There really is something about music from New Zealand. We used to think it was sort of shorthand cheapshot music journalism, comparing everything to the Dead C, and lumping all these disparate sounding bands together based entirely on locale, but dammit if the more we listen to this stuff, the more it does seem to be true. Take this Glory Fckn Sun lp, the latest chunk of sweet dreamy noise from New Zealanders Antony Milton, Ben Spiers and Simon O'Rorke. As we were listening to this, all sorts of other bands came to mind, but when we thought about it more than a second, and listened really closely, we realized that this music could not have come from anywhere else. A blind listening, and we're fairly sure, even if we couldn't name the band, we would have immediately known New Zealand.
None of that is to say this record isn't unique or its own entity, or that it sounds like everything else from NZ, it most certainly doesn't, but it does share much sonically, and texturally, and there's just something ineffable that makes the music of GFS distinctly New Zealand.
Regardless, it's a big glorious fucking soft noise explosion, beginning with soft cymbal swirls and rumbling low wend, lots of effects, and deep buried melodies. Long streaks of buzzing metallic skree skitters over bits of clatter and clang, all held in place by a field of creaking metal on metal shimmer, murky vocals swimming in swirling pools of crumbling distortion. If you need references, think of some lost record on Corpus Hermeticum in the nineties, Surface Of The Earth maybe, a softened Dead C, muted and swathed in electric crackle, the whole thing a glorious whirling abyss of sound peppered with the clank and clunk of mini pipe fights, and twisted atonal chords, chiming harmonies, all layered and spread out into gritty streaks of droning abstract, slightly noisy beauty.
Pressed on clear red vinyl, housed in a striking chipboard sleeve hand screened, two color, and of course LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Latest chunk of noisy bliss from Antony Milton, head honcho of the Pseudo Arcana label, the man behind Mrtyu, the Nether Dawn and others, as well as a member of The Stumps, With Throats As Fine As Needles, Street, Claypipe and about a million others. Glory Frckn Sun finds Milton teamed up with Ben Spiers (from Empty Mirror) and�improv percussionist Simon O'Rorke. The three form a phalanx of sonic solar warriors, wielding an arsenal of noisemakers including�guitars, violins, electronics, percussion and gongs...
Beginning life in 2003, this disc has been over two years in the making, and sounds like it, in that it sounds like a super saturated slooooooooooow burn, the sound of the birth of a universe, a blinding glistening supernova of sound, the guitars are white hot, blinding sonic glares, that just drift in long solar flares, woven into huge expanses of constantly shifting soft drone, over the top, shimmering billows of reverberating melodies crash like waves, this is some impossible drift through alien skies, navigating black holes and clouds of whirring glimmering particles. Cacophonous squalls pepper the mostly tranquil stretches, with the occasional jagged streak of feedback or spatters of metallic percussion. The opening track is massive, a 30 minute trawl though the heart of the sun, everything melting into buzzing smears all around you. Imagine SUNNO))) of Fushitsusha set up on the surface of the sun, now imagine a field recording of those bands being consumed by fire, amps melting into thick viscous black puddles, guitar strings becoming strange serpentine shadows, flesh and bone fusing into twisted shapes before transforming into thick clouds of living sound.�
Track two sounds like the recording of whatever infernal machinery lies below the surface of the sun, the mysterious factory that keeps it burning, feeding the flames, a grinding cacophony laced with long low slow stretches of buzz and whir. The final track a gorgeous languorous outro, a bit of shuffling percussion strewn atop a long soft stretch of blown out ambience, minor key melodies buried in the murk, giving the strange sleepy shimmer a warm ominous glow. Epic, intense and beautiful.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Packaged in a hand screened, cd-sized, perfect bound book, the cover, thick textured paper, very spare and striking, the booklet inside, a series of photos, graphics and diagrams of the sun, from super technical to completely abstract, the cd in a sleeve affixed to the back cover, each copy hand�numbered.�
Here's a cool new reissue from the Medical Records label, a collection of rare synth wave jams from DIY '80s musician Christof Glowalla, a young German who endeavored to create a moody swirl of haunting synthwave with just a single synth, a 4 track, and a super primitive drum machine. Eventually, he made it into a proper studio and recorded what would become a bit of synthpop coldwave history, with the track "Erde 80", a strange bit of cold synth pop, the rhythm track, sounding a bit Kraftwerky, motorik and pulsing, but overlaid with woozy dreamlike synth melodies, and most notably some intense Teutonic vocals, sounding like they were sung in a tunnel, all reverbed and metallic, only adding to the song's strange vibe. "Technik" is just as cool (and weird), the synths darker and buzzier, laced with laxer blast bleeps and FX squiggles, droney and tranced out, with yet still more twisted vocals, this time growled and distorted and transformed into something almost robotic sounding, until the chorus comes and they morph into a weird whiney croon, all over that dense somber buzz, the real surprise though, is the acoustic guitar that pops up midway through, giving the song a strange sun dappled folk vibe, only to slip right back into the dark synth buzz.
The original "Erde 80" single is joined on this 10" reissue by three tracks recorded a year later, all of which were rejected by record companies at the time, and only one that was ever released. "Smog In Der Stadt" is starts out as a grim sprawl of atmospheric buzz and creepy processed vox, before blossoming into another acoustic guitar laced bit of synth pop, the vibe still dark, but way catchier, and much more well produced, the song featuring a haunting vocal drone in the background, not to mention some super strange falsetto background vocals, and some crunchy guitar, even some leads, a weird sort of hard rocking new wave, in fact the last minute sounds way more proto-punk than synth wave! "Der Bosse" is a darkly psychedelic synth ballad, with super dramatic vocals, droned out synth tones, kosmische pulsations, and some spidery, twangy guitars, again displaying Glowalla's new direction, and it becomes more obvious why folks wanting another "Erde 80" might have been thrown off, but we're digging it big time. Finally, "Science Fiction" is a groovy sprawl of bleepy bloop sci-fi- synth pop, which at least for the few minutes sounds more like the "Erde 80" 7", but as the track progresses, the acoustic guitars drift in, and the sound once again seems to move more toward a slightly more mainstream electro pop, eighties new wave sound, which again, sounds pretty goddamn great to us!!
Housed in as super thick, full color jacket, pressed on heavy mustard colored vinyl. LIMITED TO 600 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Fans of the damaged and deranged, the truly warped and mindbending, the freaky, fucked up and plain baffling, by now should be well acquainted with the mysterious master of the guitar synth, and his bevy of bewildering outfits, two of which we've reviewed on past AQ lists, this being the third, in what we can only imagine is some sort of insane trilogy. Xynfonica came first. A "classical" record, completely composed and performed on the guitar synthesizer. A tripped out, outsider slab of post Peter And The Wolf classical deconstructed, atonal and so so so difficult, oh and did we mention that the other part of the equation was seemingly incongruous raspy evil metal vocals? A totally not-right combination, but for those of us who dig that sort of stuff, it was pretty unbeatable. Then there was the HUGE booklet of lyrics, complete with FOOTNOTES!!!
Then came Shevalreq, part two in the "trilogy", his 'world music' record, where the same atonal angular tones and notes, the howled raspy vocals, were this time wrapped around faux tablas and various other ethnic percussion instruments. If anything, it was even more fucked and amazing. Not to mention the over the top cover art, with miniature jousting knights on horseback ON TOP OF various dat machines and other studio gear. WTF?
So while we anxiously awaited part three, we were fairly sure nothing could top Shevalreq. But oh were we wrong.
The new one is called Gluttony, the name of the record: Collapse Of The Roman Republic, another epic tale of war and death and love and betrayal, this one being his quote unquote jazz record, and fuck if it's not the most amazingly fucked up record EVER. Now in addition to the metallic rasp, the stumbling angular melodies, are lots of synthesized horn stabs, crooning synthesizers, faux vibes and marimbas, synth oboes, synth bassoons, all peppered with some serious twisted tangles of Greg Ginn-esque guitar squall, usually draped over some woozy, smoky dive bar synthjazz. It still sort of sounds like Peter And The Wolf, but it also sounds like the score for some mystery noir z-movie thriller, ripe for some sort of Sam Spade voice over, but instead you get a voice over from some growling bile spewing demon, and the tracks lope on endlessly, the melodies, maniacally off kilter, the whole thing so brilliantly baffling it's almost impossible to listen to the whole thing, but we've come close. Very very close.
Absolutely recommended, but ONLY for those who can handle stuff like this. You know who you are.
A couple weeks ago, we reviewed the debut album by Aanipaa, a new experimental glitch-drone-doom project headed up by Mika Vainio and Stephen O'Malley. One of the most abject and significant elements of Aanipaa's sound was the vocals (or shall we use the term vokills) contributed by Alan Dubin. We've been fans of Dubin since back in the OLD days (OLD being his '90s grind/electronica/WTF? band with James Plotkin), and you probably also know him from Khanate, the doomic supergroup that also included both O'Malley and Plotkin. In the pantheon of anguished, extreme vokills, there's naught that can compare to Dubin's tortured throat - well maybe Keiji Haino, and possibly also the guy that sang on Bethlehem's Dictius Te Necare. They're sort of kokills that make the listener want to curl up in the fetal position, and it sounds like the singer already has.
Well, here's some more Dubin for you, in the form of the sophomore album from his own experimental doom band, from the bowels of NYC, known as Gnaw. It's another discomforting dose of avant-garde audio terror, the four other guys in the band making utterly harrowing, heavy music that manages to hold its own alongside Dubin's vocalizations, and it's not an easy task to be so extreme.
Track one, "Humming", eases (slightly) the listener in, Dubin quietly accompanied by a simple bell-like, plink-plonk motif on a keyboard, and background industrial atmospheres. Dubin makes use of maniacal, mantric repetition in his creepy lyrics, a method used throughout the album to suggest a sick state of psychological compulsion. Here repeated lines like "you left your window open / nice lady / nice lady / window open / open" make him sound like Jerry Lewis as a psychopathic prowler. But then on track two, "Of Embers", look out, 'cause the full band kicks in, to devastating effect, with crashing drum pummel and massive riff plod. And on and on and down and down it goes, Gnaw's hellish trudge laced with weird noise-damaged effects and other disturbing details. Basically, it's like a more twisted and occasionally ambient version of Khanate. Yikes!
Gnaw's first album was called Your Face; now they're doing their gnawing on the inside of your skull instead. If they ever were to do a remake of Gummo, we'd expect Gnaw to appear on the soundtrack. Vinly version includes download.
Thee extreme/experimental/industrial metal scene has a potential new ruler here, with the doomic and disturbing debut of Gnaw. If you put this disc in your computer's iTunes, you'll see some joker has categorized their genre as "children's music". Ha, don't think so! Unless you want your kids to grow up to be like Alan Dubin, of OLD/Khanate infamy, who provides the blood curdling vokills here, ranging from throat-shredding yowls to creepy stage whispers. He's joined by former members of doomlords Burning Witch, psychfolk weirdos Enos Slaughter and cold, early '80s NYC post-punk Factory Records band Ike Yard (!) for this new project, which seems to take up where Dubin's previous bands left off, but in a direction much more deviant & eccentric.
