At this point, the idea of "improvised guitar and electronics" (what it says here) elicits a bit of a ho-hum reaction from us. Heard it before, we think. Do we need more of that noise? But, in the case of French guitarist Guillaume Gargaud, it's still pretty worthwhile of an idea. We hadn't heard him previously (despite his having a recent recording on AQ fave label Utech, somehow we missed that one!). But we're glad we checked out his new disc, released on the same label that previously brought us the cosmic New Age electronics of J.D. Emmanuel (via archival release Solid Dawn: Electronic Works 1979-1982).
Portions of this are certainly dreamily deep space sounding enough to fit in with that. The nine tracks here in fact range from truly intense, dramatic drone, like the ominous opening cut "Seve Brute" (which reminds us of Darsombra or an "isolationist" Expo 70) to purely acoustic, post-Takoma wanderings more akin to James Blackshaw or Steffen Basho-Junghans ("Aedeiinae"). Though there's heavy moments, many of the tracks are ultimately gentle, vaguely glitchy, sometimes soothingly rhythmic, mostly drifting... all quite nice. Turns out there's still lots of good & not TOO abstract results possible with ye olde improvised guitar and electronics, why did we doubt it?
Elsewhere on this week's list there's a brand new Utech title from Japanese improv drone duo Hasegawa-Shizuo. Plus there's 3 other new Utechs (Ural Umbo, Architeuthis Rex, and The Skull Defects/The Sons Of God) waitin' to be reviewed, that you'll find on our "in stock, not yet reviewed" section. But right now we're gonna deal with this one, which isn't quite so new, it came out last year, somehow overlooked by us, which is odd 'cause we thought we'd learned to keep a close eye (ear?) on what Utech puts out. We highlighted a more recent Gargaud disc on the Kvist label, entitled Here, on our last list, and that's when we realized that this French guitar and electronics improviser already had a cd out on Utech, this one, which is equally lovely and interesting, basically part 1 to the Kvist disc's part 2, more shimmering yet sometimes quite sinister stuff that again makes us think that folks who dig the moody Type and Miasmah label "sound" would enjoy what Gargaud is able to conjure spontaneously with his guitar and other gear
The disc starts off quietly, with a buzzing, hissing drone gradually emerging and increasing, as if slithering out from a malevolent mist. It's hard not to think of fog and wind and rain and other weather phenomena when listening to this. Some sunshine breaks through the clouds on the second, more pop ambient-ish piece. Gauzy, gentle, drifting, vaguely melodious fuzzzzzz. Nice. The other tracks here tend to either get physical with the grinding, dramatic drone, or stay on the soothing side of things, sometimes blissfully both. There's various degrees of abstraction as well, as Gargaud adjusts his admixture of guitar and electronics. One extreme would be the crackling crinkling night-noises of "Clairere" (how can that be a guitar?), but elsewhere on the disc the guitar is more recognizable, in fact, on "Mer Du Nord", you can actually hear strings being strummed, how 'bout that!
Recommended - and in future, we'll definitely pay attention to anything Gargaud releases!
Another killer release from the 200mg label, this one a seriously grim slab of raw primitive black metal from of all places, Arizona. Just to make sure you know where this blackness hails from, the opening track begins with a seriously desert-y intro, all rattlesnake rattles and howling coyotes, chirping crickets and croaking frogs, while all around swirl haunting black rumbles and a growling monstrous like demonic rasp, a distant pulse beats like a black heart, until the band finally kicks in. Suddenly we're in a swirling squall of ultra raw buzz and thrash. Think Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, the guitars furiously buzzing, the drums spastic and hyperkinetic and way up in the mix, giving the music at times, a Lightning Bolt / Ruins vibe. Imagine a black metal Ruins, or Brian Chippendale drumming for Bone Awl.
The tracks are separated by brief ambient interludes filled with random clatter and amp buzz, room noise and tape hiss, it's weird, most bands unfurl some weird creepy drones as interludes, but here it sounds like the band just kept the tape running between tracks, while they adjusted, tuned, futzed around, but weirdly enough it has a similarly ominous effect.
The songs though, exhaustingly relentless, furiously buzzy, insanely fast and thrashing, a snarling gnarled mass of noise drenched complex mathy blackness, that spends as much time locked into looped sounding repetitive riffing as it does spazzing out. What else can we say, if we didn't have you at "Lightning Bolt meets Bone Awl" then we give up. Needless to say, fucking awesome.
LIMITED TO 106 COPIES! Packaged in a cool oversized screenprinted cardstock booklet, inside a 12 page printed black and white booklet with lyrics and stark images of forests and mountains, the whole thing held between two pieces of cardboard, the front printed with the band name and record title, all tied up with rough twine.
Mort Garson is probably best know for playing on records by folks like the Sandpipers, Glen Campbell, Mel Torme, Doris Day and others, which is to say, probably not very well known at all. He even composed and played the music accompanying a short film of past space missions to fill in the spaces when not much was going on during the 1969 moon landing.
He was however, one of the earliest proponents of the Moog synthesizer, and for the crate diggers out there is probably most famous for two records, a disc of Moog music based on the signs of the zodiac, and a record credited to Lucifer, called Black Mass, another freaked out Moog holy grail. But until those get reissued we'll have to make do with this tripped out drug addled re-envisioning of The Wizard Of Oz. And tripped out and drug addled it is!
Narrated with some freaky beat poetry (a voice uncannily like Jello Biafra at times), the story peppered with all manner of sound effects, blown out fuzz, warbly melodies, fuzzy static percussion, blurpy basslines, swirling space-y FX, and then there are the songs. Almost Gary Numan-ish sounding synths, laced with operatic female vocals, growling menacing monster like male vocals, some more abstract beat poetry, all woven into a head spinning retro exotica mishmash.
Some of the tracks are definitely reminiscent of Perry and Kingsley, some of the tracks slip into almost groovy porno style seventies psych jams, some are manic, with the Moog spitting out super percussive sputter and hiss, others are dreamy and trippy and almost Beatles-esque (if the Beatles only played Moogs), and some tracks, like our favorite on the disc, "Killing Of The Witch" are downright freaky and sound like primitive lo-fi Goblin jams.
The narration is really weird and funny and goofy but can be incredibly distracting, and it's probably the one thing that might limit the re-playability of this disc, strip away the random dialogue, and this would have been a pretty awesome fucked up synth freakout, but since the narration is here to stay, it ends up being exactly what it was meant to be, a truly over the top exotica oddity, that might not get played all the time, but it's exactly the sort of record that will probably end up on plenty of mixtapes, and will get pulled out at parties, and will most definitely feature heavily in wild whatthefuck DJ sets.
We've long been fans of these outsider noise pop weirdos, they even played our very first AQ/WFMU showcase at South By Southwest, but wow has their sound changed since then. Our pal Anthony described this new record WAY more succinctly and accurately than we ever could:
"Expertly performed, extremely difficult clash between pop inclinations and punk ideals sent through a completely synthetic, inhuman aesthetic. If you sent the Wipers early albums through the most intuitive state-of-the-art midi processor you might end up with something like this, simultaneously baroque and sterile, and very catchy at times. When the option is to zig or zag Gary War will always zap!"
And while to our ears, at times Gary War sounds like a whole different band, there are definitely plenty of moments that harken to the GW of old, but right from the outset, Jared's Lot seems to establish a new sonic era with record opener "Thousand Yard Star" unfurling a spaced out psychedelic synthscape that seems to owe more to John Carpenter and Goblin, or more recently Umberto and the like, than Ariel Pink or John Maus, who were so obviously GW's sonic brethren in the past. But this new sound definitely suits them, "Thousand Yard Star" playing out like the soundtrack to some ridiculous, low budget seventies sci-fi epic, all pulsing sequenced synth throb and shuffling Autobahn rhythms, with wild swirling effects and seriously tweaked vox. "Advancements In Disguise" takes that psychedelic synth sound and weds it to some fractured outsider pop, everything doused in space age shimmer, and driven by those percolating synth pulses, the vocals effected and pitch shifted, layered and warped into a dizzying alien chorus, the song driving and propulsive one second, tripped out and almost kosmische the next. It's like some sort of synth heavy outsider garagekraut cold wave, slipping easily from twisted lo-fi pop to prismatic electro bliss out, everything wreathed in swoops of bloops and bleeps and clouds of shimmery outer space psychedelic synth swirl, the best moments are tracks like "Pleading For Annihilation", where the band actually rock, all pounding drums and distorted electric guitars, woven into GW's tripped out galactic synth pop, crunchy buzz butted up against dizzying blasts of arpeggiated synth melodies, those two disparate elements gradually merging into some of the most kick ass kosmische whatthefuck tripped out electronic space pop EVER.
