[ aquarius records — Experimental ]

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Showing results 3251 through 3300 of 9280.

Just in time for Enterruption's big San Francisco 3 day music festival 'Sight Sounds Liberties' featuring Gravitar's first West Coast performance in 6 years, cones the ultimate Gravitar document. Split into two different versions, each with different

Instrumental ferocity from this Michigan-based trio of feedbacking guitar, wild drums, and heavily processed brass that sound like a full on army of horns dumped underwater, struggling chaotically and desperately to get to the surface. Intense. Amusingly yet

RealAudio clip: Freedom's Just Another Word for Never Getting Paid

It's pretty amazing, that the Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band have been making music since 1967, and we hadn't even heard of them until about a week ago. Part of the reason might be that their first lp, released in 1973, was an ultra limited pressing on a tiny label. And that the second, in 1981, was equally hard to come by. Which is a shame as this is some seriously Aquarius type stuff. But better late than never, and boy are we digging this stuff like crazy. The whole concept and sound of GAEB was based around sculptor / musician Richard Waters and his hand made instruments, essentially sound making sculptures, many of which incorporated water filled resonators used to bend and tweak and twist the sounds. So cool. Just check out the list of instruments: diatonic sound generator, bazooki, pipe drums, Aeolian space horn, synthesizer, waterphones, mytar, saws, bass violin, horizontal and upright phoniums, birdcalls, microtonal revolving sound generator, sgourd (?), superball mallets, water gong drums, log drums, springs, keyboards, assorted gourds, Princess oil can and more. Phew. From the list you can pretty much deduce that the sound of One is mainly percussive, but calling this a percussion record would be way too reductive. Instead, this is a sprawling exploration of ambient sound, very reminiscent of GAEB's sonic compatriots Taj Mahal Travellers and AMM. The Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band take percussive sounds and spread them way out, letting the overtones and reverberations shimmer and merge, so while these are still distinctly rhythmic arrangements, with plenty of tolling and chiming and ringing peppered with random bits of clatter and clang, the various sounds and their after affects create soft billows of background burble, muted melodic murmurs and all manner of sweetly sonorous and slow shifting soundscapes, each track a lush sonic explorartion of bowed metals and vibrating strings, of objects both struck and stroked, a potential cacophony smoothed into lengthy dreamlike shimmers. So completely mesmerizing. You can of course hear traces of modern outfits like Avarus, No Neck, Sunburned Hand and the like, bands who obviously owe quite a debt to groups like The Taj Mahal Travellers and GAEB, but the sounds on One manage to sound completely unique, perhaps because of the time period, or maybe the music making process, or even the instruments themselves, hand made and impossible to duplicate, most likely all of those things. Whatever the reasons, One is fantastic, a simply gorgeous, an intimate collection of improvised ambient beauty. Includes 15 minutes of unreleased bonus material, as well as a booklet with liner notes, original sleeve notes and lots of photos! So recommended.

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Darin Gray presents his debut recording after years and years of working the Chicago noise-rock circuit (Dazzling Killmen, Brise Glace, You Fantastic, and Yona Kit, etc.). "St. Louis Shuffle" is a continuation away from those outfits of mutant hardcore muscularity towards improv noise splutter. Here, the central noise making means is through plugging and unplugging (guitars from amps, microphones from 4-tracks, etc.), resulting in an assortment of cracks, hums, scrapes, clicks, and pops disrupting a discordant din of gritty feedback. Unlike the electronica glitch aesthetic of Raster, Mego, Fennesz, etc. which purifies sounds, Gray's use of the glitch is a celebration of ugliness through dislocation.

RealAudio clip: Get Rid Of This St. Louis!
RealAudio clip: Eugene B. Redmond

The second collaborative effort from this guitar/bass duo. Loren Mazzacane Connors is of course known as a unique guitar improviser with a hauntingly beautiful style of "Venusian blues". Darin Gray you may know as the bassist from Chicago

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The lowercase aesthetic is one that hasn't manifested all that often in recent years here at aQuarius, but we have been known to champion the likes of Bernhard Gunter and Steve Roden in years past. Andy Graydon is a New York based sound-artist who follows that particular minimalist aesthetic with his own highly conceptual precepts surrounding the three pieces in regards to negation of form and the construction of empty spaces. Graydon intentionally engineered the first piece at less than half the normal listening volume, through which the subtle gestures and manipulated field recordings tease in and out of existence. Electrical buzzes and flickering neon-tube hums flash around a rumbling urban din and strangely musical phrases that looks back to Robert Ashley's seminal piece Automatic Writing. Over the course of the three pieces, the overall volume steadily increases, through the subterranean low-end stasis of the middle track that blossoms into a radiant Haflerian blur of tightly woven tonal oscillations. Those slippery surfaces of placid yet eerie tones reprise at a lower octave on the 21 minute finale of Unterwegs with pneumatic hisses snaking through the composition. Really nice work found within, all of which is attuned to the rigorous minimalism of Jakob Kirkegaard, Richard Chartier, and Richard Garet, the latter of which released this on his always impressive Contour Editions. Limited to 150 copies!

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From the same label that brought us two amazing records from Hotel Alexis�(aka Sidney Lindner who also played in Golden Hotel):�Goliath, I'm On Your Side and�The Shining Example Is Lying On The Floor, comes another captivating slab of dark moody twang.� The Great Invisibles was recorded as part of�The Record Production Month, styled after the�National Novel Writing Month, the challenge being to write and record a full album in 30 days. The Great Invisibles was the entry from folk / free jazz guitarist and�professor of Surrealism in literature ,�Michael Deragon, and is a gorgeously dark and dreamy chunk of dark ambience and lilting abstract Appalachia. Recorded on a 4 track, but surprisingly lush, these tracks are mini epics, rife with moaning minor key melancholia, strange distant rumbles and whirs, muted effects drifting in grey sonic skies, guitars that buzz and shimmer, ring out dreamily and unfurl mournful laments, the various tnagles of steel string strum, are strung within�murky drifting cinematic smeas of sound, distant drifting harmonics, often over soft wheezing whirs and swirling seas of soft tape hiss. A few songs have vocals and are dark gems, sounding a bit like Califone or Red Red Meat or even Hotel Alexis, sultry and slithery, brutally beautiful back porch ballads, lovely and utterly heartbreaking.� Deragon would perform live in galleries, accompanying short films by local film makers, and this set includes a bonus dvd featuring a short film used as the visuals for the Great Invisibles first performance, from�filmmaker Michael Winters, a part-time truant officer. Truly striking, mostly black and white or sepia tone (a brief bit in color), scratchy film stock, old images of factories and children, flowers, old buildings, strange shadows, dolls and leaves, strange graphics of clocks, passing landscapes, haunting masks, the whole thing quite beautiful and mysterious, and really the prefect visual accompaniment to�Deragon mournful twangscapes.� The packaging is amazing as well, every single one unique, handmade by Deragon, a collaged fold over sleeve, so dense and covered with clipping and bits of paper it's almost 3-D, old newspaper clippins, drawings, blueprints, various bits of writing in pencil and pen, hand numbered, with a stapled and typed insert, the two discs affixed to the two inside panels of the gatefold. So nice.� LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! When we run out we won't be able to get more.