The claustrophobic chaos of track one, "Haven Vault", ought to determine pretty quick if this is for you or not. Imagine a sped-up Khanate struggling through a windstorm, Dubin bawling wretchedly amidst the buzzing murk and the splatter of improv percussion... then distant, pretty piano notes fade in eerily, one by one... it's like Khanate meets Hazard meets Supersilent, in a nightmare. Extreme indeed, and all right with us! That leads to the next track, one that's calmer and more song-like, yet perhaps even more sinister-sounding, with Dubin's negative vibe lyrics more intelligible, everything backed by a springy-sprongy electronic rhythm. More of a tribal drumming pattern is exhibited on the deep rumble of the third song.
Each track seems to delve further and further into weirdness and woe, with drone and distortion and feedback given free range of the album. The jittery percussion effects a trance-like vibe at times, perhaps allowing Dubin's words deeper, subliminal access to your subconscious (uh oh). But as big fans of both OLD and Khanate, we're all for it, glad to now have Gnaw to push those same buttons, along with other ones we hadn't expected, like the way the singing on "Watcher" sounds almost like Eugene from Oxbow. Or how it sounds like maybe Dubin & Co. have been into some dubstep lately. Or how Gnaw's crunching head nodding heaviness is cracked like Humpty D. Yep, if you like some strange surprises in your grim glitchtronic avant-metal music, and moreover enjoy the varied vokill stylings of Mr. Dubin, you'll want Gnaw's Your Face at your place.
The Conspiracy label has released this on cd (digipack) and of course LIMITED EDITION gatefold vinyl of various colors (we've got any color you want, as long as it's black). They had to leave 2 tracks off the vinyl version, but it does come with a free mp3 download card so you can get the entire album on your computer.
We're running out of superlatives, not to mention overly poetic descriptions of filth and blackness and depravity, to describe this one man cinematic black doom noise outfit, but with every record, Mories, the man behind the beast, offers still more glimpses into what lurks below, or within, the sound an ever evolving cloud of black energy, rendered audible in shades of pummeling drum plod, of downtuned melting riffs, of howled and shrieked vocalizations, of Bernard Hermann like strings, all stretched and blurred and smeared and tangled into a veritable symphony of black bleak heaviness.
It's difficult to classify, as every song tends to slip seamlessly from Wolf Eyes like industrial soundscapery, to Godflesh like metal machine crunch, to lurching Abruptum like black ritual, to almost classic sounding black metal buzz, to haunting cinematic dark ambience, each of those elements fully realized, but then hurled into a black sonic vortex, where along with all the various other sounds and shapes and colors it gets mangled and tangles and spewed out on the other side as some almost living thing, a music that is at once threatening and caustic, harrowing and hateful, but also weirdly melodic and almost classical sounding, a definite case of black(ened) beauty.
For those new to the filth encrusted soundworld that is Gnaw Their Tongues, a brief survey of song titles: "My Orifices Await Ravaging", "The Stench Of Dead Horses On My Breath And The Vile Of Existence In My Hands", "The Gnostic Ritual Consumption Of Semen As Embodiment Of Wounds Teared In The Soul", the album title: All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity, the crown of thorns / blood splattered / bondage cover art, should all give hints as to what sort of sinister sound lurks inside, but again, all of that could point to something much more puerile and simplistic, the sound of Gnaw Their Tongues is something altogether more refined, if a word like that could be applied to something this hellish, but it does sound refined, and composed, epic and majestic, for every bit of sluggish heaviness, there's another part that is hauntingly beautiful, or strangely serene, it boggles the mind how someone creates music like this, it must come from some deep, dark, black part of the soul, and while we ourselves might fear such a place in ourselves, we can't help but be enthralled and obsessed with the sort of sonic darkness that lurks in others.
WAY recommended, as with past GGT releases...
You can definitely tell a lot about a band by the names of records and song titles. Case in point: Gnaw Their Tongues. Some song titles: "My Body is Not a Vessel, Nor a Temple. It's a Repulsive Pile of Sickness", "And There Will Be More of Your Children Dead Tomorrow", "Blood Spills Out Of Everything I Touch", "Sound the Horns, the Water is Poisoned". Some album titles: Spit at Me and Wreak Havoc on My Flesh, Preferring Human Skin Over Animal Fur, Dawn Breaks Open Like A Wound That Bleeds Afresh, Spasming and Howling, Bowels Loosening and Bladders Emptying, Vomiting, and now this, An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood. But then what is it exactly that we can glean from these titles? That the men in Gnaw Their tongues are demented? Sick? Depraved? Probably. But where titles like this might lead one to assume the music attached to the above words would be some sort of hateful harsh white noise, or some sort of near unlistenable Whitehouse worship, the truth is, Gnaw Their Tongues is one of the few bands with an utterly distinctive and recognizable sound. There are very few bands we can think of, even amongst our favorites. You will absolutely never confuse the music of Gnaw Their Tongues with any other outfit. And conversely, you will never hear something that is not them, and assume it is, because NOTHING sounds anything like Gnaw Their Tongues.
So much so that even explaining their sound in a review is fairly difficult. The last GTT review, we resorted to a tale of hell and hellbound journeys, of total annihilation and utter destruction, of death and decay and misery, all in a bid to evoke the same sort of images and visions, thoughts and feelings that are evoked by the sounds these guys produce.
It's definitely not black metal, but it is most certainly black. If forced to describe their sound in some succinct, and non-rambling manner, it might be cinematic operatic orchestral avant industrial doom. But since we can ramble, it might be easier to dig a little deeper.
Every song is epic, like little films, sounds evoking images, evoking thoughts and emotions, horns and orchestral stabs, flutes and strings, are as much a part of the sound as guitars. Probably more so. Thick gristly slabs of buzzing low end, crawl beneath pummeling percussive plod, operatic vocals soar and wail, bits of electronic glitch and whir drift in and out, guitars are downtuned and allowed to spread like toxic oil spills, tracks are peppered with bits of dialogue, and snippets of films, found sounds and mysterious textures, occasionally, harsh hellish blackened shrieks join the fray, as do bits of dark ambience. There is plenty of space, the sound managing to be expansive and open, as well as claustrophobic and suffocating.
It's a bit like a black metal Arvo Part, scoring a lost Hitchcock thriller, so totally intense and emotional and epic, rife with nervous tension and extreme dread. Whenever the sound verges on white noise, or total implosion, the sound abates, leaving Bernard Hermann-ish strings, or some bit of cryptic dialogue, or some strange disembodied rhythm, before spilling forth again like black vomit. The layers of blasphemous sound piling up like blackened bodies, buzzy and filthy and grime-y but so composed, not really that chaotic at all, a controlled chaos perhaps, each sound painstakingly placed to help paint that blood red picture.
An impossible blend of metal, choral, industrial, electronic, ambient, drone, noise and blackness, a gorgeous, and gorgeously infernal concoction, every record, another chapter in some sick saga, hell swallowing the surface dwellers, misery and mayhem overtaking humanity, death and pestilence, the world a graveyard for humanity, such utter depravity conveyed in such epic and dementedly brilliant sounds, which is precisely why Gnaw Their Tongues is quickly becoming one of our favorite bands going�
For years now we've been singing the dark praises of this twisted one man band, whose sound is an ever-shifting
sprawl of cinematic blackened noise-doom weirdness. Delivering noxious blurts of industrial crush, wrapped around stately marches and harrowing ambience, moments of almost soundtrack-ish tranquility give away to heaving waves of crumbling power electronics or stumbling caveman pummel. As much as we love Gnaw Their Tongues, even we had trouble keeping up with his output, a barrage of singles and splits, cd-r's and cassettes, driving the obsessive completist music nerds here mad.
Well kudos to Crucial Blast for gathering up all of those odds and ends, onto one double disc, and like the releases proper, Collected Atrocities is another malevolent sonic beast, one that fits comfortable between Reeking Pained and Shuddering and An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, which is where much of this stuff falls chronologically anyway, those familiar with either of those records no what sort of glorious epic filth is in store, those who are not, should be prepared for what is essentially a hellish soundtrack, to the most terrifying film never made. Strings shimmer amidst a cacophony of clang and clatter, loops warble and mutate, samples drift in from the ether, vokills howl and shriek behind veils of black thrum, and rib cage rattling low end threatens to turn your bones to dust, it's like a melting symphony colliding with a black metal band dosed on some seriously bad psychedelics, a harrowing sonic swirl, dizzying and darkly delightful, broodingly beautiful in places, but painfully punishing in others, Mories, the man behind GTT, conjuring up some insane alternative musical universe, one that evokes the maddest of hallucinations, and as we must have mentioned before, these SHOULD be the scores to twisted arthouse horror flicks, even though ultimately they don't need any visuals at all, it's that rare sort of sound that opens some primitive portal in your brain, unleashing your imagination, and sending it spiraling into the darkest depths of your blackened soul.
Packaged in a super swank 6 panel digipak, with some very cringeworthy artwork.
We almost missed out on this one completely. Limited to 100 copies or so, we tried to order 40 and were informed they only had a handful left. So we begged and pleaded, and the label agreed to press up 40 more copies just for us, and thus for you. Whew! Since we discovered this band we've become pretty obsessed. As have you all, judging from how quick we sell out of Gnaw records. They're heavy, they're super fucked up, it's not just black metal or sludge, it's some head spinning hybrid equal parts abstract industrial, ambient collageblasting blackness, hyperspeed grind, blackdrone, harsh and hellish, but strangely musical, their last record, the recently reviewed An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood (they have a knack for titles too) is pretty much a shoe in for record of the year. Have a look at that review for some serious gushing.
This 3 song ep, is GTT at their most black metal. The first two tracks, while laced with bits of orchestral grandeur, and blown out crumbling bliss, spend most of their time blasting away, but even then, there are bits of melodic flair here and there, the distortion is so thick and intense, the whole thing threatens to blur into some thick whirring drone, the opener has a killer breakdown groove, utterly majestic and epic, before flitting back to the black blast. The second track is another blackened monster, furiously thrashing and convulsing wildly, but it too is peppered with bits of glimmering effulgence, and a middle breakdown where distorted guitars are pitched up and allowed to shimmer ominously like some Bernard Hermann score, before the metal drops back in, transforming the track into a pummeling slow motion Godflesh style industrial dirge that eventually launches itself back into a furious burst of grim brutality.
The final track is the creepiest of the bunch, long drawn out synth drones, wavering ominously, wrapped in bis of whir and metallic buzz, samples distorted and effected drifting amidst the swirling black ambience, the moodiness eventually overtaken by a thick wave of white noise distortion and what sounds like voices screaming in terror, finally splintering into a hellish black frenzy.
Packaged in a mini 3" dvd-style case, with full color artwork, and pressed on a black cd-r. Limited to these 40 copies, once they're gone, might be tough to convince them to make us more again...
It seems almost criminal to release something so limited by a band as hyped as these guys (or this guy) are lately. But there you go. 100 copies. Already sold out. We got almost half of them, but even just in the store they've been flying out of here. So you should know what that means by now. Thankfully, all the hype is well deserved and then some. Gnaw Their Tongues is one of the grimmest, sickest, darkest, most gloriously fucked up outfits going, mixing black ambient drones, dirgey sludge, buzzing black metal, abstract industrial, even mixing in bits of dialogue and snippets of opera and random other weirdness, the result a totally baffling and bewildering headfuck, that manages to creep the shit out of us, but somehow keep us listening over and over and over and over.
