fundamentals, with the creation of a violent, masculine, and ultimately tragic orchestrations as actions purely guided by edicts of the will. While based upon live arrangements for big horns, discordant strings, and timpani (in part composed by Karkowski and in part sampled from Wagner), the two offer a punishing collage in which the orchestral sounds spiral downward into brutal stabs of molten digital noise. "World As Will II" may lack some of the loud / quiet dynamics of the first volume, but the two more than make up for it in unrelenting intensity that falls between the totalitarian critiques of Laibach and the sonic bloodletting of Hermann Nitsch. A very difficult album.
Managed to get a handful of these SUPER LIMITED lathe cut 7"s from New Zealand noise rockers the Futurians, and it's a doozy. Already they were a sludgey, garagey, noisy, a bit damaged, freaked out and arty, some mix of Chrome, the Stooges and the Brainbombs. If anything this 7"s pushes them even further out. Adding sheets of white noise distortion, some old school Butthole Surfers style vocal processing, and a production that barely surpasses tin can and twine through dictaphone, the band churn out a super repetitive hypnotic groove, the guitars not so much riffy as chunks of static, the drums a muffled barely there throb, the two elements that hold it all together, are the buzzing low end that pulses and throbs beneath the surface, seeming to fade out completely before exploding back into motion, a blackened rumble, and the vocals, a skipping, stuttering, hiccupping high end chirp, that almost sounds more like a malfunctioning synth than an actual human voice. The result is pretty fantastic though, a fucked up garage sludge noise rock wetdream, equal parts Buttholes, Siltbreeze, Brainbombs and shitgaze.
Hand painted sleeves, clear lathe, INSANELY LIMITED. Already out of print. We have 7 or 8. Don't blink...
Here's a lovingly homespun assemblage of field recordings which have been altered and pieced together over the last couple years into a hushed collage of mysterious texturous scrapings and ambience. These three hazy soundscapes were created by Bay Area artist Fuzzboy (aka Dan Borstein). 'Tis the gentler side of experimental noise that he treads.
It's unfortunate that we've not listed any G*Park recordings until now; but it's certainly better late than never. G*Park is the work of Marc Zeier who has been quietly generating some of the most evocative musique concrete / electro-acoustic whatnot / broken drones / softened noisejunk since the mid '80s. These recordings had mostly been on cassette back in the day, with a couple of discs appearing over the past decade thanks to Blossoming Noise and the defunkt Zabriskie Point label. He's also an auxiliary member of the aktionist Schimpfluch collective, although his work shares little of their scatological hyper-violence of smeared fish guts, vomit, and bloodletting. Yet, the G*Park recordings mirrors the sinister vibe of Schimplfuch through his delicately disfigured field recordings and tape-cut manipulation. Zeier presents a masterful collage of disjointed repetitions from handcranked mechanisms that rupture with bellowing drones and aqueous gurglings. Elsewhere, air raid sirens explode through the laser-whipsnap recoil of cellphone tension wires being struck, and the reverberation of prepared piano abuse slams against densely packed drones into thunderous punctures. These pieces are clinical studies of decay amplified from a microscopic order; and considering that Zeier's occupation is a plankton fisherman (seriously!), perhaps these are the birth pangs and death throes of those tiny creatures. A very highly recommended piece of sound art!
Back in 2010, G*Park performed in San Francisco for 23five's Activating The Medium festival, presenting the early sketches of his eviscerated musique concrete and disembodied field recordings, surging from vacuum-sucked voids through ice-cave drones into tumultously compacted rumblings whose frequencies were on the verge of tearing The Lab at the seams. It was an exhausting emptiness that G*Park constructed through all of his sounds, grimly alluding to a science-fictional apocalypse of an endless winter and relentless viral agents. For the next two years, G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) finessed the details of that work, tightening up the tension and further hollowing out the noises, resulting in Sub - easily the best release from his impeccable catalogue, and one of the finer outings from the Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Along with the likes of Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and Dave Phillips, G*Park hails from the Swiss collective Schimpfluch, which extends the ideas and concepts of the Viennese Aktionists (i.e. Nitsch, Brus, Schwarzkogler, Muehl, etc.) of aestheticized violence and abject transgression through the histories of punk, performance-art, industrial/noise, and DIY cassette culture. There is horror, dread, fear, and scorn in all of the work of Schimpfluch; and it manifests in many different ways. In Sudden Infant, you will find the Dada-prankster; in Phillips, you have the psycho-sexualized demon; in Eb.Er, you've got a scatological shaman, but in G*Park, you have the haunted existentialist. Easily the most introspective and mysterious of the lot, G*Park doesn't have the numerous world tours that the other members of Schimpfluch do, but his work is revered by those in the noise and sound-art communities as being a hidden gem of grizzled collage-based compositions. His work exists somewhere between the technical constructions of Luc Ferrari and the more vacant strategies of industrial culture (i.e. Thomas Koner, John Duncan, etc.); Sub is spacious album girded by darkly radiant drones and shadowy thrummings that ebb and flow as a strange subcutaneous current akin to blood streaming though veins or a toxic algae bloom fed by the strength of the sun; but that spaciousness is not one of calm pools of ambient bliss. No, this is a very tense album as he pricks, shatters, ruptures, and bleeds out those drones with agitated harsh snaps and slaps of acoustic debris - the suffocating last breath of oxygen extracted from a scuba regulator, the murderous caw of a crow, a whipcrack burst of unknown energy, a brutalist thud of a fist striking a ribcage, static errata from EMF detectors that may or may not be dialed into paranormal activities, or just the drippings of an ice cave whose entry way has just collapsed leaving you with no escape. An unsettlingly brilliant album.
The Pseudoarcana website describes G-Frenzy as "White trash hip hop and drunken country." Don't let that turn you off though, this is actually quite a cool weird record. Weird lo-fi rhythmic pop, with lots of samples (mostly 'borrowed' from other Pseudoarcana releases!). Think Sebadoh, slowed waaaaay down, buried in a hole for a month, then dug back up and slapped on the tape machine, dirt and worms and all. Mumbly, wavery, distorted vocals step hesitantly through a series of sonic backdrops, from gentle piano riffs smothered in ambient noise, to loping fuzzy rhythms and warm gauzy atmospheres. Cool.
