We made the first record from this awesomely monikered UK outfit, Silent Cenotaph, our Record Of The Week, way back in 2011, and at the time described them with some band math that looked a little like this: Shit And Shine + Butthole Surfers + Lightning Bolt. The sound was a dizzyingly psychedelic barrage of grinding, rhythmic, electronics doused in druggy tribal freakout, like a super charged This Heat, the drummers kit wired to a mad scientist array of machinery and noise making devices, turning the kit into some giant rhythmic noise machine, and enabling a duo to kick up a din that sounds like it couldn't possibly be made by just two people, and while that first record generally hewed toward a sound that was more chaotic and bombastic, this new one seems to be a bit more melodic and dare we say mellow, there's still plenty of sonic ferocity, and rhythmic bombast for sure, but it sounds more measured, more deftly assembled, maybe less 'punk', but only in the way that bands get better at what they do, and in theory, take what was great about their previous records, and add to it, creating something, even more forward reaching, and ultimately perhaps even better.
Such is the case with Mirrors Fold. We still do LOVE Silent Cenotaph, and it routinely gets play on the iPod even still, but this new one is more subtle, more textural, whereas that first one was the sort of music you wanted to rock out to, jump around and go crazy, this new one, manages to harness that feral energy into something much more focused. The opener begins all swirly and serene, with hushed ambient shimmer, chant-like vocals, be before long the drums explode, adding a churning rhythmic component, without detracting from the melodic component or the vocals, it's not really until a brief bit of hushed shimmer, a barely there ambient interlude, that the song truly launches into crazed sonic chaos, a dizzying blurry flurry of drum madness, a wild octopoidal tangle of tangled jumbled rhythms, that eventually give away to a skeletal bit of rhythmic drift, before one final push, where the drums, the vocals, and swirls of FX are all wound into a dense propulsive tribal spacey noise rock blowout. Phew!
And so it goes, the band laying down mesmerizing hypno-rhythms, while all around strange effects swoop in and out, extra percussion, echoey vox floating above, thick rumbling bass below, sitar like buzz slithers throughout, the sound and arrangement super dynamic, a bit proggy, certainly psychedelic, a sort mutant psych-prog, Afro-space groove. Some moments are like some outer space version of Afro-fuzz Swedes Goat, others sound like a super charged, space rock Necks, a few tracks get downright heavy, and sound like some tripped out psychedelic space outfit, a few tracks sound like a crazy demonic alter ego of This Heat, a few others remind us of the twisted afro-noise of William Bennett's Cut Hands, there are moments of Muslimgauze like Eastern rhythmatism, there are even moments that remind us of Animal Collective at their very weirdest, but really most of this just sounds Gum Takes Tooth, and absolutely nobody else, a totally twisted genius amalgam of all the above mentioned references, deftly shaped into something at once warped and weird, wild and experimental, but also totally hypnotic, and melodic, strangely lovely and in its own way, extremely catchy. A new favorite for sure. And a total shoe-in not just for Record Of The Week, but for our year end best of's too...
Imagine a band that sounded like a bastard mix of UK-via-Texas, multiple drummered noise rockers Shit And Shine, grinding bass and drum duo Lightning Bolt and legendary weirdo drug rock combo Butthole Surfers. Then imagine the sort of din such a band could and would kick up and mix in all manner of mangled and freaked out electronics. Finally, imagine all of that noise being conjured up essentially by a single drum kit. And thus you have UK duo Gum Takes Tooth, which is essentially a drummer, whose drums are wired up to a dizzying array of home brewed electronics and tone bent circuit boards, with a second member tweaking and fucking with the sound in real time. 43 minutes of electronic-ed drumming might not sound that appealing to some folks, but don't make the call until you get an earful of the sounds these two whip up. Sure at times it's raw and rhythmic, noisy and chaotic, but the sounds here are all over the map, from super charged This Heat style rhythmic workouts, to blasting almost grind metal like blow outs, minimal FX fueled ambient drifts, to tripped out sci-fi psychedelia, murky, meandering distorto slow-core to frenzied noise drenched prog and pretty much every conceivable stop inbetween. Add in some Merzbow style noise, a little Psychic Paramount drum heavy post rock heaviness, some world music like tribalism, and stir it all up, and voila.
Opener "Young Mustard" is a pretty good sampling of what these guys are capable of, offering up a wild frenzy of tribal drum pound, weird processed vox, swirling electronics and FX, which eventually explode into some seriously aggro Lightning Bolt style, blast beat driven, downtuned grind, only to blossom into some Six Finer Satellite like synth-drum craziness, before the whole thing devolves into a abstract stretch of minimal clatter, random bloops and bleeps, swirling electronics, all beginning a slow build, the tribal drums swooping back in, slowly goring more distorted and intense, until finally fracturing into what sounds a bit like the Ruins crossed with Man Is The Bastard, thick blown out buzz low tones, pounding drums, howled processed vox, all woven into a seriously crushing electro-dirge.
"Tankjott" is another good one, starting out with some rapid fire kick drums, some gurgly vox, some squiggly electronics, building to a lurching, stuttery groove, soon more electronics, and more of that heavy bass buzz swoop in, and it's some sort of metallic krautpsych groove, with all manner of buzzes, strange twisted vocals, electronic pulses, before exploding into another fried and buzz drenched rhythmic workout, sounding to us like a way more chaotic / noisy / electronic version of MITB offshoot Geronimo, definitely the heaviest track here, sounding almost metal, but via Hawkwind and This Heat and Melt Banana and all blurred into some impossibly mesmerizing electrometal krautgroove, WAY too short at 7+ minutes.
And in between those two tracks, plenty of hypnotic, cyclical, rhythmic noise, progged out heaviness, stuttery drum heavy buzz and psychedelic noise rock, usually all at the same time, "Strychnine Motive" probably the most traditionally song sounding, but it's really relative, while "The Earth's Mantle Colonised" takes that same sort of sound and trips it WAY out into some sort of psychedelic space rock, the vocals chopped and processed, plenty of spacey squiggles and weird chanted vocals, the whole thing still drum driven big time, "Nomad/Monad" sounds like some bastardized gamelan orchestra, or a punk rock electronic noise version of Konono No.1, all looped thumb piano like melodies, tangled up and barraged by all manner of strange sounds, and then finally, record closer "Hermaphrodite And Nourishment" which does in fact feature a member of Shit And Shine on second drum kit, and while we were expecting a super frenzied drum heavy blowout, instead, it might be the pretties song on the record, all moody and loping and melodic, laced with ringing Tibetan bowls, crooned softly distorted vocals, squalls of feedback, and the cool thing is it never really explodes or freaks out, instead, it's just gorgeously mesmerizing and hypnotic, droned out and tribal, the perfect sort of sonic come down at a record that spends much of its time at a serious musical fever pitch.
Probably one of our most exciting recent musical discoveries (thanks Jason P.!), and with every listen this record continues to confound and delight and reveal more of the weird shit that seems to constantly be going on just below the surface, and odds are if you like any/some/all of the above mentioned bands, imagine them all mashed together and distilled into some wildly and gloriously twisted hybrid, and we imagine you'll probably be as knocked out as we were.
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Steve Gunn of GHQ and Magik Markers among others, offers up some truly dreamy drone-y ragas on this WAY out of print super limited cd-r, originally released early last year, and inexplicably unreviewed until now. Guitars, banjo, voice and sample, woven into thick hypnotic mesmerizing swaths of buzz and strum, like Fahey arranged by Niblock. But that's just the first track. The other three tracks slip from blissed out psychfolk drift, lazy smoke-y guitars slithering through wispy clouds of whir and shimmer, to abstract, avant Appalachia, all obtuse strum and pick, to soft acoustic folk music, with lots of space, and gorgeous little tangles of minor key melody.