Devotion though is a departure, ditching much of the metal of past releases, as well as most of the song structure, and opts for something much more static and ambient, but no less heavy, these four tracks are thick swaths of dark torturous throb and groan, creaks and shimmers, rendered in crumbling greys and hoarse ghostlike wheezes. It's like an aural tour of some mysterious catacombs, built from skulls and rotting flesh, the bleak atmosphere rife with the sounds of strange machinery, the tortured cries of the doomed, a veritable symphony of cacophonous crashes and deafening blasts of blown out buzz, boiled down into a primordial ooze and smeared into gorgeously lush waves of corrosive grinding crush, a bristly brutal blur that slithers and undulates like a pit full of black snakes.
The packaging is appropriately grim and black and bleak, and fancy, as are most At War With False Noise releases, printed cd-r's housed in a two sided washed out black and white gatefold sleeve, decorated with goats and candles and bloodshed and naked women, tucked in an oversized A5 sized black cardstock gatefold jacket, with a barely legible black on black vellum cover, all in a plastic outer sleeve.
And again, limited to 100 copies, already out of print, blah blah blah...
Not sure how we first heard about Gnaw Their Tongues, pretty sure a customer recommended them, but believe us when we say that the words Gnaw Their Tongues had barely left their lips (or maybe more accurately, the words had barely left the email and reached our cerebral cortex) and we were already smitten. How could they not rule with a name like that? The question was merely HOW they would rule, dark and creepy? Heavy and harsh? Doom? Blacknoise? Drone? Howabout all of those?! Oh yeah, it's almost like someone snuck into the AQ barracks in the middle of the night to scan our minds and see what kind of bands we dreamed about, the bands our subconscious really wished existed.�
They took all the data back to their lair, the one hidden beneath that big scary mountain, and spent years analyzing it, and creating equations, chemicals, compounds, months in an underground lab, until eventually the whole project was forgotten.�
Until years later, when a record store employee was hiking and discovered the ruins of some old, well, it looked like a fortress, maybe a lair, and decided, against all the wisdom gleaned from a million after school specials, to explore. Way down deep in the dusty recesses of this old forgotten lair, this record store feller discovered some sort of portal, rusted shut it seemed, and adorned with messages in some strange language, an alien tongue if you will, they looked like warnings, but what the heck, shit like that only happens in horror movies, so the feller went about trying to unlock the portal, and after what seemed like ages, the lock clicked, and the rusty metal swung open, and suddenly all was blackness, and dripping red, and agony and misery, and hell embodied on earth, in the form of this filthy black musick.�
That filthy black musick was this, the first recorded document by these mysterious black beasties known as Gnaw Their Tongues. Who spew forth a caustic noxious ultradoom. A black metallized lurch and stumble, harsh, hellish vocals buried beneath an avalanche of corrosive guitar, strange alien ambience, and mechanical monster drumming. Horrible and grotesque and dizzyingly brutal, but with tiny vestiges of beauty and melody, occasionally visible through the dense black sonic fog. Stretches of distorted doom verging on the beautiful, separating gut wrenching squalls of utter black chaos. And that's just the first track.�
The second is like the first, only fast. Really fast. Like sticking your head into the middle of a lightning storm. Like Velvet Caccoon and Wold and Amacoma all playing simultaneously, at full volume, broadcast through Konono's PA, untiil your ears bleed, but it's not all pain and suffering, this� whirling world of sound is again strangely melodic, twisted into some almost pop like shapes, but always quickly bathed in blackness and sent spinning� back into the fray.�
"29 Needles" is a step away from the end, and is some sort of industrial plod, a garish landscape of bleak brutality, sparse ultradistorted percussion, clouds of caustic whir, creepy ghostlike voices, the sort of sounds that make Wolf Eyes sound like the Carpenters. A musical death march through a world of fire and death and destruction, of keening musical misery and downtuned sonic punishment.�
Finally, the prophecy is complete with once the sounds of "Die Mutter Wahlt Das Todtenkleidchen" reach the ears of mortal man. The plants wither and the sky grows dim, our hearts beat slower and our blood begins to boil, the earth begins to crack, and slowly we sink into the depths of the underworld, and this is the sound that the end of all things makes. A lonely slowed down low end caterwaul, a rumbling whir peppered with jagged streaks of harsh noise, thick swells of coruscating sonic malevolence, storm clouds of hiss and buzz, a pounding skull splitting din from the heavens, an electrical storm that singes every nerve in your body, leaving you paralyzed, supine, blind, and mute, with only your ears ringing painfully, just barely able to make out the dying gasps of life as we know it.
NOW REPRESSED AND AVAILABLE AGAIN AT A CHEAPER PRICE!!
Here's our review of the Die Mutter reissue when we first listed it back in 2009:
Two long out of print cd-r's from our favorite symphonic black doom noize combo, gets the ultra deluxe reissue treatment. Both Die Mutter Wahlt Das Todtenkleidchen, originally released on Corps-Morts (the first thing we ever heard from GTT), and Dawn Breaks Open Like A Wound That Bleeds Afresh originally released on Universal Tongue, are both represented here in full, and on top of that, there are THREE unreleased bonus tracks, so even folks who have those original cds will probably want this, not just for the bonus tracks (although that might be enough), but to have those two out of print cd-r's on a proper cd!! Gorgeous packaging too, super striking 6 panel digipak, comes with a GTT sticker too.
Not sure how we first heard about Gnaw Their Tongues, pretty sure a customer recommended them, but believe us when we say that the words Gnaw Their Tongues had barely left their lips (or maybe more accurately, the words had barely left the email and reached our cerebral cortex) and we were already smitten. How could they not rule with a name like that? The question was merely HOW they would rule, dark and creepy? Heavy and harsh? Doom? Blacknoise? Drone? Howabout all of those?! Oh yeah, it's almost like someone snuck into the AQ barracks in the middle of the night to scan our minds and see what kind of bands we dreamed about, the bands our subconscious really wished existed.
They took all the data back to their lair, the one hidden beneath that big scary mountain, and spent years analyzing it, and creating equations, chemicals, compounds, months in an underground lab, until eventually the whole project was forgotten.
Until years later, when a record store employee was hiking and discovered the ruins of some old, well, it looked like a fortress, maybe a lair, and decided, against all the wisdom gleaned from a million after school specials, to explore. Way down deep in the dusty recesses of this old forgotten lair, this record store feller discovered some sort of portal, rusted shut it seemed, and adorned with messages in some strange language, an alien tongue if you will, they looked like warnings, but what the heck, shit like that only happens in horror movies, so the feller went about trying to unlock the portal, and after what seemed like ages, the lock clicked, and the rusty metal swung open, and suddenly all was blackness, and dripping red, and agony and misery, and hell embodied on earth, in the form of this filthy black musick.
That filthy black musick was in fact these two musical documents by these mysterious black beasties known as Gnaw Their Tongues. Who on Die Mutter Wahlt Das Todtenkleidchen, spew forth a caustic noxious ultradoom. A black metallized lurch and stumble, harsh, hellish vocals buried beneath an avalanche of corrosive guitar, strange alien ambience, and mechanical monster drumming. Horrible and grotesque and dizzyingly brutal, but with tiny vestiges of beauty and melody, occasionally visible through the dense black sonic fog. Stretches of distorted doom verging on the beautiful, separating gut wrenching squalls of utter black chaos. And that's just the first track.
The second is like the first, only fast. Really fast. Like sticking your head into the middle of a lightning storm. Like Velvet Caccoon and Wold and AmacomA all playing simultaneously, at full volume, broadcast through Konono's PA, until your ears bleed, but it's not all pain and suffering, this whirling world of sound is again strangely melodic, twisted into some almost pop like shapes, but always quickly bathed in blackness and sent spinning back into the fray.
"29 Needles" is a step away from the end, and is some sort of industrial plod, a garish landscape of bleak brutality, sparse ultradistorted percussion, clouds of caustic whir, creepy ghostlike voices, the sort of sounds that make Wolf Eyes sound like the Carpenters. A musical death march through a world of fire and death and destruction, of keening musical misery and downtuned sonic punishment.
Finally, the prophecy is complete with once the sounds of "Die Mutter Wahlt Das Todtenkleidchen" reach the ears of mortal man. The plants wither and the sky grows dim, our hearts beat slower and our blood begins to boil, the earth begins to crack, and slowly we sink into the depths of the underworld, and this is the sound that the end of all things makes. A lonely slowed down low end caterwaul, a rumbling whir peppered with jagged streaks of harsh noise, thick swells of coruscating sonic malevolence, storm clouds of hiss and buzz, a pounding skull splitting din from the heavens, an electrical storm that singes every nerve in your body, leaving you paralyzed, supine, blind, and mute, with only your ears ringing painfully, just barely able to make out the dying gasps of life as we know it.
Then came Dawn Breaks Open Like A Wound That Bleeds Afresh. We almost missed out on it completely. The original version limited to 100 copies or so, we tried to order 40 and were informed they only had a handful left. So we begged and pleaded, and the label agreed to press up 40 more copies just for us, and thus for you. But those were gone before we knew it. Which is why this reissue is such a godsend (satansend?) Since we first discovered this band we had become pretty obsessed. As have the aQ blacknoize minions, judging from how quick we sell out of Gnaw records. They're heavy, they're super fucked up, it's not just black metal or sludge, it's some head spinning hybrid equal parts abstract industrial, ambient collageblasting blackness, hyperspeed grind, blackdrone, harsh and hellish, but strangely musical.
Dawn Breaks Open Like A Wound That Bleeds Afresh finds GTT at their most black metal. The first two tracks, while laced with bits of orchestral grandeur, and blown out crumbling bliss, spend most of their time blasting away, but even then, there are bits of melodic flair here and there, the distortion is so thick and intense, the whole thing threatens to blur into some thick whirring drone, the opener has a killer breakdown groove, utterly majestic and epic, before flitting back to the black blast. The second track is another blackened monster, furiously thrashing and convulsing wildly, but it too is peppered with bits of glimmering effulgence, and a middle breakdown where distorted guitars are pitched up and allowed to shimmer ominously like some Bernard Hermann score, before the metal drops back in, transforming the track into a pummeling slow motion Godflesh style industrial dirge that eventually launches itself back into a furious burst of grim brutality.
The final track is the creepiest of the bunch, long drawn out synth drones, wavering ominously, wrapped in bis of whir and metallic buzz, samples distorted and effected drifting amidst the swirling black ambience, the moodiness eventually overtaken by a thick wave of white noise distortion and what sounds like voices screaming in terror, finally splintering into a hellish black frenzy.
As mentioned in the introduction to this review, in addition to the reissued tracks, this version of Die Mutter also includes three new, unreleased tracks. The first is a gorgeous post industrial orchestral crawl, heaving horns, crunching metallic percussion, guttural vocalizations, blasting beats, exotic strings, long stretches of haunting cinematic ambience, heavy and harrowing, the production fucked up and fractured, the sound woozy and wonderfully grim. The second is more of the same, a lumbering death march painted in broad swaths of majestic strings, buzz drenched guitars, all wrapped around a super spare machinelike pound, fuzzed out Goblin like synths, like a Bernard Hermann score gone haywire. And finally, the awesomely titled closer "I Am The Lord And There Is No Other; I Make The Light, I Create Darkness" (GTT definitely have a way with song and album titles), a slow burning bit of black ambient drift, distant drones, creepy keyboard shimmers, dark layered waves of low end rumble, epic swells of soundtracky creepiness, while all throughout, the track drifts through sprawling fields of mysterious creaks and groans, clatter and crunch. Occasional squalls of orchestral percussion tangle with blurred bits of otherworldly whir, all streaked with sweetly sorrowful strings. So good.