MPEG Download: "From The Stars" [/audio/gfrenzyfrom.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "From The Stars" [/audio/gfrenzyfrom.m3u]
Bernhard Gal is an Austrian sound artist involved in the process of extrapolating and dissecting the sound of everyday life to offer new insight into those noises which we take for granted everyday. Unfortunately, Gal stumbles horribly with the pretentious introduction to this album with a clumsy vocal cut-up recalling bad New Media art from the '80s. Things pick up nicely with
Guillermo Galindo dons a diverse array of musical hats -- experimental, electro-acoustic, electronic, sound art installations and opera! He even wore a modified helmet during his performance at last year's SF Electronic Music Fest! This is the first we've heard from Gal*In_Dog, his atmospheric soundscape chapeau. The six slowly shifting vaporous tracks stretch out over the course of 69 minutes. Occasionally the sound fades to often barely-there drones, sometimes more tactile prickles and swarms of hiss, once in a while giving way to the surprise of nature bird songs. A quite nice record of electronic experimentalism, dark and mysterious, dense but still quite lovely.
One of two double disc sets from Diamanda Galas, Defixiones, Will and Testament is the song cycle that Galas has performed around the world, set to texts from various poets, rembetika singers, and blues musicians. As with her infamous trilogy of release, the Plague Mass, Litanies of Satan, and The Masque of The Red Death which focused upon horror of AIDS, Defixiones takes up another deadly serious topic, genocide. Galas offers her own definition of genocide, as "an attempt to brutally crush and erase a civilization by any means necessary in its entirety.ïAlso, this work concerns those who must live in exile as a means to escape and the desire to document one's existence -- to leave behind proof of life." For these recordings, Galas sings to those forgotten in the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides which occurred between 1914 and 1923. With minimal arrangements of piano and windswept electronic tones, Galas belts out her highly stylized demonic shrieks, operatic falsettos, and tortured blues, always pointing towards the pain and suffering of her subjects.
Diamanda Galas' La Serpanta Canta is a collection of live recordings from 1999 - 2002 that celebrates her numerous influences, a veritable Diamanda songbook, tunes by Hank Williams, Ornette Coleman, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and John Lee Hooker. Each song is hammered out on the lower regions of the piano's keyboard, with her incredibly stylized vocalizations churning out shrill falsettos and diabolical growls. Compared to the conceptually grim Defixiones album released at the same time, La Serpenta Canta opens up to a slightly wider range of emotional expressionism. Diamanda's own ragtime ditty "Baby's Insane" is a notably comic moment (intentional or otherwise), where her comparably uptempo, spry piano chords drive her faithful vocal rendition of a standard blues progression. Yet, the declarations of damnation and vocal gymnastics caught in the grieving process are more typical of many works found on La Serpenta Canta.
The Village Voice says: "[Galas] possesses the most powerful, versatile and disciplined instrument of any vocalist in the new music, and her new piece ...is more than anything else a showcase for it."
A glorious spaced out druggy FX drenched sonic trip to the outer reaches of the galaxy from the aRCHIVE label (Nadja, Goslings, Astral Traveling Unity, Alasehir, Jack Rose, Khanate, Keiji Haino, LSD-March, Growing, Bardo Pond). The perpetrator of said sonic space trip is Hiroshi Hasagawa, who spends most of his time doing similarly druggy business in C.C.C.C. and Astral Traveling Unity, on synth and ring modulator, and Keichi Miyashita (from Mandog) on guitar and tape echo. Needless to say, everyone who bought that ATU on aRCHIVE is definitely gonna want this....�
Three extended improvised freaked out ultra mega blown out drifting space jams. Swirling clouds of whoosh and bleep and bloop and shimmer and schhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwooooooooooooooooossssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Peppered with glistening sonic sparkles, a sky full of blinking twinkling melodic shards. Very laid back and meditative at times, a pulsing throbbing hypnotic krautrock like Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh, but occasionally exploding into full on blistering acid fried psychedelic chaos. If you loved that Astral Traveling Unity, or Space Machine, or the above mentioned krautrockers or Acid Mothers Temple at their most unhinged and free (one�track even features AMT's Hiroshi Higashi on extra synth) then this will surely hit the spot.�
Like�all aRCHIVE releases, beautifully packaged, this time a glossy psychedelic 6 panel fold out sleeve with the cd affixed to the inside.�
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES and probably already almost out of print...
Totally mind blowing collaboration between three masters of drone / raga / free / folk / noise. New Zealander Alastair Galbraith is a long time AQ fave as is the UK's Richard Youngs. Alex Neilson while not an instantly recognizable name in his own right, has played on oodles of amazing records (including some by Matt Valentine, Taurpis Tula) and you may recognize his name due to the fact that he and Mr. Youngs were the back up band for Jandek at his first ever live performance! None of that has very much to do with this, two sides of incredibly dreamy modern folk raga. Lighter than air swirls of falsetto vocals drift and shimmer, harmonies slowly shifting, all over a long slow drawn out ur-drone, constructed from buzzing steel strings, bits of percussion, warbling synthesizers, spaced out effects, electronic buzz and glitch, strummed guitars get stretched into fuzzy blurs, melodies float by in the distance, chimes tinkle and sparkle, almost the whole disc is made up of languorous, lazy stretches of dreamlike sound, EXCEPT for the opening and closing tracks on side 2, when some wild drumming is introduced, and the FX levels get pushed all the way into the red, and what was once tranquil bliss, is transformed into a snarling, chaotic super tripped out space rock.
Packaged in beautiful simple full color offset printed and debossed sleeves, with deluxe debossed inserts, LIMITED TO 900 COPIES, each insert has the record's number debossed along with of the liner notes, pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Limited to 200 numbered copies, this is two new instrumentals from New Zealand's respected experimentalist.
Oh Alastair, how we have missed you. Although there have been a handful of reissues, a collaboration here and there, and those incredible long wires discs, there's something magical about the strange world Galbraith is able to conjure up give a whole record to work with. A dizzying blend of folky freaky lo-fi experimental pop, handmade instruments, ambience and noise, all held together by some ineffable magic that very few possess, but some, like Galbraith have mastered and seem to unfurl effortlessly.
Orb is the first proper solo record in years and also marks the re-activation of Galbraiths Xpressway label, now called Nextbestway. And once again, we're transported to some mysterious glade, where a strange man is hunched over a small arsenal of sound making devices, and like some sort of mad scientist is assembling an endless series of perfect little sonic gems.