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When this arrived in the shop, there was a collective cry,"Whoa, Greater Than One? What ever happened to them?" Well, it turns out that the once prolific industrial dance duo ceased to be after Lee Newman died of cancer in 1995. While the pairing of Lee Newman and Michael Wells had a handful of fantastic if agitated Greater Than One albums that graced the Wax Trax! catalogue throughout the late '80s and early '90s, they were also a leading proponent of the bleep techno sound that marked the early incarnation of Warp Records in recording as Tricky Disco. Needless to say, Kill The Pedagogue predates all of that stuff, having been originally released back in 1985 as a self-released cassette. Greater Than One had much more in common with the rhythm and noise collages of Throbbing Gristle and TG's many disciples (esp. Hunting Lodge, Portion Control, and Hula) through distorted tape loops, media samples disfigured through warbling varispeed tricks, and post-Cabaret Voltaire drum machines pushed toward exhaustion with their tumbling patterns of tribal rhythms. Given that the original cassette was a mere 28 minutes long, those fine folks at Brainwashed filled out the disc with MP3s including all of the material from another self-released cassette from back in the day called Lay Your Penis Down plus a bunch of photos and the like.

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As summer comes to an end, we're left with those lingering nights that offer up so much room for wandering reflection, and early mornings where all you want to do is gaze out the window and watch birds and butterflies fly free in the sky. This new outing from Green Blossoms is proving to be the absolute perfect soundtrack for those days of hazy daydreams, letting your memory and imagination flow so easily. The Green Blossoms' sound and aesthetic explores similar pastoral bliss as equally delicate and rewarding music makers like Tenniscoats, Eddie Marcon, Miko, Ethan Rose, Nagisa Ni Te, crafting a sound that has us imagining Mum, if they ditched the electronics and found a path to organic pastoral bliss. Many wonderful sparse yet finely textured instrumentals here as well as a few stunningly beautiful tracks with Aiko Koga's vocals, that even those of us who don't understand Japanese can still totally understand, emotional and passionate, evoking the simple themes and understanding of nature and the life around us. The music of Green Blossoms is such a great reminder that sometimes the most powerful moments are conjured by the most delicate and quiet of creators. Beyond lovely! And rife with a richness that keeps us turning to this album for early afternoon naps in the park, the kind we wish we could have every single day of forever...

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Managed to get a few more of these dreamy gems back in stock... The Green Blossoms are the duo of Anthony Guerra and Aiko Koga, and the two create gorgeously sun dappled little universes of droning ambient twang pop perfection. With just ukulele, guitar, harmonica, pitch pipes and vocals, these two stroll through some fantastical world of constant summery bliss, sometimes it's night, but even then, their world is brilliantly lit by sparkling stars, a full moon, and warm crackling campfires. Guitars and ukes play delicate little melodies, each melody then looped into an hypnotic swirl of blissed out mesmer, then each one is wreathed in some sort of diffused fuzz, a deep glowing halo of sound, be it tinkling chimes, warm processed vocal harmonies, or dense dreamy drones. This is some absolutely gorgeous, late afternoon, early early morning, hammock swaying in the breeze, back porch sunset, late night crackling fire, staring at the stars, floating in the middle of the sea looking up at the clear blue sky, cool mountain stream, sleeping in the tree shade, closing your eyes and drifting off, sweet, soft, warm and wonderful blissful dreaminess!

MPEG stream: White Cup (Tiny Reeds)
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Got three new releases from the Carbon label on this week's list, one being this kick ass one sided silk screened 12" from an outfit called Green Dreams, who take old school AmRep style noise rock and inject it with some serious poppiness, reminding us at times of Alice Donut (especially the vocals) and another recent aQ fave Roomrunner. Seven songs in 16 minutes, thick distorto bass, fuzzy crunchy guitars, frenetic drumming, and some seriously cool/weird vox, each song a churning tangle of wild riffage and animalistic drum pound, but rife with some serious hookiness, as well as some muscly metallic moments as well. The vibe is seriously reminiscent of Nirvana's Bleach for sure, but the whiney nasally vox definitely give the sound its own distinctive vibe. Crazy catchy and seriously infectious, heavy and noise rocking in a style that seems to be making a resurgence of late - the nineties never sounded so good!!! The packaging is super sweet too. A folded over silkscreened eye popping almost 3D looking sleeve, the vinyl silkscreened on the B side, includes a xeroxed insert and a download code as well.

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Frogs!!! Can AQ-customers resist frog recordings? We think not. Certainly we can't. This cute lil' 3" cd is the first in a series dubbed the "Jewelled Antler Library" from our fave SF cd-r label of the same name. The idea being to release stuff that stands alone in twenty-minute doses and doesn't need to be padded out to full-cd length. There'll be entries from Jewelled Antler regulars like Thuja, likeminded folks such as Dead Raven Choir and Antony Milton, and also odd, one-off quirky projects like this one, for instance. Green Laughter is primarily frog field recordings made and edited by Loren Chasse (Thuja, Id Battery, Of, Blithe Sons, etc.). It's twenty minutes of the call of the wild (featuring frogs, cicadas, and perhaps birds), starting off as a fairly straight documentary and then blending into a computer-processed drone-wash constructed by Chasse from his original recordings. It's like wandering in a dense creature-inhabited forest back East somewhere in the summertime, your ears overwhelmed by the natural sounds, you getting dizzy and almost passing out, the ribitting and chirping and buzzing and tweeting taking over your mind. But it eventually dissolves back into a blissful background ambience. Real nice. And many of the sounds on here that sound insect-like or electronic Loren assures us are in fact frogs. It's nature's electronic music, the sound of a laptop computer overwhelmed by heat and long grasses and the green laughter. Just the thing for when I (Allan) get homesick for Pennsylvania. MPEG Download: "Green Laughter" [/audio/greenlaughter.mp3]

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Some of you may not be familiar with a short lived instrument called the Omnichord. But those of you that are, remember just how strange and magical it was. A kidney shaped Casio-keyboard style instrument, with lots of buttons representing chords (much like an accordion) and most thrilling of all, a strip of touch sensitive metal, that allowed the player to sort of strum, drawing out the chords like an electronic harp. For more details and a photo check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnichord What's the point of this long lost instrument history lesson? Well, this here disc uses nothing but the good ol' Omnichord as it's sole sound source and the results are amazing. The warm electronic buzz, and strange chordal shimmer of the Omnichord is layered and run through all sorts of effects, making its already thick buzzing sound even more dense and crunchy. Huge swaths of distorted crumbling electronic whir, underpinning gorgeous glistening high end melodies, super distorted swirls of sound rife with all manner of glitch and gritty texture, bursts of high end skree smeared into fuzzy indistinct electronic soundscapes. all washing into each other, a constant sonic tide of hum and whir and deliriously blissed out electronic buzz. These textures wouldn't sound at all out of place on an M83 record or in a Tim Hecker track. That same sort of blown out, soft focus, dreamy ambient warmth... So nice. LIMITED TO 74 COPIES. Each hand numbered, pressed on green cd-r's, and packaged in cool mini plastic cases with full color insert and a posted on photo of Green Mine rocking the Omnichord.