If you're new to Gnaw Their Tongues, and you're into sounds blackened and brutal and bizarre and fucked up and noisy and creepy and epic, then you couldn't find a better place to start than this, and yeah, GTT fanatics, you're definitely gonna want this, even if you have the cd-r's, as we mentioned above, this is some of the best GTT material, finally on a proper cd, but even more importantly, this would be well worth $10 even if it was just a 20 minute / 3 song ep containing only the bonus tracks.
Latest ep of cinematic doom dirge black ambience from this freaky one man band, and like past missives, this stuff is gorgeous, sick, confusing, heavy, fucked up, noisy, mysterious, cinematic, epic, disturbing and totally brilliant.
It's supposedly an ep, but it's almost an hour long, and for most folks an hour of this punishment is all you could take.
Check out some of our other Gnaw reviews, to read our gushing descriptions of the super evocative sound world GTT is able to conjure up, we wrote endlessly about bleak barren wastelands, charred bodies, horrific site and sounds, it's almost easier to describe the images and ideas that this music evokes that it is to describe the sounds themselves. But we'll have a go.
Imagine Abruptum scoring films and you might have a rough idea: strings soar, horns moan and bleat, industrial percussion is laced throughout, vocals are disembodied guttural howls, melodies creep through blackened soundscapes of buzz and pound, opening up into expanses of creak and clatter, laced with samples and found sounds, all floating above a sea of tense dronemusic, everything wrapped in swirling clouds of black sludge, and doomic rumbles. The clouds occasionally part, revealing some intimate moment, whether musical and dramatic, agonized wailing, or some strange dialogue, usually tangled up with some gloomy melody, some stumbling rhythm, before exploding again into a cacophonous blast of epic cinematic blacknoize.
This record doesn't deviate too much from past releases, which is just fine with us, it sounds like we're just digging deeper into the scarred psyche behind Gnaw Their Tongues, the most notable difference might be the presence of more sampled strings, and the record's closer which is a gorgeous buzzing midtempo black metal dirge, that manages to sound grim and raw, but also weirdly melodic and emotional.
GTT is one of the few bands who manages to create an absolutely unique sound, an impossible doom / black metal / ambient hybrid that fuses all of those various sounds perfectly into something that is both all and none of those. And as always, garish artwork, this time a topless woman preparing to emasculate a supine nude man, and of course song titles like "The Uncomfortable Silence In Between Beatings" and "My Womb Is Barren And I Want Revenge".
Fucked up and genius and thus absolutely recommended.
We've gotten to the point with every review of a new Gnaw Their Tongues record, where we're essentially at a loss for words, if you have a look on the aQ site at past reviews, you'll see these sprawling ultra wordy descriptions that read like some sort of sinister poetry, because really, that's the only way to describe the twisted sound world of cinematic black doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, the work of a single man called Mories, who as we've established in the past, must be one twisted fellow. Cuz no one that wasn't utterly demented and deranged could create sounds like this. We have the genre in iTunes for this as 'Industrial Symphonic Cinematic Black Doom', which is as succinct a descriptor as we could come up with. And is fairly accurate. Odds are if you're a fan, you can't get enough, and you're gonna want this one too, after all these sorts of sick sonics engender obsessiveness, trust us, we're totally under Mories' thrall as well, and greet every new slab of twisted genius filth, like some bowl of rotting porridge slipped between the bars of our cell. We beg for the darkness, we imbibe of the blackness, we devour the sounds we are given.
But for those new to this bleak world of chaotic sonic mystery and abject cinematic noise, have a gander at the song titles, "Human Skin For The Messenger's Robe", "Urine-Soaked Neophytes", "Fallen Deities Bathing In Gall", "Bonedust On Dead Genitals", "The Storming Heavens As A Father To All Broken Bodies", which should give you at least a rough idea of the spirit of GTT, now imagine those sentiments rendered in sound, and you have Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus, which in English translates as "with blood and whip, we worship the dark", which again, should leave no doubt as to what lies beyond the blackened gates, a world of churning black metal offal, of demonic symphonies, the sound of Gnaw Their Tongues is precisely what we would imagine Satan's symphony must sound like, epic and majestic, but utterly bleak and blackened, the sound swirling and blurred, erupting into thick gouts of black buzz, but just as often collapsing into something more akin to the score for a bloodletting. The sound does occasionally let up, but it's usually only to build tension, offer dynamics, or unveil the sound of some poor wretch retching, or the cries of people as their skins are flayed, Gnaw Their Tongues is a torture chamber in sound, but so exquisitely rendered, we often find ourselves wondering why Mories isn't scoring every twisted horror film in Hollywood, probably because these sounds are too evocative, and paint too much of a distinct picture, that the need for actual images is practically null.
The thing with GTT records, is that often, there's too much going on, and the can become a head spinning wall of sound, a swirling roiling cauldron of black noise, but more often the balance is just right, and Mories' creation is perfectly balanced, equal parts buzzing blackness, abject doom, and haunting symphonic mesmer, a melding of horror score, outsider abstract doom metal and epic classical music, and Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus seems to be maybe the most perfect specimen yet, spending less time grinding and howling and blasting and buzzing, and more time conjuring up some seriously soul stirring ambience, and some blackly symphonic sonic horror.
As always, utterly intense, ridiculously epic, and has us wondering what kind of demented mind can conjure up such glorious filth, and then actually creates it. Grim genius!
If for some reason you missed out on the last Gnaw Their Tongues release, a super limited cd-r now unfortunately out of print, and aren't yet as ridiculously obsessed with these guys as we are, we can get you up to speed pretty easily. Beyond the evocative name, there's the record title: Reeking Pained and Shuddering, and how about the song titles: "Blood Spills Out Of Everything I Touch", "Destroying Is Creating" or "Nihilism; Tied Up And Burning". And if you still don't have even a rough idea of what you're in for, there's always the music itself, a roiling sonic cesspool of unfettered abject brutality and buzzing murky malevolence. A sort of black metal doom noise hybrid, like Abruptum jamming with Wolf Eyes but slowed way dooooooown, dipped in tar, rolled in dirt and shoved staggering and bloody out of your speakers.
But this isn't just noisy, or heavy or brutal, each song is strangely nuanced, and manages to veer wildly all over the sonic map without losing cohesiveness, each track is like a mini epic, with movements, moods, a convoluted song structure that is tangled and serpentine but that has some alien logic.
Take the 8+ minute opening track "Blood Spills Out Of Everything I Touch", which begins with a lurching industrial plod, all lo-fi Godflesh pound and pummel, in a swirling cloud of grey fog FX, but then, the riffs take on some horror movie like cinematic ambience, somehow sounding orchestral and majestic, before falling apart into some strange shuffling skittering krautdoom, peppered with what sounds like horns, snippets of dialogue, and huge booming downtuned crashes, until everything peels back, just leaving a weird smear of rumbling drones and smeared carnival music, beneath a super creepy monologue from some film, appropriately gruesome, the music in the background looping and more and more ominous, eventually building to a near static symphony of vacuum cleaner whir, above a skeletal framework of skittery percussion, and moaning creaking collapsing-building downtuned riffage. And that's just one song.
"Utter Futility Of Creation" begins with super sinister soundtracky strings, before the hammer falls and the record resumes its monstrous lurch, but the strings never go away, they trill and soar and scrape in the background, adding super dramatic tension and furthering the idea that this record might be the soundtrack to the scariest movie ever made. Here and there the band bow out, leaving the strings to weave an ominous swirl of sonic terror and panic, the band pulsing in the background, as if waiting to pounce, again what sound like horns join the fray. It's like what Goblin might have sounded like had they grown up on a steady diet of grindcore and black metal. "Nihilism; Tied Up And Burning" begins as another chunk of lost cinematic black ambience with female operatic vocals over a dark black whirl of thrum and throb, before a grinding looped riff surfaces and the band launch into a blasting slab of black metal, but all tangled up with those haunting vocals, and bathed in a fuzz so thick it sounds like it was recorded by Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz, but so much more harsh and harrowing. Much of the rest of the record leans toward the ambient, with the buzzing guitars washed out into dense drones, more fucked up field recordings and samples, processed vocals, whirring alien loops, howled moaned voices, but still with the occasional stretch of pounding percussion, or wall of impossibly detuned guitar, everything crumbling and filthy, frightening and seriously fucked up. Definitely one of our new favorite bands.
Some of this stuff is previously released, mostly on outrageously limited cd-r's and cassette releases, so while some of you collector fiends might have one or two of these tracks, as far as the rest of us are concerned, this fresh musical meat!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Housed in a white dvd case, with full color artwork and printed heavy paper insert.
What might you glean from an image of a shepherd with a ram's head cradling a baby lamb, standing amidst a flock of sheep, or what appears to be an image of Jesus or a saint or angel, also with a ram's head? What if those images were accompanied by phrases like "Rend Each Other Like Wild Beasts, Till Earth Shall Reek With Midnight Massacre", or "Then Shall They Come, Oh Master, Shrieking From Red Battlefields To People Thy Dark Realms", or "In Sullen Silence Stalks Forth Pestilence"? Well if you've been reading the aQuarius list for a while, you'd no doubt realize that this must be another filthy blackened sonic missive from our favorite master of cinematic black doom, Gnaw Their Tongues.
Three new tracks, all lengthy and dense and brutal and hellishly symphonic, we've struggled to describe the sound of GTT in the past, it's not doom, or black metal, although it incorporates bits of both, it's the strings and horns and haunting ambience, the weird samples and film clips, the strange arrangements that play out more like orchestrations than jams, that make Gnaw Their Tongues so singularly fucked up and genius.
Side one is all hellish deep drones wrapped around distant foghorns, or some sort of inhuman cries, layered atop dense rumbles and muted industrial percussion, tense, ominous, harrowing, building to a crushing cacophony, like a Godflesh record played at 16 rpm, alongside a soulful strings record playing at 8 rpm, the horns bleating and skronking and moaning beneath the heaving machinelike pound. Bursts of blasting buzzing crunch pepper the doomscape, as do super distorted harsh howls, and all manner of tangled melody, like some symphony of filth and crust, a creeping lumbering abstract soundscape, with a super haunting horror movie outro.
The 2nd side is more spacious and doomy, but no less intense, bits of backwards melody lace the stumbling pound, like some Bernard Hermann horror movie score gone haywire, all screaming strings, screaming voices, mysterious samples, all gorgeously abject, but hauntingly beautiful, the mournful horns, the dramatic stings, and the crumbling black wall of sound carrying everything forward and dragging it down to hell.
Gorgeous packaging, the aforementioned ram headed figures on the cover, with a heavy printed inner sleeve, and pressed on thick vinyl. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Almost out of print, these are most likely our last copies ever...
NOTE: All jackets slightly damaged, not enough to distress most folks, but anal record collectors beware!
The return of our favorite one man blackened noise drenched cinematic doomscape wrecking crew, with a super limited single, only 300 copies, of which we got about 40. Already sold out and out of print, so act fast if you want one of these filthy little black slabs.