The opening track is so immediately warm and recognizable, with it's warped warbly organ, and Galbraith's haunting multi tracked vocals, reminding us once again, that long before Neutral Milk Hotel, Galbraith was shaping similarly powerful little spiritual pop songs, and "Here Not There" is no different. Less than two minutes, but in that brief span, he's able to lull and soothe, trip out and transport. The second track is even shorter, less than a minute, but it's a killer chunk of billowy krautrock drift that finishes in a flurry of digital skipping.
Galbraith has a sort of Guided By Voices thing going, giving us tantalizing glimpses of incredible hooks, cool moody riffs, fluttering bits of sweet folk, but then nips them in the bud, songs that could very well stretch on for hours, slip away after minutes, sometimes seconds, creating these brief magical flourishes that have us returning over and over to sample briefly, always wanting more.
Like all Galbraith discs, the sounds are disparate, but interconnected, clattery feedback drenched Dead C style noise rock, with crumbling distortion and fuzzy sheets of synth, murky detuned folk ramblings, keening scarping strings, high end skree and metallic reverberations, utterly heartbreaking perfect pop, stretches of field recordings overlaid with soft shimmery drones, wheezing organs and delicate plucked strings, thick swaths of dense guitar buzz and super distorted vocals, black metal via NZ noise rock, meandering abstract Appalachia draped over soft swells of mumble and drift, warm warbly guitar and every possible combination in between.
So lovely, so magical and so totally mysterious. Galbraith is truly a bard from beyond, a songsmith who transcends genre, perhaps even time and space. And we're so glad to have him back.
This is volume two of one of our favorite records EVER, Long Wires In Dark Museums, a sound installation from a few years back where New Zealand underground legend Alastair Galbraith teamed up with American musician Matt De Gennaro and strung long metal wires, some as long as 100 feet, between the walls of the performance space, and thus proceeded to scrape and bow and coax huge reverberant drones and groans from the wires, creating huge metallic dronescapes, informed by the works of Harry Bertoia and the long string experiments of Ellen Fullman. the cool thing about these Long Wires In Dark Museums, is that when the wires are excited they don't actually produce the sound, it's the points at which the wires are affixed to the space, the vibrations run up the wall, or through the windows, turning the whole space into a natural resonator, where the architecture of the space, the shape of the rooms, the makeup of the walls determine the tone and timbre of the sound. These performances occur in utter darkness as well, so the ears become the only sense that matters.
The sounds these two, and their building of choice create is magnificent, massive, the sort of sound that not only resonates within the space, but also in our ears, in your bones. It's like the idea of bowed metal, the glorious warm sound that makes, expanded and stretched out into a sound at once so natural, but so alien, that it's impossible to not be drawn in and completely mesmerized. It almost sounds like huge violins, or a cello the size of a barn, being tuned and tinkered with. Long notes stretched out for minutes, letting the microtones and sonic subtleties gradually reveal themselves. These metallic drones shift and shimmer, each long strecth of sound full of subtle colors and layer after layer of strange texture. This is seriously deep listening. Very very recommended, as is the first volume.
Despite the designation as being "Volume 1," "Long Wire In Dark Museum" is the second documentation of the long thin wire music of New Zealand's multi-talented violinist Alastair Galbraith and American composer Matt De Gennaro, following their previous
This is the first we've heard from Alastair Galbraith since a couple years ago, when he teamed up with Matt De Gennaro for an album of Ur-drone we absoultely loved, gorgeous bowed piano and violin strings, shimmering and shuddering. Really dreamy and mesmerising. And it seems like Galbraith is continuing even further in his trajectory away from song based forms and toward more free and abstract sound. And we couldn't be happier. While we love everything this man does, our hearts belong to the drone. For these two lengthy tracks, Galbraith teams up with fellow Kiwi legend Constantine Karlis, drummer for High Dependency Unit, to craft delicate and spidery abstract soundscapes of buzzing, scraping and keening violin, treated guitar loops, and scattered free drumming. The result is absolutely divine. Spare and spacious, the violin occsionally hints at eastern sounding ragas, playing almost-melodies, before slipping back into wavery drones, squeaky and swaying, while the huge, cavernous sounding drums are splattered throughout, sometimes a basic primal rhythm, sometimes barely-there flourishes, and sometimes a full on squall of percussive brutality. At it's free-est it's a bit like Angus Maclise or Tony Conrad backing up a free jazz drummer, when proceedings get a little more structured, you can almost imagine Damon Che of Don Caballero or...maybe even...ME (I tried to think of another drummer but Allan made me put me, Andee Connors), drumming for Lamonte Young or John Cale. So highly recommended. A new favorite late night record for the drone-prone among us.
We've been enjoying a barrage of weird new tapes from East Bay tape label Sanity Muffin over these last few months, and this week marks the release of yet -another- batch, one of which is this one right here, the latest from Galena, the blackened synth-drone project of the man behind the label, and like the Galena jams we've heard before, Buried Finch is another collection of smoldering kosmische space outs that often splinter into grinding, glitched out psychedelic noise. Give a listen to the opener, beginning with soft shimmery celestial swirls, before a crumbling caustic buzz surfaces from below, pulsing and sinister, wrapping its inky tendrils around the otherwise dreamy drift, but while it's that buzz and crunch that seems to sonically dominate, much of Buried Finch finds Galena exploring much more abstract and spacey sounds, deep rumbling thrum, bleary, blurry swaths of chordal shimmer, gristly Tim Hecker like shoegaze-synth buzz, mysterious disembodied voices, deep dramatic vox, dubbed out barely there rhythms, a few moments of Casio drum machine driven Goblin / Carpenter style grooviness, but with plenty of jams that could be remixed Will Over Matter tracks. Thick gnarled sprawls of synth buzz, minimal and mesmerizing, here wrapped around motorik rhythms, and swirling space-y textures, like the soundtrack to some tripped out low budget art film, or the music accompanying the scariest planetarium show EVER.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
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One of two new releases on Oakland label Sanity Muffin, the other, a fantastic collection of sonic strangeness from Dutch blackened drone/dirge ambient outfit Torture Corpse, and this, some droned out blackened heaviness from Galena, the one man band of the guy behind the SM label, and it's definitely the sort of sound that pushes all our buttons. Shouldn't take more than a minute or so before you're sucked in, after some swirling ambience, a strange rifflike high end drone loops and loops, and then suddenly everything explodes in a frenzy of what can only be described as electronic black buzz, a churning bit of melody looped beneath sheets of hiss and buzz and thrum, with what sounds like a super distorted blast beat laid over the top, the result is fantastically psychedelic and hypnotic, even as the blast beat fades, and much of the buzz, the ensuing high ends shimmer and thick layered crunch continues to invoke the same sort of grim vibe, except here, Galena lays some lilting warped melodies over the top, so it almost sounds like a Philip Jeck installation gone haywire, a wild tangle of woozy synths over a thick swirl of Our Love Will Destroy The World like skree.