Definitely will appeal to fans of Blackshaw, Rose, and other dronefolkers. Packaged in cool hand assembled sleeves, hand stamped, with a photocopied insert, and a phot pasted to the front. Originally limited to 90 copies, this is obviously WAY sold out, and these are thus the last copies ever...
Yet another one of the ultra limited Record Store Day releases, we got enough of this one to review for all the faraway folks who couldn't be here on the day. A killer split, one side longtime aQ fave Ilyas Ahmed, teamed up with Steve Gunn on the other.
Ahmed offers up some warm sun dappled Appalachia, lush strummed 12 string guitars, all minor key and melancholic, accompanied by wispy reverbed vox, plaintive and intimate, the sound hazy and hypnotic. Near the end, buzzing streaks of electric guitar swoop in, hushed swells and layered harmonies, turning the folkiness into something more moody and softly psychedelic.
Gunn counters with his own take on Appalachia, a stripped down bluesy vamp, a little bit bluegrass, a bit folky, warm overtones, lots of layered buzz, Gunn's vocals deeper and more gruff, swaddled in reverb and delay, the various spidery melodies seem to grow more tangled as the song progresses, a gorgeous chunk of bluesy psych folk for sure.
LIMITED TO 800 COPIES, only 200 on clear, which are the ones we have. Housed in a super swank jacket with original artwork by Ahmed.
Gunshop is the work of Chicago noise artist Blake Edwards. This album (quite possibly his first) falls cleanly within the purist boundaries of noise culture and power electronics, with elements of Mego's computerized collage stutter introducing extended passages of whistling electronic squeals found on all of the Whitehouse albums (no William Bennett-esque nightmarish rants on Gunshop tho). What is surprising about this record is how it relies on the subtlety of sound rather than the all consuming control of the listening experience...
Byram once asked the rhetorical question, "What self-respecting composer doesn't have their oevre divided into three periods?" While Mr. Abbott was describing one of the many successes from the late period of Morton Feldman, Bernhard Gunter is a composer
Where albums like "Un Peu De Neige Salie," and "Details Agrandis" situated barely audible pin pricks of piercing sounds against fields of Promethean silences, that aforementioned trilogy finds Gunter increasing the volume to far more perceptible levels and filling lengthy spaces with fluid passages of gradually building / decaying tonalities. He has proudly exclaimed all of his influences (Xenakis, Rothko, Feldman, Nono, and Bill Viola) through his work, and these pieces clearly show how great an influence Feldman especially has been upon his electro-acoustic minimalism. Gunter has quite literally been extending the slow motion aesthetics of Morton Feldman out of the chamber ensemble and into the language of electronic abstraction.
Gunter still maintains that all of his compositions are the manipulation of everyday sounds, yet these processed elements hold richly complex sonorous qualities that are more in common with oboes, cellos, and church organs than radiator pipes or rustled cutlery.
The problems with the argument that Gunter has entered his second period are obvious: his changes aren't terribly radical in scope, and may merely give evidence to his aesthetic malleability, he hasn't made any grand existential changes in his life that could warrant a profound change in aesthetic; and, of course, Gunter hasn't made such a proclamation.
Regardless of this silly romp into semantics, Gunter has produced his best record to date in "Crossing The River (Night Music)." Thank you for your patience.
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"Monochrome Rust" -- which completes the ideas found on Gunter's "Monochrome White" double disc set -- finds Gunter returning to the space of near inaudibility as previously explored on his earlier work in "Details Agrandis" and "Un Peu De Neige Salie." I say near inaudibily, as Gunter has constructed this piece to maintain a consistency through the incredibly tiny crackling of digital shimmer and erratic high end warbling; but at normal listening levels, it is so quiet as to barely assert itself above the hard drive from the computer I'm using to write this review. When the drive powers down every couple of minutes and the sounds of "Monochrome Rust" are left to situate themselves against the background of Valencia Street road noise, this chorus of digital chirps is incredibly complex, building subtle repetitions and orchestrating various swells in density.
Gunter pairs "Monochome Rust" with "Differntial," an equally ephemeral construction that ripples with a vaguely noxious tonal frequency amidst the delicate digital clattering. I'm still much more of a fan of Gunter's recent "Crossing The River," but this is much more interesting than the majority of the Microsound encampment.
The ultra-minimalist Bernhard Gunter created Monochrome White in attempts to simulate the experiential weightlessness that Gunter found within a recent Bill Viola retrospective of his video installations. Gunter conceptualized that this mimesis could take place through a steady spectrum of high frequencies, as if they could "lift it off the ground, so to speak." Monochrome White is
As Gunter's last couple of releases have been dedicated to Xenakis, Feldman, Bill Viola, Rothko, and Luigi Nono, his work could be qualified as a sort of ultra-minimalist portraiture, with each album as a quiet impression of how Gunter remembers and / or has
The second piece "Abscheid" is a wholly different composition of softened orchestral elements, what could be french horn, cello, church organ, and even a few pluckings of a harp, that have been drawn out into lovely darkened drones and sustained tonalities. Very nice.
With the recent reissues from Luigi Nono and Morton Feldman, their influences upon ultra-minimalist Bernhard Gunter appear quite pronounced, mostly through compositional similarities in building slow organic fluctuations, although all three have arrived at a
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With all of the sirens, cell phone conversations that need to be directed outside, and ambient street noise, a Bernhard Gunter record with all of the details buried deep within the non-space of quiet shouldn't be able to be heard above the ambient din of Aquarius. Yet, "Time, Dreaming Itself" is an outrageous Gunter record, simply because it's audible. Fragments of organ drone fizzle from complex fields of haziness into delicate detail work of crackling digital minutae. It could be that Gunter's intent has shifted way from allowing his work to slowly build out of silence into a louder volume that captures the listeners attention and then wanes into his more trademarked sub-audibilities!
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Inspired by the modernist minimalism of Mark Rothko, Bernhard Gunter presents a rather audible composition (in comparison to his other not so audible records) of his dark gray minimalism in which gossamer fragments of droning sound are situated on the 'trademarked' silences as icy aural floes exposing their textural surfaces under sparse glimmers of lights. Recommended.
Minimalist composers Bernhard Gunter and Steve Roden had intended on selling this split CD exclusively on their tour in Japan in November 2001, but became so fond of the recordings they decided to let the rest of the world have access to them as well. Gunter
Oh boy! This is another one of those releases that pushes all of our overwhelming music obsessive buttons, like the Conet Project, The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000 box, the Yahowa 13cd box, the 50 cd Merzbox, the Ayler Holy Ghost box...
Compiled and produced by Gert-Jan Blom of the Beau Hunks, Harmonic Development brings to light the long lost harmonium performances of the fascinating Georg Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) whom some of you will know much better as a thinker and philosopher than a musician. This release consists of a beautifully designed 140 page softbound book filled with tons of photos and historical and personal minutae, accompanied by two compact discs of music in a digipack AND an additional disc of mp3's (that brings the total amount of music to over 19 hours!!) as well as a cool MPEG video of Gurdjieff home movies. Holy crap! So first, who was G.I. Gurdjieff? Well, the simple version is that Gurdjieff was an early twentieth century Russian mystic (and retired hypnotist), who drew inspiration from Sufism, and was fascinated with music. Gurdjieff had composed for piano for some years, but late in life he acquired first a wire recorder, and then a tape recorder, to document his improvisations (his "moosic") on the harmonium, a sort of pump organ, that produces a sound that is rich and full, a sort of lush, wheezing melodious moan, haunting and otherworldly. This collection gathers up recordings from the forties, from the last few years of Gurdjieff's life, and feature loads of intimate performances, several talks, and lots of ambient chit chat. It seems that Gurdjieff would perform a piece, slow and sad and gorgeously dreamy, enveloping all of his listeners in the mood, and when he was finished, he would then crack jokes and make small talk. Many of these performances feature this strange juxtaposition of almost religious intensity, and breezy lighthearted banter, which was somehow another part of his unique world view. We've yet to delve completely into the book, but even on their own, the discs are wonderful and completely mesmerizing, offering up hours of droney, mysterious harmonium music, but all sorts of ambient sounds and snippets of conversations as well, giving these recordings almost the same sort of vibe as the Conet Project, a distant dark mystery, as if these sounds were pulled from the ether, captured from another world and another time. At once recognizable, but at the same time totally alien.