And filthy they are, and heavy, and noisy, and most definitely the most metal thing we've heard from GTT to date. Two tracks, both sound cut from the same blood soaked cloth, relentless blast beats and drum machine splatter buried beneath thick oozing layers of churning downtuned black buzz, underpinned by tripped out keyboards, and some super harsh processed vokills. Occasionally moaning slabs of woozy drone surface, or the vocals become even more garbled, but the pace remains frenetic. Both sides feature a breakdown of sorts, the A side finds the sound slipping into some weird sort of soundtracky Goblin territory, all queasy synths and creepy minor key melodies, epic and cinematic, but still filthy and grimy and lo-fi, while the B-side introduces some haunting spoken word, over a dense swirl of drones and hums and buzzing, before exploding again into a guitar drenched blacknoise outro.
Awesome as always, and again, already OUT OF PRINT. These are the last copies, we, you or anyone else will ever see.
It was inevitable that these two would team up. Gnaw Their Tongues' blackened symphonic cinematic doom, and Alkerdeel's grim doomdirge and tranced out black buzz definitely sound like a recipe for some sort of sick sonic genius, and this 20 minute jam seems to confirm that theory, a slow, grinding blackened sprawl, dense Teutonic thrum, and gurgled monstrous vocals, a black drifting intro to some full on slo-mo funeral doom, lumbering tarpit trudgery, anguished howls over melting sludgy riffage, all wreathed in what sounds like shimmering strings. Abject and miserable, but infused with a weird cinematic heft, this deathlike creep oozes ominously, a downtuned deathmarch, that is suddenly transformed into something almost spacey, the distortion dialed back, leaving just rumbles and shimmers, and low end drifts, the vocals now a hissy whisper, everything blurred and smeared into a black cloud, suddenly exploding into full on, blasting black metal chaos, noisy, and heavy reverbed, a dizzying squall of buzzing and blasting musical mania, the sound growing subtly more melodic, slowing down too, with some almost-groove added to the mix, but still loose and ramshackle and seemingly perpetually on the verge of total collapse, and then the sound transforms again into a killer blast of roiling murky churn, that's more tranced out than buzzy, that too dissipates, leaving another wildly thrashing stretch of blackness, before a burst of white noise howl, obliterates everything, leaving just a gorgeous bit of pulsing melody infused noise to wind down, the various sounds receding into the blackness, eventually leaving just some gurgling low end, and a chorus of demonic vokills, all over a murky, muddy bed of churning synth flecked black blur warble.
Killer 4 way split of extreme outsider heaviness, most folks will probably grab this for the two new Gnaw Their Tongues tracks, but will probably end up digging the other three bands nearly as much.
But since GTT might be the reason most folks are here, let's talk about those tracks first. No huge departures, just more of that same, grim, apocalyptic, industrial, cinematic doom. "Crawl" is just that, a harrowing sonic crawl, with blown out distorted drums, heaving downtuned guitars, moaning miserable melodies, hysterical shrieks, shimmering strings, dense drones, a freaked out apocalyptic soundtrack to the death of mankind. "Paleness" is more of the same, but more metal, the main riff a blurred bit of undulating buzz, the vocals insane, the drums and industrial plod, long stretches of creepy ambience, the final half of the song a dense, thick, layered bit of blackened slow motion dronemusic, that is as weirdly hypnotic as it is hellish. Definitely worth it for fans, to get those two tracks, but there's much more metallic misery to be had.
The Arm And Sword Of A Bastard God (killer name!) are a Southern California doomkult, and traffic in plodding blackened doom, minimal and murky, big guitars, pounding drums, and some sick slowed down death metal style vocals. Halo Of The Sun contribute their own bit of UK style doom-ed blackness, a frantic bit of black metal laced with wild squiggly guitar harmonies, harsh vox, a definite Cradle Of Filth vibe, weirdly melodic, but way more lo-fi and underground, the track breaks down into a lurching doomy trudge, there are even some weird processed clean vocals, but it's soon back into the dense black grind and churn. Cool stuff for sure. Definitely be into hearing more from these guys.
And last up, from LA come The Slaughtered Lamb, who also do the black doom thing, their sound way more akin to Gnaw Their Tongues, super distorted, almost industrial, the guitars crumbling and nearly formless, the vocals dripping in effects, a filthy abject sonic crawl through broken glass and bloody entrails, leading to the 26 minute closer, an sprawling bit of epic and dismal black ambience, from hushed shimmer, to distorted thrum, to black buzz creep and back again.
All four bands impress, so buy it for the Gnaw Their Tongues, but stick around for the Slaughtered Lamb!
One of two new singles on this week's list from UK label Trensmat, one by outsider abstract noisescapers Whirling Hall Of Knives, and this one, from UK psychedelic spacekraut collective Gnod, and as always, already sold out at the label, and thus the copies we got are most likely the only ones we'll ever see. Gnod offer up two tracks, the A side, a thick, super distorted dirge, all downtuned riffage wreathed in celestial shimmer, pounding death march drumming and soft swirls of ethereal synths, some serious heavy psychedelic space doom for sure, and easily the heaviest darkest thing we've heard from these guys yet, and it had us definitely wishing this was way longer than just a 7".
The flipside is the 'dub' of the A side, and basically douses the whole thing in delay and a murky lo-fi patina, the sounds a bit blurrier and more washed out, the snares dubbed out and sent careening into the ether, the track laced with more weird samples, the overall vibe surprisingly much more heavy, the guitars gristlier, the drums more industrial, and like the A side, we wish there was a 30 minute extended edit, cuz this is the sort of blissed out psychedelic industrial dubbed out heaviness we never want to end.
Pressed on clear orange vinyl, and includes a link to downloads of both tracks.
This is only the second full length (we know of) from UK space rock psych drone collective Gnod, besides the recent cd-r/cassette The Crystal Pagoda we listed a while back. Most everything else we know about these guys comes from the various split and collaborative releases that came before. And that was all we really need to know, their list of collaborators reads like WE selected 'em: Bong, White Hills, Robedoor, that should be enough to give you an idea of where Gnod are coming from. But they definitely have their own twisted take on spaced out psychedelia, as is further evidenced here, on this two track lp. The first, a 20 minute epic titled "Tony's First Communion" opens with what sounds like a collision of zithers (band name?), which quickly gives way to a woozy low slung bass pulse, wreathed in distant chantlike vocals, and then in come the drums, and some swirling buzz, some croaking frogs (?), space-y FX, and the band are locked into a gorgeous head nodding hypno krautspace dirge, motorik and mesmerizing, the beat and the bassline stay solid, an anchor holding down all the chaos that surrounds them, lush tangled layers, buzz and fuzz and swirl and shimmer, creepy processed vocals, dubbed out effects, until a sudden break where the drums drop out, and howled vocals wrapped in distorted guitars swoop in, and remain as the groove restarts, adding to the tripped out weirdness. And so it goes, for 20 minutes, that main motorik spacekraut groove plodding relentlessly though a sky full of squeals and streaks, shards and squiggles, voices and instruments, samples and field recordings, all hurled heavenward and left to spin weightless in Gnod's orbit, adding all manner of twisted texture and melodic color to the already druggy and dreamy and supremely tranced out proceedings.
The shorter flipside, only 13 minutes, titled "Vatican" begins with big super distorted drums, that quickly drop out, leaving just swirling drones and muted electronics, reverbed voice transmissions and lush organ shimmer, until the drums drop again, big and blown out, reminding us a bit of a less manic Shit And Shine or Butthole Surfers, a tribal pound wreathed in glitch and hiss, a slo-mo spacerock dubstep, again the group locking tight into a groove, and letting it run out, while pelting it from all sides with thick jags of blackened buzz, or bleary streaks of Technicolor melody, twisted effects, shards of hiss and whir and hum, the voices even more reverbed and tripped out, but about halfway through, the song shifts to half time, and the sound becomes distinctly doomy, a space rock effects drenched dirge, the beat a caveman pound, the various sounds growing more and more intense, building to a gloriously glitched out, lumbering blown out space psych squall, the beat a lurching half time creep, the song plodding darkly until it finally crumbles and grinds to a halt.
So awesome. Fans of The Heads, White Hills, Shit And Shine, Bong, Carlton Melton, Robedoor, Teeth Of The Sea and all things rhythmic and psychedelic, krautrocky and spaced out, the line forms HERE.
You can often tell a lot about a band by the other bands they share splits with. And considering the fact that Gnod have done split time with both psychedelic space rockers White Hills, and space psych doomlords Bong, it's pretty much a no brainer. And the fact that these guys can pretty much hold their own with both says it all. And actually, the sound of Gnod does fall somewhere right between Bong and White Hills, beginning super murky and minimal, doomy and slow, the guitars abstract and space-y, fluttery flutes laced over whirring low end, the sound builds quickly to something seriously explosive, the drums pounding, lots of bagpipe like horns offering up more layers of drones, mumbled vox, distortion and noise and effects piling up until the rhythmic almost krautlike groove is buried beneath a heaving churning pile of constantly shifting and swirling sound. Pretty stellar for sure.
The second track here, another 20 minute space doom jam, is much less expansive, instead, it's a solid chunk of hypno space rock, the drums and bass locked tight, weird vocals drift in and out, swirls of space-y FX swoop down from above, the surrounding ambience is ever changing, but the rhythm keeps the song grounded, a head nodding, drug addled non-stop mesmerizing groooooove, lysergic and psychedelic but pretty stripped down compared to that opening salvo. Good stuff for sure. Anyone into the current crop of space rock explorers (like Expo 70, too, whose limited edition cassette/cd-r label put this out) will no doubt dig this BIG TIME.
REPRESSED AGAIN! Sold seriously dozens of these back when it first came out in 2010, but it's been gone for 3 or 4 years now... But if you missed it before, it's now back in print once again, but probably not for long...
This sprawling double lp of blissed out space rock psychedelia is being touted as the first 'official' teaming up of these two outfits, but it's definitely at least the second, maybe the now out of print Aquarian Downer cd-r is not being counted as properly official, but having freaked out over that a while back, we already knew these two were a good match. And on this collaboration, the two mesh seamlessly, White Hills seeming to let Gnod dial down the intensity and all out rocking, and crank up the shimmery washed out dreaminess, we mentioned Tangerine Dream in our review of the cd-r, and that sound is all over here, but so is Neu!, Wooden Shjips, all sorts of things, but WH and Gnod are clearly space rock masters, and these 4 sidelong tracks only further cement their placement in our personal space rock kraut drone pantheon (what, you don't have one?)!
So for this record, White Hills are a four piece, again featuring Oneida's Kid Millions on drums, and Gnod are a SEVEN piece, so you would think 11 rockers jamming out would be a crazy mess, but nope, these guys are so obviously sonic soulmates, from the first side, a slab of slow groovy krautrock, motorik (multiple drummer-ed?) drumming, smoldering minimal riffage, mantra like vocals, the Neu! / Stereolab vibe here is huge, woozy synths, tangled psychedelic leads, all glistening and sunshiney, never exploding into full bore heaviness, instead, just unwinding lazily and dreamily.
The second side starts off similarly, a super spare spaced out drift, before launching into a muscular Hawkwind sounding jam, all downtuned crunch, caveman pound, swirly psychedelic effects, churning and chugging relentlessly, the rhythm and groove LOCKED in, while the guitars and synths and effects swirl and whirl all around, finally unwinding with a cool muted bit of cinematic drift, haunting ghostlike melodies that almost sound like strings, all in a softly fuzzy dreamlike haze.