And that's just the first track. The rest of the tape plays out similarly though, taking riffy black metal buzz and transforming it into something much more washed out and psychedelic, the various elements seeming to ooze and bleed and melt before our ears, sometimes building to crushing cacophonies, other times smoothed out into a sort of almost Pop Ambient prismatic mesmer. A murky, drifty bit of ambient buzz and blurred blackened swirl, that definitely has us wanting to hear more.
Nice packaging, too, a thick cardstock J-card , with a xeroxed hand stamped insert.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Imagine a whole record crafted from an old box of jungle cassette mix tapes, but imagine it without any of the jungle, or more specifically, none of the beats, just the surrounding sounds, intros, outros, interludes, swirls of synths and snippets of vocals, woozy basslines, strange percussion, mysterious melodies, the whole thing layered and recontextualized into some sort of modern collaged avant dub soundscape. That's pretty much what Lee Gamble's Diversions 1994-1996 is, and it's fantastic. On the surface, in a lot of ways it reminds us of the recent lp from SeekersInternational, which crafted dub out of static and hiss, crackle and sonic detritus. Diversions has a similar vibe, in some ways even more so since the sound sources are old tapes, so tape hum and hiss and warble are everywhere, giving the sounds here even more of that washed out Caretaker-y feel we can never get enough of. In fact, much of this exudes that sort of Caretaker / Tim Hecker vibe, murky and muddy, woozy and looped, the vibe definitely dubby, but a sort of super abstract avant strain of dub, maybe Chain Reaction style, but even MORE abstract and murky. The track "Emu" is practically perfect, a lush, hazy sprawl of blurred buzz, laced with mysterious bits of percussion, the whole thing driven by a heaving swell of industrial thrum, one that builds to a seriously caustic crunch, the whole track mesmerizingly cyclical, dense and dark, but so lush and layered, dreamily textured, everything gauzy and washed out and indistinct. And while the rest of the record is not nearly that dark and murky, it is similarly abstract and minimally dubby. Dense psychedelic loopscapes, that often lock into a sort of minimal house music, if only because they're anchored by a heartbeat like pulse, while all around sound swirl and ooze and overlap and gradually change shape.
Actual Jungle beats only show up on one track, and even then, they're slowed down, doused in effects, and laid over a swirling sea of crackling static and echo drenched shimmer, which had us hankering for some sort of avant slo-mo, minimal jungle mix.
But Diversions is mostly just the opposite, while the sound source may ostensibly be jungle records, the sound is much more like minimal abstract murk and blissed out loop buzz mesmer, and we're digging it big time!
Pressed on 140 gram white vinyl, and packaged in a super striking orange silk screened PVC plastic sleeve.
The last Lee Gamble record, Diversions 1994-1996 was a strange sort of ANTI-jungle, jungle record, having been constructed from just the NON jungle parts of old jungle mixtapes recorded off the radio. Only a brief bit of beat driven murk toward the end even hinted at the genesis of that record. This latest Gamble missive, was described to us as Gamble finally getting to make a proper beat record, one that's maybe not jungle, but wherein all those sublimated beats apparently finally show up. Which to a degree is true. We were sort of picturing some old school jungle drum and bass style throwback, but instead, those lost beats are only part of the occasion, with Gamble focused more on creating dense collaged landscapes of hazy pulses, sculpted static and murky sublimated rhythms. This still sounds like Gamble sort of deftly stepping AROUND the beats, the rhythms that do show up, end up being woozy fragmented loops, or strange 'heroin house' style throb, all wreathed in lots of hiss and crackle and static, with much of the record foregoing beats entirely, focusing instead on textures and ambience, some of it quite lovely, a little bit woozy and washed out, minimal psychedelic drifts, but the beats are definitely an integral part of the equation this time around, just not for the usual reason.
Squelchy 8 bit crunch is sculpted into murky, hiccuping anti-grooves, which morph into woozy, blurred and looped sprawls of 4-on-the-floor pulses and cascading synth melodies. There are some swoonsome moments of Kompakt like skitter, all hazy, gauzy, murky dreaminess, the beats buried beneath pixelated swirls of grainy tape hiss, but there's also some full on beat driven alien funk, mutated beats, warped melodies, pitch shifted percussion. The sound throughout is gristly and lo-fi, which is only magnified during the record's housiest moments, where all that hiss and static gets whipped up into clouds of hazy druggy shimmer, which is perfectly balanced by long stretches of ghostly murmur, softly dubbed out thrum, and druggy nocturnal drift.
Like all PAN releases, super exquisite packaging, a heavy full color jacket housed in a thick silkscreened plastic PVC sleeve.
We first discovered Lee Gamble via his Diversions lp, an entire record crafted from an old box of jungle mix tapes, but made even more compelling by the fact that it wasn't even the actual jungle bits he used, but instead, the between song ambience, the tape hiss and buzz, all woven into something way more abstract. Dutch Tvashar Plumes was his next record and found Gamble actually crafting his own beats, and very much like Diversions, wrapping them in dense sonic collages, lushly layered, noisy, gritty, still rooted in classic jungle, and Kompakt style beatscapery, but doused in grit and grime.
Koch seems to take up right where that one left off, although the opener is a bit misleading, and had us expecting something else all together, airy swaths of synth shimmer, pocked with impossibly deep low end pulses, a gorgeous crystalline drift, but before you know it, the sound transforms into something much more aggressive and beat driven, a pounding dancefloor banger, but again, still rife with Gamble's idiosyncratic to beat making, a churning, heavy house throb, beneath a gurgling, pitch shifted sampled vocal, groovy and funky, but also sort of sinister. The sound soon slips back into that opening ambient dreaminess, before another beat swoops in, this one more loping, and laid back, headphones reveal a whole world of sound beneath the beat, a beat that eventually grows warped and woozily misshapen, as those background sounds creep to the fore.