And as you enjoy the hours of recordings, you can peruse the book which contains a preface by Robert Fripp, information on the unearthing and restoration of the recordings, track notes, transcriptions of the talks, as well as recollections of Gurdjieff's final year from a host of friends and students, among them the daughter of Frank Lloyd Wright.
There's an ongoing argument at aQ headquarters about which is more preferable: a selection of a artist's musical works or the -complete- recordings. Of course that questions is completely relative to which artist one is talking about, and everyone will have a totally different opinion based on who you ask. But it instantly came to mind when we got this gorgeous new Mississippi reissue of Gurdjieff Harmonium Improvisations.
A little backstory: The fascinating Georg Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) whom some of you will know much better as a thinker and philosopher than a musician, was an early twentieth century Russian mystic (and retired hypnotist), who drew inspiration from Sufism, and was fascinated with music. Gurdjieff had composed for piano for some years, but late in life he acquired first a wire recorder, and then a tape recorder, to document his improvisations (his "moosic") on the harmonium, a sort of pump organ, that produces a sound that is rich and full, a sort of lush, wheezing melodious moan, haunting and otherworldly. He would often record these performances after hosting dinners and various social gatherings in New York and Paris both during its occupation and then right after the war had ended. Most of the surviving recordings come from the last year of his life.
Awhile back we got in a sprawling multi-disc / hardcover book box set on Basta (which is now sadly out of print), of his complete Harmonium Recordings. Over two cds, AND a third disc of mp3s, the entire output was 53 tracks and about 19 hours! That's a lot of harmonium recordings, and needless to say a bit daunting to take in and absorb, even if it was totally amazing. But what was really cool about that vast collection was the super intimate performances and long durations of the pieces (most in the 9-20 minute range), the sound of the harmonium peppered with all sorts of incidental ambience. It seems that Gurdjieff would perform a piece, slow and sad and gorgeously dreamy, enveloping all of his listeners in the mood, and when he was finished, he would then crack jokes and make small talk. Many of these performances feature this strange juxtaposition of almost religious intensity, and breezy lighthearted banter, which was somehow another part of his unique world view.
This current collection on Mississippi was originally issued as a French private press release in 1971 and is a sampling of seven performances between April and October of 1949. While taken from the vast collection of recordings, we believe they were edited down for length with much of the external ambience (banter, coughing, bellow clatter, etc) taken out, save for a final "Amen" at the very end of side 2, which is totally apropos, given the spiritual quality of the performances. The music though, is wonderful and completely mesmerizing, offering up lush, meditative, ritualistic, droney, melancholic harmonium music, a distant dark mystery, as if these minor key sounds were pulled from the ether, captured from another world and another time. Not quite ragas, more like slow and sad oceanic sea shanties. At once recognizable, but at the same time totally alien.
An early predecessor to the searching individualistic devotional recordings of Joakim Skogsberg, Daniel Higgs and Malachi, this is a perfect antidote for those seeking an immersion into Gurdjieff's mystical sound world without having to commit to a complete lifetime of listening.
A NOTE ABOUT THE SOUND SAMPLES: Due to the different title methods used between this record and the Basta collection, we couldn't find an exact match for sound samples, so we took similar sounding pieces from the same period from the Basta collection so you can get an idea of what this sounds like more or less.
We didn't know too much about this, other than it's a lost eighties recording of turntable manipulation and plunderphonia from a member of Homosexuals related outfit Milk From Cheltenham (the band whose name inspired Stephen Stapleton of Nurse With Wound to name his label United Dairies by the way), but really they had us at turntable manipulation and plunderphonia, and that's just what this is, split into a bunch of short tracks, this plays as a single sprawling dizzying epic, which apparently was born of multiple mixes of a song built from a ROOM SIZED 24 track loop, and it's pretty crazy, sample voices, snippets of orchestras, pounding percussion, woozy strings, the sounds warped and warbly, distorted and a little crackly, booming reverbed pianos, creepy snippets of soundtracks, bleating horns, excerpts from some old language lesson tape, skittery jazz, constantly shifting pitches, lots of warble, the sounds themselves strange, but their condition, and their treatment, including what sounds like manual finger on the record manipulation, is what really makes this so psychedelic and tweaked sounding. Many of the sounds here were unused and remixed excerpts of recordings which would eventually become the title track of the Milk From Cheltenham lp, which according to the label was "a tape collage of the live mixdown of 17 cassette recordings of locked record grooves, simultaneously, with stray radio and an infernal matchbox."
Apparently, the second disc is a collection of recordings discovered while digging through tapes in search of a master for disc one, and plays out much like the first disc with the main difference being a bit of bizarre and primitive drum programming, otherwise, it's another dizzying collection of strange sounds, mysterious voices, sonic snippets, all constantly manipulated and messed with. Although those rhythms somehow make it sound even more fractured and fucked up. Definitely the sort of thing that should appeal to fans of John Oswald, Negativland, Philip Jeck, Otomo Yoshihide, Strotter Inst, LAFMS, Dennis Duck, Martin Tetreault and other tape loop / turntable experimentalists.
Both discs include lengthy bonus tracks featuring yet more material, in this case intended for a never realized second Milk From Cheltenham lp, and while there's a booklet / poster, it doesn't offer much in the way of liner notes...
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This isn't what we normally expect from Austrian label Rock Is Hell, who in the past have brought us all flavors of weirdness/heaviness, from folks like Shit And Shine, Burmese, Nate Denver's Neck, Mark Deutrom, Ocrilim, Thee Oh Sees, XBXRX and more, but here we have some serious jazz, obviously on the noisy side still, but it's legendary saxophonist Gustafsson, here teamed up with Austrian drummer Didi (aka Dieter) kern, and the two engage in some serious skitter and skronk. A 20 minute blast of wild, chaotic, octopoidal drum splatter wound around a fantastic cacophony of bleats and blorps, the two constantly locking into some serious grooves, sort of avant free jazz funk at times, but always splintering back into something super free and abstract, the whole jam a constant push and pull between free from outjazz and dense freejazz groove. Killer stuff, essential modern free jazz for sure, and only an excerpt of a much longer jam!
This is a single sided lp, LIMITED TO 222 COPIES, each one hand numbered, housed in a silkscreened jacket, with full color paste on cover art.
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I've been seeing Brent Gutzeit's name popping up recently as the guy who will open for any experimental artist who is touring the States... He played with Reynols, Mikael Stavostrand, Oval, and Stillupsteypa. You can certainly see why he's been getting such nice gigs. "New Kmocas" is a recent cd-r release of ring modulating bell tones that continuously drone until tight controlled blasts of noise glitch change the aural scenario. Pretty good stuff, and look for a Mort Aux Vaches and a Meme release. Hopefully all of this work will be as good as this one and won't suffer the problem of too much promotion and not enough thought put into the music.
Another gorgeous release from Mystery Sea, whose sonic focus is on "night-ocean drones", and more than anything we've heard on MS, Umbilicus Maris by New Zealand one man drone outfit Gydja perfectly embodies that focus.