Lp 2 begins all rhythmic and almost new agey, cool repetitive melodies, simple and stripped down drumming, all laid over a deep rumbling synth drone, everything washed out and otherworldly. Eventually that gives way to a throbbing fuzzy bassline, matched up with a rock solid rhythm, more effects are applied, as are some wild fragmented super distorted leads, some warped Manzarek style organ, that main groove never faltering, total low slung incendiary psychedelia.
And so like us, you were probably expecting the final side to be the full on blow out we had all been waiting for, a free for all freak out of epic proportions, but instead, the band dial it WAY down, and offer up some super sprawling, ethereal atmospheric space folk driftscape bliss out, all spidery crystalline guitars, barely there hand drums, thick languid basslines, gauzy restrained effects, soft focus finger picked neo-Appalachia, totally dreamlike and mesmerizing, it almost sounds like the Alps covering Hawkwind, converting heart of the sun heaviness into something hushed and pastoral, subtly lysergic and utterly divine. So good.
UK space rock combo Gnod definitely seem to have a thing for splits. Thankfully, they've shared most of those splits with some seriously kick ass bands, two with NYC psychedelic space rockers White Hills, one with riff heavy psych rockers Robedoor, and one with UK space doom outfit BONG, and now they team up with the until-now-unknown-to-us A Middle Sex, who definitely hold their own alongside Gnod, and amidst the elite split sharing brethren.
Two side long 45rpm jams, Gnod's is a sprawling expanse of swirling psychedelic shimmer, total blissed out slow burn kosmische drift, clouds of tinkling glimmering chimes, spidery tendrils of smoldering psych guitar, wailed vox WAY down in the mix and a pounding caveman beat that's not so much rhythmic as it is some sort of primal throb. The more we listen, the more it almost sounds like some twisted space rock version of Finnish forest freaks Avarus. Not a bad thing at all!
Eventually the track does attain some forward momentum, a lurching, lumbering, lysergic dirge, but by the time it does, things are already winding down.
A Middle Sex, who also call the UK home, do their own psychedelic space rock thing, which in their case is all about rhythm, after a brief swirl of kosmik krautsynth shimmer, the band launch into a seriously spaced out sprawl of tribal pound, a primitive Crash Worship style rhythm ritual, wreathed in streaks of keening feedback and swirling high end. The track gradually becomes enveloped in a haze of psychedelic guitarnoise, a Skullflowerish skree for sure, before settling back into a weirdly tranquil bit of drugged out drift, laced with strangely effected Buttholes style vox and more keening high end tones.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on nice heavy 140 gram vinyl.
We've been waiting for this one for ages. After an insanely limited 7" single, which was so scarce, no one we know has actually ever even seen a copy, let alone bought one, and a teaser video on YouTube, and all sorts of rumors about this Swedish band who were influenced by African music and voodoo and came from some mysterious village no one had ever heard of, well, needless to say, we were DYING for the full length, and it does not disappoint.
So the story goes, in a tiny village in Sweden called Korpolombolo, there has existed a band called Goat for generations, this is just the first incarnation of the band that has captured any of their music on tape. Supposedly the village was cursed by some sort of voodoo witch doctor, who was put to death for being a witch, and introducing voodoo worship to this tiny village. It only takes one Google search to discover that there is no such village, or so say the skeptics, but we choose to BELIEVE, and that village is just so obscure and tiny and tucked away, that it has even escaped the notice of Google. And whether it's true or not, the IDEA of it definitely influences the music of Goat, whose sound most definitely has a serious African vibe, the percussion, the vocals, it's heady concoction of wild psychedelic space rock, all driving krautrock rhythms, and tangled squalls of electric guitar freakout, and dense rhythmic percussion, and almost double dutch sounding vocals. When we first threw this on, our first impression was that it sounded like a weird mix of Konono No.1, The Heads and (believe it or not) the Go! Team, which even now, after constant listening doesn't seem that far off.
The tracks are dense, and psychedelic, heavy, fuzzy, definitely Stooges-y at times, Hawkwindy at others, several of the tracks display a Miles Davis style grooviness, sounding like a SUPERCHARGED ultra heavy Bitches Brew, others pound away sounding exactly how you might imagine some ancient voodoo ritual would sound reimagined by some modern Swedish psychedelic space rock outfit. "Goatman" (from the 7") is the perfect intro, after a strange sample, and some tribal drumming, the guitars come cascading in, wild squalls of psychedelic wah guitar, and keening high end wails, then the vocals come in, belted out over the fuzzed out bass, the percussion wild and groovy, it's total Swedish Afro-psych, or something, if this one track stretched out and filled up the whole record, it STILL would have been Record Of The Week.
The band do have a surprisingly broad palette though, whether it's the subdued acid folk Appalachia of "Goathead", or the organ driven Afro-groove of the appropriately titled "Disco Fever", with its percussion heavy funk swaddled in progged out organs, and then there's the equally funky "Golden Down", that sounds like some Southeast Asian Sublime Frequencies jam, but here cranked up, the guitars super distorted, the bass dangerously buzzy, the sound blissfully in-the-red, the drums wild and loose, the ultimate heavy psychedelic dance band, for those three minutes you can almost imagine these guys jamming out at the edge of the world in some alternate dimension seedy dive, with a dancefloor full of damned souls. Sweaty and swaggery and fierce as fuck. "Let It Bleed" delivers a more laid back groove, and even introduces some saxophone, which gives it the vibe once again of some psych-ed up Ethiopian groove. "Run To Your Mama" melds serious Sabbath-y riffage to some wild tribal percussion, and wailed vox, while "Goatlord" unfurls some dark psych folk, replete with super distorted heavy psych leads, over urgent strumming and cooed echo drenched vox, sounding a bit like a more psychedelic Comus in fact.
And finally, the record finishes off with the epic "Det Som Aldrig Forandras", with its bagpipe sounding opening, that quickly explodes into a heady psychedelic groove, droned out and hypnotic, the sort of jam that should/could have been ENDLESS, but instead, works its way back to a seriously heavy psychedelic coda, bookending the brief 3 minute opener, again, the sort of jam they could have stretched out for another twenty minutes, and we would have been in heaven, but the fact that it loops back around to the beginning, only adds a strange sort of endless ritual vibe to the proceedings, and makes it that much easier to play it all over again. And again. And again. Forever.
Super swank, die cut, eye popping artwork too, on the cd and lp both!
We weren't sure what to expect from this mysterious outfit, but it definitely wasn't this! We got this from FRKSE, who's most recent releases was a Record Of The Week not too long back, and the fact that the group was called Goat's Gloom, and came via FRKSE, we were really expecting some sort of dark churning experimental abstraction, rhythmic, industrial, sorta home-brewed, which is precisely what we got, at least at first, muddy, and moody, a sort of grinding industrial crunch and clatter, noisy and lo-fi, definitely our sort of thing, and then all of a sudden, there's RAPPING. Woah. We were sort of thrown for a loop, but it didn't take us long to get right back into. The weird combination of rapid white boy flow over lurching stumbling junkyard beats and blown out industrial ambience is actually pretty goddamn great. Sounding a bit like some warped and woozy cross between DHR hip hoppers Fever and aQ faves Death Grips, via Bay Area hip hop label Anticon, if that makes any sense. And it sort of doesn't, but that's definitely what makes this so cool. As the record progresses too, it just gets noisier and more chaotic, lots of drones and low end rumble, sheets of buzz and all sorts of fucked up rhythmic weirdness. Fans of all the weirdo Ormolycka tapes we've been reviewing lately, this is definitely right up your alley. LIMITED TO 125 COPIES!!
You can't go wrong with a 'goat' band name. Goat Horn, Lubricated Goat, Floating Goat, Lost Goat, Goatsnake, Goatsnake, Goatsblood, Goatlord, Goat Fire and of course Goat Thrower, so what if you just got rid of all that extraneous stuff, the throwing and the blood and the lubrication and got right down to it, the goat. Thus we have simply Goat, a one man American noise band who . So what if this Goat teamed up with one of our favorite masters of the apocalyptic dark ambient drone, Nordvargr? Well, then of course you'd end up with a creature known simply as Goatvargr, that sonically straddles the mysterious martial darkworld of Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk and the harsh caustic brutality of Andy O' Sullivan (aka Goat).
Huge expanses of industrial creak and groan, blown out beats buried under piles of sonic debris, face melting bursts of acidic distortion and crumbling walls of guitar grind, distant martial beats stretched out over smears of black sound and buried desiccated vocals, squealing sheets of feedback and layer after layer of Merzbowian murk. This is most definitely a noise record, but Nordvargr injects enough of his subtle darkness and penchant for strange beatscapes to keep the proceedings appropriately damaged, dreary and darkly demented. Recommended for the iron eared with hearts of noise! Great stuff!
The first offical cd (not cd-r) release from the Yellow Swan's label Jyrk and it's a doozy. A 45 minute spin through a dizzying collage of electronic fuckery, white noise, chopped static, all sorts of percussive amp buzz and cable jiggle, swooping sheets of feedback and chaotically controlled drones. High end sine wave lazer beams, all sorts of crickety glitchery and warm warbly woosh. Definitely for fans of Yellow Swans, Wolf Eyes, Hair Police, Double Leopards, Burning Star Core and all that lovely noisy goodness. Packaged in a super sweet hand screened, multi-colored wallpaper style sleeve. Nice.
Some of you may know the name Matt Rosin from past collaborations with AQ faves Dead Raven Choir, but here, as Godheadscope, he is now called�M. Kolophonium, and is single handedly attempting to craft a sort of classical black ambience, the label suggests Arvo Part conducting and arranging a performance by Corrupted, which sounds amazing, and while we see what they're getting at, we're not sure that's wholly accurate. The label also suggests that Godheadscope is for fans of Wolfmangler, Boris, Jesu, Dead Raven Choir among others, and that really just sort of sounds like it would be for most aQuarius customers then, eh?
But this is indeed an epic and gorgeous chunk of experimental ambience. And unlike most offerings falling under the same banner, this is not simple or really minimal, not guitars against the amps SUNNO))) style drone, not lo-fi single note drones, no this is dense and layered, composed and arranged. The songs are set up in gradually developing movements, strings and synths woven into delicate frameworks, allowed to breath, to expand and contract, to swell and pulse.
The record seems to be separated into two movements, the first two tracks, are like a sonic wave pool set in motion, then slowed down and stretched out, dark languorous waves of sound, that ebb and flow, gorgeous and glacial, with extended spaces between the notes, a truly majestic and cinematic sprawl, but within the swells, there seems to be a lot going on, synths and guitars, even voices, all smeared into strangely lush organic drones, twisted into strange lovely shapes.�
The second half of the record is much more tranquil, still adhering to that swell and shimmer pattern, but everything softer and more spare, an ambience to balance the first half's energy, culminating in the moody drift of the final number, lush pianos laid over a haunting field of electrical crackle and anguished distant wails, woven into a jazzy shuffle, sounding like a super abstract tribal Necks, some freaked out kosmiche free jazz that unwinds into a gorgeous piano / feedback coda, trailing off into nothingness...