The last couple years have been pretty great when it comes to outsider, DIY pop delights. John Maus, Ariel Pink and Night Control have made brilliant records as fucked up as they are catchy and hooky. You can add Gary War to the list of those twisted popsmiths and eccentric songwriters. This lp is filled with haunting and mysterious pop songs that are as melty and tripped out and fucked up as they are catchy and hummable. There's some serious Syd Barrett worship going on too all over New Raytheonport, but wow is it channeled so totally right on. Pop songs drenched in cough syrup that take you on a blurry and hallucinogenic voyage, the fractured sound become the perfect soundtrack for warped daydreams and drifting off into a million different dimensions. But while others groups that are influenced by folks like Syd Barret and Roky Erickson end up sounding like nostalgia acts wishing they were born decades earlier, Gary War's sound is quite timeless, and weirdly futuristic sometimes. Ariel Pink actually gets a mastering credit on the record and for sure much of the sonic scope of the album would sound right at home on any of the Haunted Graffiti albums, but there is also something so rainbow hued and prismatic and kaleidoscopically damaged about these songs that gives Gary War a unique and far out sound of his own. And it was just a matter of time before someone gave the Alan Parsons Project track "Eye In The Sky" a good outsider facelift!
We heard that Gary War is going to collaborate with Blank Dogs on a new project called Roman Soldiers and we're pretty much already signed up to join the Roman Soldiers fanclub, without even hearing a note! And we might as well proclaim ourselves charter members of the Gary War fanclub too now, can't wait to see the band rock our SXSW showcase next week! Highly recommended!
Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try.
Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism.
The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to be assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas.
As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone.
The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking.
A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless.
Each disc is packaged in a full color sleeve, along with four inserts, all adorned with blue and green tinted forestscapes, and all housed in a gorgeous matte finished cardboard box, also adorned with a similar image, and the letters G A S embossed across the top of the box.
Maybe even more anticipated that the recent Nah Und Fern box set from Gas, compiling all of the previously released Gas records, is this, a book of art from the man behind gas Wolfgang Voigt, which beside being beautiful and packed with variations on the foresty images that graced all the Gas records, also comes with a 5 track disc featuring rare, old, unreleased Gas tracks, which have the Gas faithful in a frenzy. More on the music in a second.
The book itself is quite striking. A slightly blurred shot of a forest, tinted deep red, it could be the cover of a lost Gas album (which in some ways it is), the band name embossed in a deep red metallic ink, Voigt's name on the back. Inside is a selection of photos, which seem to be from the same shots that produced the record covers, all shot of trees and branches and leaves, close up, from afar, they would look amazing all blown up on a gallery wall, but manage to be pretty dang striking here too.
Even sans cd, this would make a pretty excellent coffee table art book. But there is a cd, and as we mentioned before, it does in fact include nearly an hour of unreleased Gas, so�
Five tracks, all ten minutes or longer, each a deep dark gritty drift, almost completely eschewing the beats that would find their way into later Gas albums, these tracks explore deep billowy black ambience. A few have some glitch and crackle, but never does it evolve into that murky thump Gas does so well, instead, it sounds like water dripping, or ice melting, while the leaves and branches sway in the background, one track is super lo-fi and raw, with an industrial machinelike loop beneath the glistening musical mumble, underpinned by deep string swells, and haunting melodies, but that track is quickly followed by something much darker and elegiac, a brooding longform shimmer, like a string quartet slowed waaaaaay down, and blurred into soft shifting shapes. The closer is the most pastoral of the bunch, almost like it could be the music for some sort of nature show, slow panning shots of glaciers glistening in the sun, leaves falling in slow motion, time lapse films of wildflowers blooming then withering, clouds drifting across a deep blue sky, the only thing keeping it from going to far in that direction, is the soft patina of fuzz, the buried buzz, the looped mesmer, the barely audible glitch, all the things that make it distinctly GAS.
Here's a band we haven't heard from in ages, and to be honest, one we honestly thought we might not ever hear from again. O'Rourke is in Sonic Youth, Grubbs has his own stuff going on, but back in the day, Gastr Del Sol were a post rock beast. Born of the mighty Bastro, they took that muscled math rock and twisted it all up into something much artier and more avant garde, and we LOVED it. Heck, we still do. So it's awesome to hear this blast from the past. Not actually a new record, this is a fancy new reissue of a long out of print 7", and boy it sounds as good as ever.
Beginning with a blast of old skool post rock, strummed angular acoustic guitar and complex drumming, before giving way to a mellow mathy folk, which quickly crumbles into strange melodic fragments, almost sounding like a Gastr Del Sol track proper, chopped up and put together in some random order. Nice.
The flipside starts off again, with a blast of post rock fury, aggressive acoustic guitar riffing and some seriously chaotic math rock drum freak out, before blissing out into a droney drift, complete with strange field recordings of children laughing and playing before fading out into a slow shimmer, all muted electronics and reverbed piano. So nice.
Packaged in a thick vinyl sleeve with a full color sleeve, pressed on clear vinyl with a full color center label. Simple, stark and striking.
The first new Gate music in over a decade! Michael Morely aka Gate, may be more well known for his work in legendary New Zealand noiserockers the Dead C, but he's been making Gate records just as long, and they've all been pretty much stone cold classics, The Dew Line is one of THE most unsung, underappreciated weirdo outsider pop records EVER, Golden is ostensibly a noise record, but manages to harness noise into something much more beautiful and listenable and lovely. And now we have A Republic Of Sadness, that like all Gate records, is tough to describe, but impossible to resist. A strange swirling assemblage of lush guitar textures, of Jeckian turntable loops, of crooned lo-fi bedroom pop, of skittery IDM style beats, all woven into dark, woozy, abstract electronic drone pop, or minimal dreamfolk electronica.
The opener "Forever" is totally gorgeous, built atop a scratchy turntable loop, that Basinski like backdrop repeats endlessly, drifting in its cloud of crackle and pop, while all around it other loops sway and swell, a simple stripped down beat, shuffles and skitters, and Morely unfurls a distorted dreamy croon, it's like Gas meets Jeck meets Basinski meets The Caretaker meets Sentridoh. When the vocals drop out, and the loop just repeats endlessly, it's utterly trancelike and mesmerizing. "All" starts out with soft swaths of synth, before a weird clattery lo-fi distorted beat lurches into action, thick rumbling bass underpins the sound, and in come Morely's creepy distorted mumbled vocals, a bit like a Strotter Inst / Gas remix fronted by Jandek, mysterious, mournful, intimate, part way through, a strange lumbering low end wheeze adds a strange counterpoint, and like the track before, the non essentials are jettisoned, and the layered loopscape plays out hypnotically.
The rest of the record constructs similarly twisted bits of lo-fi electronica, woven into skittery dreamscapes, and muted minimal grooves, slipping from the almost funky wah wah guitars and low slung depressive basslines of "Desert", sounding like some home brewed DIY Interpol, to the almost M83 bliss out of "Wilderness" with its fuzzy shoegaze guitardrone, and creaking almost industrial sounding rhythms, all beneath some sun dappled buzzy synths and twisted mush mouthed crooning, to the deconstructed trip hop of "Freak", a stuttery effects drenched rhythm shuffles beneath some super distorted looped guitar crunch, and finally to the nearly 10 minute closer "Trees", with its blown out metalgaze guitar smolder, its booming skeletal big beat rhythm, more moaning vox, a throbbing synth bassline, a sort of lo-fi bedroom brewed cold wave, until about halfway through, when the drums drop out, and all that's left is a gorgeous pulsing synthscape, that will have fans of Oneohtrix and Emeralds and other outer spacesynth krautdrone explorers frothing for sure.