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RealAudio clip: Nadia 1972

We're not entirely sure, but we think Shawn Greenlee was a member of Six Finger Satellite, if he wasn't this disc sure makes us think he would have been a perfect fit. Cobbled together from various live performances, run through all sorts of filters and hand made electronics, Greenlee takes all manner of glitch and bleep, buzz and crackle, squeak and hiss, and renders it totally alien, creating shimmery squiggles, sheets of caustic high end skree, long streaks of textural whir and rumble, harsh white noise draped over creaking malfunctioning machinery, processed voices, fractured melodies, all sorts of grinding skitter and strangled buzz, essentially a field recording of a laboratory full of robots and machines, becoming sentient, and deciding to destroy their former masters. This isn't harsh noise, but it's definitely noisy, and chaotic and freaked out and pretty dizzyingly over the top. Strictly for folks who find even the most damaged of electronic music too pedestrian. We only have a few of these, it came out last year, and is packaged in a super gorgeous metallic gold die cut fold over paper sleeve. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES...

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A peripatetic and a workaholic, Kevin Greenspon is constantly touring around California and hocking a small library of post-noise / blistered ambient cassettes & cd-rs that he's been producing over the past couple of years. Having performed alongside the likes of Pedestrian Deposit and Infinite Body, his smoldering, sorta-shoegazing dronescapes make a lot of sense. The A-side of this tape begins with a creeping two-note guitar melody, accompanying a muffled crackle and occasional interruptions of short noise transmissions. Out of the compressed noise and overdriven distortion pedals, a summery lullaby emerges from the tape murk and grime that blossoms through harmonic clouds of organ/synth drones and guitar smear. Yeah, comparisons to Infinite Body's prickly noise-pop hybrids are definitely apt. The B-side continues with these same ideas, as serene washes of distorted noise allude to something sinister just seething below all of the shimmer, twinkle, and glisten. 25 minutes in duration, and another great tape released through Monorail Trespassing!

Recordings of Argentinian Guillermo Gregorio made between 1963 and 1970. Part of Atavistic's "Unheard Music Series", Guillermo Gregorio's improvised pieces and tape experiments fit nicely next to the best works of the Fluxus artists. The disk starts off with several home taped experiments utilizing various sources for manipulation: the first piece, "On the piano, inside the piano, around the piano...", is exactly as one might expect from its title. Following this, there are more recordings that use the tape deck as a means for effects -- bells are recorded and played backwards as Gregorio overdubs other sounds. Another piece using voices and the pause button produces a nice effect. Later pieces on the cd are mostly duet and ensemble improv pieces of Gregorio with fellow avant jazz/classical musicians of Buenos Aires.

RealAudio clip: Voces

This is one serious assemblage of European electronic noisemakers. We're pretty familiar with Mr. Lasse Marhaug, but the rest of these sonic terrorists are new names to us: Lene Grenager, Harald Fetveit, Lucio Capece and Mattin. Armed with a mighty arsenal of soundmaking implements: electric cello, turntables, microphones, effect boxes, sax, mixing board and some computer feedback, these guys weave two epic, wide open soundscapes of hiss and fuzz, glitch and hum, a lowercase soundworld of buzzy electronic fuckery, huge thick swaths of pink noise whir that quickly subsides into a distant topographical map of barely there sound, tiny bursts of hiss or warble dot a spare plain of muted creak and bird cheep squeak, a sea of shortwave drift, and minimal shift that morphs into a corrosive flow of psychedelic sine wave freakout and grinding industrial grit. Instrument cable buzz and caustic distorted whitenoise hiss hover in a weightless field of scattered sonic debris, mostly space, but along with the bursts of sonic turbulence, create some sort of super stretched out impossible to define non-rhythm. Like a sweetly drifting slab of dark ambience being constantly interfered with by Merzbowian transmissions from some alternate universe. Nice!

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Not too long ago we made Austalia's Grey Daturas record of the week with their killer Dead In The Woods record (now available again for a limited time, we got the last copies! See elsewhere on this list), a perfect mix of churning metallic rock, New Zealand style free noise, freaked out psychedelic space rock and buzzing rumbling drone rock. So so good. We knew there were other Daturas recordings floating around but we couldn't figure out how to track 'em down. Finally the band returned from tour and managed to dig up their last copies of their two previous releases, their debut record and a 30 minute ep, so we took all of 'em and they finally showed up. So act fast as these will be gone in no time. This is a single song, 30 minute ep from last year, and is half an hour of drifting abstract ambient guitar bliss. Really pretty, with melodies floating to and fro, while other guitars sort of spread out a warm fuzzy blanket beneath, you can also hear voices and people talking, hard to tell if the voices were placed there or if this was a live set and that's the sound of the crowd, but either way it adds another subtle layer to the track. There is a sense of building and intensity, but before it really takes off, everything just sort of drifts back to earth and blisses out. A gorgeously druggy late night swirl of otherworldy guitars and subtle strummy ambience. SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 25 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.

MPEG stream: All I See Is Nothing (Excerpt)

Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left. So this pack includes a killer red on black Grey Daturas t-shirt, a Grey Daturas pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with large t-shirts we only got 4!!! The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge.

Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left. So this pack includes a killer red on black Grey Daturas t-shirt, a Grey Daturas pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with medium t-shirts we only got 8!!! The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge.

Okay, we only got a handful of these in, and in very limited sizes, but we figured we oughta grab as many as we can since so many AQ fans are such huge Wolf Eyes and Grey Daturas freaks. That means act fast, and don't be too bummed if we've already sold out. We took every single one the bands had left. So this pack includes a killer red on black Grey Daturas t-shirt, a Grey Daturas pin, and a gorgeous full color poster. Super limited, and of the sets with small t-shirts we only got 8!!! The shirt/poster/button combo has to ship in a tube, so if you order this with other items it will have to ship separately and thus there will be an extra shipping charge.