Umbilicus Maris is very oceanic, aquatic, even sub-aquatic. The rhythm is tidal, a subtle pulse, a gradual swell, the sounds shift and shimmer like light through water, and of the handful of Mystery Sea releases we've heard, Umbilicus Maris is the loudest and most active. That's in no way to infer that this is anything but drifting blissy ambience. It most certainly is, but the sounds are not lowercase. Not barely audible. Abby Helasdottir, the sole soul behind Gydja, brings the sounds to the fore, they are dark and mysterious, droning and drifting, but they are loud, the listener can hear them, FEEL them, peer inside and around, can experience the sound physically, get lost inside the sound. A pair of headphones is all you need to get sucked under, floating weightless in a strange sun dappled undersea world of sound.
Field recordings (tides, oceans, streams?) are mixed with performances, all processed into some otherworldly soundscape, or seascape. Burbling, shimmering, glistening, glimmering, everything slightly blurry, warped and warbled, multiple layers, shifting and drifting, low end rumbles slowly drift to the surface, where strange sonic skitters and burbles float on the surface, everything drenched in echo and reverb, like some massive undersea cavern, lit only by a single shaft of sunlight, the sounds of dripping water magnified into swirls of sound, distant percussive pings, an ultra abstract undersea dub. So completely warm and dreamlike, headphones like a diving bell, eyes closed, no need to breathe, letting the sound wash over you, slowly sinking to the bottom of some warm sonic sea. Absolutely gorgeous.
And like all Mystery Sea releases, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc numbered, and gorgeously packaged in striking full color artwork.
We've said it before, but it bears repeating, we LOVE when we discover amazing music made by one of our customers. Gyron V is in fact our customer / pal Terje Oeveraas, from Norway, who has been quietly self-releasing limited cd-r's, very few of which it seems have made it over here, in fact if we didn't know Terje personally, odds are we wouldn't have heard or seen any of them. So thanks to Jason at Living Tapes, who's stepped in on the 10th anniversary of Gyron V, and put together a sort of greatest hits / career retrospective, gathering up tracks from the first five cd-r's as well as some compilation tracks, and thus we have Muscae Volitantes. But what does it sound like? Well, the label describes the music of Gyron V as being "fueled by folk music and new wave in equal measure", and that's not all that far off. There's definitely a serious neo-folk vibe happening here, deep dramatic vox, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, spidery melodies, a moody intimate ambience, everything echo drenched and bathed in reverb, the opener "Climbing The Blue Pavillion", reminds us a bit of country-goth crooner King Dude, while "In The Circles Of Ether" adds primitive drum machine, a motorik mechanical rhythm beneath, shimmery chords, and some dreamy falsetto vox. There's definitely a new wave feel to some of the songs, but it seems to be more in mood and melody than sound, as most of Muscae plays out like a super intimate home recorded bedroom folk, although at times, we're alternatingly reminded of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Death In June, New Model Army, Angels Of Light, Current 93, Roy Montgomery, fans of any or all of those bands will dig this stuff big time, and will most likely find themselves hunting down the original cd-r's as well. Moody and darkly psychedelic, the instrumental backdrops lush and brooding, melancholic and achingly contemplative, the vocals transforming the mood of each song, whether it's haunting and hushed, moody and brooding, or strident and majestic. Gorgeous stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
First V/VM Test release that isn't a completely moronic conceptual art piece of shit. H>OST is the work of Polish artist Jacek Toszek. Cold and beautiful sonic landscapes much like those found in his native land, Toszek captures and embraces the frigidity
Wow, now someone's done a first-time-on-vinyl version of this interesting Bruce Haack artifact. It came out on cd about 13 years ago, that's now out of print, and this is what we said then:
This is the previously unreleased 1979 sequel to Bruce Haack's 1970 Electric Lucifer LP, perhaps the most awesomely bizarre psychedelic pre-Kraftwerk electronica album ever to be released on a major label (Columbia) or elsewhere. The robotic voices and mechanical rhythms that made the first Electric Lucifer such a cult kitsch classic are still present on Book II, although it's perhaps more poppy and goofy and less disturbingly weird than its predecessor. Aside from that one (not-too-successful) major label release, Haack's career from the '60s through the early '80s focused on self-released electronic children's records, which while certainly amusing (and of interest for his innovative home-built synths), of course don't come close to the trippy electro-rock and serious religious themes of the Electric Lucifer concept. Book II is a definite treat for Haack fans, nice to have it on vinyl, and lookin' good.
If you're like us, you can never get enough Bruce Haack. Pretty much everything he touched was amazing, as well as way ahead of its time from a technical standpoint. Haack's genius, however, is that at the core of his strange electronic music is real emotional depth.
The most obvious comparison for Bruce Haack's sound would be Kraftwerk, and surely both parties were taking electronic music into unprecedented new territories. It's a bit of a lazy comparison though, as Haack's pioneering work actually predated Kraftwerk as most people know them, and it overlooks how unique Haack's approach to songwriting was. Haack is most famous for the Electric Lucifer album, definitely his strongest and most conceptually realized statement, but he also made children's music, as well as some more, shall we say "adult-themed" compositions. There was even an Electric Lucifer Book 2 and a number of perfect pop singles. Farad (the name of the homemade vocoder he used extensively, named in honor of famed British scientist Michael Farraday but also sounding a bit like "far out") collects prime cuts from 1970 to 1982, showing an artist who remained true to his initial vision while continuing to break boundaries. Haack was a man who wanted to share his songs with the world, as evidenced by a quote in this album, and accordingly, his music is very fun to listen to. Songs like "Rita" are really beyond any sort of reference point, just weird and beautiful and insanely poppy gems that even today sound beyond anything else. Other numbers like "Man Kind" from the Haackula album are spacey sci-fi romps filled with all kinds of great analog atmosphere and evocative vocoded lyrics that flow like bizarre little nursery rhymes. Then you get some racier stuff from the 80s like "Snow Job" and "Program Me", the latter of which resurrects a song from the Electric Lucifer and re-envisions it in a colder, more robotic way for some great results. Haack even proves with 1982's "Party Machine" that he was fully ready to embrace the progression of electronic dance music while still sounding unlike anyone else. It's crazy to listen to the more playful material alongside the epic storytelling of the Electric Lucifer tracks, as you realize Haack grasped so many types of music with a wide range of emotions, and merged this with bold electronic innovation. As a compilation, Stones Throw have done a great job here, making this the obvious place to start for anyone unfamiliar with Haack's work while also being a great collection of some of his strongest songs. Awesome.
Wow. This is a real "believe it or not" release. We thought we knew all about eccentric electropop pioneer Bruce Haack (1931-1988). Omni's reissue of Haack's 1969 psychedelic synth classic The Electric Lucifer was an automatic Record Of The Week for us. But we'd never heard of Haackula before. However, it lives up to its billing as a "lost classic of outsider electronica" for sure. At first, we weren't sure what to expect, putting it on with some excitement and trepidation... rest assured, we now have big smiles on our faces. Haackula is playful and perverse, and perhaps more than a little bit paranoid. Imagine Perrey and Kingsley on some bad acid. Haack's electronically effected vocals here continue the wordplay that he delighted in on The Electric Lucifer but now, shockingly, some swear words have crept in, for instance he drops the f-bomb in the first song "Lie Back", wherein he also rhymes "schizoid" with "shitzoid"!
Bruce Haack unleashed his Moogs (and warped imagination) in his bedroom studio to create Haackula back in 1978, but it remained officially unreleased until now. Possibly 'cause a large portion of Haack's discography consists of records for children, we were really surprised by the R-rated content of Haackula. And the R isn't just for robotic. There's a song called "Blow Job" fer chrissakes. Perhaps this is why it never saw the light of day in Haack's lifetime...