Includes a download card.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Before we delve into a detailed discussion of Gate's latest release, let me just say that this album is gorgeous, droney and dreamy and about as un-noisy as noise gets, with chirping electronic whale-call blips and bleeps and luscious gossamer washes of
Michael Morley's output in the New Zealand free-noise / avant-rock ensembles Gate and AQ-faves The Dead C has always been purposefully unsettling. He's primarily armed with gritty, somnambulent guitar noise and a half mumbled voice, yet "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart" offers a drastic shift in his aesthetic focus, as he has recently put down the guitar in favor of electronics. This double CD features reworkings of two previously recorded pieces, with a condensed and vastly different remix of Gate's 1999 vinyl only double album "The Lavender Head" and a recapitulation of his 1996 soundtrack to the cacophonous sound installation "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart."
For Morley, the use of electronics is not just about the technological filters and modulations offered by drum machines and synthesizers, but also the ability to recontextualize and deconstruct the sampled fragment. Morley's use of the quotation may not seem anything new in comparison to, say, Amon Tobin, until he brings the woozy melancholia and troubled combativeness of his earlier guitar-based work to these electronic compositions.
"My Dear Sweet..." is a series of electronic dirges made by collaging together various samples of contemporary electronica onto a really noisy 4-track with lots of tape hiss. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 2," Panacea's "Twisted Designs" and something resembling Biosphere or Orbital are some of Morely's sources. These are pretty simple overlappings of rhythmically synchronized loops with elements of his guitar noise phasing in and out of the mix. And on "The Lavender Head" Morley loops his patented guitar grit into abstract slow-motion warbles, forming downtempo rhythms that appear lost in a sea of lo-fi tape hiss -- something *NEVER* heard in any other electronica. Really nice!
Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again a few years back, Gate's The Dew Line always seemed to disappear before we could get enough copies to list. Which was a shame as it still ranks as one of our favorite discs. A mesmerizing noise-pop-drone jem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and raw�
Gate's Golden record was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden noise in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blownout bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of shirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Much of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy. Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happy...
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscape of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a chunk of dark moodiness.
Way recommended. This disc is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but if you missed out on this, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablism.
And be warned, while we finally managed to get a bunch of these, it took forever, so if or when we do run out, please be prepared to be patient, since it could take a while to get more.
Another record we've been trying to list for a while but we were never able to get enough... until now. This is the newest record from the Dead C's Michael Morley, and while it was only released recently on his own Precious Metal label, it was actually recorded back in 1997. Morley's Gate obviously shares many similarities to his full time 'rock' combo, but Gate is less about deconstructing rock and fee improvisation and more about skewed pop songs, dismantled and buried in murk and scree. Clattery percussion, buzzing guitars, squealing feeback, all form a tangly prickly web of noise for Morley to sing over, in his ultra-distorted mumble. Quite reminiscent of local boys Iran actually, with gorgeous melodies, hidden and tangled up in sheets of barbed wire guitar and throbbing, lo-fi percussive splatter. Think Ira from Yo La Tengo or Lou from Sebadoh fronting Harry Pussy or (duh) the Dead C. Easily the best Gate record since their 'pop' masterpiece 'The Dew Line' or their gorgeous noise record 'Golden' from a few years back.
Killer split from two aQ faves. Gate is Michael Morley of NZ noise rockers the Dead C, and his side here sounds like it could have been plucked right off his classic The Dew Line record, a creepy, lurching noise rock dirge, all billowing clouds of distorted guitar, and a lumbering motorik rhythm, all wrapped around plaintive, softly effected sad boy vox, everything gorgeously crumbling and decaying, hissy, washed out, mournful and melancholic. Tom Carter (of Charalambides) counters with a beautiful bit of gristled, glitchy raga-drone guitarscapery, if that even is a guitar. It actually sounds more like electronic bagpipes, an alien bleating that gets stretched into a heady hypnotic field of raga-drone mesmer. Dreamily distorted, and very reminiscent of all time aQ faves Amps For Christ which is a very good thing indeed!
LIMITED TO 313 COPIES!!! Pressed on random different colored vinyl, the packaging super deluxe, a cool origami style Stumptown Arigato cardstock silkscreened sleeve, with a digital download as well.
You'd probably never guess listening to this, the debut from a mysterious trio called Gauchiste, that one of the guys here plays guitar in Loincloth, whose recent Iron Balls Of Steel record for Southern Lord was a huge hit around here, but even with that sort of metal pedigree, one that does in fact extend to all three members, you won't find any churning math rock metal mayhem here, or even pounding downtuned chug, instead, this trio specializes in a haunting hybrid of minimal electronics, abstract soundscapery, and droned out avant metal, that more resembles some strange soundtrack than a metal record proper, the whole thing meticulously assembled mostly via computer, using the various sounds in different ways to produce all manner of timbres and textures, evoking a gorgeous hauntological dread, that is seldom found in more traditional metal.
The opener is a noxious cloud of blurred guitar buzz, skittery cymbal shimmer, and buried double kick drumming, that initially sound more like some strange chittering insect, it's definitely metal, but a sort of smeared abstract offshoot, with those drums fading out gradually, eventually leaving dense slabs of heaving chordal thrum and post industrial shimmer. The follow up track starts out like it's gonna ooze into some sort of dense doomic creep, but instead blissed out into a billowy cloud of ethereal ambience, washed out drones, and buried processed vox, while elsewhere on the record, deep rumbles pour forth like some sort of downtuned sonic avalanche, the occasional metal vokills, are appropriately growly and gruff, but they're suspended in a sort of blackbuzz stasis, with the most metal moments more reminiscent of a group like SUNNO))), or even more appropriately, like some obscure Cold Meat black ambient outfit.
Guitars seem to be the main instrument, but they're rarely left in their distinctly guitar-like form, instead, deftly transformed into what sounds like whirring organs, or smeared blackened hum, over which the group lace skittery glitches and machinelike rhythms, rarely propulsive, or even strictly that rhythmic, more another textural element, to add to the already bleak atmosphere that infuses pretty much every moment.
The last two tracks probably best sum up the group's sound, slipping from glimmering dreaminess, almost orchestral at moments, to blurred blackened ambience, and finally to super dense drone, a harsh, haunting, abject sprawl of super cinematic malevolence, that should most definitely appeal to metalheads and dronelords alike.
The packaging is stunning, the lp in a deluxe, heavy paper, weirdly cut multi-panel jacket, the cd-r (why a cd-r and not a real cd we do not know), in a cool hinged metallic case, with a plastic front panel, the disc visible through the plastic.
We first heard the awesomely monikered Gay Witch Abortion on a killer 4 way split we reviewed recently called A Butcher's Waltz, which teamed up this duo with some other aQ faves including Skoal Kodiak, Seawhores and Power Take Off. But for as much as we dug those other outfits, Gay Witch Abortion definitely stole the show, more than living up to the hype, which was a relief as we'd been hearing how great they were for ages.
So here now is the debut full length from these guys, hot on the heels of their collaboration with AmRep head honcho Tom Hazelmeyer, which should come as no surprise cuz GWA definitely sound like they'd be right at home on AmRep, channelling a little Lightning Bolt, reminding us a bit of recent aQ faves Wizard Rifle too, these guys take that bass (guitar?) / drum duo thing and make it their own, their sound more a sort of blown out fuzz drenched heavy rock stoner prog thing, wild chaotic drumming under dense buzzing riffage, the guitar weirdly processed so it almost sounds electronic, their might be keyboards too, but it sounds more like the guitar/bass is run through some seriously fucked up FX, the sound constantly peppered with bits of buzz and hum, little glitches, swirls of hiss and crackle, the songs locking into dense looped mesmer, before slipping into songs proper, the vocals clean and crooned, when there are vocals, but more often these two are like a cobra and a mongoose, a wild squirming sonic tangle, a gnarled, writhing metallic noise rock that flits from droned out dirge to frantic hyperspeed punkprog and back again in the blink of an eye, all that and the group never shies away from weirdness either, peppering these blasts of acrobatic noise rockery with bits of twangy dirgery rife with whistled melodies, or stretches of Torche like fuzz pop, tripped out super distorted psychedelic drones, and even some cool experimental electronic noisiness.
Super intense sweat soaked math metal spazz punk stoner prog heaviness that will definitely hit the spot for anyone who digs Lightning Bolt and other like minded outfits, or really anyone into heavy, dense, noise rock aktion!!
The cd version comes with a Learning Curve beer cozy!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A gorgeous and mysterious one sided lp from GazHeart, a duo made up of artist Rita Ackerman, and No Neck Blues Band's Dave Nuss. The two played together in Angelblood as well, but these recordings were made after the breakup of that band, on the duo's annual trip to visit Ackerman's family in Budapest. During late nights in the backyard, with Nuss beating on coffee cans and broken bottles, Ackerman sang lyrics she had created using automatic, unmeditated writing. The results are beautiful, innocent, playful, haunting and very mysterious.