We'd like to say that's pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, but it really doesn't, Gamble is a sonic mad scientist, and while there is definitely some sort of musical thread holding it all together, it's difficult to put your finger on just what that thread is. From the spare skitter of "Oneiric Contur", to the gauzy almost Heroin House sounding digi-dub abstraction of "Head Model", to the washed out blur-bliss sprawl of "Frame Drag", to the nocturnal beat-murk thrum of "Voxel City Spirals", to the churning blackened throb of "Jove Layup", to the skeletal avant-house groove of "Gillsman". to the warped, and woozily melty dreaminess of "Flatland"...
And so it goes, constantly shifting in tone and tempo, vibe and texture, all the tracks here part of some impossibly cohesive, fantastically far out, abstract-electronic, alien dancefloor, psychedelic songsuite. Cool!
We're certainly fans of this long running New York collective Gamelan Son Of Lion, a modern gamelan ensemble who, so inspired by traditional Indonesian music, built their own gamelans from juice cans and oil barrels, creating a sound at once distinctly gamelan like, but at the same time strangely alien.
This cd reissue, which we should have reviewed a while back, unearths a 20 year old cassette and is a prime example of this group's ingenious way with primitive sound. Simple and childlike, ultra minimal and totally hypnotic, GSOL weave expansive soundscapes of metallic clatter and lush shimmering drone, sometimes the gamelan sounds like tiny music boxes, other times it sounds like Konono No.1 style amplified thumb pianos, and occasionally it also sounds like some East Village hippy drum jam (which it sort of was), but it's never less than totally captivating. Percussive and rhythmic, but simultaneously fluttery and ambient, the various struck metals offering up incredibly textured overtones that smear and blur into glistening pools of sound, while all manner of bell like chimes and dense tangles of metallic melodies dance amidst the droney drift.
Often mentioned in the same breath as folks like Morton Feldman, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, this is most definitely modern minimalism, but at the same time it sounds surprisingly modern, predating the current crop of freenoise /ambient-drone underground outfits by 20 some years. It also reminds us a bit of abstract sonic pioneers like the Taj Mahal Travellers and AMM, who share a similar penchant for epic spaciousness and drifting rhythmic ambience.
Dunno if we can keep up with all the cool stuff that Locust has been putting out lately, but we'll try. And we definitely need to let you know about this one. This here double cd set is a remastered reissue of the contents of two obsure and out of print Folkways LPs from the early '70s that documented the activities of NYC's Gamelan Son Of Lion. That's right, this Gamelan wasn't from Indonesia, instead they were a bunch of long-haired, bearded American avant-gardists, among them Fluxus composer Philip Corner. Wasn't one of the Sun City Girls quoted recently in The Wire as saying the last thing he wanted to hear was white people playing a gamelan in a traditional manner? Well he'd probably be happy with this group. As much as by the ethnic musics of the East, this group seemed to be inspired by minimalism and Morton Feldman. Unlike "real" gamelan music I've heard, this isn't nearly so dense and rhythmic. It's rather more slow and spacious. Simple, even. But the resonating metal sounds are incredibly lovely. Our resident gamelan musician, Byram, didn't care for it as much...but then he gets to play with a gamelan quite often. And probably if you had your own gamelan (a home-made one like the Son of Lion folks built, with grapefruit juice cans and the like) you could come up with music a lot like the compositions heard here. But I don't, so I found this to be totally gorgeous and mesmerizing...
We heard about this single back at the On Land festival, where Daniel Lopatin awed the packed house with his polygon planes of synth as Oneohtrix Point Never. Lopatin brought a handful of the Games single, which was being rumored to be his hip-hop excursion. Well, now that we've gotten a hold of this; it's not quite hip-hop, and not even the abstracted witch-house / chillwave variant of screwed hip-hop from the likes of Salem and oOoOO. Lopatin and his Games partner Joel Ford apply loops of muffled robot-speak vocals, dopey-eyed slow-jam rhythms, and Lopatin's trademarked '80s computer as utopian object iconography. The Ariel Pink-ish false starts through the sampled guitar jangle, and the Max Headroom skipped disc jitter make this unmistakably Lopatin (especially from those hard to find KGB Man tapes) and strangely believable as a wintery mixtape staple for beleaguered COBOL programmers and the robots who love them.
She of Thorr's Hammer fame!
We ended up digging the last GGD, even though it took us a little while to get into. And we're guessing this new one might also take us a little while. Not because it's a bad record, it's just.. weird. But weird in a way we don't always find appealing right off the bat. The first record set up the sound: a chaotic almost dancey mix of hypnotic drum circle clatter, off kilter This Heat-ish rhythmic propulsion, scattered snatches of jazzy piano, almost circusy melodies, burping low end and all sorts of other sounds. The sound on this record is quite similar, if not a bit more refined. And definitely a bit busier. Like they had this band, and then had all their friends over, and had each friend add the one thing they really loved, whether it was those weird new age pan pipe flutes, or brittle music boxes, or Copshootcop junkyard percussion or any one of a million things that makes this record such a scattered, albeit joyous mess. But the maker or breaker here is the vocals. Very childlike and heavily affected, a bit like the vocalist from Deerhoof mixed with Laurie Anderson or Diamanda Galas, swooping and wailing and mumbling and back to wailing, all in the space of a single track. Very haunting and strange, but a definite acquired taste. This record is at its best when it sort of blisses out and becomes an expansive abstract sound field, all glittering and spacious. Because the music here definitely hits all the right buttons, woozy and drone-y, skittery and playful, sometimes ominous and aggressive, sometimes joyful and resplendent in all its post-funk splendor, but then the vocals kick in and you're either sold or you're not. Listen to the sound samples and you make the call.
Boy this is a weird one. A sloppy but strangely compelling mess of random spastic percussion, strangely jazzy piano, ambient affected guitar spinning wildly into oblivion, and creepy falsetto voices howling, whooping and sometime spitting out sing-songy sort-of nursery rhymes. But what does it sound like, all of those disparate elements jammed together into one band. Howsabout the No Neck Blues Bands jamming with the Teletubbies in a haunted house? Or maybe Diamanda Galas as a young girl, invoking musical demons with the help of Sunburned Hand of The Man? Or even a battle of the band between Deerhoof, Dave Brubeck and Acid Mothers Temple all jamming simultaneously. While this is definitely werid and wooly and wild, Gang Gang Dance are at their best toward the end of each of these lengthy tracks when things sort of bliss out and become a warbling, woozy tinkling outer space ambience.