Haack's homebuilt synths and rhythm machines bleep and bloop, shuffle and shudder, conjuring an alternate universe of electronic computer funk wackier and weirder and way more off-kilter than anything Kraftwerk was up to at the time. The musical sense of childlike innocence with which Haack was so adept is still happening here, these tracks are as tuneful and catchy as ever, but his mystical ideas are joined by sexual themes... where The Electric Lucifer was astrological, Haackula is scatological. Adult realities are confronting the outsider, making Haackula's haunted house electronics all the more eerie, while the bizzaro-factor (plus Haack's aforementioned songwriting skills) insure that it's all very entertaining, gleefully so.
And if Haackula itself wasn't cool enuff, there two equally mindblowing bonus tracks. First there's Bruce Haack's 1982 proto-hiphop collaboration with Def Jam's Russell Simmons, an 8 minute track entitled "Party Machine" that features funky Herbie Hancock "rockit" style grooves and deep distorted vocals laying down such science as "Haack attack is back... Bruce Haack... Anti-wack." Damn!
The other bonus track included is an epic 32:15 piece called "Icarus" that would have made a fine release all by itself. Commissioned in 1979 to accompany an avant-garde art exhibition in Guadalajara, it's a sensational soundscape of everything from mad scientist laboratory burbling to faux-classical fantasias, frightening noise and groovy beats...
Omni has done their usual nice job with this. It's remastered from the original master tapes, and includes a thick booklet. Extensive, informative liner notes tell the story of Haack's "lost years", about his psychological ups and downs, how his passion for music and technology (and the two together!) never flagged despite his lack of major label success after The Electric Lucifer failed to take the world by storm... we also learn how he hooked up with hiphop producer Simmons, though we're left wondering if any DJs back in the day ever got their hands on it. As well, the cd booklet includes vintage photos and lyrics to all the Haackula songs.
Like we said, believe it or not, it's true. Haackula lives!!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
This sixties electronic kids' classic reissued on vinyl!! Here's our review from when we listed the (now out of print) import cd version way back in 2004:
There was a time not too long ago when Bruce Haack was simply an anomalous footnote in the history of electronic music. But thanks to the rise of (for the lack of a more specific term) experimental music and the good folks making it, the gospel was spread and steps were taken to lift Haack's dedicated life's work out of the doomed classification of 'incredibly strange music'. In the late '90s, a vinyl reissue of Haack's legendary Electric Lucifer album appeared. Then in 1999, the QDK and Emperor Norton labels issued separate compilations of tracks selected from Haack's massive oeuvre: Hush Little Robot and Listen Compute Rock Home, respectively. These compilations featured a huge chunk of material originally released on Haack's own Dimension 5 imprint (with Listen Compute Rock Home being tagged as a D5 'best-of'), and set off a new generation of record geeks and purveyors of oddly adventurous sounds on the lookout for the original small press lps.
Introduced in 1963, Dimension 5 was a project created by Haack to reach children, as he believed that music could be a powerfully communicative, and ultimately educational, tool. Along with a host of guest musicians and educators (most notably Miss Esther Nelson), D5 set out to create inspiring and imaginative recordings - both sonically and narratively - for children of all ages. Having issued eleven lps over a span of thirteen years, Dimension 5 is certainly a musical phenomenon worth investigating itself, in addition to the other works of Bruce Haack. So here's 1969's The Electronic Record For Children, which just might be the best of the bunch.
This album is credited to Bruce Haack, but also prominently features Miss Nelson. Like the title implies, there is an emphasis on the use of electronics, but the narrative certainly doesn't take a back seat here. There are songs that are indirectly of an educational nature: "First Lady" is a skit in the style of a television game show in which a young girl lists off the names of the US presidents in chronological order, set to a robotic rhythm. Simple enough, but when the host asks the girl to recite the names in reverse order, Haack flips the tape backward, splices and cranks it - a total mindfuck for kids! Other 'lessons' teach us about rhythmics ("Clapping With Katy"), the compositional use of call and response ("Echo") and the life and daily routines of arachnids ("Spiders"). Inspired by the classes that Miss Nelson and Bruce once taught is the activity song "Dance", a Raymond Scott-fueled rollercoaster ride with wacked out helium vocals. But what stands out most for me on this recording are the songs of an abstract nature. "Mara's Mood" tells the story of 'a boy who tried to grasp the moon' over a loop of fuzzed out psychedelic guitar and synth. "Upside Down" could easily be mistaken for late sixties era British psychedelia a la Twink or Floyd. Quintron fans just might toss out their Quintron records when they hear the completely insane organ and rhythm box track credited, incredibly, to the Planet Of Singing Mice's Greek Cathedral Childrens' Mouse Choir, "Saint Basil". Definitely one of the better of the Dimension 5 releases, though there's something for everyone throughout all of their wondrous recordings!
We listed the 7" by these guys ages ago, and in that review coined the term DRONOISE for whatever it is that Haare do. A roiling black mass of distorted dark ambient, and slow motion abstract free-doom, that record went out of print in no time (it was limited to 270 copies after all) and we've been waiting patiently for more. And now it's finally here.
Another split release between two Finnish labels, Kult Of Nihilow (Fleshpress, Dot [.]. Marzuraan, Boris, Church Of Misery) and Freak Animal (a noise/drone/industrial sublabel of the mighty Northern Heritage). This Finnish one man band continue of from where that 7", and their last full length (The Temple, a Julian Cope Head Heritage record of the month!) left off.
Beginning with an avalanche of skree and shimmer, Haare navigates his strange vessel, assembled from skulls and bones, sticks and twigs, leaves and dried flesh, through four extended soundscapes, each rife with high end, but offering much in the way of deep rumbling drones and buzzing black ambience. Everywhere fall hailstorms of corroded crumbling melody, so blackened they appear more as grey smears than anything resembling melodies. Malfunctioning machinery groans and whirs, clouds of warped effects are shot through with streaks of feedback like shafts of sunlight, explosions of post industrial chaos, riffs pulled to pieces, the parts nothing but jagged shards of crumbling shimmer and decayed drone, everything bathed in a gritty, grimey unearthly glow. It almost sounds like Avarus and Yellow Swans, dosed with LSD and sealed up in a cave with nothing but some busted amps, guitars with no strings, a junky 4-track and the spirit of the undead cave dwellers.
Creepy and noisy, heavy and drone-y, buzzy and blackened and almost psychedelic.
Unfortunately, like the 7" before it, this is crazy limited, ONLY 275 COPIES!! And almost out of print at the label. We got a bunch, but they won't last long. And once they're gone, there's a good chance we won't be able to get more.
A brand new record from Finnish psychedelic noise alchemists Haare, and it's a doozy, two tracks, nearly 32 minutes of thick, swirling, blackened, corrosive crunch, and crumbling blackdrone shimmer.
Ritualistic and caustic, this is the sort of noise music we can get behind. Not white noise, but more like dense clouds of grey and brown noise, gristly, and crunchy, and abrasive, but simultaneously textured and layered, an epic and expansive sprawl of industrial thrum and buzzdrenched ambience. And there's organ. Lots of it. Creepy and haunting and mysterious, turning the noisiness into something way more chilling, it's like a blacknoise haunted house, or the sort of soundtrack you wish real scary movies would have, where the music elicits and evokes the same sort of horror and the visuals. And here, the organ also manages to settle and smooth out the sound, turning it into a more tranquil, almost soft noise, a blurred, blasted, coruscating ambience that is also moody and mournful and melancholy. Imagine Merzbow or Ramleh reinterpreting the soundtrack to Carnival Of Souls. Fuck yeah.
The second track is like a super charged, extra filthy and crusty version of the first, the organ still present, but way lower in the mix, the other sounds more fierce and frantic, streaks of feedback and squalls of blackpsych swirl, a furious sonic storm that again deftly straddles the line between speaker melting pummel, and blown out atmospheric softnoise drone.