This consists of a series of short tracks, each with a slightly different tribal rhythmic component beneath Ackerman's vocals, which range from ghostly chantlike recitations, to sweet cooing, to wild wailing. The record drifts from tripped out FX drenched clang and clank beneath childlike gurgling, to campfire handdrums and sweetly almost whispered vocals, to hypnotic almost looped sounding tribal drums tangled up with breathy ethereal hum, to Casio style drum machine pitted against manic vocalizing and buzzy synth melodies, to the final track, the percussion super abstract, with chimes and bells, the vocals sung by a little girl, very cute and innocent, but also quite haunting.
Fans of Deerhoof, OOIOO, Tenniscoats and obviously No Neck and Angelblood will definitely dig.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Housed in a thick sleeve, with Ackerman drawings on both sides, each the opposite/negative of the other, printed on nice thick paper, the lp is one sides, the flipside has an original Ackerman etching. Cool.
Recorded live in 2000, this is the new collaborative project of Martin Ng and Mathias Gmachl (Farmers Manual, Fuckhead). As GCTTCATT, Gmachl digitally manipulates, via "realtime data processing", sounds run through Ng's turntables and cd player. I really
We try to get everything we can on our pal Jason's Ormolycka label, we usually only manage to get enough to put a few in the store, so while some lucky local tape nerds have managed to snag some of these, our long distance tape obsessives have been left in the cold until now. Of the many releases on Ormolycka, we've only really ever managed to list a few. There was the tape version of the Liturgy record (which featured a remix by our very own Andee!), as well as the Death Grips Exmilitary tape (relisted elsewhere on this week's list), this week we have a big handful of Ormolycka tapes, enough to finally review on the list, one of which is this, the first we've heard from a mysterious outfit called GDFX, who we know nothing about, other than this tape is a sweet slab of low end synth buzz, stuttery fractured beats, looped layered drones all woven into a sort of tranced out new age big beat lo-fi synth pop, that slips from creepy minimal thrum to tripped out skitter to 8-bit video game groove, easily on of our favorite jams on Ormolycka.
Another mysterious synth missive from Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin, this one from a group/guy called Gears, two sidelong sonic sprawls, the A side, a heady dose of analog buzz and cosmic celestial shimmer, the sounds thick, and buzzy and corrosive, heaving swells of low end rumble, wrapped in wispy streaks of abstract melody and subtly shifting tonal variations, meditative and mesmerizing, long tones that lazily undulate, sonic ripples that pulse endlessly into the ether, the sound lush and lustrous, a dark solar sound journey into outerspace and out of innerspace, headphones strapped on, and Matrix-like, you'll be jacked into the sonic cosmos, your brain transformed into miniature motes, carried away on slipstreams of serene sound. The flipside is something else entirely, some sort of mutant hip hop, all skittery drum machines, and squiggly electronics, the celestial synths from side one resurface here, but as the backdrop for a wild tangle of beats and rhythms, a strange dizzying mix of blissful melodies, swirling textures, bumping beats and fractured digital glitchery. Over the course of the side/track, the sound shifts from churning and rhythmic, to mutated and dubbed out, from old school jungle, to near DHR crunch, the sound feels live too, as if it were a DJ set captured on the fly, but regardless, a serious sprawl of dark rhythmic energy, that in some weird way, balances the tranquility of the tape's dreamily kosmische A side.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Housed in super swank full color six panel J-cards.
Latest from this Seattle psychedelic horde, whose last tape was recommended to us by the late great Magdalena Solis, and like that first tape Beyond This Vessel is another collection of apocalyptic, ritualistic psychedelia, but UNlike that first tape, this time around, the sound is a lot more swampy and swaggery, in fact opener "On The Next Full Moon", sounds almost like a stripped/slowed down Stooges, or like some Stooges B-side being performed during the winter solstice by the campfire, guitars buzzing, simple tribal percussion, those drawled vocals, it's a lot more rock than anything on the last tape, but it works, and gives Geist more of a Woven Hand / Sixteen Horsepower vibe this time around, which is not a bad thing at all! The whole tape continues on in that vein, ditching much of the psychedelic shimmer, and abstract folkiness of the other tape in favor of a bloozy swampiness, not to say there isn't still a serious psych-folk vibe, there definitely is, when things slow down, we get a Comus vibe for sure, that same sort of demonic sonic malevolence, but invariably, the sound shifts to something more loping and lumbering, the drums much more driving, the guitars louder, the swampy swagger of some pagan psychedelic ritual. One track devolves into pure ambience, a soft noise drone-drift, laced with buried melodies, and that leads directly into the closer, which slows things down to a tarpit crawl, just acoustic guitar, and those drawled vocals, wrapped in a gauze of distorted guitar buzz, and blackened staticky noise, a gloriously demonic, abject doomfolk creep of a campfire ballad, haunting and ominous, and the perfect way to finish this ritual, and the song here most likely to conjure up whatever demons this sacred ensemble bow before.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
We were first turned on to this Seattle collective by our pals in psychedelic kosmische krautdrone combo Magdalena Solis. As much as we love MS, we figured a band THEY found worthy of recommending, would in fact be well worth checking out, and we (and they) were right. Geist & The Sacred Ensemble are from Seattle, and traffic in a sort of Eastern tinged psychedelic folk ritualism, spidery guitar melodies, minimal percussion, tinkling chimes, chanted vocals. But unlike many of their sonic brethren, who stop just shy of actual songwriting, instead subsisting on creating sprawling soundscapes, Geist often transform whatever abstract drift they've just conjured up into what sounds like some twisted strain of swampy apocalyptic folk, or some twisted psychedelic sea shanty. Just check out the opener "Awaken / The Gut", which begins like some abstract forest folk ritual, all blurred melodies, hushed percussion, chanted vox, only to blossom into a proper song, all woozy strum, druggy atmosphere, echo drenched melody, hauntingly crooned vox, the song sounded strangely familiar, until we realized it sorta sounded like a super slowed down, ultra psychedelic, dirgey and druggy reworking of the Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood". Weird. More often than not, it's songs proper that these guys offer up, sometimes slipping into a bit of ambience, or some psychedelic drift, but otherwise weaving lush expanses of drug folk shimmer, or woozy, swampy psychedelic blues, check out "Grave Coins", with it's drunken swagger, and sonic snarl, we're guessing fans of King Dude, Woven Hand, Kiss The Anus, Nick Cave and the like will flip for these guys. The whole record bursts with mysterious psychedelia, gypsy folk, brooding campfire dirges, tracks like "In Search Of Fabled Lands" wraps snake charmer guitar melodies, around shuffling percussion, with swooping backwards chordal wheezes, all building to a more percussive, tribal psych dirge freakout, or there's "Fertilize", which is all stripped down blues, or "Circles", which is a lo-fi sprawl of tribal, junkyard swagger, crooned vox, over murky shimmer, and pounding percussion, or even "These Embers Need A Blowin", which sounds like New Model Army by way of Cop Shoot Cop if that makes any sense.
A fantastic collection of dark, brooding, bluesy, psychedelia, that's haunting and hypnotic and harrowing in equal measure.
Comes with a full color printed J-card and includes a download coupon as well.
Latest from local label Time Released Sound comes in the form of this 3" cd from cellist/sound artist Guy Gelem, who crafts a lovely avant chamber music with just treated cello, swoonsome melodies drift over deep rumbling tones, and softly undulating layers, pulses and pulsations are molded into abstract pizzicato almost-rhythms, the sound pastoral, wistful and melancholic, dark loveliness that reminds us a bit of the late great Rachel's, with tracks ranging from dreamily propulsive and effervescent to more somber and funereal, the latter, unwinding as aching, brooding threnodies, laced with subtle sonic colors and constantly swirling atmospheres, often blossoming into the former. Beautiful stuff, and fans of other TRS releases will feel right at home!