Noisy, experimental rock band Gang Wizard hadn't ever really interested us much before, but we gave this new album a listen nonetheless and to our surprise, for the first eight minutes, we were captivated... rhythmic, spare, lo-fi shambling weirdness that was remarkably listenable! But, from then on the going gets a bit rougher... it's clear they used the word "headache" in the title for a reason. Intrigued, though, ended up enjoying this varied disc's more cacophonous parts as well. Heck we like throbbing distorto-jams, screamy noise, and bits that sound like beginner guitarist Allan practicing (he'll try to perfect "Soft Crust From 00" before his next guitar lesson) just as much as the next record store. Ok, maybe there's a tad too much screaming ("The Pretty Ape" is just a little taxing). So although the way the singer howls it out on "When The Song Begins" reminds us of Eugene from Oxbow, we'd have to say that the vocals aren't our favorite element of Gang Wizard, we're more into their prettier, abstract Starfuckers-ish soundscaping, and give this the thumbs up for that. Load lovin' noise rock fans ought to be pleased. As will be people who desire cd artwork which appears to be a famous Vietnam war photo melded with a notorious National Lampoon magazine cover...
Latest from these fucked up noise makers. A sort of collective, every record a brain melting brew of whooped howling vocals, angular distorted guitars and chaotic percussion, this live set no different. 18 minutes but with about twice that crammed in somehow. Dense and destructive, a screaming whirling skree filled fury.
It's not hard to imagine a stage full of squirming sweaty bodies, judging from the crowd sounds in the more minimal parts, it sounds like the folks on stage just might outnumber the folks in the crowd.
The drums are a stumbling tribal pound, the vocals shriek and howl, moan and wail, the guitars go from sheets of acidic buzz, to tangled, damaged lurch, feedback everywhere, impossible to tell if the shrieks are part of the music, or the crowd getting swept up in the band's pure joy and making such an intense and ear shredding racket. In the red, blown out, crumbling, damaged, distorted post-post-post punk verging on complete musical collapse. The band slip into serious grooves here and there, but never for long, always seeming to be barely holding it together, the band gleefully letting it fall to pieces, rolling around in the shattered song structures and fragmented melodies, only deigning to try and reel it all in if they feel the fuck like it, and thankfully they rarely do.
A gloriously chaotic and challenging free for all. Recommended for the iron eared and and the noise obsessed.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Package in full color two sided mini dvd style sleeve.
This is a long overdue reissue of the classic 1997 debut (and really, only proper full length) from this legendary NZ noise pop outfit, who remain a functioning unit to this day, but who over the last 15+ years have recorded precious little material and who most folks have probably heard of, but not actually hard.
Their sound is tough to pin down, sometimes lo-fi and dreamy, almost lullaby like, but at others, noisy and abrasive, the band deftly combining lilting loveliness with walls of crumbling sound, or atonal folk with minimal drones. Eyes Rind As If Beggars starts off with "Love Comes Slowly Now" which is a sweet little slab of bedroom folk, all simple percussion, hushed acoustic guitars, softly crooned vox, but as if to balance the sonic scales, "Nothing Going Down" begins sort of melodically, before splintering into a cloud of wild tangled guitar drones, the original recording is damaged too, so the speed fluctuates giving it a seriously twisted psychedelic vibe, the guitars spitting out drones and raga like buzz, sounding almost like bagpipes at one point, a chaotic sprawl of NZ noise that could be some lost Dead C jam really, but then they slip right back into "Carousel" a slow burn Velvets style ballad, druggy and woozy, laced with moaning fiddle, and detuned guitar warble.
That detuned warble is present throughout, it's what drives "Sweet Pea", which starts out quite druggy and dreamy, before getting noisier and noisier, before finally settling into a warped unfunky groove. "Rosicrucinn Lovers" returns to the band to noise drenched shoegaze territory, a heady, heavy stretch of blissed out guitarnoise, draped over simple caveman drumming, and warbly vox, the whole thing wreathed in wild distorted psych-shred guitar. Which bleeds right over into "Marshall Sign", sounding like some modern psych rock band going apeshit, but with some weird sort of gravitas that keeps it from sounding wanky, and instead makes it droney and trancey and mesmerizing. The rest of the record proper offers up variation of the previous songs, strummed psych folk drones, chaotic, stumbling free-form noise rock, minimal garage pop, angular Sonic Youth like dirge-rock, classic lo-fi NZ noise, fuzzy psychedelic jangle, and dense, swirling shoegaze dreampop, all of those sounds blurred and smeared into constantly shifting variations, the overall vibe, one of fantastically inventive, yet somehow still sort of naive, home brewed free form psychedelic noise pop, that really sounds like it could be some contemporary combo, which certainly speaks to both The Garbage & The Flowers sonic prescience, as well as the heavy influence they had (perhaps unknowingly) on the current crop of noiseniks.
The reissue tacks on a bonus disc/lp, featuring a ton of singles, compilation tracks, demos, rehearsals, alternate versions and previously unreleased rarities, all of which sound as good as the record proper. Includes a big booklet of liner notes and rare photos.
A little while back we reviewed a reissued of the debut from NZ noise pop combo The Garbage & The Flowers, which for many was the first time hearing this amazing outfit, but for those already well versed in the woozy ways of TG&TF there's this vinyl only collection of a rare rehearsal session, which is like an even rougher and rawer version of the group's already rough and raw sound, the detuned warble is even more woozy and druggy, the vocals echo drenched and buried in the mix, the drums a drunken stumble, the melodies angular and atonal, but strangely mesmerizing and hypnotic, slipping easily from lush warp-pop jangle to damage deconstructed art rock, and right back again. Minimal, and moody, and with lots of random studio chatter left in. It's pretty cool to hear the band talking to each other mid song, offering suggestions or directions, before effortlessly slipping right back into the song, or even more remarkable changing direction completely, as if the group just happened to be recording the actual genesis of the song(s).
Boy / girl vocals over sparkling fields of guitar glimmer, plenty of amp buzz and tape hum, extremely lo-fi, but that fidelity is the perfect fit for this band's damaged, slo-mo, Velvet Underground meets The Clean outsider jangle pop. Fans of classic NZ outfits, and all those amazing Flying Nun records, will dig this immensely. Includes a 'sing-along' lyric sheet as well.