The more we listen to the Grey Daturas, the more we see them play live, the more times we hear and their records and the more they perform and interact with other musicians and performers, the more we realize the Daturas aren't really a band. Or more specifically aren't -just- a band. They are music makers certainly, but they seem to approach music from a distinctly non rock band perspective. There are drums and synths and bass and guitars, oh! are there guitars, but the sounds they make and the 'songs' they craft have as much in common with the Dead C or SUNNO))) as they do with the drone of Sunroof! or Jonathan Coleclough or the abstract minimalism of Morton Feldman or Steve Reich. This two song live ep demonstrates that yet again. The first track is a swirling snarling tangle of slowly shifting guitar feedback, distorted waves of sonic rumble and squeal unfurl and just sort of drift and sway, slipping under and over and around each other, dense and active, but subtly so, almost tranquil, a dreamy drift of electric guitar thrum. The drums begin as just some sort of sonic garnish, a little splash here or there, before kicking into a fully rocking, totally propulsive pounding spacerock groove, the guitar and bass following suit, the track now a distorted prickly static throb, wrapped in squalls of Hendrixian guitar freakout and huge slabs of bass, lumbering skyward like a more minimal and more metal Hawkwind. The second track follows a similar path, but this time the drums are more of a chaotic presence, spitting fills in every direction, cymbal sizzle drenching everything within earshot, the guitars whipped into an impossible frenzy, so loud and recorded so hot, that the sound itself begins to crumble, a blown out blast of space rock psych fuzz sludge. Two 14 minute tracks. Hand numbered and limited to 150 copies (of which we took almost 1/3 of the pressing!). Packaged in a cool hand painted faux blood splattered digipak. And as much as we hate to belabor the point, this is SUPER LIMITED! Once these are gone they are gone gone gone.

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As we've mentioned before, Australia's Grey Daturas are an amazing live band. And no matter how great their records are (and they are great), they can't compare the the furious improvised heavy-as-fuck spectacle of the live Daturas experience. Bonnie is a seriously formidable axemaster, emitting the unholiest of heaviness from her guitar, pealing washes of coruscating distortion, dreamy swaths of washed out chordal blur, while the two Rob's do their own brand of damage, throbbing pulsing low end bass, and bombastic drum fury... So any chance to see these guys live, or even hear them live is one to not be passed up. Here we have a document from their 2006 tour, recorded live in Austin at Emo's, 35 minutes or primo Daturas beautiful brutality. Beginning with a blown out wall of guitar and freaked out feedback, crumbling and distorted, roiling and billowing, the drums kick in around minute 6 and the band launch into some serious sub-Stooges stomp, plowing through dense washes of downtuned buzz, the band plod and pound, the guitar not so much riffing as freaking out, huge clouds of psychedelic skree, the bass holding down the central riff, this is Dead C meets the Brainbombs, furious and heavy and brutal as fuck. But after about 10 minutes the drums peter out, and we're back in abstract free noise guitarscape territory and it's awesome. Glorious and epic. But before too long, the drums gradually return, the guitar slowly transforming into some sort of mid tempo riffage, and before you know it, the band are pounding out another garage-y noise rock psych drone barrage, and again the guitar seems dead set on getting away, squealing and flailing and freaking out over the relentless metallic trudge beneath it. As always, so fucking awesome. Can't wait to see these guys again... Limited as all get out, just like always, packaged in plain brown sleeves, the artwork a torn scrap of paper with the liner notes, in the style of all the Diagnosis... Don't! releases.

MPEG stream: Live At Emo's In Austin Texas

Australia's Grey Daturas are like our very own noise rock Santa Claus. They come about once a year, and every time they show up, they have a huge bag of sonic goodies. And while Santa probably doesn't come to punish our ear drums and pummel us to within an inch of our lives, crammed into some smokey sweaty little club, we'd probably have to take the Daturas over Santa any day!!! Unless this year is the year we finally get that pony... This time, the band brought with them a brand new record, technically an EP, but at nearly 40 minutes it's plenty long enough to be a record proper. And as always it's a corker. Somehow, it seems to be their most structured and least chaotic, which in no way is a bad thing, nor does it mean that it still isn't packed freaked out noise rock or vast expanses of abstract psych guitar because it is. And then some. The opener is definitely the Daturas at their most rock. Simple driving drums beneath an impossible dense swirl of HEAVY guitars, drenched in FX and churning wildly. It's like the blown out psych rock endless jam outro of every Hawkwind song jacked up and compressed into seven minutes. The rest of the record is a bit less rock, returning to their abstract noise rock ambience, like a heaver, more psychedelic Dead C, from abstract guitar jangle drift wrapped around random bits of drum flutter to an explosive noisrockmindfuck halfway through the disc, thick peals of distorted guitar that crash and crush but are almost immediately turned inside out and become a strange backwards guitar squall, all warped and warbly My Bloody Valentine / Teenage Filmstars blowout, with strange rhythms created from the ssssshhhhhht sound of the guitars being sucked through time in reverse. After that it gets a bit more minimal for a stretch, with some dark rumbling dronescapes, more snippets of backward guitar, distant swirling FX, some angular Sonic Youth style guitar rock until the final track, a massive and ultra dense guitarscape, rife with acidic riffs and distorted melodies, thick clouds of clang and rrrooooaaar, each guitar piled atop one another, layer after layer of rumbling, reverberating, shrieking, shimmering, coruscating steel string skree, a bit like Skullflower at their riffiest mashed up with Acid Mothers Temple at their least. Amazing.

MPEG stream: The New Neuralgia
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Huzzah! Our favorite instrumental down-under doom-bringers return (to disruption) with this new full-length, the prolific Melbourne trio's debut for Neurosis' Neurot label. It's a good fit, of course, this should go over well with the whole post-rock/metal crowd, this album often grindingly hypnotic, the Grey Daturas' lumbering sheets of distorto-drone skullflowering forth over a roiling bed of precision percussive clangor right from the get-go! Their threatening waves of pure heaviness, sharpened into a drill-drone of an attack, also occasionally take detours into areas of abstract ambience, the guitars of Bonnie Mercer and Rob MacManus carving psychedelic feedback sculptures, then tightening again back into full metallic impact, driven by the skittering drums of Robert Manson. As heavy as they are (which is HEAVY) you can't really call the Grey Dats a metal band. They're in that quasi-metal realm with the likes of SUNNO))), Boris, Harvey Milk, and Nadja, perhaps, with a certain amount of experimental lo-fi fuckery going on that reminds us of many of their freenoise comrades over in nearby New Zealand... The title track itself is a clattering, pottering about, like something the Dead C would come up with, while the track called "Undisturbed" is anything but, sounding like a violin or creaking door hinge dying a slow and dismal death. And the high-end scraping skree of "Balance Of Convenience" should peel some paint. And then, as already mentioned, there's all the juggernaut, trance-inducing, spaced-out, instrumental doom rock post rock surging through tracks like "Beyond And Into The Ulimate" and "Neuralgia". The Grey Daturas definitely like all the varieties of drone! And fans of, what should we call it, avant-doom, or drone-doom, or whatever, should like all varieties of the Grey Daturas, starting with this disc if you haven't already made their acquaintance, covering all the bases as it does!