LIMITED TO JUST 90 COPIES, and unlike other Time Released Sound releases, this one is ONLY available as a deluxe version, which as always, is super swank, a hand stamped mini-disc, housed in a star-punched, black felt covered sleeve, wrapped in a handworked super long, Japanese style obi, hand stamped of course, inside is a stamped insert made from vintage, hand notated sheet music, everything tied together with strands of Mongolian horsehair (!) and a handmade rubber tie down button made from a used bicycle tire tube (!!).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
While the photo in the liner notes of an elderly Gelmetti sporting new wave gear is worth the price of admission, the amazing shortwave radio experiments and dronology-through-musique-concrete certainly make this an excellent recording. While AQ has postulated when a remix album of Irdial Disc's triumphant Conet Project will be constructed, this will certainly keep us happy until then. Lots of academic liner notes in German and English.
Throughout the '80s and '90s, Michael Gendreau worked extensively in the East Bay avant-noise project Crawling With Tarts, often constructing surreal experiments with idiosyncratic pop-babble and tape collages of art-damaged noise. For Gendreau, the turntable became an ideal instrument for his explorations; and soon, he began working with the archaic technology of lathe cut, handcrafted vinyl. Often the results were bizarre, if sporadically successful recontextualizations of homemade instrumentation, radio noise, and anti-pop. Recently, it seems as though Gendreau has put Crawling With Tarts on an extended hiatus, due to his increasing attention into the field of vibrations diagnostics and consultation. This incredibly technical arena has lead him to researching the problems of acoustic noise vibrations upon highly sensitive pieces of optical equipment, which could present faulty analysis due to the tiny, but measurable effects of environmental noise (air condititioning ducts and heating vents in particular).
"55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3" finds Gendreau bridging his current activities of acoustic diagnostics with his once prolific avant-turntable collages. It appears that Gendreau has hooked up a number of accelerometers - technical devices used to detect, measure, and catalogue any number of vibrational frequencies - to a series of battered record players spinning his handmade vinyl. Gendreau's accelerometers are so sensitive, that they pick up, not only the interaction between the needle and the record in question, but also the muffled whir of the thick rubber band stretching between the motor and the turntable plate. The results found on "55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3" are astounding, with eerie mechanical drones, minute needle crackle, and the occasional, but always unnerving upsurge of quiet voices floating though the din like the EVP sounds from "The Ghost Orchid" of purported recordings from beyond the grave. This will probably become one of my (Jim's) favorite records of the year.
Our foreign language skills have always sucked; and as such, the bulk of this book from the exemplary (if bafflingly under documented) sound artist Michael Gendreau is completely lost on us. Gendreau is an acoustician by day and architectural rumbler by night; but this San Francisco denizen has long been an avid practitioner of the obscure literary form known as parataxis. Defined as the juxtaposition of various (often short and possibly disparate) clauses without any conjunctions or subordinating forms, the more obtuse forms of this type of literature became well developed first through Ezra Pound and expounded upon by Samuel Beckett. For many years now, Gendreau has been penning his thoughts in parataxis; and now the Swiss publishing house Rip On/Off has released a collection of his writings... but they've translated all his texts into French, meaning that we have no idea what this book is all about. Rip On/Off has also published writings from GX Jupitter-Larsen and Zbigniew Karkowski (also translated into French!), to give you an idea of what brilliantly daft ideas are abound in Switzerland.
BUT!!! There is a CD that accompanies the book, documenting a handful of unreleased recordings, some of which were culled from live presentations and others manipulated field recordings. Throughout these recordings, Gendreau is drawing heavily upon the tools of his trade as an acoustician, as he uses incredibly sensitive microphones and accelerometers to pick up the smallest of vibrations and textures. Unlike contact microphones which abstract and compress the sounds in a totally amazing way, Gendreau's gear is eerily clean... so that the rumble of truck against a huge metal door that he's recording would pick up all of the vibrations of the springs, the subtle creaking, and the deep deep deep resonant thrum of the metal itself.
Compositionally, Gendreau is one to lull the listener into sense of stasis (not really calm, as many of his rumbling drones are really heavy on the subharmonics) before rupturing that with elements of tactile noise and dissonant blasts. One can think more to the subaquatic ruminations of G*Park, the psychoactive landscapes of Luc Ferrari, and the classic collage techniques of The Hafler Trio. Many composers use raw field recordings, but few have the tools to really capture something as powerful as Gendreau... and even fewer have the savvy to make everything this brilliant. It's a very physical, architectural sound that Gendreau produces, even as those sounds speak to the molecular vibrations that could cause huge buildings to crack and crumble through forces unbeknownst to the original designer and to inhabitants within. Even if we can't grasp the weight of Gendreau's paratactic writings now translated into French, the sounds that Gendreau produces are certainly worth the price of admission alone!
It's been a while since we've heard any material from San Francisco sound researcher Michael Gendreau, althought he has certainly kept himself busy since his impeccable last release 55 Pas De La Ligne Au No. 3 which explored the innerworkings of old turntables. His day job as an acoustics technician takes him all over the world in order to analyse the low frequency impact of industrial machinery upon architectural structures and highly sensitive optical devices; the obvious benefit of this trade is that Gendreau's perception of the particular frequencies is incredibly refined. Gendreau put this skill into practice during the 2003 Activating The Medium Festival at SFMOMA where he found the resonant frequency of the McBean Theater and effectively rattled the entire building, much to the consternation of the head curators worried that their prized Philip Guston paintings might leap off the walls.
Vitoj is Gendreau's first album since that aforementioned 2002 release and features three distinctly different situations that Gendreau handles in very specific manners. The first piece is a real-time exploration of the micro-dynamics of air compressors. Amplified through the technical sensors he uses when studying infrasound vibrations, Gendreau's air compressor emits toxic hisses, metallic clanks, and electrical static that could easily be confused for the processed drones of the Hafler Trio or John Duncan. However, Gendreau does add a gleefully destructive side to his work, as he fully opens the valves of his air compressors on several occasions, unleashing a torrent of noise as dense and tumultous as Merzbow and Masonna. The second piece exhibits a much greater restraint to the point of rendering the buzzing whirls of a old Victrola to nearly inaudible levels. The final entry is a Lopezian field recording mutation of the din of an industrial landscape morphed into a nightmarish ambience. A mighty return for Mr. Gendreau!
One of five new tapes from the awesome Austin based experimental tape label, Holodeck. Largely documenting the growing and diverse Texas underground scene of synth conjurers, drone lords, psych meditators, and classical folk devotionalists, each tape conceived as a unique listening experience with beautifully designed minimalist packaging. We listed tapes by Lumens, Smokey Emery and Thousand Foot Whale Claw awhile back, and this time around we have another tape from Thousand Foot Whale Claw as well as tapes by Silent Land Time Machine, Amasa Gana, Survive, and this one from former Pocahaunted and Robedoor member, M. Geddes Gengra, who was also an accomplice with Sun Araw on the last Frkwys collaboration with The Congos.
No drones here or dramatic psych build-ups, just some of the most playful and bubbly modular synth explorations we've heard from a modern day practitioner. "Ball Trick" is more second generation of electronic composers Moog synth experimentation, reminding us at times of Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel or F.C. Judd. A bouncing syncopation and synth squiggles create a helium like atmosphere that gradually turns thicker and more rhythmic, like dance music made from air compressors and balloon textures. "Air Solo" has a more "industrial" soundtrack vibe, and by that we mean like Raymond Scott's commissioned interludes for IBM commercials, which have a hopeful techno futurist feeling, yet one that is not pastiche, but draws from a perhaps naive sincerity that music can be transformatively positive. "Beyond The Curtain", which comprises the entirety of the B side has a drunk machine vibe, like a happy-go lucky android who's had one too many, and runs amok with good intentions, but can barely keep itself upright. Interweaving percolating rhythms turn woozy, some rushing, some slowing, in a topsy turvy tailspin, winding themselves into the ground, moving forward as their edges grind down and garner a smooth roughness. Continuing to dance with busted eyes and blunted extremities yet at some point remarkably gaining balance and maintaining an intense diamond-edged focus like minimalist proto-techno in a Venutian atmosphere sucking up the helium and getting deadly high, endlessly waiting for the inevitable short circuit. Limited to 100 copies. Incredible stuff!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With the sheer number of releases coming from the Kawabata Makoto / Acid Mothers Temple camp, we tend to get a little jaded. But the fact remains that if any of these discs was presented to us as being by a new band, we'd be pretty excited. Such is the case with this one, which IS a new band that we're not familiar with -- an Italian psych/pop outfit with the odd name of Jennifer Gentle -- simply teaming up with hairy Japanese acid guitar guru Kawabata for a fine display of out-there instrumental interaction. Recorded live this past year, this disc includes Kawabata-added versions of two JG songs, both sprawling 12 and 14 minute long psych epics w/ guitars, keys, electronic effects, drums, and bass all over the place. Between these two tracks you get six or so minutes of Kawabata scraping and droning away solo at his Indian sarongi, a nice if eerie respite from the energetic electric Pipes of Pan rituals he enacts with the Jennifer Gentle people. A collaboration not to be overlooked by AMT fans, or anyone into heavy, claustrophobic freakout jams of almost occult power. Now we're really curious to hear JG's prior recordings, if any!