What do you get when you mix two parts Barn Owl and two parts Eternal Tapestry? Pretty much just what you'd expect, which is this here lp, 4 looooong tracks from a group called Garden Sound (not to be confused with, uh, Soundgarden), which is in fact equal parts Barn Owl and Eternal Tapestry and offer up a sound that balances right between the brooding twang flecked post rock drift of the former, and the blown out psychedelia of the latter.
The first song sounds almost like Barn Owl solo, a dark dronescape, all desert and twangy, moody EARTH-y shimmer, spidery melodies, almost like one of those slow building epics, but instead of building it just sort of drifts and hovers, there's some minimal percussion, and some extra psychedelic swirl that hints at E-Tap's involvement, but it's not until the second song, that the partnership equals out, with a massive, thunderous superdistorted doomdronedirge, big crashing drums, blurred guitars smeared into black streaks, buried barely there vocals, peppered with occasional squalls of full on psychedelic freakout.
The flipside starts out like the A side, a smoldering minimal raga, buzzing guitars, simple tribal rhythms, hazy and dreamy and definitely mesmerizing. And like the A side, the second track finds the two groups going all out, but this time, it's something way more spare and abstract, still heavy, and doomy, but the drum crashes are spread way out, less a rhythm, than a sort of textural punctuation, the guitars peal and rumble and buzz, streaks of feedback everywhere, a plodding, spaced out stretch of minimal dronedoom drift.
SUPER LIMITED!! We have less than 20 copies, and once those are gone, then this will be gone for good...
Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.
Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening!
There's a choice photograph on this album's innersleeve of a portable cassette player denuded of its plastic exterior, leaving behind an exposed array of circuit boards, gears, and miniature belts with a contact microphone shoved unceremoniously into these mechanics. Presumably, these mechanics still work or least they create some sort of flappity electro-acoustic spluttering that Richard Garet can use as source material in composition. This strategy of amplifying a malfunctioning object is one that Garet has investigated before on such records as the former Record of the Week, Areal, from early 2012, whereby he incorporated broken speaker cones, fizzing cross-wired circuits, and plenty of radio noise in that elegant album of cracked dronemuzik. Blank Tape Positive is more caustic due to all of the tape decks in various states of workability and non-workability. It was probably Wobbly who once waxed historical about a David Tudor performance in the mid to late '60s during which he made full use of a soldering iron in the middle of the performance to fix some piece of electronic gear that had failed. Garet's performances, installations (which recently included a high-profile exhibition at MOMA in New York!), and recordings engage a similar tension - conceptually, strategically, and aesthetically. Throughout this album, Garet tangles the electro-magnetic hisses from all of the circuitry with the plastic-gear clattering of the working tape deck parts all of which blooms into Kirlian drones of spectral proportions. The unstable forms on BlankTape Positive are not all that dissimilar to those strobe-light electro-acoustic pieces that Loren Chasse crafted so many years ago. Occasional warblings of varispeed start-n-stop expose the source material's more recognizable signatures; and Garet typically interjects these elements as he's abstracted everything else into a haunted Tim Hecker-like smear of rapturous drone. Garet's work has always impressed us, and this album is no exception. As with everything on Contour Editions, the album is packaged handsomely oversized sleeve with archival ink printing and a professionally duplicated disc. Limited to 150 copies.
"...defunctionalized, demagnetized, damaged, decayed, modified, looped, wet, washed, dried, baked, scratched, perforated, painted, cut, and digitized..." So, reads the aptly miniminalist liner notes for Richard Garet's haunted piece of white noise hypnosis. Whether these actions map out the process that Garet used in accumulating the ghostly residues from old tapes or if these are fictionalized descriptions of some other method of composing, it really doesn't matter as Garet's long form work amplifies the hiss from all of Basinski's work, flattens all of the tactile static from Phillip Jeck, and rarifies Chop Shop's seering noise into an ethereal chorale. A very taut line of static buzzes throughout this 51 minute piece with bursts of electromagnetic glitches and radiowave ephemera rupturing from that stream of what reads simultaneously as nervous electricity, seismic data collection, and neural brain plugs. Where the beginning half of the album flickers with eeirily beautiful washes of drones that could be the compacted blur of a female voice, something far more ominous grows from a distant rumble to an industrial roar towards the second half of the record, all the while that stream of a vibrating electrons flutters steadily onward. Very much on par with anything from Joe Colley and Jason Kahn, as an excellent piece of electro-acoustic droning and soft-noise blossoming. Limited to a mere 300 copies.
Richard Garet is a multimedia artist who has been quite active in and around New York for many years now. Our only exposure to his work was by way of an excellent if under-appreciated collaboration with perennial AQ-favorite Brendan Murray entitled Of Distance, which came out earlier in 2009. Unfortunately, we missed out on a couple of Garet's earlier recordings on NonVisualRecordings and Winds Measure, but when And/OAR announced an album from Mr. Garet, we were quite intrigued. Given the strength of this recording, he's definitely making us reconsider going back and digging up those earlier records. This double disc set is a fantastic collection of hushed drone music, cracked silences, stacked tape hiss, controlled feedback, and stoic masses of gray noise.
The four extended pieces date from 2004-2009, and all exhibit a restrained aesthetic balancing an environmental stillness from various field recordings with the grandeur of minimalist strategies in composition. In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that Garet would be drawn to work with Brendan Murray, as both generate work that oozes with a hypnotic, wholly monochromatic sound design that could act as the soundtrack to a sandstorm as viewed from the otherside of the Sahara Desert or to missile tests that are supposed to be hidden from public view. Something ominous is at hand in Garet's work, and the mystery as to what exactly 'it' is works to his advantage. Amidst these accumulations of layered textures and slow gravitational orbits of sonic detritus, Garet alludes to the swells of oceanic currents, the nocturnal buzzing of amassed insects, and reverberant echoes bellow from the depths of some underground bunker. All of which falls somewhere near Joe Colley, Tarab, John Duncan, and Coelacanth. So yeah, we dig it. Limited to 300 copies.