Second record we've had from Godheadscope, whose last release was on God Is Myth, and found this one man band attempting to conjure up a mysterious classical black ambience, described by the label as "Arvo Part conducting and arranging a performance by Corrupted", which was not all that far off the mark. This latest disc, however, is less heavy, and more atmospheric, with vocals, male and female, soaring strings, delicate piano, all woven into the minimal black ambient background, which makes for a delicate sort of blackened chamber music, quite cinematic, mournful and melancholy, hushed and expansive, long tones drift over lush strings and synths, the vocals dramatic, yet minimal, bass throbs dot the soundscape, streaks of glitch and electronic shimmer wrapped tenderly around sweetly sorrowful melodies, pointillist piano, there are some intense and brooding movements, but the record never explodes, instead opting to pulse and throb and smolder, and while the vocals do occasionally tread perilously close to cloying, dipping into some ethereal 4AD goth territory, they tend to be more hushed and whispered, adding an ominous element to a sound already haunting and otherworldly.
Originally released as a download only, we managed to get a small handful of the "Poet's Edition", which is a cd-r, bundled with an oversized hand assembled, numbered and signed book, featuring liner notes and, obviously, poems.
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*Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert*
Spacey, swirling, not-un-heavy trip-out rock jamming from some dudes who really know how to do that sort of thing, since some of 'em are members of Japan's Acid Mothers Temple, including the bearded one himself, guitar guru Kawabata Makoto! Higashi Hiroshi from AMT is on hand as well on electronics. Hence the alert sounding from your computers loudspeakers right now (what, it's not working? well, you can read the alert above). The other three musicans (guitar, bass, drums) here all appear to come from another Japanese psych band called Mandog, who we weren't familiar with before but maybe should investigate! Together, this AMT-Mandog collab called Godman has conjured up two long tracks ("God>><><
"Abri" is the eighty-eleventh album from Goem -- the hyper-prolific Dutch trio of musique concrete artists doing minimalist techno. By now, the Goem sound is starting to show the limitations of working with minimalist rhythms that are so minimal that
Goem is the exceedingly reductive post-techno ensemble comprised of Peter Duimelinks, Roel Meelkop, and Frans De Waard. Drawing from both the gentle modulations of Terry Riley's minimalism and the stripped down techno rhythms of Jeff Mills, early Pan Sonic,
Goem is the post-techno production team comprised of three guys (Roel Meelkop, Peter Duimelinks, and Frans De Waard) known more for their contemporary musique concrete /drone work. For this record, Frans De Waard commissioned remixes of the material found on the "Reduktie" which embraced the hyperminimal clickery and tone generation of Mika Vainio's solo work as �. The remixologists have for the most part left a good chunk of the structure intact with a monophunk techno minimalism, but have rearranged / reconstructed / recycled the various bleeps and blips through the wonders of the laptop. Featured remixes are Stilluppsteypa, L.O.S.D., Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, Jos Smolders, Starfish Pool, Surge, Radboud Mens, Institut Fuer Feinmotorik, and /Slo-Fi.
We are told that the track "ems een" utilizes music by Muslimgauze, but Goem (the post-techno collective featuring Roel Meelkop, Frans De Ward, and Peter Duimelinks) has systematically elimated everything from Muslimgauze's Arabic electronica except for a somatic bass pulse. Clinical rhythms and terse electron manipulation in the same vein as Mika Vainio and Ryoji Ikeda.
The latest release from one of our favorite modern masters of drone and drift and doom and dirge, the oddly monikered Gog, who in Heavy Fierce Brightness, has composed two nearly 20 minute epic soundtracks for an art installation of the same name.
But regardless of the inspiration or ultimate application of the sounds contained within, Heavy Fierce Brightness is simply a continuation of Gog's endless sprawling exploration of some grim black space, a hellish otherworld, captured alchemically and represented sonically, a harrowing, harsh, blackly abject landscape of minimal low end thrum, and corrosive grinding glacial crunch, two slabs of slowly decaying melted metal filth, allowed to ooze blackly into great sonic tarpits of sound, audial black holes, their blinding black glow dulling all the colors around their slowly collapsing centers.
"Dragged By A Black Cat" begins as a hushed creep, a low thrumming drift, peppered with strange bits of scrape and clatter, the low end billowing up in great gauzy clouds, so low the speakers struggle to keep up. A haunting cinematic ambience, like the score for a descent into some great yawning abyss. Eventually streaks of feedback, and sheets of buzz are laid atop the throbbing low end, wreathed in electronic crackle, in gouts of tremorous glitch, building into a crumbling wall of cascading buzz and grinding crunch, the chaos and clamor gradually settling into a long bit of processed drift, a slow swirly sea of near static tones and subtle harmonic shifts, a Niblockian expanse of soft sumptuous swells and lush layered thrum.
"Heavy Fierce Brightness", begins much like the first side, some hushed minimal rumble, some ominous drone, but quickly the sound grows tense, a wash of smoldering buzz quickly enveloping the softly chiming minimal shimmer beneath, but that underlying melodic swirl, remains throughout, while the more corrosive sounds above, roil and churn like some storm swept sonic sea, the various layers coalescing into something strangely shoegazey, a warped undulating dronescape of looped and layered tones, of crunch and shimmer and buzz and whir, keening distant melodies, and lush rumbling whirs, all blurred into a slow shifting panorama of blown out black bliss, a muted harshness, that somehow still manages to soothe and entrance. The final stretch a series of mesmerizing slow burning swells, dark and deep, truly heavy dronemusic, a sound that is anything but minimal, a constant slow motion barrage of downtuned guitar crunch, squealing electronics, deep metallic reverberations, whirling layered tones, strangely textured thrum, gauzy ambience, all woven into a caustic and creeping doomdronedirgedrift crawl.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Housed in a gorgeous embossed jacket, with original artwork by Colin Stinson (and featuring images of the HFB installation).
The return of these blackened psychedelic doomdrift dronelords, with their second record for Utech, and what appears to be the second Heavy Fierce Brightness record, the first being a limited lp only release from a while back, the soundtrack to an art installation (we still have a last few copies, act fast!), this one a new proper full length cd, this HFB further described as Spells Of The Sun, three new tracks, nearly 50 minutes of rumbling low end mystery and abstract avant blackness.
The ritual begins with the 8 minute sort of introduction "Spells Of Shadow", a smoldering sprawl of metallic buzz, and muted industrial throb, all manner of grinding metallic crunch, and swirling spaced out effects, the sound corrosive and distorted, but still hypnotic and soothing, a thick undulating black drone, the various layers surprisingly active, spinning off sparks and constantly changing tone and timbre, all the while underpinned by a hazy high end shimmer. Blackened dreamy dronemusic of the highest order.
"The Opening" unfurls yet another expanse of lush layered blackness, hazy and washed out and gorgeously mesmerizing, but before you know it, the song shifts gears and the band kicks in, pounding drums, distorted guitars, a sort of doomy lope, hypnotic and propulsive, wrapped around streaks of high end skree and feedback, then the vokills come in, SUPER distorted, the whole thing splintering into a blown out black squall, the main lumbering riff and rhythm still in place, but all around it, blackened clouds of crunch and chug and whir and buzz swirl and shimmer, a strangely pretty bit of motorik blackness. The metal fades out leaving traces of melody, stretched out into hazy smears of softly kaleidoscopic sound, some hushed minimal droney drift, only to explode once again into some dense doomy pound.
Finally, the 21 minute title track finishes things off, a sprawling layered dronescape, that shifts slowly from glassy almost new age-y minimalism, from soaring howling psychedelic squall to crumbling distorted doomdronedirgedrift, from keening high end ur-drone, to wild storms of swirling feedback and finally to murky minimal shimmer. As always, gorgeous stuff.
Packaged in cool oversized black and white four panel poster sleeve with artwork by Locrian's Terence Hannum.
Latest sprawling dronedoom epic from this aQ favorite one man band. For whatever reason, we always forget to mention that the Gog guy once did time in some other aQ fave heavies Unruh and Wellington, but for the last little while has been trafficking in something much more minimal and abstract, that would be Gog, whose sound is a constantly mutating black sonic cloud. While already a strange beast, Gog seems to have gotten even stranger here. Four sides, all spinning at 45 (although they sound even murkier and sludgier at 33!), the first of which begins with a long stretch of grinding metallic industrial blackness, like the hum of machinery magnified into a glorious drone-y din, occasionally coalescing into something resembling SUNNO))) like riffage, before ultimately fading out in a blur of muted shimmer. The B side introduces some spaced out jazzy drumming, a strangely out of pace shuffling rhythm, draped over a fog of blackened whir, the vibe very Necks-like in its spacey almost looped sounding mesmer, rife with swoonsome melodies, and a final movement that's all washed out lo-fi drift and click splattered low end churn.
The second record begins as a thick, caustic industrial dirgescape, again flecked with some jazzy rhythms, that continually shift, and at one point transform into what sounds like looped fills beneath sheets of whirring buzz, only to explode into a corrosive finale, all keening high end skree. And finally, the D side unfurls a blurred bit of gauzy ambience, the loveliest of the bunch, at least briefly, a very Tim Hecker-ish feel, that quick grows more corrosive and caustic, the drums come shuffling in, the sound growing more rhythmic, tribal and dense, laced with samples, the whole thing subtly dubbed out and heavily effected, making it a sort of tripped out psychedelic coda. So cool.
LIMITED TO 220 COPIES!! Pressed on white vinyl, and comes with a 33"x22" poster!
The return of Gog, and yet another monolithic slab of avant heaviness, this time based on, according to the label at least, the death of the American dream, with much of the sounds coming from Gog mainman Mike Bjella's family blacksmith shop, hence the title. And sonically, it is a gorgeous dark and depressive epic, the opening track a strange bit of atmospheric ambience, constructed from a weird brittle blast beat, beneath a crumbling all of distorted low end, buried melancholic melodies, and what sounds like the clank and clatter of metal on metal, the sound eventually builds into something much more melodic, that opening buzzy brittleness, overlaid by a dreamy washed out guitar, all blurred and shimmery, eventually the buzz and blast dissipating completely, leaving just spidery guitars over the sound of churning machinery, plaintive piano, before finally exploding into a wall of Tim Hecker like buzz. The rest of the tracks aren't all so lovely, instead they often veer toward blackened industrial crunch, and smeared blacknoise, often with deep vocals drifting over the top, but just as often left to churn and squeal and howl and rumble.
"God Says To Love You In Chains", though, IS as lovely as the opener, at least in the beginning, another melodic noise hybrid, delicate buzz, echo drenched anguished wails, pointillist piano, all beneath a crumbling cascade of blown out distortion, and mysterious percussion, building to a caustic and chaotic frenzy, the strange percussion giving the track a tribal fee, all the while wheezing swirling synths or organs drift beneath, adding a strange bit of atonal drone to the proceedings. "A Promised Eternity Fulfilled With Cancer" too is a dark beauty, haunting piano wreathed in a cloud of static and hiss, crunch and crumble, a more abject take on Tim Hecker / The Caretaker, or perhaps a more blissful lovely take on Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, either way, the sampled sound of machinery, or what sounds like it, drives the track, grinding away beneath the piano, and the psychedelic haze. After a track of what sounds like pure processed field recordings, those sounds murky and muffled, gradually more and more processed, into sheets of noise and haunting rhythmic pulsations, the record finishes with a lovely bit of melodically sculpted noise, "I Draw My Strength From You", is a brooding drift, rife with thick blurred swaths of low end, and the distinctive sounds of hammer on metal, a gorgeous bit of collaged ambience, the sounds gradually growing more and more corrosive and distorted, crackling and in-the-red, a coda of blown out buzz, which quickly settles back into a long slow sprawl of grey noise and lush, textured ambience.