It's like Christmas around here (we know, it is ACTUALLY like Christmas around here right now), whenever we get a new batch of tapes from Auris Apothecary, not only is it bound to sonically all over the map, without fail the packaging is totally stellar, often high (or low) concept, meticulously hand assembled, often involving organic matter, or broken glass, or sponges, or scrolls, or who knows what else. Needless to say, every AA release is special, and is often as much a work of sonic art, as it is a piece of music.
This is the first we've heard from the oddly monikered The Gentlemen's Butcher, who have apparently broken up, or ceased recording, as this is apparently the second in a "posthumous recreation of THE GENTLEMEN'S BUTCHER's catalog", but we're pretty into this, the sounds more along the lines of the modern re-appropriation of new age, drifting long tones, washed out hushed shimmer, lushly layered ambient minimalism, hypnotic and hushed, dreamlike and tranquil. According to the label, the purpose of the music here is "to enhance subconscious dreaming while under the influence of sleep, all without the use of pharmaceutical medication", which is pretty spot on, this is the perfect fade out drift off chill out late night blissdrift soundtrack, a gorgeous expanse of barely there thrum, and minimal melodic drift, the program repeated on both sides, so if you can set your Walkman to repeat, you could strap on those headphones and have this play all night long.
LIMITED TO 101 COPIES! Fancy full color "static-textured" glossy cardstock J-cards. Recorded onto grey tapes with tiny full color art in the clear tape windows and each tape numbered on the spine.
We know nothing about this release except that it's not German. And that it's an awesome slab of tripped out tribal psychedelia. Apparently there's a thumb piano being played but it's doused in FX so it sounds more like strange buzzing insectoid melodies, all wrapped around a propulsive tribal drum jam. No Neck and Sun Burned Hand are the obvious references, and anyone who likes either of those groups will no doubt dig this. Lots of buzz, and shimmering ambience, the drums are a continuous presence, a never ending, far out, outer space drum jam, not over the top, just steady, and subtly intricate, a solid framework for the various strange sonic goings on draped over the top. Thick swaths of flanged buzz drift over soft streaks of high end feedback, vocals are garbled and looped, all surrounding a core of trance-y disembodied skeletal krautrock. Killer stuff for sure. Too bad this is another one of those discs that has been sitting on our shelves for months. It -was- LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Now it's obviously out of print and gone gone gone. We have about 10 copies, and they won't last long, so act fast...
There was a bit of confusion on the last list, when we finally got around to reviewing a record from LA minimalist murk pop duo German Army, we mentioned in the review that the band had lots of records, and as if to prove that point, we ourselves got confused and, uh, reviewed the wrong record. This week, all is put right, we're finally reviewing the 'right' record, the one we meant to review in the first place, and we got the other one in, the one we actually DID review. So double dose of German Army on this week's list, and odds are, if you're anything like us, you're probably gonna want both.
Last Language is not all that removed from their record on Skrot up, drawing from a similar sonic palette, opening with a bristlingly brutalist bit of electro-dirge pop, a glitchy skeletal rhythm, over haunting swirls of low end thrum, the vocals a mumbled whisper, wreathed in gristly buzz, the whole thing blurred and smeared into an abstract electronic creep, a slow stuttery skitter that almost sounds like it could be a backing track for some lost Sensational album, blunted and wasted and washed out, but also prickly and staticky, some seriously heady sonic miserablism. Not all of the record is so bleak and blasted, but it is all hauntingly spare and blissfully tripped out, the band's MO seemingly unfurling crystalline sprawls of rhythm and texture, with lots of space, the vocals almost like an afterthought, delivered in a sort of couldn't-be-bothered drawl, the sound slipping easily from twang flecked, woozy shimmer, to grinding industrial churn, and back again. The vibe definitely seems to fall somewhere near classic cold wave, but this is cold wave from some terrifying other dimension, fractured and freaky, this is some band from the eighties, the sort of band you might have seen at the Scream club, playing with Kommunity FK or the Abecedarians, but transported to some alien world, and then whisked right back, their music mutated and damaged in the process, the resulting sounds, a twisted outsider gloom-wave dream pop, some of the tracks downright lovely, like "Rebuild The Story", which is all hazy, casting some spidery almost Durutti Column sounding guitars amidst soft synthy swells, and some swooping, backwards effected rhythms, and some echo drenched vocal warblings, but others, like that aforementioned opener, are caustic and intense, and still others, elsewhere, drift from twisted new wave, to post-krautrock avant pop, to blown out industrial clatter, to mumbly Residents like art rock whatthefuck weirdness, to almost DHR like electro-crunch, to trippy, drifty, dreamy murk-wave shimmer, with most tracks somehow mashing all of those together.
Fantastic stuff. And like we said, we'd recommend grabbing both of the German Army lps on this week's list, and then tracking down anything and everything else you can find! you won't be sorry. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a download code!
There was a bit of confusion on the last list, when we finally got around to reviewing a record from LA minimalist murk pop duo German Army, we mentioned in the review that the band had lots of records, and as if to prove that point, we ourselves got confused and, uh, reviewed the wrong record. This week, all is put right, we're finally reviewing the 'right' record, the one we meant to review in the first place, and we got the other one in, the one we actually DID review. So double dose of German Army on this week's list, and odds are, if you're anything like us, you're probably gonna want both.
This self titled lp is on Skrot Up, a label who in the past has given us records by the Grave Babies, Water Borders, Psychic Ills, and they released the recent lp from long time aQ fave and former Net Shaker Ernest Gibson. German Army's distinctive sound is in full effect here, a gloriously dour post punk murkiness, hauntingly rhythmic, ominous drones, creepy sung/spoken crooned vox, opener "Guinea Strong Arm" almost sounds like This Heat at their poppiest, but slowed way down, and filtered through a cracked cold wave filter, a minimal pulsing beat, throbs beneath long moaning tones, and buzzing spidery guitar melodies way off in the distance, all of the sounds gradually growing more and more intense, all except the vocals, which remain perfectly cool and detached, wreathed in occasional swaths of dubbed out echo and reverb, all eventually crumbling to a bleary blackened halt.
And that pretty much lays out GA's sonic template, and it's a good one, all six tracks here sounding like they could be lost eighties industrial post-punk rarities, from the arrangements, to the sound, to the recordings themselves. Lo-fi and raw, darkly primitive, murky and muddy and mesmeric, woozily psychedelic, the vocals in constant flux throughout, way up in the mix, strident and dramatic, then suddenly slowed down to a monstrous gurgle, before being quickly sped up a la Butthole Surfers, but all the while, the music remains a blurred, tarpit miasma, of loping, lumbering bass, primitive programmed tribal rhythms, and swirling old school FX.
Sadly, in the long journey to the US from overseas, the package was a little bit brutalized by the US postal service, so most of the jackets are a little worse for wear, some bumped corners, some slight bends, the usual, so if you're super anal and a collector who needs to have his records be pristine, then you might wanna pass on these, but for everyone else, come get a taste of one of our favorite weirdo outsider dirge-murk post-punk creep-wave combos.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! Includes a digital download too!
BEFORE YOUR READ THIS REVIEW, BE AWARE WE ONLY HAVE TWO COPIES. WE WILL NEVER GET MORE. BUT I REALLY LIKE IT AND WANTED TO GIVE MAILORDERS CUSTOMERS A CHANCE. SO FIRST TWO CUSTOMERS THAT ORDER IT GET IT. SORRY. AND ODDLY ENOUGH, I ALREADY HAVE A FEELING I
Anyway, album number 132 (or something close to that) from Japanese noise musician / sound artist / professional masturbator Juntaro Yamanouchi. Gerogerigegege (loosely translated as vomit, diarhhea, ha ha ha) has gone through all sorts of sonic incarnations, noisy splatter punk, bombastic japanoise, experimental musique concrete, with some of those incarnations featuring the added bonus of Juntaro's trademark live and mic-ed masturbating. On 'None Friendly' (actually recorded in 1987), he tackles THE DRONE and it's quite a listen. Deep and sonorous, lush and mesmerising. I was convinced it was a synthesizer until I noticed on the sleeve, that it specifically points out that there was 'No synthesizer used.' So what the sound source actually is remains a mystery. Maybe it -is- processed masturbating. I mean, I hope it is. But either way, this is a fantastic record. One extended buzzing and humming, slowly developing hypnotic drone. Really great.