So killer. And definitely a possible entree into the noise world for those who have yet to take that first terrifying step. And for sure just psychedelic enough to appeal to folks into all that blissed out, heavy dronepsych weirdness.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! In a eye popping full color A5 sized sleeve, featuring cover art by Andrew Labanaris, who has done art for Electric Wizard, Moss and others...
Almost before we even heard this, we knew it had to be an aQ Record Of The Week. A double dose of Finnish sonic insanity in the form of this insanely limited one sided 12", which finds Finnish one-man psychedelic noise project Haare, aka Ilkka Vekka, creating his new record, a single sprawling twenty minute soundscape, from various sounds, much of which is sourced from the 2004 album Forest by fellow Finns and all-time AQ faves, Circle!
Here Haare transforms what was already an atmospheric, sort of acoustic sinister spookiness, into something even more abstract, an arcane sonic ritual, all deep resonant rumbles, keening distant tones, rumbling thrums, haunting chimes, murky melodies, clouds of blurred metallic shimmer drifting over softly undulating sprawls of moody murk, a swirling smear of all manner of gauzy melodies, and ever-shifting texture. The sound barely obscuring creepy monstrous low end rumbles, that sound like some sort of demonic crooning. The upper register tones, sounding a bit like bowed metals, muted and muddied into sonorous tones, but that metallic buzz gradually breaking free from the murk and the mire, intensifying like some swarm of metal insects, way off in the distance, a sort of blurry buzz that billows ominously around the softly roiling ambience at the track's core. The sound obviously moving in a noisier direction, but finding a sort of swirling almost serene stasis just on this side of that ambience/noise barrier, the sounds gristly and crackling with energy, infused with a haunting dark mystery, that seems to imbue all the buzz and crunch with something much more soft focus and abstract, which somehow gradually attains a strange sort of next level dreamlike ambience, all the sounds blurring into a bleary bit of washed out thrum, a thick layered wall of super active sound, but with all the edges worn away, resulting in a slow pulsing stream of warm whir and dense warm dreamnoise, which reaches a sort of bliss out near-raga equillibrium in the last few minutes, and definitely has the listener in a total trance, and had us really wishing there was a second side.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered!!
Released on Freak Animal (a Northern Heritage offshoot dedicated to noise and industrial and drone music) and Kult Of Nihilow (home to Fleshpress, Dot [.]. Marzuraan, Boris, Church Of Misery, Ox) this ULTRA LIMITED 7" (only 270 copies!!!) is a massive slab of "dronoise" (just made that up but it's the perfect genre for stuff like this): dense clouds of caustic feedback, murky and thick and heavy, a bit like Sunroof! on some seriously bad drugs, the blissful raga vibe twisted and distorted into a roiling pit of black guitars and crumbling buzz. Side A is relentless and like dunking your head into a black hole. By side B the sound smoothes out a bit (only a bit) into a super harsh low end dronescape, huge tectonic rumbles beneath a swirling swarm of high end feedback squeals and streaks of barbed fuzz. Like Total on PCP.
LIMITED To 270 COPIES, we got about a dozen so act fast.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The unusual didjeridu of Haas meets up in improv duets with guests Fred Frith (guitar), Keiji Haino (voice), Ikue Mori (drum machines), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Anthony Coleman (organ), and Makigamai Koichi (voice).
NEW ON tUMULt!!!!
It's starting to get seriously tUMULtuous around here. One killer disc just out and still fresh, The Memories Attack, (one of ,if not THE pop record of last year, this year and any year, in Andee's humble opinion), THREE new releases about to drop (Diamatregon, Amocoma and the Ovens) and this, the first full length record from French ultra-mega-abstract-doom trio Habsyll, which just so happens to feature one member of the mighty Fantastikol Hole, as well as the former drummer of faerical punk blasters Nuit Noire!
But nothing, and we mean nothing will prepare you for Habsyll's particularly virulent strain of ultradoom. Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!
This is a split label release, tUMULt of course, along with 5 other kick ass labels: At War With False Noise, Obscure Sombre, PsycheDOOMelic, Skyr and Odio Sonoro.
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It's been over 4 years since we last heard from these guys, having raved about a stunningly handcrafted cd release back in 2010. Their sound, at the time, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", which essentially amounted to haunting black ambience and dark, minimal dronescapery, and their M.O. hasn't changed too much on this new tape via local label Black Horizons. Three tacks of creeping sonic malevolence, and brooding sinister soundscapes, if anything, their sound has developed into something a bit more industrial, the opener all dark chimes and shimmering metallics, pointalist piano and soft swirls of FX, spoken word vocals, and motorik percussion, the black ambience seemingly blossoming into a sort of death industrial, a lumbering gloom rock, slowed way down, flecked with moaning horns, and thick rumbling bass, distorted synth blurt, smears of chordal shimmer, giving way to something almost like black jazz, a soft noise drenched drift that unfurls like a black fog, anchored by spare percussion, and twisted fractured anti-rhythms, culminating in the hazy, dreamy closer, a swath of distorted thrum, draped over more spoken word, glacial riffage, spread out into blurred drones, before letting all the distortion, grit and grim wash away, leaving just a stretch of hushed shimmer, woozy minimal buzz, and terrifying whispers, a gauzy, darkly psychedelic finale, a slow build/fade blackened, mysterious and otherworldly. Whew.
Like all Black Horizons release, the packaging is exquisite, a die cut six panel J-card, silver metallic ink on matte black, black and silver cassettes, and of course EXTREMELY LIMITED, only 100 COPIES!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A Ec Ad, Halda Afram marks the fourth entry in yet another Hafler Trio series. At least for this body of work all published by Important Records, the Hafler Trio has kept his work reasonably priced in spite of its limited release. At the same time, each entry in the Important Records series clocks in at about 20 minutes, so the dollar per musical minute ratio is still about the same. Regardless, A Ec Ad, Halda Afram? is a bit of a departure for the Hafler Trio as Andrew McKenzie drops a slow crawling breakbeat into his sonic transmogrifier. Sounding an awful lot like the devastating beats of Techno Animal or The Bug, these breaks do possess a curious, disjointed warble that makes this uniquely the Hafler Trio. But of course, McKenzie takes almost 10 minutes of his alotted 20 very quietly shuffling around his soundfield before unleashing these breaks. Pretty great and as always, McKenzie leaves us scratching our heads; but one has to wonder if Important will go out of their way to irritate the Hafler Trio fans (and probably Andrew McKenzie for that matter!) by releasing the whole series in a single package much like the Acid Mothers Temple incidient a while back. Remember the Magical Power From Mars series?
No MP3 samples as requested by the Hafler Trio.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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With so many Hafler Trio releases being released from every corner of the world, it's not surprising that we almost missed this 10" on the Spanish label Rossbin, which typically promotes the austere strains of improv and electro-acoustics. Released earlier in 2004, A House Waiting For Its Master is pressed on a very thick piece of semi-transparent vinyl with three mid-length tracks of the high-quality dronescaping that has become the standard for The Hafler Trio in the past few months. At times, the drones are quite lovely, sounding like David Jackman's placid sustained flute constructions; yet, Andrew McKenzie (the sole member of the Trio) manipulates and modulates his minimalist constructions into abrasive psychoacoustic rumblings and intense acousmatic noises. Stock is limited!