The title of Richard Garet's exemplary piece of lowercase tonefloat and crackle refers specifically to what Jacques Derrida saw as a profound difference between the future that has been mapped out and a future that is unpredictable and can shatter the continuity of the present. L'avenir is defined in French as the latter of the two, with Garet describing this through oblique shifts of electronic drones suspended quietly upon a backdrop of hushed activity and near silence. The album opens with a slight crackling that sounds like a ill-tempered radio transmitting from somewhere outside, whose particulate pocks of activity quietly burst in the distance. From these, radioluminescent tones grow and collapse within a flickering glow of a haunted melody, just barely announcing itself through the overlapping of rarefied frequencies. After a noticeable crack from a short and sharp tactile event -- somewhere between a hammer, a creak, a sigh, and a jolt - Garet fleshes out the sinusoidal drones with what could be field recordings or maybe some low-voltage electronics, which elicit the nocturnal stillness of hidden motors creating their own chorus of phase-shifting hum. Some 30 minutes into the 49 minute piece, the relative placid mood which Garet has carefully crafted shifts towards a something comparatively menacing before everything dissolves into a quiet mass of radioactive snow.
Garet's methods are reductive in nature, stripping away everything that isn't essential; but there's also a subtle, but certainly noticeable flair for the dramatic that comes across L'avenir. Through his signals and gestures, Garet is easily on par with the finest work of Richard Chartier, Steve Roden, Keith Berry, and Bernard Gunter. L'avenir comes to us by way of Winds Measure Recordings, who has housed these professionally duplicated cd-r's in a very elegant oversized, and letterpressed folio. Limited to just 150 copies, and very recommended!
Richard Garet is on quite a roll with his latest two albums! Earlier in 2012, he presented us with the eerily beautiful album Areal (which we made a Record Of The Week!), and now there's the discordant blurs of Silver. Garet's work centers on the errata from deconstructed and cracked consumer electronics. In dismantling radios and speakers, Garet unleashes a Pandora's box of noise, static, chaos, and dissonances that he then meticulously sifts, culls, and abstracts to arrive at atonal frequencies, electro-magnetic cracklings, or attenuated broadcasts from the other side of the world which happened to be caught in his network of wires, photocells, and electronics. Though this process, Garet renders those ill-tempered noises as hollowed-out drones and vacant ambiences populated with desolate scrabbling textures. His is a deep and haunted sound, akin to the work of John Duncan, Mika Vainio, and Joe Colley; but where those three use noise as a metaphoric tool of psychic and psychological aggression, Garet prefers to sublimate his noise as if they were ghosts communing through an electromagnetic seance.
Silver glides through 4 movements, the first of which was originally part of 23five's radio broadcast series for their annual Activating The Medium festival from 2011. Here, the smoldering grit of dead-space static hovers amidst cathode ray tube drones and well-timed razor edit compositional techniques that look back to John Duncan's masterpiece River Of Flames. Garet's other three pieces follows suit with passages of intense sinewave purity that slowly dissolve into nebulae of smeared buzz and hiss, thoroughly obliterated from whatever source material he may have been using. Fantastic work that parallels those aforementioned artists as well as the more abstract work from Tim Hecker and William Basinski. Limited to 300 copies.
Here's a beautiful dvd-r from Richard Garet and Asher Thal-Nir. While Garet's greysmear minimalism has hypnotized us via his previous releases, it's his visual sensibility that provides the sublime, slow-motion drama here. Asher, too, is an exceptional understated composer whose signature lines of soft-focus static gird his musical accompaniment to Garet's film. There are only a few interlocking elements to the sounds and visuals for Melting Ground, with Garet providing a single tracking shot of a series of Alaskan glaciers viewed from above by way of helicopter; and Asher's piano interludes look back to the delicate compositions of Satie, hovering above that audio snow that he so often uses within his work. The treatment that Garet gives to his film is quite remarkable, as he really does an excellent job in simulating the antique patina of a hand-cranked camera whose imperfect motion creates a pulsing flicker with overexposed flashes of bleaching white and Rorschach blots of underexposed inky blacks. Coupled with a fine coat of fabricated film-dust, scratches, and debris, the film itself has the bruised visual corollary to so many of the sounds generated out of Phillip Jeck's vintage turntables. The pacing of the film is deliberately slow, panning across enormous mountains of crumpled earth jutting out of looming banks of suspended fog and vast patterned surfaces of ice. The effect is one of a found-piece of film, uncovered from somewhere deep within one of those glaciers as an artifact from a lost team of explorers. The elegiac timbre of Asher's composition supports a similar antiquity, given the early 20th century references he seems to be making. Even the softened static that grounds all of his clustered piano notes, seem to have been extracted from the surface noise of a wax cylinder from that same time period. There is a sense of wonder, awe, fear, and beauty to this piece, one that parallels Leif Elggren's minimalist abstraction Arranging for an Opening of a Teleport to Shangri-La, which appropriated Frank Capra's early film Lost Horizon into a smear of drone and slow-burning visuals. Melting Ground's magic lantern approach to the material gives it more of a haunted, excavated aesthetic, with all of it addressing an allusion to the perils of climate change, especially in its impact upon the glaciers which hold so much of the world's fresh water. Limited to a mere 150 copies, and nicely packaged in an oversized folio.
Dronesculptor extraordinaire Brendan Murray should need no introduction, after his slew of stunning releases through Students Of Decay, 23five, and Intransitive; but this collaboration gives us some insight into the work of NYC based composer / painter / photographer Richard Garet. The two began collaborating back in 2004 and worked throughout the intervening years on the two sprawling compositions that make up Of Distance, heavily processed out of field recordings, textured improvisation, occluded dronescaping, and shortwave radio.
Given the presence of shortwave radio static and detuned transmissions rippling through this fine exercise in tense minimalism, there is an obvious parallel between this album and the work of John Duncan. But it's not just those grey smears of disembodied voice and cracked ether that provide such a reference. Garet and Murray have built an album with its crucible of noise that vulcanizes sound into harmonically vibrant if psychologically dark accretions of fluctuating drone.
Broken into two long-form pieces, the album opens with slashes of metallic timbres that gradually give into a series of tactile cracklings, whereby the shortwave radio static and broadcast detritus filter through the mix. A low growling rumble intercedes as a structural girder, only to cast an ominous hue across the piece, which intensifies in its pierced tones, industrial grade electrical fields, and radioluminous hum. This is probably not a track for headphones given some of the upper registered frequencies, and they certainly cut through the ambient din of Valencia Street here at aQuarius quite easily! The second piece follows suit with an initial thrust of aerated white noise pocked with utility signal bleeps (these again are shortwave transmissions, nothing as overtly creepy as numbers stations, but far more common). As this chunk of sound collapses into a slow build of rarefied drones, Murray and Garet offer another evolving composition of tonal intensity, smeared with aggregate textures and extended harmonic exercises. Murray has never let us down before, and his work with Richard Garet does not disappoint!