It was sort of inevitable that this disc would end up being an aQ record of the week. But before we tell you the strange tale of how we got to this point, how we discovered this band and this disc, let's offer up a quick, succinct, three word description that might render the rest of this rambling review moot:
CAVEMAN THIS HEAT.
Sold? We would be. Imagine Man Is The Bastard transported back to the early seventies and let loose in This Heat's Cold Storage recording studio, or take the black hypno kraut noise of former aQ record of the week, Aluk Todolo and strip it down to its bare essence, a sound based almost entirely on rhythm. A pounding, Neanderthal groove, pelted with squelches, and laced with a strangled inhuman mewling, huge chunks of grinding minimalism and long swaths of dreamy shimmering bliss, an ultra intense slab of kraut-doom power violence for sure.
The weird thing is, the first time we hear Geronimo was several years ago, when Circle came to play some shows on the West Coast, and so I (Andee) was happily drafted to drive them around, roadie for them, all that stuff. So one of the shows was at Arthurfest in LA Circle were playing with SUNNO))), in a way-too-small seated theater, based on how many angry folks were turned away (as in HUNDREDS!). I spent the whole time, running back and forth, up and down the stairs, trying to sneak as many people into the show as possible, through the emergency exit, the backstage door, every time I went back out I would run into someone who wanted me to get them inside. While this was all going on, a band started playing, and they were AMAZING. A bunch of cholo looking dudes, handkerchief headbands, all sort of just standing there, behind huge racks of busted looking equipment, making the most unholy racket, a gorgeously destructive rib cage rattling pummel, eventually I had to stop running back and forth, cuz this band was totally sucking me in, and so I just sat down on the floor and let the band's vibrations wash over me, the floor literally shaking violently with every note.
Well, we later discovered they were called Geronimo, but no one knew anything about them, and the folks waiting for Circle and SUNNO))) didn't seem to get it or be that into it at all. We never got to talk to them in the chaos of getting Circle sorted. And eventually it sort of just slipped my mind.
So flash forward two years to the end of 2007, when we highlighted that No Skull Left Unturned comp a list or two back, collecting the various offshoots of Power Violence pioneers Man Is The Bastard. And we were particularly taken with the band Sleestak, a doomy math rock variant on MITB's bassy grind, and their sound reminded us of THAT band, the one that opened for Circle back in 2005. Then we sort of randomly stumbled across this here disc, and suddenly everything clicked, THIS was the band we saw and loved so much, and whaddayaknow, Geronimo just so happens to feature folks from both Man Is The Bastard and Sleestak. And it sounds even better than I remember, heavier, groovier, way more fucked up and WAY more freaked out. So here's a song by song breakdown of this devastating chunk of brutal beauty and monstrous minimalism:
The opener, the 18 minute "Firewater", is perfectly placed to test the listener's mettle, an endless epic stretch of looped high end klaxons and choked cymbal crashes, like a metal intro stretched into an entire song. All around this constant crunch and whine, whip flurries of electronic glitch and crunch, swaths of grinding crumbling analog buzz, while beneath it all a rumbling minimal bass line lopes lazily, until about half way through, when the track suddenly switches gears, and turns super abstract, minimal smears of drone and muted feedback, LOTS of space, and huge percussive crashes spread WAY out. It's like a super minimal abstract doom. But with bits of atonal keyboard and strangled vocals. Like the rhythm section of Khanate scoring a Dario Argento movie. That soaring high end from the beginning of the track returns, along with some speaker destroying analog buzz, still spaced out around long stretches of silence, finishing off with a brief burst of intense fury, distorted vocals, thick wall of crumbling distortion, If you survive the first track, then track two, "Headdress", is your reward, a short sharp shock of rhythmic groove, it's all about the drums, a simple, killer rhythm, the drums slightly distorted, locked into a relentless loop, while all around it, malfunctioning synths and skittering shards of glitch and skree soar and swoop, until it too shifts suddenly, into a mathy breakdown, another mesmerizingly minimal and hypnotic looped drum fill, pounding its way through a sky filled with creaks and groans and whirs and garbled grinding lo-fi squelch, finishing off with another furious blast, this time a spray of super distorted bass riffing, howled ultra effected vocals, and total drum destruction.
"Spiritwalker" offers up another side of Geronimo, the strange homemade electronics muted and smeared into much softer shapes, allowed to drift and shimmer, the drums a muffled pulse, lots of low end rumble and whir, darkly droning and cinematic, thick swells of minor key melodies, over a wasteland of glitch and buzz, slow motion tribal percussion, everything wrapped in a gauze-y haze of psychedelic textures, low end murk, and abstract FX, a gorgeous soundscape, of slow black krautrock ambience. "Medicine Man" is another brief chunk of abstract doom. A simple plodding rhythm, a thick grinding rumbling low end synth, huge blasts of effects-drenched crunch, and ominous spoken vocals and shrieked demonic howls,
And then there's "Facepeeler", which begins with a propulsive drum part, a serious metallic jam, huge bass riffs, shrieked maniacal vocals, and speaker shredding, super stereo panned effects, until suddenly the song slows down into a lurching doomic plod, the drums blown out and in the red, locked into another super simple, but completely intense and relentless slow motion rhythm, again, the sky full of FX, squealing and grinding and buzzing and screeching, but now sprawled over Geronimo's angular what-the-fuck minimal math doom, are some of the most fucked up and intense vocals ever, alternately growling, roaring, howling, whispering and mewling, it sounds a bit like an industrialized Wolf Eyes-ian Oxbow, until you realize that the vocals in question belong to one David Yow, of Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid (if only Qui sounded this bad ass). The suddenly it begins to sound like some Jesus Lizard outtake, slowed down, pulled apart and run through a bank of rusted and duct taped effects. One of those songs that easily could have been stretched out to the length of a whole record. Abrasive and brutal and hateful and super intense and heavy as fuck, but somehow weirdly hooky, and impossibly catchy, it's almost like having your pain and pleasure centers swapped, so having that anvil dropped repeatedly on your head ends up feeling so so divine. Definitely the song we keep coming back to, and playing over and over and over and over...
Finally, the band finish things off with the uncharacteristically mellow "Prints Tie", wrapped around a fluid almost jazzy bassline, drifting keyboard melodies, and shuffling abstract percussion, the Neanderthal electronics are still present, but used much more sparingly, gorgeous and glimmering, a soft smeared minimal workout that almost sounds like a more lo-fi Necks. Super dreamy and darkly shimmery, and just pretty enough to almost make you forget the 47 minutes of glorious sonic punishment you just endured. Almost.
So so so recommended. The minute we threw this one, we knew, THIS WAS THE ONE. Definite contender for record of the year (and actually, since I got it in December, it WAS my record of the year for 2007, even having only had it less than a month!) Folks who dug the Aluk Todolo will for sure dig this too. Likewise if the idea of, say, Mammal doing This Heat songs sounds cool to you too. Basically anyone into brutal rhythms and abstract minimal heaviness NEEDS this...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Gescom is better known as Autechre and has released this collection of fractured sounds, skittering noises, and disjointed beats on minidisc so that the listener can reassemble the order of the tracks to meet his or her own whims. This was ONLY released on mini disc and is located behind the counter.
Finally back in stock, one of the AQ-staff's all time favorite drone recordings! This came out in '95, but we thought we'd list it anyway, after ordering a batch directly from the label 'cause we like it so much. Electronic instrument inventor Q.R. Ghazala (you may remember him from the instrument-inventor compilation "Gravikords, Whirligigs...") presents his "first insect symphony", performed on his "Vox Insecta" -- a synthesizer than specializes in simulating insect voices! The beautiful instrument (depicted on the cover, it looks like some sort of Art Deco stenographer's machine) may or may not always sound like a swarm of insects, but it certainly produces some gorgeous drones... Dark stuff, with keening higher-end tones supported by bass-y undulations. Creepy and beautiful. For fans of Tony Conrad and Lustmord and that sort of thing. So totally recommended!