When Mute reissued the Golden Hammer series by The Hafler Trio in the mid '90s as part of their Grey Area reissue campaign of industrial and post-industrial masterpieces, Mute dropped nearly 25 minutes of music from The Hafler Trio's perennially obtuse A Thirsty Fish. Nearly a decade later as Korm Plastics has been lovingly reissuing The Hafler Trio's early recordings, A Thirsty Fish now gets a proper re-release as a double disc set, with all of the material from the original 2LP presented in a remastered form. In an interview with Option magazine back in the late '80s, The Hafler Trio's Andrew McKenzie explained that the intent of A Thirsty Fish was "to confuse people until they couldn't think anymore, so they'd have to feel. It was conjuring. The idea was � and still is to a certain extent � watch this hand while the other hand goes into the pockets. The stuff that everybody sees is not actually the whole point. People can't see the whole point because it's like this covert action. But I'm still talking around it, I'm not going to put it in one easy bite-size piece because that would destroy the whole point of what I'm doing. I have a very definite intent, but if I talk about it, it will evaporate. If I put it into words, you'll just have an idea again � and then it's gone. All the stuff you see on the packaging, and the sounds in fact themselves, all that stuff Is just the fluff. The real stuff is actually going on somewhere else." Given the oblique collage techniques of electrified voices, erratically pitch-shifted tape modulations, puncturing noises, pure sine-wave generation, and decontextualized media samples, The Hafler Trio again succeeds in utter confusion.
Sorry, no MP3 samples are available for any Hafler Trio works.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
1996 was a particularly quiet year for the Hafler Trio; whereas in this day and age some nine years later, there's a major Hafler Trio release coming out almost every month or so. While the man behind the Hafler Trio -- Andrew M. McKenzie -- might like you to believe this or that about his slow down in activity during the mid '90s, his paucity of recordings was simply due to the fact that his job at the time kept from his art. How pleasantly mundane of the Gnostic sound sorcerer! Nonetheless, McKenzie did release Utterances of the Supreme Ventriloquist as a very expensive LP edition through Soleilmoon. While it doesn't belong to any of the great triologies (Kill The King / Mastery of Money / How To Reform Mankind) or serial works (The Golden Hammer series), this album fluidly introduces many of the pristine compositions of electric minimalism that grace his recent outpouring of work (How To Slice A Loaf of Bread, etc.), but also enjoys many of the discordant, psychoactive jolts and flourishes of those aforementioned earlier works. Glossalaliac ripples of feedback, terse repetitions of mechanoid rhythms, and immaculate drones meander through a whole host of psychologically tinged soundfields from frightening to holy to meditative to menacing. Beautifully packaged in the same style as the reissues found on Korm Plastics. And again, we cannot offer any MP3s for you to sample per the wishes of the Hafler Trio.
As much as Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio likes to present little bits of Gnostic wisdom in the titles of his records, Being A Firefighter Isn't About Squirting Water is oddly lacking in cleverness, weirdness, obtuseness, Hafler Trio-ness. In case you might think that McKenzie is loosing his mastery upon allegorical puzzles, metaphorical misdirections, and megalomaniacal obsessiveness, he does boldly claim that this record is "a product that will allow you take charge of your destiny completely." How 20 minutes of subtle wafts of feedback can provide what self-help gurus have been claiming to do for centuries is the precise location for the art of the Hafler Trio. Lest this (or any other Hafler Trio album) be construed as mindless New Ageisms, these wispy fragments of rippled drones have plenty of shadowy forms lurking in the distance, and at least the sense that a profound intellect has constructed this body of work.
Being A Firefighter is the fifth CDEP published by Important Records. As with the rest in the series, this is woefully limited; and as with all Hafler Trio albums, there can be no MP3 samples.
Released as the first in a trilogy, "Cleave: 9 Great Openings" is a magnificent piece of minimalism from the enigmatic Hafler Trio. While the source material has been speculated to be a cello, the electrical nature of the persistent drones with "Cleave: 9 Great Openings" has much more in common with the Hafler Trio's continued use of feedback as the principle sound source in composition than the sustained cello work of Jonathan Coleclough or Robert Rutmann. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter where these ethereal hauntings come from, as a continuous tonal flutter steadfastly buzzes for over an hour with swells of magnetic sounds sporadically rising above the uniform drone.
As an aside, the Hafler Trio had been incredibly prolific in the late '80s and early '90s striving to get funding for a release a week in order to present their work as something of an aural magazine of post-rational thought. The last six or seven years had found the Trio in a lull; however, the project's activities has drastically increased and will continue for some time now, as the sole member Andrew McKenzie has come down with a complex set of illnesses which left untreated will result in his death. Without any health insurance, McKenzie has been turning to his art in order to pay for his medicines and support his family. We wish him the best of luck...
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One that nearly slipped through the cracks, here we have The Hafler Trio's impressive Dislocation. Originally recorded to tape back in 1986 on Staalplaat, who later released it on disc in 1990, Dislocation was certainly one of their more obscure albums both in terms of distribution and in terms of content. It has been speculated that these recordings represent the final material that Chris Watson contributed to The Hafler Trio before embarking on his own impressive field recordist career; but there's no discernible 'proof' to back up that claim. Such is the way for the man behind the curtain of The Hafler Trio - that man, of course, being Andrew McKenzie. The title here couldn't be more apt in describing this very decentered collage, which leaps, cuts, and jumps from one tape-spliced collage of oblique, industrial-stained musique concrete to electronic decompositions of found sound, marked by short snippets of near silence and ambient room noise. In this collage, you might find yourself confronted with electrified voltage arcs bursting out of field recordings of fighter jets racing above and waterlogged ships creaking below. Elsewhere, h3o presents an unsettling sonic clamor prescient of the Schimpfluch aktions that may or may not be part of some unknowable gnostic ritual, or the sonic detritus from a display of guttural abjection. Blurting alarm calls and scraped metals disrupt streams of disembodied voices and heavily collaged media samples, and electrical drones are plucked from the ether of the shortwave radio band. There are elements from Dislocation that reappear throughout the Hafler Trio's early catalogue, say from 1984 - 1992; but with Andrew McKenzie, the act of recontextualization is a critical component to the process of splintering mediated and social metaphor. McKenzie states that he's reprocessed and even replaced some of the original material with this reissued disc on Korm Plastics. The material all has a gritty tape-grafted feel, so whatever is replacing the old material has the spirit and feel of the original. As with all of the Hafler Trio releases, sound samples are verboten by decree of the man behind the curtain.
Exactly As I Am is the third and final chapter in the trilogy of releases in which The Hafler Trio employs the vocals of Jonsi Birgisson as the only source material. The Hafler Trio shouldn't need much of an introduction, as we've championed his work for many years now; but for those of you new to The Hafler Trio, this project is the work of one Andrew M. McKenzie who concerns himself with a rigorous psychoacoustic research that has evolved into a neo-gnostic amalgamation of psychology and spirituality as applied through extreme forms of technology. McKenzie is never easy to digest, even when he might be employing gnostic idioms as a slight of hand to confuse his audience. In recent years, McKenzie has been heavily involved with extremely long-form compositions, most notably How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread whose two parts spanned six cds of sound material, plus a dense amount of additional text. Exactly As I Am along with Exactly As I Say and Exactly As I Do act as a similiarly overwhelming body of work, in which he extracts particular harmonic phrases and angelic drones from the voice of Jonsi Birgisson (best known as the crooner from Sigur Ros). McKenzie is a masterful technician with sound; and he proves his expertise over his craft yet again with Exactly As I Am, as oceanic dronescapes flutter and swell into intensely bright timbres that are so pure as to become almost too much to take.