Packaged in a super striking black on black embossed jacket, includes a download coupon, and is LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
In a world (our world at least) full to overflowing with drone records, dirge records, doom records, and yes, dirgedoomdrone records, the mysterious Gog have somehow always managed to transcend. From their very first release, the subtly spectacular Noriah Mills, Gog have continued to mine similar territory as so many other soundmakers, but with the resultant whole so much more than its constituent parts.
The music of Gog, while on the surface, perhaps seemingly simple, minimal, abstract, is the sort of sound that requires deep listening, upon which, the guitars then reveal themselves as so much more than electronic tone generators, the long strands of feedback and the layers of dense billowy buzz, so much more than just texture and timbre. And while on past releases, the band hinted at something a bit more black, their occasionally blissed out ambience drifting into darker and darker greys, on Mist From The Random More, the band have fully committed, creating what for them is a haunting otherworldly black metal suite, a droned out, blissed out, buzz drenched, almost static expanse of smoldering grimness, shot through with glimmering glistening effulgence, a bit like wrapping a black gauze around an exploding sun, the results, again, transcendent.
The record begins with a gorgeous, slow burning bit of guitar drone, that owes more to the kosmiche sounds of krautdrone than the downtuned glacial fug of more doom-ed entities. These guitars soar and shimmer, warm gouts of feedback enfolded by deep rich sheets of coruscating soft focus heaviness, any other band would stretch this out to fill up a whole album, and rightfully so, we'd probably be gushing just as much if Gog chose to do the same thing, but these Sunroof-ian solar sonics are only part of Gog's grand vision for Mist From The Random More.
The title track, taking up the bulk of the record, finds Gog fully immersing themselves in black metal, or at least their (very) loose approximation of what black metal is, or could be. The sound is grim, and frosty, but only in the sense that it reflects much of the black metal that came before, in every other way, it's anything but, the guitars glow, the riffs are fluid, organic, wrapped in a soft burnished buzz, that reminds us a bit of Jesu or Nadja, but the arrangement is more Necks. In fact, a shorthand descriptor might be "a black metal Necks", which if you're anything like us, would be all it would take. Simple skittery minimal drumming, almost looped sounding if it weren't so abstract, beneath a roiling cloud of layered guitars, grinding and whirring and hissing, and within that cloud, some gorgeously melancholic low end melodies, difficult to describe the strange blend of loveliness and heaviness, but there it is, a distinctly lovely heaviness, washed out and blurry, and hypnotic and epic and melodic, within this seemingly static structure, the sound swings and slips through various incarnations, moving from total blurred buzz, to a more slowcore lope, always wreathed in swirling clouds of blackened shimmer, until the end, when the track explodes in climax of effects drenched psychedelic churn.
The closing track offers a chance to decompress, a strange assemblage of soothing tones, shot through with streaks of feedback, very cool and clinical, almost a Raster-Noton sort of sound, there's a brief burst of super distorted crumbling sonic chaos, almost Merzbowian in its intensity, transforming into a haunting post industrial doomscape, before again returning to the relative tranquility of the first few minutes, eventually leaving just a single upper register tone, which also finally fades into the shadows.
Another fantastic record from Utech (after a whole mess of incredible releases, including last list's Aluk Todolo Record Of The Week), gorgeous packaging, an abstract skull, rendered in some kind of white dust (cocaine?), on a spare black background, a gatefold with printed liner notes inside, and yes, probably limited...
Gog is definitely one of our favorite modern purveyors of droning doomic filth. From the massive downtuned multiple o'd doom of�Noriah Mills to the more abstract but no less heavy split with Apparatia (the one with the metal cover we just reviewed, only a few copies left), it's as if Gog the man is on some hell-bent mission to explore the foulest pits of hell and dredge up the crustiest, doomiest, ugliest, foulest sonic ooze in existence.�
And we're fully supportive of this endeavor, as we're the ones who benefit. We're the ones with an insatiable appetite for all things grimy and sludgy, slow and low and heavy heavy heavy....
We got this slab of black ambient brutality at the same time we got the split, but we only got a fraction of the copies we requested since this one is already out of print. We have about fifteen of these in stock, so be prepared to leave empty handed, but at least the most fleet fingered amongst you doom obsessed will leave here with a big sick grin and an earful pockets full of oozing black beauty.
Four tracks, about a half hour, the opener is a stone cold black ambient doom classic, thick glacial slabs that shift and growl, pulse and throb, blown out and distorted, crumbling and overdriven, heavy and thick, but seeming to decay before our very ears. A gorgeous melancholy melody rendered in black tar and allowed to melt in the hot sun, clogging your ears and speakers.
The rest of the disc is not so distorted, a bit more tranquil, but with hints of the doom metal that lurks just below the surface, thick swirling washes of rumbling crumbling whir, chunks of fragmented riffs, doused in reverb and sent spinning into the ether, dense foghorn like swells, crazy hyper delayed and dubbed out squalls of hiss and static, snippets of distant percussion, whirring soft shimmer, all slowed down and smeared into glacial black blurs, settling at the bottom of your speakers like some sort of hellish doomdrone silt. Awesome.
And again, already out of print, only 15 copies or so in stock, once these are gone that's it.
In the early days, Gog, aka Mike Bjella, trafficked in straight up blackened drones, thick slabs of monolithic heaviness, but with each record, that sound got weirder, more difficult to classify, and more removed from that more primal, metal drone sound. This trajectory culminated in Gog's last record, Ironworks, which was mostly sourced from the sounds of the Bjella family blacksmith shop, and found Bjella fusing that early blackness, with something more minimal and hypnotic. We mentioned Aussie minimal jazz trio the Necks, and on the first track on this brand new self titled Gog record, we feel like we have to mention them again, cuz that track lays down a thick backdrop of rumbles and whirs, punctuated by a weird subtly distorted rhythm, over which haunting, melancholic piano drifts and loops, super moody and mesmerizing, those background sounds gradually building momentum, and slowly overtaking that jazziness, burying it beneath moaning sheets of sound, keening slabs of metallic buzz and clouds of gristly static, eventually transforming into something almost black metal sounding, maybe via Skullflower, a frenzied guitar riff, and buried vocals, blurred into a woozy blackened swirl.
Not all of the record is so subtle or avant, as quickly the sound evolves into something way more metallic, pounding, weirdly produced drums over more harsh vokills so low in the mix, they almost sound like white noise, while swirling all around, more black buzz, the sound gradually darkening and deepening and becoming a sort of feedback drenched noise rock doom, all plodding and lumbering, and at times sounding like a breakbeat slowed down to a near crawl. But still there's no way to pin down what's going on. The next track is a barely there field of static, a deem resonant thrum, crafted from sonic gristle, while the next track begins as a dark torch song like ballad, all lush sonic swells and female vocals, haunting and almost liturgical, before exploding, quite suddenly into some seriously muddy, muted, and blown out black metal murk. And finally, things finish off with some noise flecked, loping slowcore, the piano returns once again, wrapped around a laid back rhythm, the whole thing a dark jazzy drift wrapped in clouds of caustic noise, exploding in a final bust of churning heaviness, a howling black-psych frenzy still somehow underpinned by that moody, mysterious darkjazz. So good. Definitely recommended for fans of moody, minimal heaviness, and haunting, abstract, metallic minimalism. Includes a download code!
The return of the peculiarly monickered Gog, a one man practitioner of the dark musical arts, able to whip up huge swaths of drifting droney shimmer as easily as a crushing avalanche of corrosive slow motion riffage. More often than not some glorious grey area right in the middle.�
Here Gog is teamed up with the unknown to us Apparatia, who proves to be a worthy match up.�
Gog begins the proceedings with a 25 minute epic, blown out and buzzy, recorded SUPER hot and way in the red, a strange creepy soundscape of metallic clang, and huge reverbed guitar, not riffing, just sort of shimmering and vibrating, everything suspended amidst a barren sprawl of decay and delay, until everything explodes, and the track is transformed into an impossibly distorted, barely moving glacial wall of sound, the production so hot, the speakers seem on the verge of collapse, a massive spacious dirge that like other Gog stuff, manages to be lovely amidst all those jagged edges and crumbling chaos. Partway through, the guitars blur into just a long stretch of distorted whir, while beneath, the bass and drums continue to plod along, a strange slowed down groove buried beneath roiling clouds of fuzz. Gog finishes off his half the split with a little minute or so long chunk of random sound, peppered with vocals, a haunting little fragment of creepy ambience.�
Apparatia are in fact a grim buzzing black metal behemoth, who right out of the gate, first song, launch into some seriously grim blasting, super distorted and ultra sick, the vocals a demonic croak, the guitars a blurry buzz, the drums another static roar buried in the mix. But the band do mix it up, weaving haunting clean guitar interludes, with the harsh super affected vocals crooning hellishly over the top. Raw and primitive, and gloriously intense and brutal, the�vocals and guitars in a constant battle of the buzz, the recording quality sort of damaged and lo-fi, making for some Faxed Head like audio damage. Pretty fucking cool for sure. Definitely need to hear more from these guys. But for now, this is a seriously killer one two punch, one part slow motion sludge, one part grim, buzzing fury.�
AMAZING PACKAGING. A printed sheet of metal, black on silver, super heavy, like the music inside, text and images affixed to the back, the cd housed in a black and silver metallic paper sleeve, with mysterious blurred images and liner notes. Sticker on the front,�LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!! Each one hand numbered. We got 40 and that's it. Once these are gone, we will not be able to get more...
Gold Panda's Lucky Shiner was one of our favorite electronic records from last year, so we were super psyched to discover this special Record Store Day remix 12", with four super distinctive and very different versions of one of the tracks from Lucky Shiner, by some pretty cool remixers. Star Slinger is up first, and douses the original in super thick buzzing dubsteppy bass, and thickens up the beats, everything distorted and intense and blurred and fantastically prismatic. Baths takes the opposite approach and stretch the original into something much more minimal and blissy, hushed and muted, lots of backwards smears, tinkling melodies, warm and warbled, a sort of housey almost pop ambient vibe, deep soft pulses, and haunting pianos, so so lovely. AQ faves, drone steppers Forest Swords totally reinvent the track as a glitched out sprawl of folky abstract minimalism, drifty and dreamy and so otherworldly. Halls takes the track EVEN further, and transforms it into a hazy, gauzy, softly glimmering stretch of abstract ambience. And finally, the original is tacked on the end in all its playful looped and sampled glory.
SUPER LIMITED. This was a Record Store Day release, so stock is limited, and odds are once these are gone that'll be it.
The Golden Oaks are a dreamfolk duo consisting of Keith Wood (Hush Arbors) and Brad Rose (The North Sea, and Digitalis Records head honcho) who perfectly bridge the gap between soft focus free form Appalachian folk, and drifting droney abstract ambience.
Falsetto vocals, delivered mantra-like, drift lazily over delicately finger picked steel string guitars, and thick swells of harmonium, strings are bowed and buzz warmly, everything wrapped in gauzy swaths of smokey reverb.
Here and there, the druggy space rock meter gets pushed into the red, with streaks of fuzzy white hot feedback wrapped in layer after layer of undulating guitar fuzz, a dizzying otherworldly dreamdrone, an indistinct shadow of Spacemen 3 / Loop-ed space bliss, cast over a glistening expanse of crystalline Appalachia. Quite nice.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, already sold out at the label we have the last 20 copies....