MPEG stream: Beyond And Into The Ultimate
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Not too long ago we made Austalia's Grey Daturas record of the week with their killer Dead In The Woods record (now available again for a limited time), a perfect mix of churning metallic rock, New Zealand style free noise, freaked out psychedelic space rock and buzzing rumbling drone rock. So so good. We knew there were other Daturas recordings floating around but we couldn't figure out how to track 'em down. Finally the band returned from tour and managed to dig up their last copies of their two previous releases, their debut record and a 30 minute ep, so we took all of 'em and they finally showed up. So act fast as these will be gone in no time. This is the band's first full length from way back in 2002, and finds the band in a much driftier dronier place. The first two tracks are extended guitar workouts, slow shifting waves of distorted guitar and rumbling bass, alternately ominous and atonal, and lilting and lovely, it's not until track three when the drums kick in, just sort of offering a bare bones framework for the super saturated sludge guitar, a SUNNO))) worthy guitar drone indeed. Not long after that the band gets seriously revved and kicks out the drug addled psych space jams, with wild super nova guitars, acid fried riffs and pounding relentless drumming. The last two tracks, clocking in at 20 minutes each, are pretty much the core of the record. The second to last track "I Talk To The Voices" is a haunting soundscape of heavily affected guitars, simple percussion, that builds and builds and builds into a swirl of psychedelic fuzz, before splintering into a sixties freakout of delay and splattery free drumming. The final track "Bloodcloth", is about as heavy and harsh as the Daturas get, a full on freaked out ultra noise deconstructed Dead C sort of racket, strangled squealing guitars, weirdly atonal piano, layer after layer of fuzz and feedback and noise and hiss, all mixed up into a dizzyingly chaotic swirl. SUPER LIMITED. THESE ARE OUT OF PRINT AND LONG GONE. WE HAVE THE LAST 30 COPIES. ONCE THESE ARE GONE, THEY ARE GONE FOR GOOD.

MPEG stream: When Planes Attack
MPEG stream: Bleeding Bleeding Zodiac

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. NOW AVAILABLE AS A SUPER DELUXE, ULTRA LIMITED DOUBLE LP!!!! You may remember a while back, we made the new record from The Grey Daturas, Dead In The Woods, our record of the week. And how could we not? We described their sound as: "blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. From churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah!" Heck, that sounds so good, it makes us want to pull out Dead In The Woods and throw it on right now!! Well, the Daturas spent a couple months touring the US last year, and while they were in the Bay Area, they crashed with the guys in local free noise ensemble the Yellow Swans (now relocated to Portland). And what do two bands do when they have a week to kill together? Record a record! Or in the case of these guys, record a super limited double cd-r, now a fancy double lp! So what do you get when you mix the druggy free noise psych rock of the Daturas and the noisy clattery skree of the Yellow Swans? Well obviously noise is gonna play a big part of it. No real song structures to speak of, although occasionally a brooding bass line or a simple strummed riff will surface, this is mostly freaked out and free, ambient and abstract. Expansive swaths of guitar noise, amp buzz and electronic glitch and grit. Melodies drift and disintegrate while guitar and bass slowly unfurl all manner of rumble and drone. Definitely reminiscent of Skullflower, Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and all that sort of shimmery noisy goodness. Beautiful and droning and so so so good! Packaged in a super cool hand screened sleeves with pasted on artwork, with a creepy spike through the skull image screened on the front in metallic silver! This is a vinyl reissue of the long out of print double cd-r originally released in an edition of 200 copies on Jyrk. This 2lp version is also of course limited, to 525 copies this time, and those probably won't last long!

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As always, let's get this out of the way first. This is EXTREMELY LIMITED. Only 200 copies were made, and we took about a quarter of 'em. By the time you read this it will already be out of print, so as always, act fast if you want one of these! You may remember a few lists back, we made the new record from The Grey Daturas, Dead In The Woods, our record of the week. And how could we not? We described their sound as: "blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. From churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah!" Heck, that sounds so good, it makes us want to pull out Dead In The Woods and throw it on right now!! Well, the Daturas spent a couple months touring the US recently, and while they were in the Bay Area, they crashed with the guys in local free noise ensemble the Yellow Swans. And what do two bands do when they have a week to kill together? Record a record! Or in the case of these guys, record a super limited double cd-r! So what do you get when you mix the drugg free noise psych rock of the Daturas and the noisy clattery skree of the Yellow Swans? Well obviously noise is gonna play a big part of it. No real song structures to speak of, although occasionally a brooding bass line or a simple strummed riff will surface, this is mostly freaked out and free, ambient and abstract. Expansive swaths of guitar noise, amp buzz and electronic glitch and grit. Melodies drift and disintegrate while guitar and bass slowly unfurl all manner of rumble and drone. Definitely reminiscent of Skullflower, Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and all that sort of shimmery noisy goodness. Beautiful and droning and so so so good! Packaged in a super cool hand screened cardboard gatefold sleeve, with a creepy spike through the skull image screened on the front in metallic silver! And in case you missed that bit at the beginning, SUPER SUPER LIMITED!!!!!