McKenzie doesn't like his work to be converted into MP3s, and we have obliged his request. So you can only take our word for it, Exactly As I Am is a quite wonderful recording.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Yes, the man loves a mini-series. There have been many sequels, triptychs, and serial works for the Hafler Trio, the tech-Gnostic program of grandiose minimalism and conceptualized electronic manifestations of sound, engineered by the lone member of the Halfer Trio, Andrew M. McKenzie. Exactly As I Do falls within a sub-series of a larger body of related work dealing with the essence of the human voice, and this album is the second album in a triptych centered upon the voice of Sigur Ros' Jonsi Birgisson. With the first album called Exactly As I Say and packaged in the same oversized folio, McKenzie is not making it easy for anybody in calling this album Exactly As I Do. Nevertheless, these are two distinctive albums which are variations upon a theme (in this case Birgisson's voice). As a preamble to Exactly As I Do, McKenzie states that he is investigating "voice, the most human expression of a person, striped down and elabrated to show the essence of a person, and a human leading towards the divine. Hopefully." As far as his essentialization of Jonsi Birgisson's voice, McKenzie extracts particular tones, frequencies, and breathy fragments, which he recontextualizes into dense chorales of majestic drones tinged with a bout of melancholia. In a lot of ways, these drones resemble that kid's toy consisting of a flexible plastic tube that you swing in a circle over your head to produce a constant hoovering sound. McKenzie, of course, twists and folds all of these sounds into a beautiful maelstrom of polyphonous Birgissons. Sorry, McKenzie firmly disapproves of offering song samples and we will oblige his wishes with no sound clips of his work on our website.
Exactly As I Say is The Hafler Trio's third offering from an ongoing series that investigates the atomization of the human voice into post-linguistic mantras. The two previous offerings in this series reworked the respective voices of Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld and Current 93's David Tibet; and here, h3o has taken on the task of reworking the ephemeral voice of Jonsi Birgisson best known for his androgynous croons in Sigur Ros. On all three albums, Andrew McKenzie (the presiding genius and essentially the only member of the Hafler Trio) extracts what may be constued as an essence from those unique voices and molds them into his own signature smoke-and-mirror conceptual program. Even before Sigur Ros began to woo flocks of Iceland-o-philes out of the woodwork, we had been scratching our head about them; and our opinion of Sigur Ros' saccharine orchestrations was validated by a mash-up which lumped Celine Dion's vocals on top of one of Sigur Ros' hit songs. Admittedly, there is a beauty to Sigur Ros and their bright-eyed angelic neo-babble; but it sometimes hits you like a sugar rush and leaves you with a stomachache. Fortunately, there's Exactly As I Say, which removes everything superfluous about Sigur Ros and leaves simply the beauty. Of the two hour long compositions on Exactly As I Say "Diksha" is the more dramatic piece concentrating mostly on the breathing patterns of Birgisson and turning them into ring-modulated flutterings that have the eerie resonance of terra-cotta pottery scaping against itself. Later on this mutates into an extended dronescape much like the work of Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock. The other piece "Para Bindu" continues along a similar path, which in turn has it's parallels to many of the Hafler Trio's recent works for extended timbral interplay. In other words, this is another great album from the Hafler Trio.
And as always, the band requests that there be no Hafler Trio MP3s, sorry.
How To Reform Mankind marks yet another entry in the reissue campaign of The Hafler Trio's early research into sound and its effect upon the human psyche. It was the third in what now stands as the first of many untitled "triologies of three," standing as the final chapter to the series featuring Kill The King and Mastery of Money. Within the entire catalogue of the Hafler Trio, How To Reform Mankind (1994) represents one of the last records that Andrew McKenzie produced before drastically slowing down his activities in the middle and late '90s. In many ways, this album is also an exceptional culmination of the ideas that McKenzie propagated throughout the '80s, which reflect a considerably different perspective upon his work, his life, and the world in general. The early Hafler Trio albums revelled in the miscommunication, the recycling of information within new contexts, and a disorientation caused by the play between what is real and what might be real. In recent years, The Hafler Trio's idioms have suggested a revelation / obfuscation of truth in the grand traditions of ancient Gnosticism.
Psychoacoustics and the psychological impact of sound have both figured heavily into all of the Hafler Trio's work, and these areas of research are profoundly present on How To Reform Mankind. Subtle flutterings of shortwave data have been processed into rarified air; low volume, resonant frequencies colliding with the body for a chest-cavity massage; the clunky piano from McKenzie's Negentropy album returns as a post-serialist leitmotif; and desolate sonar plinks slam against metal walls to astounding effect. McKenzie's uncompromising drive for his art has made the Hafler Trio one of the greatest artistic endeavors of the last two decades; and How To Reform Mankind stands close to the top of his best recordings.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we cannot offer sound samples of the Hafler Trio's work. Oh well.
It's ridiculous. Yet, by know you should know if you need to own this or not. This is the second 3cd set from the Hafler Trio in the How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread series. The packaging is as elaborate and beautiful as the Fluxus art editions from the '60s, but be warned, this is incredibly fragile! Musically, fragments spiral into enigmatic drones and psychologically profound atmospheres. We only have a couple of these in stock, and considering that there's only 500 in print, there's little use in waxing poetic as found elsewhere on these Aquarius reviews. Buy it now or spend five or six times this already hefty pricetag on eBay in a couple of months.
As always, there can be no Hafler Trio MP3s. The aeons have cursed us once.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
For years, Andrew McKenzie has presented the Hafler Trio's gnostically inspired compositions as parts of a larger series, such as The Golden Hammer series (including six albums of conceptually driven collage material) and the ludicrously expensive Who Sees Goes On series (with seven 10"s each costing close to $80.00 each). The series that McKenzie has released through Important has developed into quite an interesting body of work. Each of the components to the Important Records series has featured short programs of about 20 minutes and dashing graphic design with elaborate silkscreened printing. Musically, this series appears to be based on voice, although McKenzie hasn't mentioned what the source material is, so it's probably irrelevant anyway. These aerated drones maintain a gossamer elegance with subtly sinister underbelly. As McKenzie has been stretching his albums across massive triple-disc sets, the brevity (both in terms of price as well as the time) of this series is certainly welcome. As with all Hafler Trio recordings, McKenzie doesn't want us to post any MP3s of his work... so we'll comply.
We didn't really expect to ever see this record again, but lo and behold here it is: The Hafler Trio's brilliant lp-only production If Take, Then Take from 2005. The album was recorded and released during a notorious flurry of Hafler Trio activity about a decade ago, when he cranked out some 20 albums in a 4 year period. Pretty much all of those albums (and most everything that Andrew McKenzie has produced as the Hafler Trio and beyond) are highly recommended; and mostly are out of print. Here's what we had to say about the album way back when:
Is there much more to say about The Hafler Trio that hasn't been said already by us or anyone else for that matter? Perhaps. Yet another month and another Hafler Trio album arrives, stretching our feeble efforts to describe the audio / visual / contexual productions of Mr. Andrew M. McKenzie, the sole member of the Hafler Trio with assistance from other like-minded techgnostics on occasion. For the month of September 2005, the Hafler Trio album in question is If Take, Then Take which marks the first full length LP that McKenzie has engineered in over a decade - this, of course in the wake of numerous multi-cd sets and 10"s galore. In describing this record, the C.I.P. label offered an exceptional introduction for If Take, Then Take: "Unanswered questions, unasked-for responses, stimulus and response exercises conducted and presented for the benefit of a select few. Hafler Trio has always asked more of the listener than many sound artists do, with questions and ideas that provoke and, like an open invitation, await response from those who are willing to tackle, often at length, the ideas presented. The audio cleanses the aural palette and refurbishes it nicely. The ideas in the booklet are available to those who wish additional illuminations, provocations, questions, and - when the light is right - answers, may add greater tricks to their own personal repertoire of knowledge. Please note: in this instance, knowledge may be considered fact, fiction, or entirely up for debate."
As to the musical program found within, McKenzie offers another breathtaking variation on the theme of hidden ambience, disrupted silences, and rich timbral minimalism. Limited to 400 copies and signed by Andrew McKenzie and includes a fancy trapezoidal booklet of text and art. And as always, he prefers for us to not offer any sound samples.