There's very little known about the British born artist Abigail Ghimp, other than that she died in 2012 of a heart attack at the age of 30. The recordings on this cassette are presumably the only remaining traces of her artistic career, as her belongings and artwork seemed to have vanished after her death. But when she was living in Belgium and working on a series of experimental films, she handed out a number of cassettes to colleagues and to some experimental labels around Belgium and Germany of the soundtracks to the unfinished films. One of these tapes ended up at garage sale of some dude who used to run a record shop only to be discovered by proprietor of Soft Corridor records, who was smitten by the mysterious looping collages of slow-motion chants, decontextualized tribal rhythms, and tape-delay aggregation worthy of comparisons to Robin Storey-era :zoviet*france:. In the quest to find the "Gail Ghimp" who had penned scant information on the hand-dubbed cassettes, Soft Corridor discovered that Abigail Rosa Ghimp had recently died. Keeping the recordings on a micro-edition cassette is a pretty perfect homage to this strangely poetic and morose tale. Ghimp's soundtracks are narcotized collages of Dada appropriation, some of which presumably came from the African recordings she grew up with in London. She snaps those samples into monochromatic patterns of chiming guitar, distantly dreamy chants, and eerie rhythms are as evocative and profound as those haunted turntable collages from Phillip Jeck or even those interstitial fragments that dot the Demdike Stare recordings. So very nice.
From the Leaf Trail Label, run by the Bonecloud / Changeling folks, comes this brand new disc from the very strangely named French duo Ghost Brames Of The Cerf. Clues to the sound of Ghost Brames can be found in the fact that A. it's on Leaf Trail and that B. one half of the duo also does time in like minded sonic countrymen The Reggaee.
So yeah, we're talking, looooong tracks of super abstract drones, and disembodied free folk weirdness, and Ghost Brames give it their own spin, haunting similar sonic landscapes as Avarus and other Finnish folkies, as well as the abstract drift of their Leaf Trail label bosses.
Four tracks, all 10 minutes plus, the first, super minimal, distant melodies drifting in and out of earshot, in the foreground a hushed looped machine-like rhythm and a wheezing organ, but all of the various parts are whispered, the tape hiss nearly loud enough to overtake the music. Lovely but so so subtle and so abstract it could almost fade into nothingness at any moment. The second track is also minimal, but much more present, a tangle of keening high end, not sure if they're horns or strings or synths, but they glimmer and shimmer, like streaks of feedback, while below, detuned guitars strum and a non-rhythm is plonked out on wood blocks and cardboard boxes. That track segues directly into the third, where the drifting upper register smears are quickly overtaken by a wash of staticky thrum, smeared and blurred but fuzzy and dense, beneath it a strange sing song vocal surfaces, the track eventually building to an almost operatic climax.
The final track, takes the operatic frenzy of track three, and slathers it with buzzing guitar and fuzzed out loops, the vocals transformed into jagged melodic fragments beneath the almost doom like stasis of distorted guitar whir. Quite cool.
Packaged in oversized full color sleeves, with color printed inserts.
Wow, is that a mouthful. The band is called Ghosts Brames Of The Cerf's Magickal and the record's called For Every Hang Thy Dreamy Spell, Round Mountain Star And Heather Bell. WTF? Nothing there could possibly prepare you for he dreamy drift contained within. GBOTCM is another project of French outfit the Reggaee, who have teamed up with some like minded musical alchemists for a late night ritual of simple guitar strum and strange disembodied percussion. Minor key buzz and twang, stretched out over a murky low end throb, with bits of fluttery flute, a bit of dark and drifting campfire forestfolk, ominous and melancholy, laid back and shadow lit. Eventually, this flickering folks is joined by soft swells of subterranean drone and brief burbles of spacey FX, adding to the dreamy drift but never disrupting the tranquil ambience.
LIMITED TO 49 COPIES!!!
FINALLY, this long out of print, all time unanimous AQ favorite gets re-pressed and is available once again!
The Conet Project from beyond the grave!?! Perhaps that's a good way of describing this baffling, terrifying, occasionally laughable, but always compelling album. It's been out of print for a very long time, and we're pleased to see The Ghost Orchid haunting our shelves once again!
To recap, The Ghost Orchid documents instances of something called "Electronic Voice Phenomenon," the paranormal appearance of strange voices (which at times sing and speak in multiple languages) on magnetic tape when there shouldn't be any voices there at all... Respected parapsychologists have postulated that these voices are those of dead people (i.e. ghosts) or possibly of extraterrestrial origin! Unlike The Conet Project, which cross referenced the audio tracks with written information, The Ghost Orchid presents these recordings with the audio commentary of one of several researchers (Nadia Fowler, Raymond Cass, and Lief Elggren -- the Swedish performance/audio artist and a part time collaborator with the Hafler Trio), explaining the findings. These recordings are the findings of a number of parapsychologists including Dr. Konstantine Raudive, Friedrich Jurgenson, and Raymond Cass.
While there is something wholly terrifying about these recordings, there is an absurd question about these ghostly voices that we have to ask: Why are the majority of these recordings in Latvian? At any rate, The Ghost Orchid manages to be both spooky and silly, and is definitely a fascinating listen from a pure sound perspective regardless of how disturbing and/or amusing you might find the alleged sound source itself. For non sequitur pop culture reference, the sample "You are sleeping, you do not want to believe" which concludes The Smith's "The Rubber Ring" hails from an old recording made by Raudive and can be found in its entirety here. Brilliant!
Anyone remotely familiar with aQ knows we've long had a soft spot for earthy, psych-tinged music that weaves its way along beautiful shadowy paths through the dewy glimmers and murky sludge. Well, here's something new that fits the bill and has been pleasing many an ear around here! We actually put a call out to these Portland, OR folks back in October to send some of their music down the coast. A few months have passed and here we are finally with cds in hand, and we think it was worth the wait! Heck, in the short time we've had Like This Forever in stock, in-store play has already been stirring up many many queries with at least one purchased each time it's spun.
Stormy waves of electric guitar distortion and reedy woodwinds crash upon one another, then melt into clear smooth bell chimes. Horns and piano also enter the fray that ebbs and flows around mainman Eric Crespo's emotive vocals that have been compared to those of Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. As you listen you get a sense that Crespo and co. may have been raised on a balanced diet of Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac as well as Pavement and Slint. Yes, all the most nutritious and tastiest food groups! Recommended.
Another gorgeous and mysterious sonic document from these until recently WAY under the radar sound sculptors from Portland. And yes, this is another way too limited cd-r, but rest assured it's another absolute abstract freedrone gem.
One 33 minute track, a ghostly dreamlike shuffle through a fuzzy indistinct world of softly surging swells, smeared guitar ambience, shimmering high end short wave interference, distant almost-melodies, sonar like blips and bleeps, and thick washes of rumbling chordal swirl, all deftly woven into a fuzzed out, slow shifting dreamdrone. So good.
Includes a full color poster/insert
Limited to 100 copies.
This is the second disc we've had from these North Western sonic explorationists, the first was an appropriately ghostlike dronescape and while this new one is similar, it is also a lot more active and varied, and quite a bit weirder. Where the first one was dreamy and drifty, easy to get lost in, music to float away to, Why Not Be Utterly Changed Into Fire is much more dense, with a nonstop series of sonic events manifesting themselves in subtle ways, each sound and each layer and each element is quickly absorbed into the whole, adding to the richness of sound, but not completely losing their unique sonic footprint. The sound is still soothing and mesmerizing, but definitely begs to be listened to closely, to be explored and enjoyed actively. Drone is still the order of the day, but these drones are not so simple, there are layers and layers of disparate sound, that have been deftly assembled into this half hour sonic swirl. A fuzzy staticky pulse is underpinned by warm monochromatic tones, a very simple melody almost rendered unmelodic by its arrangement, the different tones beat against each other and create strange overtones, which become yet another layer. The static builds and builds until the original drone, the original melodies are barely visible beneath a sea of fuzzy prickly staticky hiss. The rest of the record plays out as a constant battle between the soft shimmering drone and the thick billowing clouds of static, the result is quite beautiful, a noisy yet melodic soundscape, a drone swallowed whole by the sounds around it, a dense and detailed rare glimpse into the secret life of sound.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