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Finally, the full length has landed, a killer collection of industrial, electronic flecked, dubbed out metallic pummel from Grey Machine, three parts Jesu, one part Isis, the long anticipated team up of Justin Broadrick and Aaron Turner. We were treated to a teaser in the form of a super limited 12". We still have a few copies left, actually, with an exclusive super rad dubby remix B-side. The A-side, "Vultures Descend" is found on Disconnected as well, we described it thusly: "A wild cacophonous chaotic noise jam, that features crunchy post industrial rhythms wrapped around a thick blown out blast of dubstep style bass, the vocals fuzzy and lo-fi buried way down in the mix, some woozy dark descending riffage, the timbre prickly and abrasive, but beneath all the churning and roiling heaviness (and it IS heavy) are some awesomely melodic guitar lines and some tripped out spacerock FX draped over the almost jungle bass and drums (or should we say drum + bass)." Sounds good huh? Cuz it IS good. Really good. Although the whole record isn't quite as chaotic and abrasive, every song is pretty dense and sprawling, much of it sounding quite a bit like Broadrick's former outfit Godflesh, but with way more weirdness mixed in, be it extra programmed beats, layered guitars, explosions of thick oozing psych buzz, whatever. The opening track is the perfect example, with its low slung bass and industrial drumming, weaving trancelike through clouds of electronic hiss, mysterious creaks and groans, the vocals processed and chopped up, the song a lurching, unstoppable beast, but all around it, strange sounds are surfacing, transforming, becoming tangled up in that lumbering crush, as the guitars get thicker and more distorted, but seem to be twisting and warping... Eventually the drums drop out leaving just a sky full of high end streaks and a feedback skree drone drift. So yeah, the sound here is Godfleshy, definitely not as blissy as Jesu, although some of those elements still remain, wrapped around a dense rigid industrial framework, with some surprising bits of modern electronic music (dubstep!) deftly woven into GM's sound without sticking out or sounding forced. "When Attention Just Isn't Enough" begins life as another gloriously plodding dirge, but chiming guitars and fat fuzzy dubby bass transform it into something much more moody and groovy. "Wasted" begins with that sort of super heavy synth bass that defines most dubstep jams, but here it's laced over skittery metallic percussion and squiggly psychedelic leads, and lots and lots of noise. But it does rear up and buzz wildly every few measures, making it almost feel like some sort of industrial metal dubstep. But the wah guitars and squalls of freaked out FX also give it a distinctly Loop / Hawkwind sort of drug jam vibe as well. A killer combination for sure. "Sweatshop" is the only really electronic sounding track, still thick ropy basslines, but with a killer loping programmed beat, super distorted and sort-of-funky, the whole thing super skeletal and dubby, with tons of texture and ambience, before giving way to the final track, probably the most blissed out of the bunch, still industrial and murky and washed out sounding, but everything is wreathed in a warm haze, the guitars muted, the drums minimal, the bass rumbling and fuzzy, lots of tape hiss and amp buzz, almost dreamy, but still appropriately ominous and intense. Killer packaging too, blacks and greys and metallic silvers, printed on transparent vellum, with the other pages of the booklet visible through the cover, inside all sorts of high contrast video stills, a look both modern and reminiscent of the old Earache / Godflesh days. Cool.

MPEG stream: Wolf At The Door
MPEG stream: Vultures Descend
MPEG stream: ...Just Isn't Enough

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

Blood And Sand dates back to 1990 for The Grey Wolves, one of the more notoriously confrontational outfits from the British power electronics scene. The discomforting themes of misogyny, terrorism, fascism, and general hatred of the world at large are commonplace for The Grey Wolves; and Blood And Sand began as a missive against the Gulf War, as a collaboration / split release with the wholly unknown project Shock City. Grey Wolves revisited the material in 2002, reworking the material from that 1990 cassette that proved very prescient of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well as the NATO coalition attacks in Afghanistan in the wake of the 911 attacks. Jump forward yet another decade, and the conflict continues in Mesopotamia. In crafting this album about the horrors of war, The Grey Wolves have manifested an album that purposefully encapsulates the lack of clarity when it comes to Western boots on the ground in dealing with the local populations as well as the self-perpetuating rhetoric of warmongering from all parties. Quite literally, the album is a sandstorm of military ephemera, radio communication, somatic fluctuation, and deeply plumbed noise. The treads of tanks and twin-blade volatility of attack helicopters are commonplace with the heavy drone from The Grey Wolves. Muddled radio communications, lock-groove surface noise, and tape-loop hypnosis flutter throughout the two long-form pieces, bringing a much more subtle compositional sensibility to The Grey Wolves arsenal of sound. There is an existential gloom and anger to the whole record, expressing a frustration and exasperation that 24 years later this album would STILL be a valid critique of geopolitical turmoil and not a time capsule of a war long since past.

MPEG stream: Desert Storm
MPEG stream: Gulf Breeze

The Grey Wolves, a British industrial, provocateur duo, has been in operation since the mid-'80s, presenting themselves with a patchwork of antisocial, right-wing images under the pretense of a critique against contemporary cultural paradigms. They make the case that if they can get anyone in their audience to "think" about the political implications that run amok through daily life, then their antagonism through Nazi imagery, Osama Bin Laden t-shirts, poses of sexual domination, and even their name (a Turkish right-wing political movement responsible for hundreds of murders in the '70s and '80s) are justified. Unlike Throbbing Gristle and Laibach whose irony and wit are self-evident in their darkened theatrics, The Grey Wolves play fast and loose with all of these allusions; and more often than not, they stand as sympathizers to right-wing causes rather than as cultural critics. Given how much of black metal aligns itself with the far right and how some of those bands can kick-ass in spite of their politics, we can't wholly denigrate The Grey Wolves on their questionable politics attempting to disguise themselves as art. This is doubly so considering that the reissue of Judgement is a pretty great document of tape damaged, lo-fi murk and rumbling noise. Hospital merely states that Judgement was originally released "in the late 20th Century," but given that the Grey Wolves had yet to adopt the post-Whitehouse aesthetic of power electronics found on their '90s recordings, we can safely say this was one of their earliest documents from the mid-'80s. The blown out 4-track recordings enjoy a crackling, ominous hiss which accompanies plenty of lo-fi crumpled rhythms and minor-key melodies sculpted out of feedback. While certainly snarling and nasty, many of these sounds could easily transition into any of more abrasive moments from turntablists like Philip Jeck or Gum. The Grey Wolves were gifted in terms of sound construction; and this album is thankfully devoid of any overt political statement. If only the rest of their catalog had such foresight.

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MPEG stream: Judgement

A dark and dreamy drift through a late night world of moonlit sound from this UK driftrock slowcore duo. Silky serpentine guitar lines, moody meandering dreaminess, hushed whispery vocals, simple brooding dark ambient swirl, disembodied melodies. So so lovely. Like your favorite Low songs, set adrift in outer space, reflecting the twinkle of distant stars, shimmering in the soft vacuum of space. So absolutely gorgeous and otherworldly. Packaged in a hand numbered black digipak with a tiny square piece of mirror affixed to the front.

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What may unfortunately be a one-off project, The Greys are (were?) a trio featuring Jed Bindeman, Barbara Kinzle, and Birch Cooper. Bindeman is a man-about-town in Portland, Oregon, having his avant-rock fingers in Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Operative, and Jackie-O Motherfucker; while Kinzle and Cooper had been recording as the heavy-dream-pop duo The Slaves. Unfortunately, Kinzle and Cooper broke off their romantic relationship, leading to the likelihood that their creative relationship may have also terminated. Meaning that The Greys (and The Slaves for that matter) may be just a brilliant flash of dissonant beauty which will offer the world this one and only recording. In The Greys, Kinzle and Cooper build off what they had done in The Slaves with those oceanic, engulfing song-drifts and crank that through a fucking huge wall of noise. On the first side of this tape, if Bindeman is supposed to be behind the drumkit, he's clearly been knocked on the floor by the heavy-as-fuck guitar churn that is somewhere between the industrial sludge of early Skullflower or Terminal Cheesecake and the accelerant buzz of Cascadian black metal. We suspect that Bindeman is actually adding to the frenzy of guitars. Kinzle's voice does flicker through the overblown mix, but it's hardly the ethereal beauty one hears from The Slaves. Here, she's uttering more of a shrieking caterwaul to complement the torrent of discordant noise. Side two opens with something closer to an unhinged Nadja with a slow-crawling riff that blisters with noise, distortion, and multiple lines of feedback squalor rising from below. Here, Bindeman is definitely heard bashing away at his kit, but even so, he's way buried in the mix, which has been recorded Les Rallizes Denudes style, with just a mic in a room, all oversaturated and overdriven. Seriously, SOMEBODY has got to convince this band to continue recording and making more of this awesome soft-doom-noise-blur-rock. Yup, this tape is pretty limited, too.

Japan's noise-junk / industrial project Grim began back in the early '80s, mostly as the one-man project of Jun Konagaya with occasional help from Tomosada Kuwabara and Yukio Nagoshi. All three had formed the politically charged noise-punk trio White Hospital in 1983, with that outfit being discontinued in favor of other means of expression. The project that Kuwabara and Nagoshi started was Vasilisk - a ritualistic, post-industrial project of much greater notoriety with Konagaya occasionally working in that ensemble as well. Grim went in an entirely different direction seeking the more violent and the more extreme forms of music making. Konagaya finds parallels in Japan obviously through Merzbow, Hijokaidan, and Dissecting Table (although Grim predates Dissecting Table by a couple of years), but also the classic industrial works of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Whitehouse. In the mid-'80s, Grim issued three proper releases (two lps and a single) along with a handful of compilation tracks. This compilation features everything from those three releases plus a couple of the comp tracks; and we should mention that everything here is also found on the Vinyl-On-Demand 3lp boxset released a couple years ago. Yeah, the VOD box had slightly more material than found here, but that was crazy expensive, and is long out of print, meaning this is the only way to get a hold of this material for the time being. As for the contents of Grim's musical destruction, there's plenty of metal bashing, atonal synths, crude basslines, and blown-out, blister-pocked noise to accompany Konagaya's gargling-with-acid vocal discontent throughout. The rhythmic spines of Grim's noise tracks separate him from much of the freeform noise constructions from his fellow countrymen, although it's hard not to hear the Tetsuo The Ironman soundtrack emerging out of Grim's demolition music. This was the course of action for the first two Grim releases in 1986, but by 1987, Konagaya made a radical detour for into a bleak Japanese folk sensibility, akin to what David Tibet did with Current 93 around the same time. The songs are presumably still about war and death, although sung entirely in Japanese with a highly introspective whisper and quiet, gentile plucking on the acoustic guitar. The juxtaposition between the brutalist noise and the naive-folk stylings is quite disturbing, much more so than the C93 switch from the Crowleyan collages to the apocalyptic folk. When the noise returns at the end of this album, there is a very twisted logic that seems to become apparent... that this is just really dementedly fucked up. And of course, we dig it.

MPEG stream: Yongpakugan
MPEG stream: Holiday
MPEG stream: Mooncalf's Waltz
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Ostensibly, this is a 'new' album from Grim, but in keeping with the obscurant aspect of Jun Konagaya's industrial noise & outsider folkmuzik agenda, there's no real way of knowing if he made this in 1986 or 2013. As we mentioned in our review of the Grim anthology Folk Songs For An Obscure Race (found elsewhere on this week's list), Konagaya's aesthetic alternates between noise-laden abjection and weirdly compelling Japanese folk songs, delicately performed for voice and guitar. The subject matter of all the Grim material - noise or otherwise - is presumably war and death. It would be hard to imagine those metal-bashed dirges with their bloodcurdled vocals to encapsulate the poetics of cherry blossoms in the spring time; so we'll take Konagawa at his word that the folk tunes maintain that interest in the bleaker aspects of the human condition. On Love Song, those folk songs are Spartanly performed on a small organ with gritty recordings of some sort of political speech laid over the somewhat sweet melody. The subject matter of the speech is unclear given that it's delivered in Japanese, but it has the same feel of any given power electronics appropriation of Nazi imagery. But these instances are few and far between on Love Song, for the most part, Konagaya bashes out industrial rhythms on junked slabs of metal with accompanying blown out synth-noise drones and impossibly corroded chunks of distortion. If anybody remembers the anarcho-industrialist outfit Missing Foundation who jubliantly smashed everything around them in the late '80s, Grim's Love Song is similar, but all the more septic and mutated. Or if anybody is longing for the days when Neubauten was actually threatening, Grim is neccessary listening. This lp comes housed in an oversized box, each featuring a handmade etching from Konagawa. Very limited stock on this one!!!

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MPEG stream: Love Song
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Not all that long ago, we got in what we thought could have been a new Grim album. That being the very unlovely Love Song album on the Japanese imprint Art Into Life, released in 2013. There was no information about when it may have been recorded; but the industrial nihilism for iron-fisted rhythms, eye-gouging noise, and those strangely saccharine organ drones which comprised the Grim aesthetic of the early '80s was wholly intact. It very well could have been that Love Song was a lost recording from back in the day, never released until Art Into Life dug them up. Regardless, we can safely report that Psycho Sun is in fact a new recording from Grim - the first since the mid-'80s (well, all of this is according to Steinklang Industries). Grim is the nom de guerre for Jun Konagaya, an obscure pioneer of Japanese industrial music whose aesthetic slips outside the histories of Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Hanatarash / Boredoms, Incapacitants, etc. He began in late '70s as part of the equally volatile and even more obscure White Hospital (with Tomo Kuwahara later of Vasilisk), where the torturousness of Grim had incubated within a feral noise-junk crucible. Both in White Hospital and in the early incarnations of Grim, Konagaya would juxtapose these strangely ethereal, almost celebratory organ tunes with teeth-clenching pummel of metal-on-metal overdrive with throat-ripped vocalizations. This also defines what he's doing in the modern-day Grim, with a few minor tweaks - the organ tunes are augmented by detuned radiowaves bent through the electrically irradiated landscape of urban Japan, the metal bashing finds chunks of guitar noise to wrestle with at center stage, and the vocal range has deepened slightly. Despite these augmentations, Grim remains an uncompromisingly perverse project of brutality, violence, and nihilism.

MPEG stream: Nomad
MPEG stream: Shelter Song
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Another new release, and another incomprehensibly confusional band name from James Ferraro, formerly one half of warped soft noise duo the Skaters, now a bonified solo phenom, with about a million cd-r's and tapes and lps under various monikers, including his very own actual mom and dad approved name For Grippers Nother Onesers, Ferraro does more than loop and sample, there seems to be some actual riffing going on, as well as lots of singing, a warbly warped reverb drenched falsetto, over fuzzy fractured riffage, even some drumming, but all the instruments are smeared and blurred and muddied, so instead of coming even remotely close to sounding like a proper rock record, it still sounds like a Ferraro jam, but this time it's got more of a Ariel Pink meets Prince vibe (mostly cuz of the vox), the music tweaked and twisted, the fact that it's actually being played and then buried under a patina of muted hiss and hum, makes it all the more compelling. We're sure there was actual playing on other records, but this one sounds the most like a band, albeit a damaged drugged out band from another dimension, where all communication takes place via busted up old transistor radios, and all record players shift from 33 to 45 constantly, so all sounds seem to twist and melt before your very ears. The soulful falsetto crooning is the high point here, turning even the most disjointed fucked up Jeck-ian jam into a dizzying slab of alien soul pop. Fans of Ariel Pink and other warped poppers, if you're not already hip to Ferraro's groove, now's the time...

Latest from this French one man depressive black metal band, whose name means 'greyish', which is actually not a bad description of Grisatre's washed out minor key buzz and blast, definitely a sort of 'grey metal', very melodic and melancholic, reminding us of Happy Days and Hypothermia, being yet another group whose shrieked vokills are mostly what keeps the sound firmly entrenched in the black metal world. And yeah, the guitars buzz, the drums blast, the recording is murky and lo-fi, but even at full blast, the guitars chime and ring out mournfully, and the songs evolve continuously (the three tracks here are all between 13-16 minutes long), so the sound slips into woozy midtempo melancholia as often, if not MORE often, than it explodes into blasting black buzz. Three long stretches of loping buzz soaked mesmer, peppered with bursts of more overt blackness, but also creepy shimmery drones, there even seems to be some warm swirls of softly psychedelic synthesizer in the mix, and amidst everything, there are some truly divine moments of melodic bliss, gorgeous bits of pop songsmithery buried in the murk, as well as twisted bits of production, that turn what could have been something more more generic, into something a little bit more far out and weirdly warped. It's also one of the rare BM records where you can actually hear the bass, and not JUST hear it, as it's a sinewy melodic driving force in the sound, giving much of this a gloomy post punk vibe as well. We're digging this big time, and we're guessing if you like buzzy melancholia and hauntingly melodic 'grey' metal (and really why wouldn't you?), then you will too.

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We reviewed a record by Canadian drone combo Ashtorath a few lists back, an amazing disc of dark and harrowing, cinematic dronescapes. Released on one of our favorite labels, NOTHingness. As we mentioned in that review, NOTHingness closed up shop, and in its place was born Consouling Sounds. We proclaimed Ashtorath the last NOTHingness release, when in fact there was one more, this, the 2005 demo from Grivf, a mysterious funeral folk metal one man band from Denmark. Reissued as a super limited cd-r last year, this is in fact the first we've heard from Grivf, and we have to say we're pretty into it. Falling sonically somewhere between Skepticism and Make A Change Kill Yourself, but with long stretches of spacey dark ambience, no drums to speak of, so even at its heaviest, the record sprawls and oozes, the vocals a rumbling demonic gurgle, the guitars mournful and so so depressive, everything swathed in distortion, the melodies minor key and miserable, the tracks crawling and slithering, through black clouds and even blacker fields of sonic misery . Some tracks lace acoustic guitars over pounded piano, unfurling a creepy funereal folk, that broods intensely, only to be swallowed up by a wave of crumbling distorted buzz, and harsh blackened vokills, but the guitar and the piano never stop. Instead infusing the black metallic drone with a super creepy vibe, elsewhere strings and synths play the same part, spreading out into long grey streaks, everything washed out and lit by a dying black sun, this is some of the most fantastically and gorgeously depressive music we've heard in ages. A few of the tracks take distorted riffage, steel string guitars, and piano, and let them get all tangled up, weaving a heartbreaking doomic black lament, weirdly melodic but still oh so melancholy. Dark and depressive, heavy and slow, ambient and abstract, drone-y and sludge-y, miserable and mournful, drone-y and utterly haunting, some seriously essential listening for the black hearted. SUPER LIMITED. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. We did get a bunch, but these are the last copies, the label is defunct, so once these are gone, they are gone forever.

MPEG stream: Midgaard
MPEG stream: Hvad Isen Skjuler

It took some of us a while to come around, but we eventually ended up digging Grizzly Bear's debut, Veckatimest, quite a bit - orchestral pop equal parts Van Dyke Parks and Elliott Smith, lush and lovely, impossibly catchy, dreamily dramatic. So we were definitely prepared to dig this new one, but we weren't necessarily prepared for THIS. Give the opening track a listen (the first sound sample below), and be as baffled by us by GB's new sound, and we mean baffled in a good way, a really good way, in place of their sweetly twee Pitchfork-y pop, is something downright PROGGY, dark and driving, they sound like some obscure Italian prog from the seventies, we hear a little Yes too, some Comus even, everything minor key and darkly tinged, intensely strummed acoustic guitars, the vocals reminding us of Terry Reid, the dense mix rife with blooping percolating synths, driven by bombastic drumming, the sounds stereo panned, swooping from speaker to speaker, there's even some seriously hard rocking fuzz drenched psych guitar, it's total modern retro trip out psychedelic prog. We're curious how fans of the last record will feel about this, but we can definitely tell you we're LOVING it. Sort of the way Malachai reimagined seventies proto metal and fuzzy psych rock, the sound here, at least in places, is equal parts obscure prog and acid folk, a bit modernized for sure, but that opener, wow. Nothing else on the record is so overtly retro prog, but that vibe does ooze into the rest of the record, giving the whole thing a definite retro feel, the production, the arrangements, the songs, plenty of tripped out experimentation, dark drones, GB's dreamy pop does of course shine through in places, but for the most part, the feel is a bit more haunting and melancholic, and yeah, folky / proggy / sixties / seventies sounding, with some of the songs dipping into early Peter Gabriel and Genesis territory (just check out "What's Wrong"), and others unfurling as almost classic rock sounding ballads, but darkly psychedelic and dramatically brooding (check out the closer "Sun In Your Eyes"), which makes for a cool / strange balance for the overt pop that surfaces throughout. Awesome!

MPEG stream: Sleeping Ute
MPEG stream: Speak In Rounds
MPEG stream: What's Wrong
MPEG stream: Sun In Your Eyes

The third beautiful lp of sublime guitar instrumentals from local luminary Danny Paul Grody. Grody has a rich history of intricate musicianship with bands The Drift, and Tarentel and his side-projects Believer and Moholy-Nagy, but it's with his deeply introspective solo records that Grody shines the most. He tends to be lumped in with the American Primitive scene, and he can play with the best of them, but his music draws from deeper wells, such as Eastern mysticism, ritualistic drone music and the timbre explorations of influential composer Lou Harrison. Grody uses chiming guitar figures and sonorous synth drones that build slowly into vast mountains of sound then cascade into fluid filigrees and rapturous waves. We've loved all of Grody's solo records, but this one may just be our favorite. Download code included!

MPEG stream: Still Night
MPEG stream: Grass Nap
MPEG stream: Ojito (At Sunset)